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Fruit of the Spirit - Weekly Devotional
This week's focus: Fruit of the Spirit
As we wrap up our series on the fruit of the Spirit, it’s important to make a distinction about fruit. Many of us tend to understand the list of characteristics in Galatians 5:22-23 as different "fruits" that the Holy Spirit will grow within the hearts and lives of believers. When we do that, we are then interpreting the noun "fruit" in the phrase, "the fruit of the Spirit" as a plural but it isn't. The Greek word, karpos, is in the singular. Meaning one fruit, not many fruits, or different kinds of fruit. So, this means that when we read what the fruit of the Spirit is, Paul is not naming different kinds of fruit that the Spirit gives, instead he is describing the different characteristics of the grace that the Spirit is working in you.
What Paul is doing is showing us that if the Spirit is truly in us, then we should see the evidence through the "Fruit" of the Spirit, which is described by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Not one or two characteristics, but all of them.
Yet Paul is talking about "a fruit", and fruit doesn't appear all at once. Fruit must grow. Fruit must mature. Sometimes the growing season for the fruit is rather long. None of us perfectly display the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control but if the Spirit is really in us, then they are seen at some level. Jonathan Edwards put it like this, “There is a concatenation of the graces of Christianity. That is, you do not get one part of the fruit of the Spirit growing without all the parts growing."
Adapted from Pastor Clint Hogrefe
Galatians 5:22-23 (ESV)
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
Prayer Points:
- Continue to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” in these historic days (Psalm 122:6). In what is being called “a seismic event in Israeli politics,” Prime Minister Netanyahu’s rivals announced the creation of a coalition government that would replace him. Yair Lapid, who leads the centrist Yesh Atid party, and Naftali Bennett, who heads the right-wing Yamina party, will team up with six other parties. You can get up-to-date information on what’s happening in Israel from our friend, Joel Rosenberg, at All Israel News.
- Need ways to be able to look at current events from a biblical perspective and know how to pray about them? We have a weekly news summary called the Intersect where we take four top news stories of the week and “dissect” them from a “think, pray, and act” perspective. You can find the Intersect each Wednesday morning here.
We want to see God honored in America, and we pray for an unprecedented spiritual awakening.
This devotion was produced in partnership with Every Home for Christ.
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