Fruit

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Galatians 5:22-23

I've read those words hundreds of times, it might be thousands. Many times I've prayed them as I read them. Often, too often, they have been prayers of confession that whatever fruit there might be is unripe, maybe even unformed.

As with everything else in Christian experience, the fruit of the Spirit is sown in grace and harvested in the life of those who are in Christ, who live by the Spirit, and whose first confession is of grateful praise for the love of God in Christ. 

And yet. The last thing Paul intends by listing the fruit of the Spirit is that those virtues should be a further checklist of our failures. They are to be looked for as the natural outcome of God's gifting grace, Christ's reconciling love, the Spirit's liberating power. 

Instead of seeing the fruit of the Spirit as mere aspiration, what we'd like to be but never will, (or even worse, as a hit list of our chronic failures), take to heart Paul's advice to another group of Christians whose behavior was at times far from exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit: "He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion until the day of Jesus Christ." (Philippians 1:6)

We are called to live into the freedom of Christ, to walk and live in the surrounding environment of the Holy Spirit. Crucified with Christ, and living by faith in the faithfulness of Christ, knowing that the Son of God loves us and gave himself for us, we live in Christ and Christ in us, and the fruit will appear.   
 
Grace and peace, 

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation