The last fruit of the Spirit that Paul writes about in Galatians (5:22-23) is self-control (NIV, NRSV) also translated as temperance(KJV).  That sounds like an outward control of bad habits, but it’s more an attachment to Jesus’s teachings and His leading us to the kingdom of God than us controlling our own behavior.  Priorities change […]

  We Christians are a faith-filled people, faithful to the God we worship, faithful in worshipping regularly, faithful in prayer, but are we faithful to what Jesus taught and how he lived? Or are we still too attached to the world’s ways and too dismissive of Jesus’s ways? We should ask ourselves these questions: Do […]

Fruit of the Spirit Kindness, Goodness and Gentleness   Kindness, goodness and gentleness are love in action in this world, with everyone we meet, with friends and family and enemies. The ability to be kind, good, and gentle grows in us—like all the fruit of the spirit–as we follow Christ in our lives, especially as […]

In His Two Great Commandments Jesus first tells us to love God with all of ourselves and, secondly, He tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. I think the problem is that we don’t know how to love ourselves or even what that would look like, so that we often do “love” our neighbors […]

We Americans talk so much about happiness, but happiness is a just short-lived positive reaction to meeting our goals or buying the next thing on our list or getting someone’s approval. Happiness is really about what our ego- and culture- dominated lives desire. It has only to do with superficial goals and the surface of […]

  The fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5:22-23 is a description of the attitudes and mind-sets that we develop as we give our lives more and more over to God, as we give up the world’s viewpoints and adopt a broader, truer way of thinking and being. As the fruit ripens in us, we […]

  The answers to our prayers don’t always give us what we asked for; they can seem like a denial to us; they can take a long time coming; or sometimes, they give us just what we asked for. How we deal with the answers to our prayers says a great deal about how much […]

Following Jesus is a life-long journey that takes us to the fullness of who we were created to be, free of our ties to the world, free of the dominion of our minds and egos, free of the control of our lives, free to follow Jesus wherever He would lead us. It takes our willingness, […]

Recently, I was drawn to reread Neil Douglas-Klotz’s book, Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus’s Words. In it he focuses on the Aramaic meaning of Jesus’s words in the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes and more. We take for granted that the meaning of these passages is from our perspective today, […]

6.21.21 Now that the world is opening up again after a year of being sequestered in our homes with our immediate families, we need to take the time to acknowledge the lessons that the COVID-19 has raised in us about our country, about our lives as they were before the pandemic so changed our lives. […]