Confessing The Fruit Of The Spirit
Galatians 6: 22-23 describe to us the pillar of the Christian faith without which no Christian is worth the name:
“22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law”.
Well, we need to remember that the original scriptures contain no punctuations; every punctuation mark in the Bible translations is an addition of the translators to make the passages clearer. It is my considered opinion that they got it wrong in verse 22 above. I think they should have put full colon after the word “love”. This would then show that the fruit of the Spirit is love and that joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance are all facets of love. This is soundly correct if you compare it to 1 Cor. 13: 4-8.
Why are our Christian families falling apart today? Why do we still have racial prejudice right in the church? Why would a Christian accumulate huge wealth and refuse to bless the poor? Our practices today are at variance with the word of God. The major area of our failings has always been in the area of love and the reason the world is not yet evangelized.
Perhaps you’ve heard how Mahatma Gandhi decided to become a Christian because he said Christianity is the solution to the cast system in India, which he described as the greatest sin against humanity. Gandhi said Christianity is the only religion in the world whose pillar of faith is the love of one’s neighbor. He therefore, went to a white church in London but was stopped at the door by an usher who asked him just what he wanted. Gandhi told her that he had come to become a Christian to which the answer came, “Then go to an Indian church”. The man Gandhi exclaimed, “So you have cast system in Christianity too!” He left and never came back. Later on in life when some Christians evangelized to him, he said, “I will become a Christian the day I meet one”. India, no doubt, would be a Christian nation today but for loveless Christianity.
The gifts of the Spirit without the fruit of the Spirit will lead to hell fire because Christ promised to deny miracle workers that lived in sin. We must develop prayer confessions that lead us to repentance and keep us in check on the issue of loving the brotherhood and our neighbors. Lack of love for our neighbor is the height of ingratitude in any Christian. How God could love us so much and we refuse to love our neighbor? If Christ paid such a gruesome price for our sins, how can a Christian couple divorce for “irreconcilable differences” except, at least, one of them is a backslider?
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