Birthday Fruit Check

OK, so...  I'm 28 today.  That's a thing.

I did manage to survive being 27.  That's something that Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse did not accomplish...  I would like to believe that this is related in at least a few ways to my decision to make non-heroin life choices.

Well...  OK, that's unfair to Robert Johnson.  But man, that guy's life was so hard, being let go at 27 was a commutation of his sentence in view of time served.

I am definitely not the same dude I was a year ago.  I believe I'm a better guy.  I'm going to go ahead and chalk all the credit for that up to God, because He knows better than I do that I didn't do it on my own.

Over the past year, I have found myself growing more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.  In case you missed what I was doing there, those are the fruits of the Spirit from Galatians 5:22-23.

Now...  I did not choose to be those things.  I wanted to be those things, sure, but I did not set out to do those things.  I set out to follow God more closely.  I chose to submit to His Will.  I chose to model my life on the example and teachings of Jesus.  I made room for the Holy Spirit in my life, and - whaddya know - it made an extraordinary difference.

I don't know where you're at with the Holy Spirit.  Growing up in the Church of Christ, even with the parents that I have, I didn't hear much about it.  Mom and Dad definitely talked about it more than anyone at church ever did.  There was always this vague idea floating around (thanks to some disgustingly bad understandings of I Corinthians 13) that the Holy Spirit only exists (currently) within the pages of the Bible.

THAT IS REALLY DUMB THEOLOGY.

The Holy Spirit is a part of God.  It is, in fact, the Spirit of God Himself.  Hence the "Holy" part.  God is eternal.  Any one part of eternity is still an eternal thing.  So the Spirit is just as eternal as God Himself.

If we say that the Spirit is in the Bible itself, then the Bible is on par with God.  That ain't cutting it.  If we say, however, that the Spirit merely interacts with us through the Bible, then we are saying things that the Bible does not say about the Spirit.

Jesus makes it perfectly clear that the Spirit would allow His disciples to not only understand all of His teachings, but also enable them and embolden them to actually carry out His work on earth.  I try to live my life by the basic guideline that Jesus knew what He was talking about, so I'm thinking that the Spirit just might still be active in the world today.  Hope you're with me on that one.

But I think so many people miss the work of the Spirit in their own lives because they're so focused on the fruit thereof... instead of the Spirit itself.

If I nail an apple to a pine tree, that doesn't make it an apple tree, does it?

So why do so many people seem to believe that we can simply choose to be more loving, joyful, peaceful, etc... and call it a day on getting the fruits of the Spirit into our lives?

The thing is that while, yes, we can make choices that move us towards being better people, one of the key choices we have to make is completely tied up in whether or not we actually have the ability to do anything good for ourselves.

As I mentioned in the last post, there are some pretty substantial points to be picked up from an understanding of the nature of God, and how that nature reflects on the Love that God has shown us so richly.

The Spirit is God.  God is Love.  The Spirit is Love.  The Spirit dwelling in us is Love dwelling in us.

But is it showing up?

I can't check your life, I can only look at mine...  which is what I've been doing a lot of lately.  I've been looking to see if those fruits have shown up in my life, and I believe they have.  I believe, fully, that the Holy Spirit has managed to get through my thick skull in a few places and transform me into a better dude, which is pretty solid all around, if you ask me.

So many people have an end-times-only view of Christianity.  They're convinced that the only good of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was our redemption, so we can get to Heaven when we die.

Here's the thing...  I don't know when I'm gonna die, but I do know that I ain't dead yet, so the Heaven bits don't do me a ton of good right now.  I also know that before He died, Jesus sure had a whole dang lot of stuff to say about the way we live.

The transformative powers of the Gospel are not limited to the eternal, but reach out to the temporal, as well.  This world can be better.  This life can be easier.  Love can be stronger.  We just have to accept that as reality and furthermore understand that the only way it ever will actually happen is through the direct involvement of God Himself...  in the form of His Spirit coming down and showing us how to live.

The Spirit is definitely the part of the Trinity that confuses people the most.  Some people are so confused by it that they refuse to accept the possibility of it even existing or working in our lives today, and that's a bummer, because I'd hate to believe that I don't serve an active, living God.  Otherwise, what's the point?

Aren't we to a place where we can actually trust God when He says He'll do a thing?

I mean, He at least worked out some good in me...  That's gotta count for something, right?