18. For me to receive the Spirit’s fruit, I must participate in a spiritual community.
(Before looking at the questions below, take a few minutes to think about this statement. Invite Jesus to speak to you about what He would like you to notice.)
What fruit of the Spirit do you most long for?
How might a spiritual community help bring this about in you?
Do you desire this fruit for your own good, for good of others in your life, or both? Explain your answer.
How and where, might others benefit from the fruit that the Spirit brings into your life?
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23, NIV)
A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. (Mark chapter 4:26-28 NIV)
The verses quoted above illustrate an important truth about our spiritual journey: our efforts are not what creates growth in our souls. Certainly, we do play a part in our transformation, but the fruit that we realize from our effort is the work of the Spirit. Most often, like the farmer in the Mark passage, we don’t really understand how growth happens and we definitely can’t make it happen.
What our efforts do provide, though, is the place or space for the Spirit to work. If our desire is to harvest the fruit that Paul describes in Galatians, then one of the best places to sow our seeds is in spiritual communities. The fruit of the Spirit described in the Galatians passage are character qualities that are mostly expressed in relationship with others. We can like things, but we love people. The peace that Paul describes is an inner peace that permeates our inner being and flows into our relationship with others. Forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and gentleness are all qualities that require another person in order to be expressed.
The context in which this fruit of the Spirit is demonstrated will be the same space that is required to create those qualities. The place where we show love, patience, kindness goodness, gentleness, and so on is the same place that the Spirit uses to develop those qualities in us. All of these are expressed in our relationships and all of them will be developed and “perfected” in those relationships.
So, we can say that relationships are the place where we sow the seeds that the Spirit uses to produce the fruit we desire, and spiritual communities provide a place for us to develop these relationships. They provide a safe place to work on our character and formation and to be encouraged in our spiritual lives. In another parable, Jesus teaches about the importance of where seeds are planted (Mark 4:3-8) Spiritual communities provide the rich soil that will support the abundant crop of fruit that both we and God desire.
If we want to harvest the fruit of the Spirit’s transformative work in our lives, we must be intentional and wise about where we invest our time and energy.