DAILY DEVOTIONAL
June 4 — What the Spirit grows
A spoken reading of this is being recorded — it will appear here soon.
June 4 — What the Spirit Grows
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law." — Galatians 5:22–23 (KJV)
Paul calls it fruit. Not output. Not deliverables. Not metrics.
A fruit takes a season. It will not be hurried. The tree is rooted somewhere — usually in soil the gardener cannot see — and the fruit appears in the time the fruit appears. You cannot pull on the apple to make it ripen. You can only keep the tree alive.
This is one of the quiet differences between the Spirit's work and the work of a tool. The tool produces on demand. Ask it for a paragraph and a paragraph appears. Ask it for an answer and an answer appears, often a good one. We are surrounded now by an economy of on-demand outputs.
The Spirit does not work that way. He does not produce patience by Wednesday because we asked Him on Tuesday. He grows it, slowly, in seasons we cannot fully see. The kindness we have today is the long answer to a prayer we forgot we prayed last fall.
The next nine devotionals will walk through the nine fruits Paul names. The order is Paul's, not ours. We will not rush. We will spend a day on each — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Most of them will say something quieter than we expect.
For today: notice one fruit that is showing in your household this week. Don't name it out loud yet. Just thank the Gardener.
May the Lord bless you and keep you.