EXEMPLIFYING A HEALTHY SPIRIT
Galatians 5:22-23
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
There is something about fall that is very special to me and yet I rarely think about it until I'm experiencing it. It usually begins just before labor day weekend and lasts until the first hard freeze. What I'm talking about is the fruits that ripen throughout the fall months. First the blackberries, then early apples, late apples, and one of my favorites are grapes.
Late fall grapes are so sweet and when I've been coming and going from bowhunting on some of my leased land I would stop and pick grapes, when they were ripe, and eat until I was sick.
I also had a lease that had a lot of apple trees, the wolf river apples are my favorites. They took the longest to ripen of all of the trees in the area, but when they did I picked all I could get. I not only ate them right off the trees, but I also made pies, applesauce and cider from them.
Then one night, usually in early November, we would have a night where the temperatures will drop down around 20 for the night. The next day the fruit was no longer sweet and crisp. The attractiveness was gone. It still looked good on the outside, but the inside was bad.
I remember a while back hearing of a marathon runner that ran a complete marathon and when he crossed the finish line he fell over, dead from a heart attack. He looked perfectly healthy from the outside, but inside he was very different.
These verses in Galatians give us a "check-up" of what we look like inside. These attributes of a spiritually healthy person are a measuring stick of where we need to be. Read them again carefully. How are you doing? I found myself reading them over and over again to check my own life.
When our spirit is living closely with the Spirit of God, we will not only have a look of sweetness, but it will show through in our lives. Others will find us loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and self-controlled. We will be like the grapes, apples and other fruit at the peak of their ripeness... others will see the good in us and want to be close.
If we live out the fruits of a good spirit, people will want to know why we are different from the world. You see the world is bitter, joyless, angry, impatient, unkind, unfaithful, brutal with no self-control.
Look around and you will see this played out on TV talk shows and on the news, covering riots and protests.
We must be different, we must exemplify the fruits kf a healty and godly spirit. And there is great news, there are no laws against any of these things. You are free to practice any and all of them.
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