Pastor Charlie challenged us to memorize the list of fruit in Galatians 5, but since I've been thinking about a new meditation passage, I decided to take it a bit further and do morning lectio on Galatians 5:22-24 for the duration of the sermon series (scheduled for 5 weeks).
I'll blog bits as they come.
Love: towardness, withness, and a decision to be and do for the good of another.
Joy: My mind is so polluted by the understandings of my culture, that all I can say is whatever joy is, it most certainly is not a generally positive outlook. It is something deeper and larger than that.
Peace: Too often merely considered the absence of conflict, the NT word translated peace draws on the OT concept of wholeness. Peace is the presence of something NOT just the absence of something.
Patience: not merely waiting for, but bearing up under. The assumption here is that life this side of heaven is actually difficult. In fact, sometimes it downright stinks. On the other hand, the reality is that we are already fully connected with Jesus and with each other (see the post on Body-Building-Bride for some discussion of this. Because of this we are able to bear up under the evil spiritual power in this world.
Kindness: So reading this, I figured it was unlikely that Paul was telling his readers to be nice. When I looked up the word this morning, I saw that it means 'moral goodness, integrity; kindness'. So, our moral goodness has a real effect on others such that it is considered kindness? This puts a whole new criteria to 'being nice'.
Goodness: The definition is 'uprightness of heart and life,' but what does that look like? What comes to mind is a statement from business: it's not just about doing things right, it's about doing the right things.
Study it at Crosswalk
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