Embody the Fruit of the Spirit in your Life

Words and actions ripple through our world. Each wave starts in a person’s heart before moving into creation. So we give ourselves over to God’s refining work. God wants us to naturally embody and emanate the Spirit’s love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

It can be hard to grasp that all things are within God. There is only God and everything is held within their vastness and glory. One who called themself: “I am”. God is all that God is, was, and will be. Beyond our grasp and comprehension, God is. Jesus is. The Spirit is. For thousands of years, Jesus continues to confound the powerful, the privileged, the strong, and the violent.

We expect God to act as we might. We see glimpses of our nature in God and so easily believe that God is like us. We expect God will intervene to save us from harm, to grant us favor, and to crush those who are against us. Yet, Jesus did not do these things. He was the personification of the hopes and expectations of the voices in scripture. Then He went against many of those hopes. For the essence and being of Jesus is the Fruit of the Spirit.

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

Within God, there is no separation between being and doing. God’s every movement is with His Spirit. Every expression and movement of God is ripe with the Fruit of the Spirit. All good things and every blessing emanate from the heart of God into existence. The Fruit of the Spirit animates God and gives life to all of creation. His living and moving are one. The Fruit of the Spirit is the essence, being, words, and works of God.

Yet, this Fruit comes so unnaturally to us. Within my heart is a longing for these things because I lack them. I long to desire them. I wish I was more restless in my fruitlessness. I pray that I would long for it. I pray that I might see myself cut back, and new fruiting branches grafted into my heart. May the sun of righteousness shine upon you, as it did for our desert mothers and fathers, so that its light will bring forth every virtuous fruit in your life.

This is a perilous place to find oneself. To realize the Fruit of the Spirit in our lives can quickly become a work of the flesh. We may use our own strength to manifest each aspect. With the best of intentions, we put on works and words of this fruit. It becomes, almost, a performance of us pretending to be. We can easily act and pretend while hoping we will become. Yet, we know that Jesus looks to the heart. Out of the overflow of our hearts, our mouths speak. Performing the fruit is exhausting, and leaves us little energy for change. So, do we wait alone in the long, dark silence? In this waiting, we could pray. Let us pray fervently for our hearts to change within our being. Let us wait in expectation for the Divine to intervene with transformation. Here we pray alone. We grieve and wait in stillness for change that feels ever further away. God, is this all we can hope for? To pause our lives until some moment when our hearts are changed?

Instead, let us move into transformation. We begin with a deepening prayerful awareness and growing tenderness in our hearts. Within our movement, we find and accept Jesus’s invitation. He invites us to be transformed and for our hearts to be made clean. Then we discover Jesus giving us the strength to rise from death and walk in life. We discover a difficult inward journey. We begin prayerfully holding the inner work that shines a light upon the dark parts of our hearts. This inner light shines and illuminates our innermost places as we move through our world. We become more mindful of the fruit we long to see sprout, grow, and flow naturally from us. Fruit can be seen ripening within ourselves and within the community. Celebrate it in ourselves. Lavish praise when we notice it in others.

As we move through our world, we begin to see ripples of darkness being overcome by the Fruit of the Spirit flowing from ourselves and all the children of God. In time our hearts and actions more intimately mingle. We find ourselves more effortlessly expressing the Fruit together with God. In this process of becoming, we embody and emanate the Fruit of the Spirit. Today we embody it with greater ease, grace, and hope as our eyes are fixed on Jesus. He is the One who sits upon His throne in the Kingdom of Heaven. This kingdom is taking root in our hearts, our midsts, and our minds as we open ourselves to the transforming presence of God.

• Memorize the Fruit of the Spirit and meditate on the ways God has expressed each one to you.
• Meditate on a part of the Spirit’s fruit and ask God to more deeply plant it within your heart.
• Ask God in prayer to help shift your focus from avoiding sin towards embodying the Fruit of the Spirit. Trust God to lead you into a fruitful life where sinful behavior loses its appeal.
• Celebrate the Fruit of the Spirit that you see in your life because of God’s transforming work in your spirit.
• Contemplate the ways your faithfulness grows from the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.
• Meditate on the tension between ‘doing’ the Fruit of the Spirit versus the work of becoming.
• Celebrate with God when you see the Fruit of the Spirit in lives around you..
• When have you seen an interaction with another person transformed by part of the Fruit of the Spirit?
• Reflect on your day and ask the Spirit to reveal opportunities that you couldn’t see to embody the Fruit of the Spirit.
• Ask God to show you, with gentleness, when your words or actions do not come from the Fruit of the Spirit.
• Grieve the moments and interactions of your life where the Fruit was not fully present.
• How have/could you celebrate the Fruit of the Spirit when you see it in others?
• What ways have you seen each Fruit of the Spirit grow in your heart and life over time? (Becoming more gentle, more kind, more self controlled, etc.)
• Meditate deeply on the fruit of love (including 1 Corinthians 15) and let it transform your understanding and experience of love.