The Fruit of the Spirit

I'm super excited to discuss a very special and not well-understood topic (at least for me, historically speaking), because it's so close to my heart! That topic is the fruit of the Spirit. What a wonderful analogy that I have always brushed over in years past. Before we dive in, here is the verse that I would explicitly like to refer to:

Galatians 5:22-23
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

Amen! And as always, I'm not claiming to have the authority to give you a rundown of each fruit in a super knowledgeable way. Rather, I'd like to talk about my personal experience with desiring the fruit of the Spirit, as well as what God has shown me. Because let's face it, when you get excited about something, you gotta share.

So I guess I'll give a little background on why I love this verse so much, and what relation this verse has to me and other parts of the Bible. First, I love when the Bible gives lists of things. Like all those verses that tell you specific sins? So conveniently helpful, especially when it comes to repenting.

Growing up in the church, I was always super familiar with the verses preceding 22. It says,

Galatians 5:19-21
Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

What's super cool about this set of verses is that it's almost naming perfectly opposite qualities to the ones we witnessed above. We have X, Y, and Z qualities, but the Spirit, thank goodness for the Spirit, gives us the definition of perfection. Love, joy, peace, what's not to like?

Now of course, I think there comes a point in every Christian's life where you get kind of jaded to all the wonderful promises listed in the Bible: promises of revival, of renewal, of safety, of God's kingdom. But when you look again, verses 22 and 23 are loaded! If you actually take the time to contemplate all the goodness of each quality, you could probably fill a whole book with your findings. And this is coming from someone who still struggles to grasp the idea of holiness.

I'm going to jump back to the beginning though and talk about just a few of these fruits. There's way too much to say about each one, so I'm going to limit our discussion to love, gentleness, and self-control, but if you're interested in knowing about the others, feel free to send me a message! I want to save talking about joy and peace for another time actually, so I'm going to skip that for now.

Love seems pretty straightforward at first glance, but as it turns out, it's extraordinarily deep and complex. The love referred to here and in other places in the Bible are God's love, not the kind of love that we are familiar with in TV and movies. You know that super famous passage about love, 1 Corinthians chapter 13? I encourage you to go read it, it's really beautiful and often quoted in weddings and such. It's even one of those awesome lists I was talking about, because it lists the qualities of true love. Love is so much more than actions or a feeling. It's not just the idea of romantic or familial love. Love is transformative. The passage tells me that through love I will grow as a person, and describes it in this way:

1 Corinthians 13:11
When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

This is so inspirational for me because it humbles me and reminds me of just how childlike I am. Sure, I might have walked this earth for a while now, I might think I'm smart and mature and know a lot of things, and I might be growing in my faith, but I have such a long way to go, and thirty years from now I'll still have more to learn. And the best part is, God has such a tender and loving way of guiding us that the Apostle Paul really understood (Paul, if you are not familiar, wrote letters to people in different parts of West Asia, including Greece and the people of Corinth, and those letters make up a large portion of the New Testament). Love is the reigning concept of the New Testament, and it's so incredible to know that we are given the same capacity to love as our Father who gave up His only Son on the cross.

Let's talk about gentleness and self-control. Some more background on myself: I've always had a lot of insecurity about having a bit of a harsh personality. I used to pride myself on it, and I actually liked being cold and formidable at one point in time, because it made me feel unique, and it made me feel like I was in control. But as I realized over time that my true identity was in Christ, I starting wanting to change. Being gentle is embarrassingly difficult for me. If someone makes a mistake, I'm not inclined to be gentle. If someone's having a hard time, I don't know the first thing about comforting them. However, that doesn't mean I can't change, the Bible promises so.

I am also your quintessential procrastinator by nature, and as we all know, procrastination is a result of lack of self-control. Honestly, so many problems can be rooted back to self-control and discipline. A good way to recognize this is to be intentional about your thoughts. For example, sometimes I sit there and evaluate parts of myself that I'm afraid to address, and then think about the root cause. If my temper flares up, it's because I don't have control over how I respond to my emotions. If I obsess over something and I can't let go, it's because I don't have control over my fears or what's going through my mind, etc.

That's actually a very "heady" example of recognizing flaws, and it's honestly a very "me" thing, as I have found out. Some of you might not like to think as much as I do, but the reason I mentioned it is that instead of fixating on our negative qualities, as Christians, we are given an outlet to bring our weaknesses in front of Christ. You don't even need to sit down and think about it, that's not the point of this post since we are focusing on what the Spirit provides us with, but I did want to make it clear that the parts of my life that I used to consider secular (during my non-Christian phases) were still very much affected by my desire to change.

One last cool thing about these qualities: they tie into one another. A verse that's recently stuck with me shows how this is true:

2 Peter 1:5-7
Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love.

This shows that there is an order to acquiring these traits, and what's more is that this paints an exciting picture of what faith looks like. Just think for a moment: how great must someone's faith and patience be to achieve this? Seems like an awful lot of steps to get to love. But that's the challenge! A misconception that non-Christians often hold is that they think following a religion is a) blind, b) easy, c) irrelevant, or d) useless. This verse proves all those ideas wrong. I mean, how easy can "applying all diligence" be? What does that even look like? If a couple of verses in the Bible convey that much information, then how much more could there be in a chapter, a book? There's so much potential in how we live our lives that rejecting faith is almost like a cop out at this point in my life. That's not to diminish the struggles people have with their faith, but in my opinion? You can't possibly know if you don't try.

(Some of you might be asking why I haven't discussed the Spirit yet, since that's only like, the most important part. I'll admit, I'm not the most well-versed on how the Spirit works or its relation to us. A lot of people talk about being spiritual or achieving certain things on a spiritual level, and I don't want to get into technicalities because I'm no authority on the matter and I can't speak to other people's experiences. But I promise I'll include some of my own accounts of receiving the Spirit at a later time. In the meantime, refer to Acts 2:38.)

All in all, the nature of my prayer has changed due to the passage in Galatians. I've been seeking out material blessings less frequently and asking Him to make me more like Him. I want to obtain the qualities of the Spirit, because they are the qualities of God and the Son. If you're curious to learn more about the nature of the Spirit, which is super neat (check out 1 Corinthians 2:10-13), I suggest that you talk to your pastor about it. Who knows, maybe he or she will have a lot more to share than I do. But I hope you got a taste of the Word in a way that I took a really long time to see.

Best blessings to you,
CM