WORDS
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WORDS •
I am passionate about writing and often find that speaking is difficult when trying to get my point across. With writing, it’s easier for me to convey what I feel, but there are still challenges as I’m not perfect. I want to write about the Word and what God calls us to do and be in an uplifting and meaningful way. However, as I do not claim an elite theologian title, I am positive that I am inaccurate or confused about things sometimes. If you ever see anything I write and want to correct me, please fill out the form below so I can convey Truth to all who see it.
Fruit
Can we compare the fruit of the Spirit to a well-tuned guitar?
I had a vision last night. I was trying to imagine the different ways the fruits of the Spirit show up in my character. We learn from Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). While I was thinking about different times I’ve been loving or joyful, the image of a guitar came to mind. Each fruit represents a different string, and the more time you spend with the Lord, the more He tunes them so they all blend in a beautiful harmony. Sometimes we are out of tune, and a good reason for that might be because we are out of our Word or out of prayer.
Then the vision went even further. Situationally, we might need our fruit to show up in different ways. We might need to play a different note on our guitar and switch our finger placement on each string. I thought about a scenario where I was trying to be there for a friend struggling with sin. My love isn’t going to sound like sin is okay and life is short; it’s going to sound like I love them enough to make sure they know that the Lord wants better for them. But where my love would sound similar to ‘it’s okay and we can move on’ could be if my friend was stuck in shame for their past. Like any good guitarist, we need knowledge of the chords we’re meant to be playing at any given time. So how do we know what chords to play? The answer might be that we’d rely on wisdom.
Interestingly, wisdom is not a fruit of the Spirit that Paul describes. King Solomon tells us that wisdom is the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 9:10). Reverence for the Lord is the bedrock for the spiritual insight necessary to respond fruitfully in different scenarios. If we didn’t fear God, we wouldn’t want to do right by Him and respond to others in the way that He would desire us to in the first place. What I understand is that the Lord is the songwriter; the more time we spend singing His songs, studying them, and meditating on them, the better we will be at playing the proper chords on a well-tuned guitar. By that I mean that the time we spend in worship, in our Bibles, and in prayer, the more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control we will have, and the more valuable these things will be to other people through us.
