The Fruit part 1
What I want to say in this Rant series is pretty simple. It starts with Galatians 5:22, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith." It continues on, continuing listing what I think some people have referred to as all the different kinds of fruit of the Spirit. But here's my idea: The fruit of the Spirit is love. Period. Full stop. Look at Genesis 1:12, "And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that is was good." A seed can only produce after it's own kind. Apple seeds make apples. You can't get something different from a seed other than what is already in there. So, for example, the Tree of life can only produce life. The tree of death (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) can only produce death. When God told Adam that on the day he ate from the tree of death, he would surely die... God wasn't saying, "Do it and I'll punish you, kill you," He was saying, "the only thing that can come from that tree is death. Don't eat from it." Point being-- the Tree of Life only produces on fruit. Love. And then, if you continue to read on, you see what love is. You see the different aspects of love. Kind of like how there are all different kinds of apples. And I know that's not a PERFECT analogy, because each apple tree only produces one kind of apple, but come with me on this. Love is like a prism. Depending on how you look at it--depending on how the light (of the world) hits it--you get different shades and colors. Love is the answer because love is multifaceted. Love never fails because love gives you just what you need in every and any situation. So what I'm trying to say, in my normal wander around way, is that when we think about fruit... we ought to think about love. Start there, and then we can beging to explore all the different aspects of love. All the different flavors of the fruit of the Spirit. When we know and believe that it's all love, that's when we can really get into Ephesians 3:18 (NLT), "And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people shold, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is." Because that's really the whole point of the whole thing, right? Learning how to love by learning how we are loved. Learning what love is so that we can experience it. Knowing and believing that God is love and He loves you. And then taking that love and running with it. Receiving it and releasing it. Filling ourselves to overflowing with what we have already been filled with. Letting the love that's inside come out by knowing and believing that it's in there. Understanding that we can love in every situation. Because the fruit of the Spirit is love. And love comes in many different shapes and sizes. Love is joy. Love is peace. Love is longsuffering. Love is gentleness. Love is goodness. Love is faith. And on and on it goes. I'm telling you, in the "Love Chapter" (1 Corinthians 13) what we really see is a personality profile of Jesus. And when we understand that as He is, so are we in this world... when we understand that HE is our true identity... that's when we can see OURSELVES as all of those things that Paul describes love as. Love isn't just what we do, it is who we are! Because God (love) lives in us. Lives THROUGH us. And, as we're going to see in the rest of this series, the best way to understand that love is to feast on it. You are what you eat. The fruit of the Spirit is the diet that will keep us healthy, wealthy, and wise!