Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness

The last fruit on the tree of Spirit-empowered Christian character is self-control. Besides its appearance in this verse, it appears in only two other verses in the New Testament, and they don’t help us much with the meaning in context:

“And as [Paul] reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trembled, and answered, Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee” (Ac 24.25).

“And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; ⁶ And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness” (2P 1.5-6).

All of these occurrences are in lists, which are notoriously unhelpful in providing the kind of context that’s useful for drawing out the meaning of the word.

The adjectival form appears one time, in Titus 1.8, but that’s a list too:

“For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre; ⁸ But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate” (Ti 1.8).

But fortunately for us, the verb form appears in two verses in 1 Corinthians, both of which give us some helpful context:

“But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (1Co 7.9).

“And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible” (1Co 9.25).

The first is in a context of marriage, specifically as a sexual outlet. Paul says that if a young couple is unable to control themselves with regard to their sexual impulses, then they should get married.

The second is in an athletic context, specifically running a race (1Co 9.24). When an athlete is in training, he needs to exercise self-control over every area of his physical and mental life: he works out even when he doesn’t feel like it, he carefully controls his diet, he visualizes what he’ll need to do to be a winner.

In the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint), the verb form appears once, when Moses tells Pharaoh,

“For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still, ³ Behold, the hand of the LORD is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain” (Ex 9.2).

Here it speaks of an external restraint—Pharaoh not “letting my people go.” Similarly Herodotus writes of the Greek generals having an area “under their control” (Histories, 8.49). In a more spiritual sense, an OT apocryphal book speaks of someone who “takes hold of” the Law (Sir 15.1) and of one who “restrains himself” from lust (Sir 18.30)—which reinforces the use in 1Co 7.9 above.

Also in the Septuagint the verb form is used of Joseph “composing himself” before going before his brothers (Ge 43.31).

So “self-control” can include the sexual sense, but it’s broader than that; it speaks of personal discipline in general. So it includes our thoughts and plans, our goals, our words, our actions. It includes our responses to people we don’t like. It includes the way we drive.

In one of many ironies in the Christian life (dying is living, the servant is master, the first are last), our “self-control” emerges not from ourselves, but from the Spirit who empowers us.

Jesus said that we’ll be known by our fruits.

Who are you?

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness

The eighth of the nine fruits of the Spirit is gentleness. The KJV uses the term “meekness..” The Greek lexicons include ideas such as meekness, mildness, even-temperedness, even friendliness and humility.

The Greek word is relatively rare in the New Testament—it appears just 11 times—but those few uses give us a fairly robust picture of it by their context—

• It’s used in parallel with compassion (Co 3.12), humility (Ep 4.2; Co 3.12), kindness (Co 3.12), patience (Ep 4.2; Co 3.12), peaceableness (Titus 3.2), reverence (1P 3.16), tolerance (Ep 4.2), and love (1Co 4.21; Ep 4.2).
• It’s used to describe the attitude of a believer who is
  • correcting those who have fallen into error, in hopes that they may be restored  (2Ti 2.25);
  • restoring a fellow believer who has fallen into sin (Ga 6.1)—and that word “restoring” is used in secular Greek literature of a doctor setting a broken bone;
  • “receiving” the Scripture (Jam 1.21);
  • doing good deeds (Jam 3.13).
• It’s contrasted with “boldness” (2Co 10.1) and with the attitude of a person intent on maligning someone (Titus 3.2) or disciplining someone for bad behavior (1Co 4.21).
• It’s said to be a characteristic of Christ (2Co 10.1).

I’ve been going to dentists since I was a boy. My first dentist practiced in an age when the profession didn’t give a lot of thought to the pain involved; pain was just kind of understood to be a part of the experience. He didn’t use a topical anesthetic before he came at me with that 9-foot-long needle that had the real stuff in it. It never occurred to him during a filling that the patient might like a little break 20 minutes in. I learned to just tough it out or focus my thoughts on my happy place (which was most certainly not the dentist’s chair).

As an adult, in another part of the country, I had to establish a relationship with a new dentist. The one I ended up with was, shall we say, enlightened. His training had included some simple techniques that would significantly lower the pain inflicted. A decade or two later, when he retired and sold his practice to a young guy right out of dental school, I realized that by then the training was focusing even more on techniques to lower or even eliminate the pain.

Just had a crown done last week. Piece of cake.

Good for dentistry.

Now.

Dentists are dealing with tiny fragments of bone in our heads, and their motivation derives from the simple desire to have their patients come back, so the practice can be profitable and therefore stable. (And yes, I’m sure that many dentists, and others in health care, have an altruistic motive as well.)

Most of us, though, are not dealing with tiny bone fragments. We’re dealing with the souls of men and women in the image of God, who are going to live somewhere forever, and in the case of fellow members of the body of Christ, are going to live with us forever—and who, as members of Christ, are deeply treasured by him.

We ought to think seriously, then, about the pain we inflict. Some pain is necessary, no doubt; but much of the pain we inflict with our words and actions, even when confrontation is called for, is unnecessary. Some of the pain we inflict comes from our own impatience, or frustration, or self-focus. I’ve done that, many more times than I’d like to admit. And recently.

That’s not a result of the Spirit’s work in us.

We all—all who follow Christ—have within us an omnipotent  person who is influencing us to be gentle. We can do this.

And we ought to.

Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness

The seventh fruit is the Greek word for “faith.” This is a common word, with two distinct meanings. The more common, as you might expect, is “faith”—which is simply trust, believing someone or something. The other is “faithfulness,” or trustworthiness, or reliability—someone who can be believed.

In this passage, the KJV has “faith,” while all the modern versions except the HCSB have “faithfulness.”

Why are they so confident? I suspect because it seems odd to say that “faith” is a product of sanctification after you’re saved, if “faith” is the key to how you got saved in the first place. But faithfulness, trustworthiness, as a result of sanctification makes perfect sense; in Ephesians Paul makes it a specific example of how Christ’s followers differ from the kind of people they were before:

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another (Ep 4.25).

So something the Spirit of God works in us is faithfulness:

• We tell the truth.
• We keep our promises.
• Our word is our bond.
• We show up when we said we would.

Why is that important? Paul gives us one reason in the Ephesians passage: “for we are members one of another.” It wouldn’t make any sense for the hand to lie to the eye, or to ignore its responsibilities to the eye, because they’re parts of the same body, and all the parts want the whole body to prosper. Have you ever noticed that when you get something in your eye, your finger doesn’t hurt? But it knows that because it’s articulated, and pointy, and reinforced at the tip with the backing of a fingernail, it can help your eye out with things that the eye can’t do for itself. I’ve noticed that my mouth, even though there’s nothing it can do, still wants to help—try getting something out of your eye with your mouth closed. 🙂

So how moronic is it to lie to another member of the body of Christ? or to make a promise you don’t intend to keep?

When my older daughter was about 10, I had the opportunity to take her on a two-week fossil-digging trip out West with a friend. At the time, my younger daughter was too young to come along, but since it appeared that such trips would be likely in the future, I told her that when she was 10, I’d take her on a trip too.

You know how it goes. Complications came along, and 4 years later the trip just wasn’t possible. I had to tell my little girl that I had made her a promise I couldn’t keep. I have never felt lower than in that moment. (Fortunately, she seems to have handled it well, avoiding prison time and other evidences of sociopathy.)

Do you recall the biblical story of Joshua and the Gibeonites? The Lord had commanded Israel to exterminate the Canaanite tribes. The Gibeonites tricked Joshua into believing that they were from far away and therefore not included in the decree, and Joshua promised—with an oath on the name of YHWH (Jos 9.18)—that he would not harm them.

Shortly later, of course, he found out that they had lied.

And he still kept his promise (Jos 9.1-27).

In our day, any such fraudulent contract would be legally void. But Joshua didn’t see it that way.

And centuries later, when King Saul went after the Gibeonites, in violation of Joshua’s oath, apparently God didn’t see it that way either (2S 21.1-9).

I don’t know about you, but I notice when people don’t keep their word, and if it happens repeatedly, I remember. And then I don’t count on them. And sometimes that has consequences for them—they don’t get a position of responsibility that they might otherwise have gotten.

Keeping your word matters.

Jesus said that people will know us by our fruit.

Who are you?

Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness

The sixth fruit that the Spirit grows in the developing character of a Christian is “goodness.” Pretty much all the English translations translate the word this way (though NRSV has “generosity”). There are lots of Greek words that involve the idea of goodness, but the two most common generally involve qualitative goodness (“He’s a good musician”—that’s καλος [kalos] for you Greek bodies) and moral goodness (“He’s a good person”—αγαθος [agathos]). (As in all languages, there’s considerable overlap as well.) Here we have the noun form of the latter. Paul is talking about being the sort of person who is prompted by his internal moral character to act morally, to do the good as distinguished from the evil.

This is a tricky business, for a couple of reasons. Most obviously, we’re not only in the image of God, but we’re also corrupted by sin, and that corruption has affected every part of us. So we all have in us a strong tendency to evil, and that tendency never goes away completely; in fact, most of us are dissatisfied that we haven’t made better progress, especially since the standard is “the glory of God” (Ro 3.23). We think of all kinds of things that we shouldn’t do, and often the motivation to go ahead and do those things—disgust, revenge, logistical desperation (as in “how am I going to pay the rent?”) is quite strong.

Most people control their evil inclinations for social reasons, among others; it just wouldn’t be acceptable to kill that guy who cut in front of us in the checkout line at the store, even though he’s acting and speaking rudely and remorselessly, right in front of the children. People would look down on me for doing what I’m thinking, and there might even be more drastic (legal) ramifications, and what would the folks in town think if I got carted off to prison?

We find such social constraints powerful, and they help keep us in line. But we know the evil inclinations are in there. If you’re a Christian, exercising the means of grace and growing thereby, you see progress (sanctification) over time; the inner darkness lifts, and the victories get more frequent. But you still wish you were doing better.

A second complicating factor is our tendency to justify ourselves, to see our situation as an exception. We’re all really good at that. Much of the evil that others see in us, we don’t see as evil, because we have perfectly good reasons for what we did. There’s a reason that the defendant is not allowed to sit on his own jury.

So for this character quality, we’re not very good at evaluating our own progress.

But progress is there, certainly and irrepressibly, if we belong to Christ, because

• we are in Christ (Ro 8.1), who is perfectly and pervasively good;
• the Spirit of God is in us (Ro 8.9), bringing this character change to fruition.

Writing to the first church he planted in Europe, Paul assures them of his prayer that God will “fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power” (2Th 1.11). And why is Paul so confident that God will answer this prayer? Because, as he will write later to what is likely the last church he ever visited, God has “predestinated” those he knows “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Ro 8.29)—a determination so certain that Paul speaks of their future glorification as already accomplished: “them he also glorified” (Ro 8.30).

All who belong to Christ are being changed, from the inside out, to think and say and do the right thing, to treat their neighbors, and the people who cut in line in front of them, and the drivers who wave just one of their fingers at them, and the people they didn’t vote for, as genuine image-bearers of the Creator God himself, of infinite value and worthy of their time, care, and respect.

One of my friends posted recently, “Joe Biden wasn’t elected. He was installed. Like a toilet.”

Nope. Wrong fruit.

Jesus said that people will know us by our fruit.

Who are you?

Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience

The most popular modern English versions list “kindness” as the fifth fruit. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the KJV has “gentleness.” These two English words focus on our relationships, or at least our interactions; they’re all about how we treat other people.

As to the underlying Greek word, one Greek lexicon (Friberg, for you word nerds) says it has two nuances: “(1) as a gracious attitude … opposite severity; (2) as moral integrity.” So there’s the relational sense implied in the two English renderings, but also a simple moral sense: being good, doing right.

We can get a richer sense of its breadth of meaning (what the linguists call “semantic range”) by running through the 11 times it’s used in the New Testament—

• In Ro 2.4 it’s used twice, paralleled with “tolerance” and “patience”;
• In Ro 11.22 it’s used 3 times, contrasted with “severity”;
• Ep 2.7 uses it to describe God’s gracious treatment of us;
• Co 3.12 lists it alongside “compassion, humility, gentleness [a different Greek word], and patience”;
• Titus 3.4 speaks of it in connection with God’s love for mankind.

These 8 uses of the word are all pretty clearly speaking of the first nuance, the relational one—how we treat other people.

• Ro 3.12 uses it this way: “There is none who does good; there is not even one.” This is a quotation from Psalm 14.3, where the standard Greek translation, the Septuagint, has our Greek word. Paul has chosen to quote that Greek version rather than translating from the Hebrew himself. The Hebrew word there is tob, the standard Hebrew word for “good.” (Remember that song from “Fiddler on the Roof,” Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov? The phrase means “good fortune.”)

So in this one passage, the Septuagint translators used our word to indicate the basic concept of goodness.

That’s 9 of the 11 uses. The mathematical genii among us will realize that there are 2 more:

• 2Co 6.6—”in purity, in knowledge, in patience, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in genuine love.” Is this kindness, or goodness—or something else? It’s hard to say. It’s a list, which often—as here—makes a poor context for discriminating between senses of a word. This list is part of a larger list of the characteristics of Paul’s ministry among the Corinthians (2Co 6.4-10). We might detect a general emphasis on the relationship between Paul and the Corinthians, which pervades the whole letter. But even against that background, it’s hard to rule out the nuance of “goodness,” even if “kindness” fits quite well.

What’s the 1 remaining use? It’s Ga 5.22, our verse on the fruit of the spirit. Again, a list. So it’s ambiguous.

Forgive all the tech talk, but I think it’s worth doing a mildly serious word study in a case where there are multiple possible meanings—or where the word might in fact have multiple intended shades of meaning. We’d like to get everything that’s actually there.

And now we’re ready to talk application. What does this look like in a person in whom the Spirit is working?

Such people are good—they think, speak, and act in good ways, and in particular in their interactions with others.

How are such people thinking? They’re thinking outwardly; they’re focused not on what they want or need, but on what’s in the best interest of the people around them.

Seems to me we’ve talked about that concept recently. Lessee—it was just a few posts ago—in this series, in fact—oh, yeah, here it is, right at the beginning of this list:

Love.

People who are obsessed with what they want—their rights, their wishes, their needs—don’t act with kindness. They make life unpleasant or difficult for other people just to make their point.

They ruin the shift of a 16-year-old store clerk because they think the store’s policy on mask-wearing is unnecessary or stupid—when the clerk didn’t set the policy and is just trying to do her job, get through her shift, and make a little money for college. Have a nice day yourself, mister. I can sense Jesus just oozing out of your pores.

People know who you are by your fruit.

Who are you?

Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace

The fourth character quality growing on the tree in the Spirit’s garden is—well, it depends on whom you ask. The KJV calls it “longsuffering”; the NIV, “forbearance”; and the other major English translations, “patience.”

Hardly anybody uses the word “longsuffering” anymore—at least, outside of church. Same with “forbearance.” But “patience” we understand.

It’s not losing your temper. It’s not letting the fact that you’re in a hurry turn you into a jerk. It’s taking a deep breath and just waiting your turn.

Interestingly, this word seems to be used particularly of how we interact with people. There’s a different word, “endurance,” for bearing up under difficult circumstances. This one’s about people.

In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic Old Testament, this word is reliably used to translate a Hebrew word that means, literally, “long of nostrils”—that is, someone whose nose is so long that it takes a long time for it to get red with anger.

And if the concept strikes us as a little comical, it really shouldn’t; God himself claims it as one of his central attributes:

“The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; ⁷ who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations” (Ex 34.6-7).

I’ve written a series of posts on this passage in the past. Spoiler alert: God controls himself perfectly and infinitely, allowing 4 generations of descendants to feel the natural consequences of their forebears’ sins, but extending mercy for 1,000 generations—in human terms, forever—because he is “slow to anger”: the end of his nose doesn’t quickly get red.

And as God enables us, through the work of his Spirit, to follow his example in this regard, we should consider what that looks like: God, who is, like us, an emotional being, is revulsed by the pervasive and persistent sins of his creatures, those who bear his image and wallow in his common grace, but does not lose his temper, does not strike out in frustration, does not become the servant rather than the master of his wrath. Though the anger is righteous, and deserved by those creatures, God persists in grace and mercy and forgiveness, for thousands of years, until the day—the right day, the perfect day—when all that anger is unleashed in the only place, and in the only way, and on the only person, by which righteousness and deliverance could be accomplished.

Our anger, such as it is, should look like that. It should be rightly motivated, controlled, and purposeful.

That’s hard for us, because we get frustrated.

Has it ever occurred to you why that is?

It’s because things are not perfectly under our control; we’re not sovereign.

God is sovereign. He never gets frustrated, because he has no meaningful obstacles.

Frustration is a sign and consequence of our limitations—limitations we’ll have until the day we die, and some of which we’ll have even after that.

But as we grow in the Spirit, he enables us to see past our limitations to God’s sovereignty—to trust the wisdom and goodness of his plans for us, and to learn to trust his time scale rather than imposing our own. He’s not in a hurry, because he doesn’t have to be.

If I have a choice between trusting somebody who’s calmly and purposefully moving pieces on a chessboard, or somebody who’s beating himself over the head with the same chessboard, I’m going with the calm one every time.

Personal confession.

For most of my life I’ve been a very aggressive driver—and I have the citations to prove it. (For a while I considered trying to get one in every state. I did get citations from two different countries in Africa; I’m an internationally renowned citationist.) As I age, I find that I’m getting less aggressive. It’s not that I’m not in a hurry anymore—my schedule nowadays is as busy as ever—but I’ve come to realize that in past years I’ve almost never needed to be in hurry; I just always was. There’s great joy in letting someone else go ahead of you and getting “the wave.” There’s joy in enjoying the ride and not having white knuckles when you get there.

Is that the Spirit’s work? Well, I’m not inclined to think that the tendency comes from inside me.

Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy

The next item in this list of the identifying marks of people being changed by the Spirit is peace. I’ve written on the topic more than once, but this time I’d like to view it from a tighter perspective, the perspective that this passage calls for.

If you study the use of this word in the New Testament (the Greek word, by the way, is the basis of the name “Irene”), you’ll realize that it’s a common wish in first-century culture. Many of the epistles begin or end, or both, with a benediction that includes peace. Paul in particular likes to combine the standard Greek greeting (chairein, “greeting,” slightly altered to charis, “grace,” to suit his theological frame of reference) with the standard Hebrew greeting (shalom, “peace”); he begins every one of his epistles with the wish “Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ,” or something remarkably similar.

Of course we wish one another peace. And, as Paul notes, the source of that peace is God—specifically God the Father and the Son in his epistolary benedictions, and the Spirit here in Galatians 5.22.

But we find that God’s relationship with peace is … complicated. The Bible characterizes God as both “the God of peace” (Ro 15.33; 16.20; Php 4.9; 1Th 5.23; Heb 13.20) and “the Lord of Hosts,” or “Commander of armies”—the latter nearly 250 times in the Former and Latter Prophets of the Old Testament. In fact, the “very God of peace” is the one who crushes his enemies (Ro 16.20). Similarly Jesus says, on the one hand, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you” (Jn 14.27), but also, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Mt 10.34). At the end of it all, “the wrath of the Lamb” is a huge concern (Re 6.15-17). It turns out that whether you find God to be a source of peace or of terror depends directly on how you stand with him.

But it’s even more complicated than that. Sometimes God wants his people to be at peace, to be free from disruption and persecution (Ac 9.31). But at other times he allows—no, he sends—persecution that kills many of them and scatters the rest (Ac 8.1-3; 9.1-2). He does that not to punish them for their sins, which are many—because Jesus himself has fully exhausted the punishment for those sins—but to work endurance in their character (Ro 5.3) and to display that character to those who have yet to join the family. In doing that he’s building directly on the work Christ has already done (1P 2.20-25); Christ is our example of suffering unjustly without defense or complaint, and he calls us by that example to do the same.

So in some ways we’re not experiencing peace, but in other ways—the most important ones—we are. Because we have peace with God (Ro 5.1), we can experience peace from God (Ro 1.7); and that indwelling peace changes our character and then our outlook in a way that enables his people, who used to be enemies with him (Ep 2.1-6) and with one another (Ep 2.14-17), to have peace with one another (Ro 14.19; Ep 4.3), and even with those spiritually opposed to them (1Co 7.15; Heb 12.14), and to endure trials with confidence in a positive outcome (Ro 15.13; Php 4.7).

Do your words communicate calm and confidence, or turmoil, frustration, and rage? Jesus said that what comes out of us communicates what’s on the inside.

Maybe it’s time to think about the basis for powerful and lasting peace, the kind of deep-seated assurance and confident expectation that will radiate out from you, even in difficult times, with a force that prompts those around you to ask, “How do you do it?”

In these days, peace attracts attention by its contrast with the chaotic and violent background noise of our world.

Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love

As the Spirit of God works on the character of his people, it should come as no surprise that right on the heels of love comes joy. Or maybe it might be surprising after all, if you consider the biblical definition of love rather than the common cultural one.

We all know that when people “fall in love,” there’s a lot of joy involved. But as we noted last time, love isn’t really about serendipity; it’s about a focus away from oneself and on others. And these days our culture takes it as axiomatic that you can’t love others until you first love yourself; that there’s nothing more joyous than “being true to yourself.”

Au contraire.

I’m not suggesting that we should be doormats or hypocrites, or that we should be obsessed with self-loathing. But I am confident that making yourself the center of the universe is no path to joy.

If we devote ourselves to acting in the best interests of those around us, though, the roadway is blossoming with joy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We should start with definitions.

The word translated “joy” here occurs 60 times in the New Testament. It’s used to describe

• How a man feels when he learns that he’s finally, after decades of trying, going to be a father (Lk 1.14)
• How the wise men felt when the star they had seen back home reappeared just as they needed help finding the newborn king (Mt 2.10)
• How a man feels when he finds a hidden treasure (Mt 13.44)
• How a woman feels after she gives birth (Jn 16.21)
• How Jesus’ disciples felt when they found that they could cast out demons (Lk 10.17)
• How the women at the tomb felt when the angel told them that Jesus was risen (Mt 28.8)
• How the disciples felt when the risen Jesus appeared in the room with them (Lk 24.41)
• How Rhoda felt when she realized that the imprisoned Peter, for whom the church was praying, was free and standing at the gate (Ac 12.14)
• How a teacher feels when his students excel (Php 2.2; 4.1; 1Th 2.19-20; Heb 13.17; 1J 1.4; 3J 4)

I really get that last one.

If you scan through the uses of this word in the NT, you can’t help noticing something that you may find surprising—the frequent connection of joy with trials.

• When Paul and Barnabas were opposed and then thrown out of the first major city they visited in Asia Minor on their first missionary journey, “the disciples were continually filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit” (Ac 13.52).
• To the church in Corinth Paul writes, “I am overflowing with joy in all our affliction” (2Co 7.4).
• To the same church he writes that for the churches of northern Greece, “in a great trial of affliction the abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded unto the riches of their liberality” (2Co 8.2).
• He tells the Thessalonians that they had “received the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Spirit” (1Th 1.6).
• The author of Hebrews writes that his audience “accepted joyfully the seizure of your property” (Heb 10.34).
• James writes, “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials” (Jam 1.2).

So joy is how we feel when we get really good news—but it’s possible to feel the same way when the news is not at all good. It’s delight that isn’t based on our circumstances.

How does the Spirit work this in us? The “trials” passages give us a clue.

• God “comforts the depressed” (2Co 7.6). And, as Paul makes clear in this instance, the causes of sorrow are not permanent, and God brings good things out of hard times.
• In the case of the Hebrews, they accepted persecution “knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one” (Heb 10.34).
• And James, writing earlier than all the others—and before his execution by being thrown off “the pinnacle of the Temple” in Jerusalem, where his half-brother had refused Satan’s invitation to jump—notes that “the testing of your faith produces endurance” (Jam 1.3).

What’s the takeaway here?

When your perspective changes from the mud in the road to the eternal outcome of the beneficent divine plan—when we live “with eternity’s values in view,” as the gospel chorus says—we deal more joyously—more realistically!—with the instabilities of life. Like an experienced driver, who takes in the whole road and not just what’s happening right in front of his bumper, we’re much less likely to crash.

Joy.

It’s how we live.

Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction

Paul begins his list of Christ’s character qualities with love.

We all think we know what love is—it’s that tingling sensation we get when we “fall” for someone.

One of my seminary roommates used to call that “zing.”

Let me state for the record that zing is good. May we all experience zing, and may we rejoice in it.

But zing is not all there is to love.

If we study the word as it’s used in the New Testament, we find that while it certainly includes an emotional component, it’s much bigger than that. I think the best definition I’ve come across is from my friend and colleague Randy Leedy: “a disposition to sacrifice oneself in order to secure the benefit of the loved one.” (For a considerably deeper discussion of the complexities of the term, try this dissertation by a former student of mine, the kind webmaster of this blog.)

Love is more than just an emotion, or a choice, or an understanding. Love is a perspective and its consequences; love is the way you look at something or someone, and the decision to elevate the worth of that object above your own interests.

Once you realize this, you realize how toxic much of our culture’s view of love is. Many people, informed by the artistic expressions of the age, love people for what they can do for them—you make me feel good, you “complete” me, you make my life worth living. “I can’t live without you,” after all.

But that’s upside down and backwards. Love, genuine love, impels me to give, not to take. It impels me to think of someone else, not my own joy or pleasure or desire.

Sure, it’s complicated; there are lots of facets to genuine love. But if there’s not at its core a greater valuation of the object than of the self, then it’s not love.

What can we learn about love from the Bible? Perhaps it was J.R. Fausset who first observed that Paul is the apostle of faith; Peter is the apostle of hope; and John is the apostle of love.

In that case, let’s see what John says.

In his brief first epistle, he talks a lot about love—

• God is love (1J 4.8, 16).
• He expresses that love toward us (1J 3.1) by sending his Son (1J 4.9-10) to lay down his life for us (1J 3.16) even before we loved him (1J 4.9-10).
• We should love God in return (1J 4.19) and show that love by obeying him (1J 2.5; 5.2-3).
• We should love our brothers, because that’s one way we obey him (1J 3.23; 4.21). And we should love them genuinely, in action, not merely in words (1J 3.18).
• When we love our brothers, we demonstrate that we have passed from death to life (1J 3.14); that we know God (1J 4.7-8); that God is in us (1J 4.16-17); that we’re growing in our understanding of his love (1J 4.12); and that we’re walking in his light (1J 2.10).
• We should not love “the world” (1J 2.15), defined as desires that are fundamentally self-focused (“the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,” 1J 2.16).
• And we learn that mature love “casts out fear” (1J 4.18).

There’s a lot of fear these days. And a lot of that fear is being expressed by Christians.

That doesn’t make any sense. If we’re in God, we exist—“abide in”—a state of love. And if we’re living with an external, loving focus, we have no business being afraid.

Perhaps you’ve seen the meme that says, “No one, in the history of ever, has ever calmed down after being told to calm down.”

Granted.

But calm down.

In this case, there’s supernatural power involved, which ought to make the impossible possible.

How do we walk in love?

• We think about others. First.
  • How will what I’m about to say affect this person? Will it build him up or tear him down? Will it draw him to Christ or push him away?
• We devalue our own rights and needs and wants.
  • Does the fact that I have a right to free speech mean that I have to exercise it at this moment? Is my winning this argument—or even just getting in a zinger as I walk away—more important to me than the value of my opponent—who is, by the way, in the image of God (Ge 1.27), and deeply loved by him (Jn 3.16)?

Jesus observed that in nature, you identify a tree by its fruit (Mt 7.16).

Who are you?

Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

In the current societal turmoil, there’s a lot of suspicion toward people we disagree with, and consequently there are a lot of charges being lobbed casually back and forth between opposing camps. Any historian will tell you that you should be suspicious of one group’s descriptions of a group they oppose—that principle has come into play notably in current skepticism about descriptions of historical people groups as cannibalistic, and it even played a role in our understanding of the Ecuadorian Huaorani (not “Auca”) who killed the 5 missionaries back in 1956.

So it shouldn’t surprise us when people on the other side of an issue from us describe us inaccurately. I see broad characterizations of Christians, for example, that are demonstrably, objectively inaccurate. No, Christians are not characterized by “hate”—an all too facile accusation these days—simply because they disagree with a policy decision or a view of morality. No, they’re not “phobic”—irrationally motivated by fear, another all too facile accusation that conveniently liberates the accuser from having to answer their rational statements rationally—when they allege that a given lifestyle will carry significant negative consequences, both culturally and individually. And no, they don’t believe—and this is my favorite—that they should read the Bible “literally”—they’re not knuckle-dragging troglodytes who wouldn’t recognize a metaphor or a synecdoche if it bit ‘em on the, um, kiester.

But.

On the other hand, I see many of my Christian fellow-travelers saying and doing things that make these accusations, well, credible.

My brethren, these things ought not so to be.

Christianity is not at root a cultural position (“this is just the way I was brought up!”), a pragmatic political position (“they’re destroying our country!”), or even a change of worldview (“I see it all so clearly now!”), whether due to significant rational, emotional, or circumstantial experiences.

Christianity—personal salvation—is a work of God in the heart of a human that spiritually resurrects him from the dead and sets him on a radically different course of life, empowering him to instantiate that lifestyle consistently and progressively. A Christian—a real one—should be significantly different from the kind of person he was before, and he should get progressively better over time at resembling the character qualities of Christ.

Now, we all start out life broken morally and in many other ways, and that brokenness is never perfectly mended in this life. But we ought to have something in the way of character improvement as an unavoidable consequence of our new birth, and we ought to be making progress.

Paul speaks of this contrast in Ephesians 4, where he exhorts believers to “walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called” (Ep 4.1). Earlier in the epistle he has spoken of having been “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ep 2.1) but then “resurrected together with Christ” (Ep 2.5) and “created in Christ Jesus unto good works” (Ep 2.10).

Radical change.

For much of chapter 4, Paul contrasts the old way of life (“being alienated from the life of God,” Ep 4.18), characterized by “all uncleanness” (Ep 4.19), with the new way, “which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ep 4.24). He lists several specific examples of this new way:

• We quit lying and tell the truth (Ep 4.25).
• We control our anger (Ep 4.26).
• We fight temptation (Ep 4.27).
• We give instead of taking (Ep 4.28).
• We use our words to build up rather than tear down (Ep 4.29).

And the list goes on (Ep 4.30-32), ending with kindness, tenderness, and forgiveness (Ep 4.32).

That last verse is the first one I ever memorized, in Sunday school back in 1960. After 6 decades, I’ve still got work to do, and I suspect you do too.

Paul makes the same point in an earlier epistle, contrasting the “works of the flesh” (Ga 5.19-21) with the “fruit of the Spirit” (Ga 5.22-23). The latter list amounts to a description of the character of Jesus, to whom God is conforming our character over time (Ro 8.29).

Christians are different from their fellow citizens. We’re always going to be seen as different, strange (1P 4.4), odd, even contemptible, even dangerous. It’s happened before, and it will happen again.

But as Paul’s apostolic predecessor and colleague Peter reminds us, we shouldn’t be giving them legitimate reasons to think that way about us (1P 3.14-17; 4.14-16). Suffering for Jesus is one thing; suffering because you’re not like Jesus is another thing entirely.

So it will be helpful to spend some time thinking about the fruit of the Spirit and assessing our own needs in these areas.

Next time.

 Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash