The Fruit That Grows in You

Paul had just told the churches of Galatia that they were God's own children, free to call him "Abba, Father." He kept writing, because the news from those hill towns was still bad.

After Paul left, some teachers had arrived with a long list of rules. "Jesus is not enough," they said. "If you want to belong to God, you must keep every law of Moses first." Some people believed them and some didn't, and soon the churches were quarrelling, and the quarrels turned nasty.

"If you keep biting and gobbling each other up," Paul wrote, "watch out, or there will be nothing left of you!" (He did not mean real teeth. Probably.)

When the letter reached Galatia, someone stood up in a crowded room and read it aloud. If you had been there, you might have seen two men who had argued all week stare hard at their sandals.

Then Paul answered the question everyone was asking. If rules can't make us God's children, what will ever make us good?

"Walk by the Spirit," he wrote, "and you will not do what the flesh wants." By "the flesh" Paul meant the part of us that always wants its own way, first, right now. God's Spirit pulls one way and the flesh pulls the other. Paul named what the flesh does when it wins: breaking the promise to be faithful to a husband or wife, worshiping idols, casting magic spells, hating, fighting, jealousy, fits of temper, splitting into gangs who won't speak to each other, getting drunk. "People who live like that," he warned, "will not share in God's kingdom."

Then the letter turned. After a list of things people do, Paul wrote about something that grows.

"The fruit of the Spirit," he wrote, "is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." (Paul wrote "fruit," one word, as if all nine grow together on the same branch.)

"Against such things," he added, "there is no law." Nobody has ever gone to prison for being too gentle, and no judge in history has banged his hammer and shouted, "Stop being so patient!"

"Those who belong to Christ Jesus," Paul wrote, "have nailed the flesh, with all its grabbing and wanting, to the cross. The Spirit gives us life, so let's keep in step with the Spirit." He meant walking the way a child walks beside a grown-up on a long road, matching stride for stride. "And let's stop showing off, and poking at each other, and being jealous."

But the Galatians could never grow this fruit by gritting their teeth, any more than a branch can grow a pear by frowning. A branch stays on the tree, and season after season the fruit comes.

Read Paul's list again, slowly, and it starts to sound like a person. Someone patient with friends who kept getting things wrong. Someone gentle enough that mothers brought him their babies. Someone who stayed calm while soldiers laughed at him, and stayed faithful all the way to the cross. Only one person ever grew all nine together, every day, with no bad fruit anywhere on the branch.

God's kingdom had already begun in those quarrelsome hill towns, though the full harvest was still ahead. The Spirit at work there was the Spirit of God's own Son, so the fruit ripening in those people was the life of Jesus himself.