Next week will probably be the last, depending on how the Holy Spirit leads. I hope you feel excited and ready to allow the Holy Spirit to lead you into producing more fruit. I’ve lived life as an unproductive Christian and a productive Christian. I can honestly say that I will never go back! After you make the heart change, it’s easy because the Holy Spirit steps in and helps you. Also, I’m believing with you and praying over you.
Let’s jump into this week’s study, but first our fruit scripture!
Galatians 5:22-23 NKJV
22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.
Longsuffering, no one I know likes this word! Even worse, the Greek word for longsuffering is makrothumia and means patience, and it’s sometimes translated to slow to anger. That’s a little easier to accept. Let’s be honest, we all have something we call “our pet peeve,” and have a low tolerance when someone agitates us. I looked up some common things that agitate people: chewing noises, repetitive tapping, interrupting, texting during a meal, scraping teeth on a utensil, scratching a chalkboard, speaking in text shortcuts (TMI), someone driving slow when you’re late, wearing too much perfume/cologne, typing in all caps, and not replacing toilet paper. While those are silly things that agitate us, there are more serious offenses like gossip, slander, theft, lying, betraying, and other hurtful behavior we have to endure. Let’s look at how to handle these situations and how to produce fruit.
If you read my blog posts early on, I talked about why you can’t pray for fruit and especially not to pray for patience. We’re going to go over that again, because it’s important to NEVER pray and I can’t stress it enough!
Fruits are used as an example to Christians because we’re supposed to get the idea that we grow, share our fruit with others, and it’s a continued cultivating process. We don’t just reach a level, and that’s it, done, move on to next level. We also can never pray for these fruits; believe me I tried! I learned from my error, and I don’t want anyone else to make this frustrating mistake. Growing up in mainstream denominational church, I learned we were supposed to pray and ask God to give us these fruits. I asked and I asked. The Lord never gave me one fruit, and no one else in that church had any fruit that I had seen either. I’ll be willing to bet you know someone who has tried the same approach! Ever hear someone say about longsuffering, “Don’t pray for patience! You’ll be very miserable!” These types of comments are always followed up with a list of frustrating stories. I know, I was one of these people. But why?
These fruits are a choice, growing pains, it’s allowing your spirit man to dominate your life instead of your flesh. Making decisions in favor of these fruits, or characteristics of God, will cause us to grow. I realized my prayers to the Lord were actually being answered by the enemy. Patience was something my pastor kept harping on us to pray. We all came back the next week with frustrating stories of what we had to deal with. We were all kind of laughing at stories, and it seemed one person could one up another. Yet others said I don’t feel so bad about my frustrating story. The pastor laughed in happy amusement, because he thought it was working. He thought God was sending us people to make us grow. The Lord was never sending people to make us miserable or to teach us lessons to grow, the enemy was behind it. There are no stories in the Bible where the Lord places a call on a man’s life to act like the devil or cause someone to sin to “expose your weaknesses to teach you a lesson.” If that were true, sin would be the work of the Lord. The Lord wouldn’t be a just God using humans against each other. In the end, fruit was never produced in my life from those prayers or anyone else. I always ended up being the failure in the funny-frustrating don’t-do-it story. Let’s see what scripture has to say on this matter.
Paul said in Romans 5:3
New King James Version
And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance;
Webster’s Bible Translation
And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that tribulation worketh patience;
Amplified
And not only this, but [with joy] let us exult in our sufferings and rejoice in our hardships, knowing that hardship (distress, pressure, trouble) produces patient endurance;
God is not the author of tribulation or temptation!! God is not sending you people to annoy you. People that entice you to sin are sinning too. James makes it clear God is not the author!
James 1:13-15 NKJV
13Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. 14But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. 15Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.
So, maybe like me, you prayed for patience because a minister told you that you should. A very slow person cuts you off in traffic, and continues to drive slow when you’re late. You become angry, and call the person in front of you some names. Now you’re walking out of the debt of love that Jesus said we owe people. The slow person stays in front of you, and you end up losing your joy and then peace. By the time you get to where you’re going, you’re so mad you speak out of the flesh and gossip about the “idiot” that made you late. Two sins, and the truth is that the “idiot” only made you an extra 30 seconds to 1 minute late, because driving 10 miles over the speed limit doesn’t get you there much faster. God has nothing to do with that scenario! When you’re praying for fruit, you’re literally praying for tribulation to come upon you!
It’s easy to love those that love you. It’s easy to be full of joy when life goes your way. It’s simple to have peace when nothing is opposing you. It’s the opposition that causes the fruit to grown. Don’t ever pray for opposition, because you’ll be set up to fail. When it just comes, you’ll have the grace to deal with it from God to overcome. In the meantime, practice your fruits on your pet peeves. Instead of imagining digging your finger in your ear to pop in the person’s mouth that’s whistling, or wanting to smack that fork out of someone’s hand for scraping their teeth on it, use your fruits! When that day comes when someone calls you mean names for no reason, takes advantage of you, or gossips about you, you’ve been practicing and you’ll easily rise above it with perfect peace and stride on towards the Lord. If you haven’t been practicing, you’ll have a high chance of failure.
What do you do when a bad situation is thrust upon you? How do we work the fruit? I’ll use myself and a real situation that recently happened as an example:
There is an older lady at my church. If you watch her for 30 seconds, you can clearly see she’s a sandwich short of a picnic, a few fries short of a Happy Meal, her elevator doesn’t reach the top, the lights are on but no one is home, the engine is running but absolutely no one is behind the wheel. I think you get the idea. Church started and she was going around touching people as usual. She was heading back to her seat so I stopped watching for her. All of a sudden, like a creepy movie, she appeared next to me with that crazy look on her face. I held my hand up like a “stop,” and kindly said, “Wait a min. I’ll give you candy to pass out.” As in, “Don’t touch me!” I got a handful of various caramels from my bible case, as I was getting them, she said, “I’m going to give them to MY FRIENDS!” I could careless!! I held them out in front of her and said, “Give them to whomever you want.” She smiled and immediately sprung up into the air taking a flying leap at me. She crashed her head into mine, and smashed her chest on mine. I went into shock! She said, “OUCH! I hit our heads together really hart. It hurts.” I said, while still in shock, “YA THINK?!” She was rubbing her head and said, “I sorry.” I told her, “Here, take your candy and go.” She left rubbing her head. I have neck issues. She slammed my neck backward and caused a tremendous amount of pain and migraines. I had to go to the chiropractor, but I couldn’t go the next day because it wasn’t safe for me to drive. I had to wait for a friend to take me. Once I did get there, she hit me so hard it took electrodes, a massage and a few maneuvers to fix it.
This is what I have to do too, go through the fruit. But first let’s look at the picture again.
Love:
“God, I know you love her. I know you created her for something better than this, even though I can’t see it right now. I’m really really mad, but I am forgiving her by faith. I am doing my best to release her into Your hands to take care of this situation. I’m doing my best to let this go and not dwell on it.” The next day, the Lord put it on my heart to tell the pastor, because the Lord wanted him to handle it.
Joy:
I needed some of my joy restored! Any type of bad event that we go through, no matter how much oil of joy you have, some joy needs to be restored. First things first, I asked the Lord to bless me with spiritual blessings so that I would come out of this better than I went into it. After that, I started singing and dancing around the house, “I got the joy, joy, joy, joy of the Lord.” My focus was on the expectation of spiritual gifts, greater revelational knowledge and understanding of The Bible. That’s what I wanted! Did I want to dance around the house and sing that? NO! But I wanted my joy restored! I was happy that day I walked into church.
Peace:
I refused to allow those bad thoughts of what she had done enter my mind. Any thoughts of how I should have done this or that were not allowed to dance in my head. The thought of, “What do I do when I see her,” kept coming, but I just told myself that God will let me know how to handle it. My flesh really wanted to swat her with my church notebook if she returned, but I knew that’s not God!
Longsuffering:
Without the love of God, oil of joy, and peace of God on me I would never be able to sit in church and not be angry with her (longsuffering means slow to anger). To get this fruit operating in your life, simply lean on love, joy, and peace, then this fruit will do its own work if you refuse anger. When the other fruits are operating, choosing to be slow to anger is easy! “Might be easy for you,” you probably want to snap back. No! I was a teenager with a violent anger problem. I just learned to choose God’s character (fruit) above my own character. Colossians 1:11 tells us to have longsuffering and patience with joy, because you can’t be slow to anger without joy.
Kindness:
Because I had the other fruits already operating in my life, kindness to this old lady came easier than I had thought. My flesh still kept that notebook handy for blocking or perhaps a gentle swat, but I said in my heart by faith, “I won’t need to swat her… God’s got this!” A few weeks later, she came by asking me if I wanted a bottle of water, she took from the church fridge and passes out. Without thinking, I smiled at her and said, “No, but thank you for asking. That was very kind of you to think of me.” I didn’t regret it. The response came out of my spirit. A friend next to me that knew what she had done and what she had done previously that I didn’t mention here said, “I can’t believe you answered her that way. I would have never been able to speak to her like that! I can’t believe it. You’re more kind than me.” I turned to her and told the truth, “It’s not me! Believe me, it’s God in me that answered her that way.” I shut my mind up, and didn’t allow it to comment on “what I really wanted to say.” I treat my mind like a little kid, “No, you won’t think that way!” It won’t hurt her any, it will only hurt me.
I don’t think there’s a point in doing deep studies on the word patience or kindness. What I think is more important is to understand not to pick a random fruit and go after it in your prayer life or work on it. The Lord doesn’t want us to jump the line either and feel like a failure. Talk to the Lord, ask Him to show you where to start. When I go out of the religion I grew up in, and started actually getting the Word to work for me… I started walking in love and the Lord was fully pleased with me. I had a bad anger issue as a teenager. I’d never miss a beat telling someone why they were wrong, and I had zero patience; but God was fully pleased with me focusing and choosing love. It naturally produced joy, peace, longsuffering, and kindness; but the day came where the Lord taught me how to use joy as a spiritual weapon in my life, which keeps increasing. I’m at the point where I’m learning how to share my oil of joy with others.
I hope you feel inspired, not discouraged, on producing fruit. It’s easier than we think! Next week we’ll talk about how to make it even easier to produce fruit, fertilizer so to speak. We’ll quickly skate through the other fruits, because the Lord has revealed to us that love, joy, and peace are the biggest offshoots. I think those should be our biggest focus. Once you get those fruits growing, longsuffering and kindness follow much easier, and the other fruits just seem to popup out of nowhere!
Thank You Father for teaching us and helping us to understand that it’s easy to produce fruit. Please continue to speak to our hearts and teach us that with Your help we can completely change in a short amount of time. Reveal to us how much of Your Breath of Life is operating through us, and how to get more of Your Life and Character working in us. Teach us how in our personal lives that Your Breath of Life keeps us well and gives us long life. Thank you for being slow to anger with us and loving us unconditionally. We love You and want to reflect Your Character. In Jesus Name, Amen.
Christi
My Prayer Notebook 
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