Tasteless fruit

Have you ever bought strawberries from the supermarket out of season? They are available all the year round these days. They always look beautiful – large, deep red, plump and very inviting. But do they taste like fresh strawberries in season? Absolutely not. In fact you could probably be given one whilst blindfolded and not be able to tell what kind of fruit it is. Red on the outside, white and tasteless on the inside.

We’ll come back to strawberries in a minute.

Before we do, I need to admit that in the past I have misunderstood some bits of the Bible. Actually, if we are honest, probably most of us have. My trouble is that I have happily passed on that misunderstanding to other people, not realising I was wrong.

In my defence, this particular misunderstanding is common in many many churches, but left unchecked, it gives a very distorted understanding of what it is to be a Christian. Let me explain.

In Galatians chapter 5 there is a list of the fruits of the Spirit; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. I used to look at that list and think that these are things that we ought to have, and so we needed to be working hard to produce them in our lives.

In the verses just before this list, there is another list, not a very nice list. Things like impurity, hostility, quarrelling, jealousy, selfish ambition, envy, division and much worse. I saw this list as things we ought not to do and needed to work hard at avoiding.

This is missing the whole message of Galatians. It ignores the basis of the Gospel but is a very common way of thinking in Christian culture. Basically it is a gospel of “you were saved because of the Grace of God, but now you have to work really hard to keep what He’s done for you”. You have to work hard to grow as a Christian. Even, you have to work hard to keep on the right side of God.

It has become “You need to produce these fruit, love, joy, peace etc.” But Galatians tells us that this is something the Holy Spirit does.

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!

Gal 5v22

The whole book of Galatians is very interesting. It is all about freedom and being free. About how God saved us, about how God set us free from the dominating power of Sin, about how God lives in us, about how we could never have done any of this for ourselves, about how He has provided what we need to live and grow in this new life of freedom. My mistake (well one of them anyway) was to lift the passage about love, joy, peace etc and say “Aha, since we are now saved here are some fruit that I must grow”. I must produce this fruit? NO.

The Holy Spirit produces the fruit in me

So what’s the difference? I try to “force grow” fruit in my life and I end up producing something tasteless and without substance, a bit like out of season strawberries. I can make myself love people because I ought to, but what they will feel from me is as tasteless as a winter strawberry. Patience that I have worked up doesn’t feel like patience to anyone else. Try making yourself be joyful through gritted teeth when things are not working. What does that look like? Whatever it looks like, it certainly doesn’t look like something the Holy Spirit has done.

So what’s the answer? Allow the Holy Spirit to fill you. Give Him the best place in our lives. Allow Him to speak softly to us, to nudge us, to encourage us, to lead us and then real fruit, fruit with flavour begins to grow.

Not forced fruit. Not the fruit of “I ought to….” but the fruit of “this is how I am starting to live and be, since I let the Holy Spirit have His way in me”. This fruit is His fruit. If you like what you see then thank Him, because He did it. This is Freedom folks.

Oh, and by the way, that stuff off the other list; you know, all the bad stuff – well that doesn’t grow when the Holy Spirit is running things in our lives. So we don’t have to work at getting rid of them. They melt away quietly. They don’t like the atmosphere 😂