Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11168. How do I cultivate self-control? It is the very last fruit Paul names in his well-known list in Galatians 5, and I sometimes think that particular placement is not accidental at all, since self-control is where every other fruit of the Spirit eventually has to be lived out in practice, in the moment,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11167. Cultivate gentleness is a phrase that often gets mistaken for cultivating weakness, and I want to correct that misunderstanding directly, because biblical gentleness is one of the most misunderstood fruits of the Spirit in a culture that tends to equate strength with harshness and softness with feebleness. The call to cultivate gentleness appears…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11166. Cultivate kindness sounds simple enough until you actually try to practise it consistently, especially towards people who have not earned it, on days when you are tired, overlooked, or provoked, and Scripture treats this fruit of the Spirit as something considerably deeper than pleasant manners or a naturally sunny disposition. The command to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11165. Cultivate patience is easy to say and remarkably hard to do, especially in a culture engineered for instant answers, instant delivery and instant gratification, and if you have ever earnestly prayed for patience only to find yourself immediately, almost comically, handed a queue, a difficult relative, or a delayed answer to prayer, you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4096. I get asked fairly often whether the fruit of Spirit in Galatians 5 and the character Jesus describes in the Beatitudes are really describing the same thing, and my answer is yes, with one qualification worth unpacking. Paul is describing what the Spirit produces in a believer from the inside out. Jesus is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4098. The fruit metaphor Paul chooses in Galatians 5 was not his only option, and that is worth sitting with for a moment. He could have written a list of virtues, a framework every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would instantly have recognised from Aristotle and the Stoics. He could have described the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4097. Character formation is a phrase psychologists reach for almost as often as pastors do, and that overlap is worth pausing on before going any further. Anyone who has watched a believer grow steadily kinder, calmer and more self-controlled over years of walking with Jesus has watched something that both categories, the psychological and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4043. In Galatians 5 Paul sets two lists side by side, the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit, and I cannot think of a passage anywhere that more honestly maps the daily battle of the Christian life. The works of the flesh are what my old fallen nature produces when…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4196. The love among believers that Jesus made the badge of His disciples is not something we work up by trying harder to be nice; it is fruit the Holy Spirit grows. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, He said, if you have love for one another (John 13:35)….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04020. The difference between the fruit and gifts of the Spirit is one of those quiet distinctions that keeps a church honest about itself. Both the fruit and gifts come from the same Spirit, and yet they are doing two very different things, and when we blur them we start measuring one another by…