The Fruit of the Spirit

The fruit of the Spirit cannot be artificially produced. These qualities must be developed in us by God’s grace. Today, Sinclair Ferguson considers the Lord’s purpose of growing His people in a wonderfully balanced way to make us increasingly like Christ.

I want to think with you this week on the podcast about what Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”

I think we’d agree that these words are worth memorizing, and I’m going to repeat them every day this week. But I think it’s also interesting that for some people, these are favorite verses. I’m not sure that’s always been true of me, and so it’s a good thing for me, and I hope it’s an encouragement to you that we spend some time thinking about them.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Paul calls these different qualities—there are nine of them—he calls them fruit. “Fruit” in the singular, not “fruits” in the plural. Although, earlier on in this chapter, he’d spoken about the “works”—plural—of the flesh, not just the “work” of the flesh. And I rather think that he’s suggesting that all of these qualities belong together. They’re meant to grow on the same tree, as it were. You can’t really develop one of them fully without having all of them.

At the same time, I wonder if the reason he calls them “fruit” is because they take time to grow and they need to be nourished. It’s interesting, I think, isn’t it, that he uses a horticultural metaphor here, not a mechanical one. These qualities can’t be artificially produced. They need to be developed in us by God’s grace.

When I think of these words in Galatians 5, I often am reminded of two comments made by two rather remarkable Christian ministers. The first is a comment made by the great eighteenth-century Anglican minister Charles Simeon of Cambridge. And he made it about a young man whose name was Henry Martyn, who became a very great missionary and translator of the Scriptures. He was a brilliant young man. He was the outstanding mathematics graduate of his time in the University of Cambridge. And he became a missionary and died as a young man. But Charles Simeon, who befriended him, once commented that what struck him about Henry Martyn was not just how tall he had grown spiritually, but how the fruit of the Spirit in his life seemed to be perfectly proportionate. I think that’s a beautiful description of a Christian, don’t you? Someone in whom all the graces of God, the fruit of the Spirit, are growing in a wonderfully balanced way, and at the end of the day, showing that all of these fruit grow on the same tree.

The other comment that I often think of in connection with these words is something that my own minister as a student in Scotland, William Still, made. I remember he said that the growing Christian is someone who has learned to do the natural thing spiritually and the spiritual thing naturally. I think that’s a very good way of thinking about the fruit of the Spirit, isn’t it? It isn’t a matter of just trying to do the right thing, trying to be this or trying to be that. It’s much more organic. It’s this ninefold fruit of the Spirit, which the Spirit produces in us as we grow in our love for the Lord Jesus, as our hearts and minds and our wills submit to Scripture, as our affections are suffused with the teaching of Scripture and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus. Then there is a kind of spiritual natural way in which we grow to be more like Him. And at the end of the day, that’s what these fruit of the Spirit add up to: likeness to the Lord Jesus.

So, as we think about them this week, let’s pray that the Lord will make us more like Him.