The God Journey Chance Scoggins.com Seth Godin
I shared this poem a few years ago and love it so much I wanted to post it again for those that may have missed it.
Jesus shut within a Book
Is hardly worth a passing look;
Jesus shut within a creed
Is a fruitless Lord indeed.
But Jesus in the hearts of men
Shows His tenderness again.
-Gordon Grooms
We spent the past few weeks looking at the varying degrees God is real to us and also explored some of the things that keep us from more of Him. It makes sense to move on to how our life might look if we truly allowed Him into every area. So over the next few days let’s see what we might recognize in our life as fruit and also take a look at what might be areas still under cultivation.
Remember there is no formula and the thoughts shared here are in no way meant to be a list of things to mimic in order to appear like God is involved. We also need to be careful to examine ourselves as opposed to finding the flaws in others. There’s nothing more personal than your relationship with God so I hope that as we dive in here He meets you in new and wonderful ways.
“Multiply”: take our fruit out into the world and allow God to use us to draw others into His perfect love. Loving Him by loving others.
It’s great that with this fruit comes the ability to remove self not just control it. It is the demonstration of all of the fruit listed in the previous ten posts. Another description might be that it is the ability to recognize when we are stepping away from The Lord and making the correction by quickly turning back to Him.
Full of faith, trusting God with all that we are and all that we have. Knowing that in the big picture, no matter what today may look like, somewhere down the road we will understand and appreciate all that we experienced today.
Mildness might be another way of saying gentleness. This sometimes gets confused with avoidance or being the kind of person that stays away from difficulty. That’s not what this fruit is about. The confidence that comes from the Spirit within us allows us to confront the things that need to be addressed but we are able to do that with gentleness, being considerate of others.
I like to think the explanation of this fruit is like the foods we say are full of goodness, in other words, of great benefit. People filled with the Spirit and thus the fruit of goodness, are beneficial to those around them.
We demonstrate kindness when we put aside the things that are important to us at the moment and give our focus to what is important to another.
Patience is a huge indicator of God’s Spirit working in us. I can’t think of an instance when impatience isn’t self-centered. We want things our way; on our schedule and when it doesn’t go that way we get mad about it and make others feel inferior to us by losing our patience.
“a: a state of tranquility b: a state of security or order c: freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions d: harmony in personal relations.” Sounds like The Spirit to me!
The Better Thing 