Bible In A Year | Read: Galatians 5
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other. Galatians 5:22-26
Overview of Chapter
Since Paul is challenging people to not return to the slavery of the law, the obvious question is, how do we live a godly life after we have trusted Jesus? Paul tells us we have the Holy Spirit living in us. When we try to do the right thing on our own, it’s slavery. When we rely on the Holy Spirit, he brings freedom. The fruit of the Spirit is not a list of behaviors, but character traits. The Holy Spirit lives within us, changing our character. When our character changes, we naturally do the things the law requires. That doesn’t mean we should purposely do wrong things and wait for our character to change; that would be returning to the slavery of sin. It’s that we willingly submit to letting the Holy Spirit change our character.
Working at being righteous is discouraging. The harder we work at it, the more we think about the very thing that is a temptation to us. Relying on the Holy Spirit isn’t easy either. We like quick and easy fixes to our problems where we can take some credit for it. Paul recommends the slow process of character change and giving God the credit.
Thoughts on the verses
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Galatians 5:22-23
There is a famous saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”. It means eating fruit can help us stay healthy. Most fruit not only tastes good, but it is also good for our body. For example, oranges! They are so juicy, sweet and contain a lot of vitamin C. Vitamin C helps to prevent us from being sick.
The Bible says there is fruit that the Holy Spirit produces in our lives. The fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. It means when we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we would be able to show the fruit mentioned above to the people around us in every circumstance.
There are times when we fail. But it’s all right!
We can ask the Holy Spirit to guide us each day so that we can become more like Jesus.
Action Steps
Bible: What is God showing me? What am I going to do about it?
Bless: Serve one person through word, action, or gift today.
Prayer
Dear God, fill me with your Spirit so that I will show the fruit of the Spirit in my life. Amen.
Have you ever thought it would be cool to hear some C3 leaders discuss the daily verses, share about their lives and mostly just talk about nonsense? Of course not!…even though nobody has ever thought that we are still doing it. You can follow along with us each morning in a brand new podcast – Wednesday Fantastic Four & Aaron’s Doing Yoga.
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