Freedom For Today

Galatians 5:22 — Patience

“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!”

We could spend today’s devotional talking about how to improve your patience. We could talk about how God challenges your patience by making things take an extra long time. (If you find yourself 10 steps ahead of God, it’s you, not him…) But we are not going to talk about any of those things. Why? Because we have already determined that the fruit of the Spirit is not a list of rules that we are trying to conquer behaviorally. These characteristics describe the very essence of who God is, and we are currently trying to wrap our brains around the idea that the Holy Spirit is being all these things towards us.

So we are going to spend today dwelling on the fact that God is incredibly patient. With me. With you. In no way and at no time is God ever looking at you and wishing you would hurry up and improve already. He is not shaking his head in disappointment or thinking that you are an idiot for not getting this “good Christian” thing sooner. Last I checked, God was pretty well aware of what he was getting into saving a bunch of limited human beings wrecked by sin. It wasn’t because he was looking for a peer relationship. He’s all set with that.

Here’s your freedom for today: God wants to engage with human beings that are slowly becoming. If God were in a rush, he would have saved the world pretty rapidly after the fall of humanity. But he didn’t. I’m not going to attempt to explain why — after all, I barely understand the concept of patience as it is, nevermind fully grasp God’s motivations. I can only guess that those who know how to create something truly brilliant know it is a bad idea to rush. Imagine the Sistene Chapel if Michelangelo had gotten antsy after a year or two. (It took him four.) God is right now at this very moment not rushing you. He is deeply involved in your life, patiently sculpting your very being into the masterpiece he has in mind. As you sit in God’s presence and invite him to have his way, he gently presses your spirit into something more beautiful than yesterday. Right now, you might look like a misshapen lump of clay and you might wonder what he’s up to. But he knows. And he likes it.

 

Galatians 5:22 – Peace

“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!”

You know what makes even less sense than joy during trials? (See yesterday’s post on joy…) Peace when your life is at constant risk. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul writes about a peace that goes beyond anything we can understand. And since he was in prison at the time and his life was often threatened, he ought to know a thing or two about it. I like to call it the peace that doesn’t make any sense.

Our brains are designed to scan for danger and avoid it at all costs. When something is going wrong that we feel could be a threat to us, we worry. It is a built-in alarm in our brains to signal us to run the other way. But as humans we have the power to override instinct, especially when the Holy Spirit dwells inside us. We can hold on to a greater truth that can stop the signal. Just like when you burn the morning toast and fan the smoke detector to silence the awful beeping, trusting God to override worry restores peace to our hearts.

We must continue to keep in mind the context of this chapter: the flesh and the Spirit are in a war and continually pull you in opposite directions. You can’t get closer to God by trying to follow a bunch of rules because you will fail (the flesh will get you every time). The only hope we have is to seek the Holy Spirit and allow him to guide our lives. We are transformed simply by being with him.

Here’s your freedom for today: peace does not come from somewhere deep inside yourself. Eternal peace, the kind that doesn’t make any sense, can only come from God himself. If you want to totally fail at finding peace, try to work harder at getting it. (That’s about as effective as rushing a lesson in patience, which we’ll talk about tomorrow.) Instead of thinking of peace as a feeling or state of mind, think of it as a place you can go inside the Holy Spirit. It is in this sacred space that we can be sheltered from the torrents bearing down on us in the outside world.

 

Galatians 5:22 — Joy

“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!”

You know what doesn’t make any sense? Joy in the midst of trials. The only explanation must be a supernatural one. Too often we think that “joy” means we have to be happy, and if we are not happy we are doing this “Christian” thing wrong. We think, “I’m going through a hard time and I don’t like it. I keep praying over and over for God to take it away but he doesn’t. I just must not trust him very much.”

That emotionally stuck place is where joy comes in. James 1 suggests that hardship is an opportunity for joy because we have secret inside spiritual information. From an earthly perspective, your situation may look grim. And it may in fact be grim here on earth. But faith-testing develops perseverance, which brings spiritual maturity and wholeness.

Joy is not a goofy smile with a delusional thought process that denies the hardship. “My life is falling apart, but I’m fine! No, sadness here!” Nope, joy is only possible through the Holy Spirit because we are suffering. Joy is the knowledge that God is in the middle of outsmarting Satan. When Satan is throwing his biggest party about what he is doing to your life, joy can increase because God is in the middle of his greatest spiritual victory.

Here’s your freedom for today: joy is knowledge of and faith in the eternal narrative. Satan doesn’t win, period. Not in your life, not in the world. Armed with this knowledge and faith in the victory of Christ, we gain determination to keep going. What can Satan really do to destroy you? Nothing. He can try a million ways and even destroy your physical body, but he cannot separate you from God’s love or rip out the deposit of the Holy Spirit that comes with surrender to Jesus. When we experience true joy, there is a sense of defiance against this world and its clutches. What does joy look like for you today? What is the enemy doing to make you suffer? Are there ways you can connect with an eternal perspective today that can help you keep fighting your uphill battle?

Galatians 5:22 – Love

“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!”

Love may be the single most complicated word to understand in our world today. You can grab a dictionary, sure, but it will not even begin to define “love” in a way that holds more power than your own personal experiences. Each of us carries definitions of that word, and many of these definitions involve significant pain.

Pause for a moment. What does “love” mean to you? Who are the people who have said, “I love you” in your life? How did they act towards you? If those questions are complicated, I would encourage you to write more extensively in a journal to process your thoughts and experiences.

God has a lot to say about love. In the New Living Translation, the word appears 759 times. Jesus used it twice when summing up the greatest commandments: Love God and love each other. Paul said that if you don’t love, anything else you do is basically about as pleasant to God as the clattering noise of pot lids being used as percussion instruments.

Perhaps the most freeing verses about love are found in 1 John. Since John was known as the “disciple Jesus loved” it makes sense that he would have one of the best definitions of love around. Few of us have had an earthly source of love so pure as that. 1 John 4:9-10 say,

“God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.”

And verses 17-19 add,

“And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world. Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first.”

Real love, regardless of anything you have ever experienced before, is defined by the very fact that God loved you and came to rescue you. Real love does not expect anything in return because we know that there is nothing we can give back to God that would be an equal exchange. God never asks for a “quid pro quo.”

Here’s your freedom for today: the only way we know love is by being loved. Any love that has eternal value comes from dwelling in the presence of the Holy Spirit and being filled by his love for us. We know from our Galatians 5 study that we no longer have to focus on rules and punishment. And so it is with love. We are free to love because we are loved. What would freedom look like for you today if you threw away everything you have ever thought about love and started over? Even if you have been a Jesus-follower for a long time, I challenge you to throw out everything you think you know and start again. That is what I am doing right now as I write this. Because the love of God is deep and infinite, I know I have only barely cracked the surface so far. Are you ready to dive in deeper with me?

 

Galatians 5:22-23 (NLT)

“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!”

We are going to simmer on these two verses for a week or so because they are simply packed with the secrets to emotional freedom. In my book, On Edge: Mental Illness in the Christian Context, I write about the fruit of the Spirit and how we often treat these verses like a list of feelings. The warmer and squishier we feel, the more of a “good Christian” we are. Funny how we are so much better at seeming like “good Christians” on sunny days…

If I feel lots of love, joy, peace and patience then I am awesome, right? Yay Jesus! But hold up — then I arrive at “kindness” and I’m confused. I can’t really feel kindness, nor can I feel kind. I can be kind, or I can experience the kindness of someone else. Same with goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Here’s where we start to go wrong (once again!) in our “Christian” thinking: if I can’t feel these things and I must do these things, then this must be a list of rules. A wonderfully holy to-do list. How many of you have said that you are “working on” one of these fruits? I know I have. Let’s take patience — I have worked on becoming more patient through mostly behavioral methods that anyone, Christian or not, could achieve. Slow down, count to 10, take deep breaths, think before I speak. Sure, tack “pray” on there, too (by which I mean that muttering under your breath, “Jesus, hurry up and make me patient before I kill the children!” is not really prayer). These methods may seem effective, but it is why loads of non-Christians can love and be patient and experience joy. These methods work on the surface but they are not supernatural. Since these verses are talking about something produced in our lives directly by the Holy Spirit, it must be supernatural.

Reminder about our context in this chapter: we are working on a mental shift. Rules = slavery and constant failure, Spirit-living = freedom. Let’s not jump right back into a slavery mindset by turning this list into a new set of rules that we try to conquer ourselves. Let’s look for the freedom being offered to us here. We know that our flesh and the Spirit are in constant opposition and war. In yesterday’s post we got a list of the things the flesh produces in our lives. It wasn’t pretty. Today’s verses offer a hope beyond anything we could ever imagine on our own: total freedom from rules and personal destruction. The Spirit’s war is a fight on our behalf — an effort to reclaim the inheritance being robbed from us by the flesh and the enemy. When he fights for us, here’s what we get: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Why do we get these? Because he is being all of those things towards us.

Here’s your freedom for today: stop trying to “work on” the fruit of the Spirit. Be a receiver. Embrace the Holy Spirit’s love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control towards you. Let him be all of these things in your life today. It is only when you receive in this way from him that these things can ever be supernaturally produced within you.