Fruit of the Spirit - Part 2 - FAITHFULNESS

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Wednesday, May 22, 2019

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  There is no law against these things!                 Galatians 5:22-23

Bob Smith.  Not exactly a name that jumps out at you.  Unless, of course, you’re a student at Moorehouse College in Atlanta last Sunday during commencement exercises, and you’re about to graduate when the speaker, Robert F. Smith, the world’s richest African American, with a net worth of over 5-billion (which is way-more than Oprah Winfrey, by the way), declares he is going to pay off your student loans – as well as all the other 400 graduates…a gift of about $40-million[2]…and give you a chance to start your working career debt-free!  Can you hear me now?  Hi; I’m Bob Smith, and I just laid some fruit of the Spirit on you.

Now, before you accuse me of laying some Joel Osteen on you, let me say that whether you have 5 billion in the bank, or owe that much in debt, money, per se, has nothing to do with it.  Bob Smith’s act was faithfulness, the gift of doing for someone else, what you can, with what you have, where you are; that’s what means everything.

People do the same kind of thing Smith did in places like McDonald’s, buying an extra lunch combo to hand to the homeless guy who hangs-out just down the street from a fast food pace.  Or randomly paying at the drive-through for the car behind you.  You never know when that $8.00 meal will rescue a soul, because that guy in the car behind who is broke and desperate, because everything he cared about in life had just vanished, and this was going to be his last meal before he just gave up and jumped off the cliff.

Faithfulness (to the faith once delivered to the saints[3]) is a matter of using that with which God has empowered you, to bless and strengthen someone else. 

If you’re somebody who belongs to Jesus, and you’re good at something, chances are that is where this spiritual fruit will show up.  That talent, or gift, or ability, isn’t the fruit…it’s what you do with it.  Bob Smith is a smart guy, who figured out a long time ago how to make money…lots of it.  That isn’t spiritual fruit; knowing what to do next and doing it…that’s where the new wine is made from the best fruit that is just waiting to be harvested! 

The old expression about a detective finding the bad guy is follow the money.  Here’s one about finding the faithful guy:  follow the faithfulness.

For You Today

For the rest of this series on the 9-fold fruit of the Spirit we’re going to let Scripture finish our devotional thought, because it is our encouragement and challenge to work this field of producing Kingdom fruit:

The seeds of good deeds become a tree of life;  Proverbs 11:30a

If your gift is to encourage others, be encouraging.  If it is giving, give generously.  If God has given you leadership ability, take the responsibility seriously.  And if you have a gift for showing kindness to others, do it gladly.  Romans 12:8

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

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[1] Title Image: Pixabay.com  
             Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from The New Living Translation©

[2] Who’s Robert F. Smith, the billionaire paying off Morehouse College students’ loans?

[3] Jude 1:3