Fruit of the Spirit

As I sat with English speaking Chinese students in the coffee shop in Wuhan, China, having conversations with them as they practiced their oral English, I would often hear them describe me with words given in the verses above. After this went on for some time, God finally impressed upon me that what these students were seeing in me was an expression of God’s love as described by the words following the word “love”. As I thought about this I began to see the verses differently than the way they are normally interpreted.

Verse 22 begins with “But the fruit of the Spirit” not “fruits”. Fruit is that which is produced by something and can come in various forms depending on the source. Trees and plants produce a different fruit than does our labor. For the Spirit, the fruit is “love”, which makes sense because God is love (1 John 4:7, 8, 16). Since God is love he produces love, as a fruit, in those in whom he dwells.

Since there is no punctuation in the Greek text, the person translating the text into English must add punctuation where appropriate. It has been an accepted practice to place a comma after love and include the remaining words as additional fruit. I began to object to this for two reasons. First, verse 22 says “fruit” not “fruits” and second, the eight words that follow “love” seem to be characteristics that define love; those characteristics that I seem to display to the students in the coffee shop. It made practical sense to me to replace the comma following the word “love” with a colon. Then one day when I was looking at verse 22 on the NET web site I happened to notice their footnote pointing out the possibility of using a colon instead of a comma. I found that encouraging.

Once I was willing to break from tradition and write the verse with a colon, I began to understand love more clearly and began to see its power in witnessing and in changing my life. It was these characteristics of love that drew these students to ask questions about God. Seeing the eight words that follow love as characteristics of love, not as additional fruit of the Spirit, added insight to these verses that I never saw before. It is this insight that I would like to write about in future entries.

In this entry I will state my position that “The fruit of the Spirit is love” and then in the next eight entries we will consider the eight characteristics and their effects in our lives. I think you might be surprised from what you will learn from our study.