Book of John and the Fruits of the Spirit

One of the things I did over the Christmas break was to work on organizing lessons that I have done in the past for Sunday School.  Not long ago I was doing a 12 week study on the book of John and I found myself re-reading through some of the notes I had. One particular week we were into John 15 talking about the Vine and the branches.  Now naturally for when you’re studying scripture you are always bound to jump around to different chapters and even different books that can relate to the one section of passage that you are trying to focus on and this past Sunday was no different.  Through the course of conversation we stretched out into Galatians 5 and more precisely, the Fruits of the Spirit.  Now I find it interesting that really all of us know these, but do we really know what they are?  For the sake of this writing, I’m going to include all of them, along with a dictionary definition.  So here we go…

Love:  a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.

Joy:  the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying.

Peace:  a state of mutual harmony between people or groups, esp. in personal relations.

Patience:  the quality of being patient, as the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain, without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like.

Kindness:  the state or quality of being kind, a kind act; favor

Goodness:  The state or quality of being good.  Moral excellence; virtue.

Faithfulness:   true to one's word, promises, vows, etc.

Gentleness:  kindly; amiable

Self Control:  control or restraint of oneself or one's actions, feelings, etc.

So there they are, the Fruits of the Spirit, along with a definition.  Have you ever looked at what the actual definitions of the words are?  Are they the same as what you would have said it was?  That is one of the things that I like to do when preparing lessons and such, I like to make sure I have the actual definitions if we are going to key on.   So how do you compare to that list?  Which of the items on that list do you feel are you strong point?  Which ones do you feel you need to work on?  I posed another question to the students on this and I thought it was interesting how the answers came back.  Many people believe that the better connected you are to these attributes (the more you try to exemplify) in your life.  The closer you will be in your relationship with God.  Now while I think this is a valid way to look at it, I believe there is another way to look at it as well and it is this.  The deeper you try to be in your relationship with God, the more time you spend with him every day, the easier these attributes will play out in your life.  But the verses (Gal. 5:22-23) doesn’t end there.  It finishes with “Against such things, there is no law” Wow!!  Have you really thought about that?  There are hundreds if not thousands of laws that we have to live in accordance with every day.  What side of the road you drive on, wearing a seatbelt, how many hours in a week a student can work, even how you treat people.  That is what really floors me; there are laws that tell you how you have to treat people.  It is sad that we even need to have those laws.  God tells us right there in Galatians what we need in our lives.  If we could just follow them think about how much less we would have to worry about.  Now I am no less guilty of not being able to follow these fruits as the next person.  It’s hard to do, unfortunately, that is our nature.  But I’m asking you to help hold me accountable to them, and I will do my best to do the same for you.

God Bless.