Is the Fruit of the Spirit M.I.A.?

Some days, I honestly struggle to find the fruit of the Spirit.  Love, joy, peace, and so on.  They have to be there because I know I’m saved.  The Spirit of God lives within me; therefore, the fruit of the Spirit must also be there.  But most days, I just don’t see it.

When the calendar is overbooked and the bills are overdue, peace is the last thing on my mind.  When my body is tired and my back is aching, I struggle to muscle up any joy.  And when that person has gotten on your last nerve for the fifth time in a day, love and patience are nowhere to be found.

At times in my life, my fruit of the Spirit has been so absent that I doubted whether I was truly saved.  It was awful when well-meaning preachers would comment that Christians should be the happiest people in the world and shouldn’t struggle with anxiety, depression, or emotional turmoil.  I reasoned if that were true, I must be lost, but deep down, I knew I wasn’t.

This morning, I had a breakthrough, and my heart feels so much lighter I just had to share it with you.  It’s not that the fruit of the Spirit is MIA.  It’s the fact that those fruits abide in my heart alongside the weeds of anger, bitterness, worry, fear, and insecurity.  And those weeds do what weeds do—they try to choke out the good fruit.

The best way to keep the weeds at bay is to shine the light of God’s Word in my heart regularly.  This is more than just reading a few verses each day.  It’s about meditating on the Scripture all day, every day.  It’s about allowing the Word to dwell in me and change me from the inside.  It involves spending time in prayer and worshiping God for who He is and what He’s done.  In short, I need to spend less time fretting about my fruit and more time focusing on the One who provides the fruit.

Maybe you, too, have doubted your salvation because the fruit of the Spirit doesn’t seem evident in your life like you feel it should.  If so, I hope this message will bring you hope.  If you’ve repented of your sin and trusted in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, that’s salvation.  It isn’t complicated, and it was never meant to be.  If you do not see the fruit of the Spirit, there may be some weeds in your heart that you need to deal with.  Dig into the Word of God.  Let it fill You.  Spend quality time with God, and allow Him to get rid of those weeds so the fruit can thrive and flourish.

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