The Singular Fruit

The word in today's verse is fruit. It is singular, one fruit, and nine things are listed after it.

Three verses earlier, Paul's other list is worded differently: "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these," and more than a dozen items follow. Each of them is something a person does. The nine that come after are covered by one word instead, and it is a word for what grows on something alive.

Walk through the nine anyway, because the list matters. Love, joy and peace describe what a person is like inside, when nobody is watching. Longsuffering, gentleness and goodness describe what a person is like to live next door to, and longsuffering is about how long it takes you to lose your temper. Faith, meekness and temperance mean being reliable, being humble, and keeping a grip on yourself. The list stops there, and then comes a dry closing line: "against such there is no law." Nobody has ever needed a law to forbid these things, and no law has ever produced a single one of them.

Notice what the verse does not do. It does not hand you nine targets, and it gives you no scale to measure yourself against. Elsewhere Paul uses a similar phrase for a different list of three, though many older copies read "the fruit of the light": "the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth." That should keep anyone from scoring themselves against these nine as if they were a fixed checklist. Fruit comes the way it does on a farm, by growing, and Jesus put it plainly: "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine."

So ask the person who lives closest to you which of the nine they have seen grow in you over the last five years. Then be quiet while they answer, and do not help them. Whatever they say, the growing is the Spirit's work, and a branch that stays in the vine will bear fruit in its season.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 267 is Coming Forth as Gold (Job 23:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two