5 Fruit of the Spirit

7.31.23            Patience, Goodness, Kindness, Faithfulness, Gentleness

This week I want to focus on these five fruit of the Spirit which are all part of the totality of love when we live in love, peace, joy, and humility, the other fruit of the Spirit described by Paul in Galatians 5:22-23. These five qualities that the Holy Spirit passes on to us as we truly become followers of Jesus embody an all-encompassing definition of love. Love, that is God’s kind of love, is patient, good, kind, faithful, and gentle. Love understands that we humans have our flaws, that we will make mistakes, but mainly love understands that God will love and support, challenge, and forgive us throughout our lives. That God created all human beings in His image (Genesis 1:26-27). That anytime any one of us turns back to Him, no matter what we have done, He is there to welcome, to forgive, to love, to lead us to become the persons He created us to be.

Now, with these qualities of God’s love for us—patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, and gentleness—slowly arising in us as we follow Jesus Christ, we are extending God’s love as we have experienced it to the other people that we meet, just as it has been extended to us. What a marvelous thing it is to sit with someone, to get to know them deeply and to pour out God’s love to them just by our interest in them, no matter what they have done or failed to do. For this is how we have experienced God’s love for us and we are grateful to be able to pass it on to others without judgment and prejudice and other human failings which we have all experienced both from other people and coming from ourselves, before we said “Yes!” to loving God and to following Jesus Christ.

It takes a while of following Jesus for these qualities to arise within us and to become the vehicle of God’s love which we have experienced and which we can now pass on to others. When we think of the length and breadth of the road following Jesus, these qualities come to us as we have lifted up to God much of what has come between us and the Lord for healing. His healing work in us tackles the burdens that we have carried all our lives, the suffering, the grief, the pain in our lives. What Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30), comes true in us as issue after issue is healed in us. All the stuff that we just wanted to forget, that kept us living in the past and hiding its effects from ourselves and others, now no longer binds us.

The one hurdle we all must accept before we are able to pass on God’s love and forgiveness to others is to love ourselves. This doesn’t come at all naturally to us who live in the world. Maybe some of us are able to just live in God’s love for us and accept it, but if you’re like me, we have to make a decision that if God can love and forgive us, then surely we can love and accept ourselves. As soon as we can love ourselves, then we are free to pass on the love that we have experienced from God to others. And that is our purpose—to pass on His kind of love, not the human kind—in whatever way He calls us to fulfill the purpose of our lives.

And so, when we are together with another person or even a group of people, and we are expressing God’s kind of love by our interest in who they are and how their lives have gone, we all will feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, held by Him, prodded by Him, loved by Him to be the people who feel the true blessing of being held in love. It is a privilege on both sides—to pass on His kind of love and to accept the love that is being given to us: it’s the true blessing of our lives!

Questions to ponder over the week: Have I given my life to Christ? Have I felt the rising fruit of the Spirit within me over the time since then? If I haven’t, what issue(s) or cultural “must” do I need to lift up to God in order to begin to experience these gifts of the Holy Spirit? What it would feel like to love everyone I meet, to see them as God’s children.

Blessing for the week: May we be the people of God who can love others as we love ourselves. May we express God’s love to everyone we meet. May we be true to our Creator/Sustainer/Loving/Forgiving God.

Check out my two websites: patsaidadams.com and deepeningyourfaith.com.

Two Announcements

1. I am giving away a 10-week journaling guide to Jesus’s Two Great Commandments. If you are interested, email me at patsadams@gmail.com and I will email it to you, free of charge.
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