The Fruit of the Spirit IS...

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

I attended Faith Presbyterian this morning and the sermon was on the latter part of Galatians 5 where Paul has been speaking about our freedom and liberty in Christ and how it is not a license to sin but the empowerment to love others, and he then transitions into the works of the flesh vs. the fruit of the spirit. I picked up on a few things that stuck with me throughout the day.

First of all, I love how the passage in all the translations I have seen, reads, "The fruit of the Spirit is," not "are." This may seem slight and a trivial English quark, but I believe it is very intentional and very profound. Nicholas Cage in National Treasure 2 comments on the same profundity when he says something to the effect of, "before the Civil War when one would talk about the United States he would say, 'The United States ARE doing...", where after the same person would say, 'The United State IS doing...'" It is an issue of unity and completion. We cannot pick and choose fruit, saying, "Well, I am good at faithfulness and joy, and you are good at peace and self-control." The fruit of the Spirit is a package deal. If you have the Spirit, you will have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, AND self-control. They are all intrinsically and intricately tied together in and through the Spirit. They are His nature and so become our nature when we are united to Christ.

Secondly, "Against such things there is no law." I don't care what you do. As long as you are loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled... cut loose, run free, do whatever you want, for the fruit is the fulfillment of the law. To truly live out the fruit of the Spirit is to have perfected the law of loving God with our entire being and to then love others as ourselves. If this is the case and the fruit of the Spirit is the fulfillment of the law, then we must remember the dual purpose of the law: to show us the character of God and the way we are meant to live being made in his image, and to show us that it is impossible to obtain on our own. The law was given to show us what we are supposed to do and why (because it is God's nature) and as a microscope to hold up to our lives to show how far short we fall of that mark. A right understanding of the law leads us to the posture of Paul in Romans 7 where he cries out, "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" The law has to be fulfilled outside of ourselves, we are powerless to restrain is ocean of guilt, shame, and justice. "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" Christ took on the wrath of our rotting fruit and gave us his own sweet fruit as a free gift of his grace.

All this keeps us humble yet gives us hope. We cannot achieve the fruit of the spirit on our own, nor perfectly in this life. There is no way that we can live by the Spirit without the Spirit. Our growth in the Spirit is a dying growth; a dying to ourselves and a deeper daily dependence on his power. But he is at work... and one day, when the thin veil of this life is torn, we will be freed from the nature that still holds us to the sweet allure of sin, and we will find eternal delight in creating beautiful fruit, to give to our bountiful God, and to those around us.