Second I.B.S.

Galatians 5:22-23- “But the fruit of the spirit is Love, Joy, Peace, Longsuffering, Gentleness, Goodness, Faith, Meekness, Temperance: against such there is no law.”

“The FRUIT of the spirit” are these things. Attending a private Christian school for 9 years certainly had its ups and downs. Of course, looking back everything that I learned at that school, I see now, that God used that school to prepare me for the rest of my life spiritually. One of the things they repeated over and over was the saying, “root to fruit.” This is the basic idea of whatever you plant your roots in, will determine what the product looks like. So if you plant an apple tree in soil and give it the proper nutrients it needs to grow every day, you’ll get some beautiful apples. However, if you plant an apple tree in soil and don’t give it what it needs, you’ll still get apples, but those apples won’t be any good, you wouldn’t want to share them with anyone, and if you did, they wouldn’t want them or like them. Now let’s look at this root to fruit thing from a biblical stand point. If you plant your roots in the Word of God but you’re not feeding those roots every day, you might still produce fruit but nobody is going to see a beautiful fruit, they won’t look at you and say wow, I wonder what’s different about that guy, because your product will be just as rotten as the worlds. However when we do continue to feed our roots in the word, we see here in these verses that people will see Love, Joy, Peace, Longsuffering, Gentleness, Goodness, Faith, Meekness, and Temperance through us. I think one thing we need to ask ourselves is, what are we rooted in and what are we feeding ourselves? While I do know I am rooted in His word, I wonder at why I feed myself with some of the sinful things that I feed myself with. While I was blessed by God for raising me in a Christian home, I know at one point in my life, I chopped down the roots of the tree that my parents helped me plant and said, “Nope, I’m growing something different!” Other people didn’t grow up in Christian homes, I was blessed by that, yet I still wanted to go my way. It’s funny because the more that you feed a tree, the stronger the roots get and the harder it is to cut down that tree. It took a while for me to cut down my tree, I hope it’ll be even harder for the evil one to cut down the tree that I am building up right now. But the thing about trees is, even when your chop one down, you have to make sure you dig up the roots or else it can grow back.

I hope to continue to strengthen the roots that I am growing right now and to keep the old ones away. From now on, I will write now in my devotional and commit to being an example of at least one fruit per day.