I get the inkling sometimes that others have a very different idea than me of what being fruitful and producing fruit is.
I think they love God and feel they aren;t producing fruit for Him and sometimes I see that they are producing more fruit for him than those who think they are producing a lot.
They think that they need to go and preach the gospel to someone to produce fruit for God. Or that they need to go and do good works like in an area of need in the community. These are necessary things, do not misunderstand what I am saying. Preaching the gospel is sowing seed. It is not producing fruit. It can lead to someone else producing fruit for God, so there is some sort of overlapping in what I'm trying to say, but sowing seed is sowing seed and producing fruit is producing fruit.
When I am sowing seed (which we all do, even those of us who do not preach, and often we are sowing seed without words by how we act, as with the man who said: preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.)
But each of us is the tree that God wants fruit from and wants to get even more fruit from with His pruning and this fruit is not sowing seed. This fruit is the fruits of the Spirit. You can see the humblest person cleaning the church and that humility is fruit, while you can see someone who preaches and teaches and goes and does all manner of good works in the community but is not growing in humility, meekness, kindness, mercy, so they aren't producing fruit for God. (No, I am not saying that there are no people who do these things who don't also produce fruit for God!) I am saying that I quite often see those who produce massive amounts of fruit and become more and more fruitful by leaps and bounds who think they produce no fruit for their Lord when they produce reams of it! 2 Peter 1:8 is the scripture that talks about this - if these things are in you and are increasing, you will not be unfruitful.
The reverse of that would be doing many good works and volunteering everywhere and preaching and teaching and getting the idea that you are producing fruit by this when you are not growing in fruit at all and are really full of yourself and temperamental and nasty!