Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 267 · September 24
The Singular Fruit
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”
The word is fruit, and it is singular, and nine things are listed after it.
Three verses up, the other list is worded differently. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these, and then seventeen items, each of them a thing a person does. One word covers the nine that follow, and it is a word about what grows on something alive.
Walk it anyway, because the list is the point. Love, joy, peace: what a person is like inside when nobody is watching. Longsuffering, gentleness, goodness: what a person is like to live next door to, and the first of those is a word about the length of a temper. Faith, meekness, temperance: the reliability, the low posture, and the grip on yourself, and the list stops on that one. Then the odd closing clause. Against such there is no law, which is a joke at the expense of anybody who wanted to legislate this, and a plain statement that no statute ever manufactured a single item on it.
What the verse does not do is hand you nine targets. It does not say produce these, and it offers no scale. Ephesians runs the word fruit over three quite different words, in all goodness and righteousness and truth, which should stop anybody scoring themselves against these nine as a fixed inventory. The mechanism given is agricultural: As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine.
Ask the person who lives closest to you which of the nine has grown in you over the last five years. Then be quiet while they answer, and do not help them.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 267 is Coming Forth as Gold (Job 23:10).