Good fruit: Spiritual Growth in and out of Season

The bible describes one of the fruit of the Spirit as goodness. The Holy Spirit within us can somehow produce good fruit. This is contrasted with the fruit of the flesh. If we "live in the Spirit" we will not exhibit fleshly fruit. The Bible says that these are contrary to each other. We naturally produce worldly fruit but it must take some supernatural fertilizer to produce spiritual fruit right?

Living in the spirit is making the conscience effort to step back and allow God to lead your life. When we make decisions, one thing leads to another and that is how a life is formed. Your previous knowledge and previous choices have led you to the life that you experience today. But what if you had a fork in that road and chose to follow God down a different street? Then His knowledge would change the trajectory of your life. That is how living in the Spirit is. It takes you from living life on your own terms to readjusting your life for spiritual growth that produces good fruit.

Production for good fruit requires right growing conditions. You need to sun, water and time to ripen. Fruit is good when it is mature - not too soon before and definitely not after. It needs to be just right. However, who has a just right life? Fruit can only be developed in season, but spiritual fruit ripens in and out of season. You can only be fully ready at all times for all things by aligning your life with Almighty God.

All things that are good in our lives are a result of God's goodness to us. Jesus said "I am the vine, you are are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing". (John 15:5, KJV)

Just as we can do no good without Him, we need Him to be any good at all.

 Good fruit is the only kind of fruit that is worth eating. Everything else is either counterfiet or bad or both. Think about it. Even if you have some good fruit, if it is not used, it will begin to go bad. God gives us ample opportunity to be fruit-bearers on this earth. We can practice faith and kindness and goodness daily, but many times, we let it "go bad". We waste our love and peace by replacing it with counterfeit fruits. This does not please God and people know when you are not genuinely following Jesus and have a true connection to His vine.

So how about we get the right heart conditions for bearing good fruit and show what a real connection to Jesus looks like!

Good Grief

It is good to grieve. It is helpful and healing. When we wait to let go of things that bother us, we tend to emotionally "constipate" ourselves. Sometimes we are backed up with hurtful thoughts and feelings especially in our closest relationships.

As a wife, I was queen of stuffing things inside. I would wait and wait to share some of my most deep heartfelt issues with Maurice. I figured that I was overreacting. On a good day, I would say that I was just a forgiving person, but the truth was, that I was not dealing with my emotions in a healthy way. I needed to grieve. Sometimes it was something simple, other times it was overwhelming. When things would finally surface, I would find myself very angry and I would not communicate well at all.

Grieving is not just for when we lose someone close to us. It is also for other loses as well. Consider these:

Sometimes we grieve our sinful habits! We no longer engage in certain activities and we miss them. There may be broken relationships due to your newly found life in Christ. Let's face it. Sin feels good, but it is not good for us. It is truly "good grief" in that case.

The bible tells us not to grieve the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4:30, KJV). The Spirit is with us to convict us of our wrong. When we ignore His tug on our hearts, He is grieved. We are ignoring Him. We are not sharing with Him. We push Him out when we do not give Him access.

So how do we move on? These areas are tender for us, like a scabbed wound that we do not want to peel off. As true as that is, we must remember that Jesus died for all our wounds - physical, mental, emotional and otherwise. Only He can make a scabbed area brand new! Everything is colored blue when we view it through our hurt and pain. God doesn't just want to cover your scars. He wants to completely restore you.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away, behold, all things are become new (2 Corinthians 5:17, KJV).

We have to face our grief so that we can overcome it. Acknowledge that you need to deal with it and then pray and ask the Lord to remove that burden from your soul. Life may "take you there" with all of its twists and turns, but be sure that the same God that gave you life can also renew it. Pour out everything that you have stuffed inside and trust God with it. Do it over and over until all that is left is a vessel that He can fill. And He will fill it. He is waiting to exchange our grief with His grace.

Not good Enough

When I measure myself by other people, one of two things happen. Either I am not good enough or I am better by comparison. However, when I use God's ruler, I always come up short on holiness. Always. There is just no way that my goodness even comes close to His greatness!

The enemy loves to tell us that we are better than we really are.  He did it to Eve. In the book of Genesis, everything God made was good. Even the trees were good for food. The first mention of evil is in regards to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:9,17). God said not to touch it or eat it. "Did God really say that you could eat of every tree in the garden?", whispered the serpent. Eve's current level of knowledge was not good enough for her, so she desired to be wise "like God" as the serpent suggested. We often figure that what we have, what we drive, our relationships and our money are simply not enough. We crave more than our current paradise.

In this passage, the enemy actually contends that God's ruler is incorrect. He asserts that what God said was in error and that we deserve whatever we want, whenever we want it....like, now! It's such a sneaky deception. He plays on our discontent by comparing us to God. He knows that if we recognize who God is, that our only right response is always pure obedience because we can't get on His level! Really?

Going head to head with omnipotence and omniscience is utter foolishness!

 When we do not stay in our God-given lane or our "scope of practice" in nursing terms, we start to look around and stray off the path for our own lives. We think "Maybe I need to get on tv, start a podcast, do a screenplay". "I need a better car". "My kids have to have the same toys as their kids". "I need a husband/wife like THAT ONE!". Adam and Eve had it all. Every tree. All the food. No guilt. No shame. No problem. They had enough until they were led by their lust to covet more.

Once our eyes are trained on what is "not good", we often forget how good what we already have is.

I want us all to try something ok? Look around you. Examine your life. What good do you see? You have so much. You are so blessed, so rich. So why be unsatisfied and discontent? Practice gratefulness and appreciation instead. Find a way to remember all the things that you asked God for that He gave you. Walk around your living space and pull out some old things that you forgot about. Remember those pictures from that amazing trip? Look at all the food you have in so many different palaces! Do you have friends, family, a job, clothing, shelter, money? Then what are we whining about?

God has given us EVERYTHING that pertains to life and godliness. (2 Peter 1:3) Let's learn to enjoy it!