If you were at WMB (Waterloo) this morning (service here, no notes available online), then you experienced a celebration of the fruits of the Spirit, how Jesus makes a difference in peoples lives, kids & moms. It was great to be part of.
The Bible intendeds a lifetime of meditating and growth. While you might not get big points for memorizing the fruits of the Spirit, its really helpful to have the list in your head so you can turn to it anytime to meditate on them.
With thanks to Shawn for pointing it out this morning, does this help you to remember them?:
… the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives:
love, joy, peace, [ 3 of one syllable each ]
Galatians 5:22 (NLT, English)
patience, kindness, goodness, [ 3 of two syllables each ]
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. [ 3 of three syllables each]
Again, knowing the fruits just allows you to meditate on them. When you are driving, or waiting this week, what would does it look like in my life to exhibit “patience”? The point isn’t to get an “answer”, the point is to work the ideas into the soil of our life. Knowing you can look them up in Wikipedia is fine, but doesn’t let you meditate on them, so it doesn’t count (as much as I am a big fan).
I love that Paul calls these “fruit of the Spirit” and for sure its not an accident that he does. Fruit is the result of a lot of work. I like it: fruit is more colourful than result, like the idiom “the fruit of your labours”.
Maybe one day we’ll have a petri dish grown fig, but for now, there just are no shortcuts. You have to plant a tree, nurture it, prune it and then somehow, ruakh (breath, spirit) causes the flower to blossom and the fig to ripen. You can try a self-help shortcut (just checked: there are 60,000+ self-help titles on Amazon.ca), but you’ll still get a crappy fig — you can’t duplicate what the Spirit does. True love, joy, peace thru to self-control is a result (fruit) of being changed from the inside by God’s Spirit, his breath, his ruakh.
So, the big question:
What habits or practices do you have (or are you forming) that foster your Spirit-led growth?
Side-trail #1: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer is a thoroughly enjoyable & memorable(!) read on the history of memory and how you too can remember (GoodReads seems is a little harsh with 3.8). His TED Talk is a nice summary. Here’s the connections:
- Meditating on things requires internalizing and knowing deeply. This requires remembering it inside your head, like memorizing. Knowing its “online somewhere” does not allow you to meditate.
- You remember things that you internalize and know deeply. So there is a symbiotic relationship between meditating and remembering. Being fully present and blocking out distractions, like Foer shows in his TED Talk helps the meditating process.
- Before Gutenberg, we all relied on our memories waaay more. The only way to know something or meditate on it, was to memorize it. The Bible was memorized as a matter of course during most of its existence.
Interestingly, its really hard to be fully present and meditate if you are really busy, or otherwise preoccupied. Maybe the glasses and ear muffs from his TED Talk would help!
Side-trail #2: That Fig Tree in Matthew (21) and Mark (11) has always bothered me. Marks telling is split over two days and is very specific that its not fig season. The surface reading is that you are a fruit tree expected to bear fruit. But it doesn’t sit right with me – why would Jesus curse a tree which isn’t supposed to bear fruit now? There’s got to be something we’re overlooking and maybe it has to do with the fact that both days Jesus is heading to the temple where he criticizes the religious establishment so severely the kill him a few days later.
It seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing we are supposed to meditate over. Chew it. Like side-trail #1, immerse myself in the fig tree story / temple story till I can visualize it. And this seems to be the point – meditating on Jesus and his stories is way more important than having the right answers. In Jesus’ interactions with people, he seemed less interested in them having the right answer than in “loving God and loving their neighbour”. What do you think? Is the meditating more important than the answer? Got the fig tree figured out?
(if you’re interested in meditating on the fig tree further, check out Episode 9 of the Tree of Life podcast series).
The Thursday After 