The Fruit of the Spirit: Patience

There are two meanings to the word patience and I believe that both are aspects of what a perfect Christian life should look like. The first meaning that I am going to look into is that of the quality of being able to wait for long periods of time without becoming annoyed. We are used to having to wait now as part of our daily life. We have to wait for people who we’ve arranged to meet, we have to wait for public transport and we have to wait for special occasions like Christmas or a birthday or even a long looked forward to holiday. We get impatient because we don’t want to wait; we want the person, bus, birthday or holiday to arrive right now. This though is foolish. If we went through life rushing past all the times of waiting we would miss out on almost our whole lives! This point was illustrated in the movie Click (which I haven’t actually seen) where a man is given a remote control that gives him the power to pause time, fast forward it or even rewind it. He uses it to fast forward through all the difficult moments of his life during which time he is present but not conscious of his actions, his body is on auto pilot. He finds that his life becomes a big mess because he didn’t want to actually spend his time working through difficulty. In the same way we can’t skip all the bad bits these are the moments when God grows us the most. In adversity all our attention is on him and we join with the psalmist in asking ‘How long Lord?’ but like the psalmists and countless people of faith in the past we can take comfort from our own past experiences where we can see how God has always supported us through times of difficulty and lead us into times of more joyful living. There is a good side to that impatience though because it is a kind of longing. Longing to see justice done on the Earth and longing to see people know Jesus are great things and will spur us on to action. What I am warning against is getting angry at God when the world isn’t brought to justice and all the people we know aren’t saved tomorrow. This is part of the second part of the meaning of patience. We can see that they do in fact fit quite nicely together.

Control of our temper is what is also known as forbearance. I used to think I had this in spades but actually since writing this blog I have realised that I too am weak in this area, this is true of all of us I think. We may think there is nothing that can nettle us but there is always something or someone that can really get on our nerves. For me my brothers can easily make me lose my cool. This is because they actually love me and know me so well that it is easy for them to pinpoint the area that I am most sensitive about. My weakest area is probably the pride I have in myself. Any jibe on my abilities or appearance or for that matter anything relating to myself will kindle some anger in me. This pride in me is the opposite of what Christ teaches. He teaches us to have a realistic view of ourselves and the reality of who we are is nothing to be proud of “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” Romans 3:23. We are only found to be someone of standing in our relationship with Christ, so… "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord." Jeremiah 9:24 in many other passages throughout the Bible the foolishness of pride is spoken of as severely damaging and God promises time and again in prophecies to bring down those who have exalted themselves in their pride. I can see clearly that I have nothing to have pride in except all that God has blessed me with. This is the key to forbearance. That our security, our personality, our character is so wrapped up in God that no one can hope to damage it with mere words. As with the whole of the fruit of the Spirit it actually requires us spending time with God in prayer and in studying his word then God will highlight our weakest points and he will ask us ever so kindly to give them up to him, what possible use could we have for them? They do us way more harm than good. Then little by little (it is a long hard road) We will lose our insecurities about our appearance, I have bid farewell to the insecurities I had about the size of my head but now new ones have arisen about the state of my skin but God his helping me to deal with those too. We also lose the pride in our abilities, that need we have for people to recognise how gifted we are in an area. We find that we can recognise the changes he is effecting in us, we’ll grow closer and closer to him and soon the approval of other people won’t matter to us anymore. When we have reached that stage we can be happy to know we have truly grasped what it is to be patient whenever others slight us whether intentionally or unintentionally.

What I have found recently that through spending quality time with God I have a clearer sense of what heaven will be like. I feel an overwhelming sense of joy erupt within me followed by a deep peace and knowledge that I am loved. I realise that whatever I feel or understand here is only the smallest taste of the true enormity and eternity of heaven. I think the times when life on Earth becomes really tough are the times I long for heaven, I find myself longing to be there now and to find relief from all my pain. I know that it is in some way a selfish desire because we whose places in heaven are guaranteed remain here for the benefit of those who don’t have a place as yet. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be with our God though because he longs to draw us to himself like a mother gathering her children he tells us so in his word. What makes heaven so perfect is the very presence of God for all eternity. In longing for heaven I am really longing to know my God to the fullest extent possible and I think we should all have this same impatience for heaven.

Psalm 13
For the director of music. A psalm of David.

1 How long, O LORD ? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts

and every day have sorrow in my heart?

How long will my enemy triumph over me?

3 Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;

4 my enemy will say, "I have overcome him,"

and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

5 But I trust in your unfailing love;

my heart rejoices in your salvation.

6 I will sing to the LORD,

for he has been good to me.

Pslam 37
7 Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;

do not fret when men succeed in their ways,

when they carry out their wicked schemes.

8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;

do not fret—it leads only to evil.

9 For evil men will be cut off,

but those who hope in the LORD will inherit the land.

Phillipians 1
21For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. 22If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labour for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! 23I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; 24but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. 25Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, 26so that through my being with you again your joy in Christ Jesus will overflow on account of me.

The Fruit of the Spirit: Peace

Peace:
A state of tranquility, quiet, and harmony, e.g., a state free from civil disturbance.
A state free of oppressive and unpleasant thoughts and emotions.
That will give me some peace of mind.
Harmony in personal relations.
free of war.

Ever since Adam and Eve chose to eat the forbidden fruit (There's that fruit again) We have esentially been at war with God. Every single human is born with the natural urge to turn away from God and follow his own selfish way. When we repent (A word which means to turn back to God) and ask for forgivness for not following God and thinking that we can do better, God is able to forgive those us and punish those sins at the same time. You see all sin deserves death and someone must die for our sins we must either die ourselves or allow Jesus to do it for us. The astounding thing is that Jesus the one perfect human to ever live was willing to die for all of us decidedly imperfect humans

To discover why there is such a lack of peace in the world we must go back in time to the garden of Eden. Within the garden Adam and Eve the first humans were fufilling the purpose they had been designed for, to enjoy a personal relationship with their creator. God lived in the garden with them, the Bible account talks of him walking in the garden. In short we as the human race were as close to heaven as we ever have been. Sadly future generations could not be born into this state of harmony with their creator because Adam and Eve chose to jeopradise this perfect relationship all because they lusted after the same knowledge that God had. When God gave them Garden to look after he gave them just one rule and as is the case with all his later rules it was for their own benefit, the rule was: They could eat of all the trees in the garden except one; the tree of the Knowledge of good and evil but they disobeyed this rule and in that act of turning away from God, sin was introduced into the World.

Though it must have broken his heart God was forced to throw us out of the garden. We had rejected him and rejecting him meant rejecting all that was good and choosing badness. A being so pure couldn't have a relationship with beings who are impure. God is water and we are oil no matter how hard you stir they will always remain seperate. What is needed then is for us to be made the same as God. If we are oil too then we can mix succesfully. Thankfully God didn't just leave this task to us because we'd never be able to manage it. There are many people in the world who think we can become like God without his help, even sadder is some of them are Christians. They think that doing good works alone, without God, will do the work of fixing the broken relationship between us and our creator Paul is very clear on this point in a number of passages.

"What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the "stumbling stone." As it is written:

"See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble

and a rock that makes them fall,

and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame." Romans 9:30-33

I'm glad I looked up the definition of righteousness a while back because it's a word you will encounter a lot in the Bible. Here it is again in Isaiah:

"All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags" Isaiah 64:6a

Righteousness in being right with God which is what I have been concerned with in this blog. When we are right with God we are at peace with him and from the the two passages I have pulled out and from the rest of the Bible we can see that we cannot achieve our own righteousness. The funny thing is even our very best attempt at being good to God is like a dirty rag this is not because God is being overly critical of us but because apart from him everything even our good works are sinful.

The only way we can achieve this righteousness is through God, through believing that his promise to forgive us and to make us pure like him is true. If we take that step of faith and ask God for this then he will do it. Then God will send the Spirit to live in you and he will set to work straight away guiding you in the paths of peace.

I asked for the Holy Spirit only a few years ago, I am one of those Chrisitans who does not know exactly when they became a Christian for me it has been a slow progression towards faith over a number of years because of this I don't know when I first asked for the Holy Spirit but I know I have and I am convinced of the fact that he lives within me now. No matter what my changing feelings may say (When I'm in a bad mood its very hard to believe that I'm saved and that my place is assured in heaven) I can be sure that the Spirit lives within me because I experience his prescence daily.

When I was a new Chrisitan I didn't realise that the feelings of peace I had at Church came from fact that so many people who had the Spirit within them had come together into one place. Now I do see this I realise that this is because the Spirit within us draws all of us closer together. You should be able to recognise a Church full of Christians who have the Spirit, you'll see a group of people interacting with one another with a unity that you won't see anywhere else on earth.

In my Church which is Anglican we have a part of the service dedicated to sustaining this unity. It is called the Peace. The idea behind it is that if you are bearing a grudge against anyone within the Church you have to go and tell them what they have done to you or what you have done to them, then the Bible commands us to forgive the other person if we can't then we have no right to be forgiven ourselves. Again these would be mere words if the God didn't act through them, as I heard in Heroes last night:

"CLAIRE: You don't just get to say you're sorry and make everything go away."

but thankfully with God we can say sorry to one another and God makes it go away! He gets rid of the sin, he heals the hurt, he repairs the trust, he builds the friendship and makes it stronger than before. This is if we allow him to do his work, if we choose to hold our grudge then we will ruin the relationship with our friend, it will be our fault not his. That's the peace! at least that is what it is meant to be like but in our Church it is mainly a way to greet each other after a week apart and while I find it quite moving the level of love that is displayed at this time it isn't really what the peace is meant to be about but to be fair I don't use that time correctly however outside of that time I have found that being honest with people is the best way forward especially if something is annoying you about the other person because I know that people in the Church don't want to annoy me because I know that I don't want to annoy them. It is then helpful to inform one another when anything we say or do is not having the effect we want it to.

I believe that there is very little disunity in my Church, if there is some present then it is within people's hearts or possibly talked about behind closed doors. My experience and especially about those people I know personally in my Church is that we are all bound together in a way that I have come to recognise is God given. I so enjoy spending time with them and basking in that atmosphere of love and acceptance and I know that this peace isn't isolated to our Church because God is way bigger than St Mark's. I have seen it in the lives of so many other groups of Christians. God helps us to overcome our differences. I've even heard and seen that God is overcoming the differences of denomination that have seperated us for so long and I pray that he would continue to do so. So that the world would see that the body of Christ (That is the Church) is far from being divided but is living, breathing and functioning as a whole. If only all people would join us then they would experience the same sense of fellowship that we experience and they would know what it is to be at peace with God and with man.

Here are some other verses on the topic:

"Everyone has turned away,

they have together become corrupt;

there is no one who does good,

not even one." Psalm 53:3

"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." 1 John 1:9

"All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation." 2 Corinthians 5:18-19

The Fruit or the fruits?

I told my friend Euan about my blog and he raised a valid point. Is Paul in Galatians refering to one single fruit when he talks of the fruit of the Spirit or is he using fruit in the plural, such as 'Would you like some fruit?' (You wouldn't say fruits now would you?) I could favour both interpretations. For as I said in my first blog the Spirit living within us naturally produces these characterisitcs as long as we ensure we are living by him, in other words following his leading and by the Spirit giving every part of our day up to God for if the acts of the sinful nature come from living for ourselves then logically the acts of righteousness must come from living life under the constant guidance of a perfect being.

You could see the appearance of these characteristics as the growing of one whole fruit with nine pieces or you could see them as 9 fruit growing on a tree the point is that they all come from the same source and they are all available to us once we have accepted the Spirit into our lives. The first fruit is under construction and there maybe quite large gaps between each blog coming out this is only because I really want to get to grips with a Biblical understanding of these fruit/this fruit.

The Fruit of the Spirit: Joy

The first thing I'd like to address is what joy is. It is deep happiness and contentment so it is far more powerful than simple happiness. It is being content which is being perfectly satisfied with your present situation. Many of us do not feel this way though and we certainly don't feel all the various words that are related to joy: Delight, pleasure, triumph, satisfaction, ecstasy, bliss, euphoria, glee, elation. The most we will find usually is happiness.

I think of it like this. God wants us to have the pure whole fruit but instead of coming to him the tree where the fruit is grown we'll go else where and settle for cheap imitations. God in his kindness still lets us have glimpses of the real product but they are mere diluted forms, fruit squashs and flavourings. In the case of joy I believe that happiness is the cheap imitation. Without God the best we can hope for is a bit of happiness on Earth before we die. In the Bible the book of Ecclesiastes talks about this subject. It looks into the wisdom of a life without God and decides that anything we try to achieve without him is meangingless so we may as well try to make ourselves as happy as possible before we die. The sad truth is that many in the world are living this way. Looking to things such as career, family, friends, money, sex, drinks, drugs to achieve fufliment and then not finding it in any of those things.

I've often tried to find satisfaction in many different combinations of these things but they have left me feeling empty. It's because though I can make myself happy I'll always sense that there is something more waiting for me just beyond my reach and the pleasure I can gain is never enough to satisfy. We weren't designed to live just to please ourselves. We were actually designed to live in a relationship with God and do you know what? We actually find the pleasure and satisfaction we were looking for within that relationship

"If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you." John 15:10-12

From obeying the Lord's commands we will remain in his love and as a consequence we will have complete joy. What are the Lord's commands? A Pharisee once asked Jesus this. He asked Jesus to sum up the Law that God gave to his people and Jesus answered

"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these." Mark 12:29-31

It is not natural for us to love our neighbour so God has sent the Holy Spirit to help us. The Spirit is from God so when we ask him to come and live within us he shares God's heart for our neighbours with us and we can love them as Jesus loves them. I have noticed this to be true the place where I feel the most joy is when I'm in fellowship with fellow believers and when truly worshipping God; the two places Jesus said we would find complete joy. So I urge you as I urge myself to seek joy from living life for God's benefit as you come to know him you will find that joy and you will hardly be able to stop yourself from expressing it to those around you.

The Fruit of the Spirit

"16So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. 17For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. 18But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.
19The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. 25Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 26Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other." Galatians 5:16-25

For the longest time I thought that when we received the Spirit we received the fruits of the Spirit. Which are all separate fruits even though they are all fruit they are different but as I have learnt recently the passage does not use the plural but the singular. When you receive the Spirit you gain all of these things for Jesus is all of these things and it is his Spirit that lives within us.

When you really explore what each piece of the fruit is you can see clearly how it all fits together so that is what I'm going to do this blog marks the start of a series looking at each piece of the Spirit's fruit. I'll be looking at joy first and finishing with love because love is probably the best known and the most misunderstood of them all.