Galatians 5 lists the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Which one do you find the most challenging to live out, and why?
It’s the Spirit’s fruit and not my fruit. The Spirit in me forms the fruit in my life as I follow Jesus. On my own I can’t live up to this consistently. It’s only by the Spirit that the fruit will show up in my life.
There’s a story about a preacher who invited a new convert to Christ to have lunch with him and his daughters. Afterwards the daughters complained to their father about how rude and opinionated their guest was. The father responded by asking his daughters to go pick some apples from the tree in the backyard. The daughters protested saying that the apples hadn’t ripened yet and wouldn’t be any good. The father said they were right and it was the same for their lunch guest. Give it some time and God’s work in him would ripen him into a new man.
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Thank you for saying this. I totally agree.
I don’t believe the Apostle intended for us to see the Spirit bearing 9 fruits, some being more challenging to “pull-off” than the others. Rather The Holy (perfect) Spirit of God bears His fruit on His vine, through His branches (us), and His fruit is described as an expression of Himself; God is love-joy-peace-patience-kindness-goodness-faithfulness-gentlenesss-self-controled, altogether, inseparable, perfectly unified. The metaphor of fruit is given to us to help us understand the manifest aspects of His reproductive fruit, much like we might understand an apple to be round, red, shiny, juicy, ripe, edible, white fleshed, appealing, nutritious, seed-bearing. These are not things we are to do, or skills for us to accomplish, or goals to attain, but rather a description of what God is producing in His saints to testify of His character. When the world sees these combined expressions of God in His saints, they know the tree on which they grow. These expressions of God are not challenging, in the sense we are trying to produce them in our lives, but are glorious manifestations of The Holy Spirit of God expressing Himself through us.
KP
I have to remind myself that I already have access to these qualities as a child of God, because most times, more than one of them feel out of reach. I think it’s so easy to view them as things I need to “work on” or part of my task list, but I continually need to shift my focus back to abiding in Christ, trusting that these fruits are the natural outpouring of a life united to Him.
Joy.
It’s much easier to wallow in self-pity disguised as seriousness. Let me quote G K Chesterton:
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Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.
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