But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

Galatians 5:22-23

When a person gives his or her life to God, certain things begin to happen, maybe slowly at first, sometimes these things are subtle to begin with, but they happen. The more we open ourselves to Him, the more we surrender to Him, the deeper these changes will go, and our new lives begin to bear fruit.

The basis of the Christian life is love. Love of God, love of our neighbor, love for the lonely and for the unlovable, and love even when others let us down. When love begins to dominate our outlook on life, we start to experience the joy that comes from God’s presence, the joy of having set aside the negative aspects of our former ways such as anger, jealousy and so on, which then brings us peace like we’ve never had it before.

Forbearance means patience, which is surely not everyone’s strongest attribute, that is, until we live according to the ways of God’s love. Impatience begins to fade as we come to realize that it really serves no other purpose than to make us miserable. With patience comes kindness, and with kindness comes goodness; this should come with no surprise, and then we have faithfulness, which means fidelity: we keep our promises and we do not cheat or deceive.

Gentleness and self-control then appear, and with these two, preceded by the others, we become very much like our blessed Lord Jesus, who embodied all of these fruits of the Spirit.

A fruit of the Spirit does not come about as a result of human effort or achievement. Instead, they are the products of a life-force within us, and that life-force is the presence of the indwelling Holy Spirit. He gives us life, and strength, and discernment, and growth as we allow Him to do. Thus, we can say that maybe there is one sort of effort required of us after all. We must surrender ourselves and our lives to Him, and then stay out of His way.

I don’t know about you, but I find that keeping out of His way is the tough part for me, since my natural self tends to take charge of things. Yet even so, I remind myself that spiritual growth is a life process, and even though life processes don’t usually run according to my schedule, they go on nevertheless.

May God continue to bless you, and guide and lead all of us to live as He would have us live.