What are the fruits of the Spirit?

In contrast thereto is the fruit of the Spirit. It does not even say fruits, for all these excellent features are considered as a cluster of fruit, all so many varying manifestations of the same life. In nature, fruit is the highest expression and crown of vegetable life. So here the life of the Spirit comes naturally and quietly into expression as love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. When we think of works we have a mental picture of bustle and noise. When we think of fruit we think of the silent processes of nature.

Then comes the "fruit of the Spirit": not works, as of the flesh, not even fruits, in the plural; but as it were one lovely bunch of nine fruits: like a bunch of beautiful grapes for the Master.

The nine fruits are one in God's sight, but they may be divided into three groups of three each. The first three are the hidden fruits, seen by the eye of God: love, joy, peace. But it is these three hidden fruits that give birth to the next three, towards my brethren: long-suffering, kindness, goodness. What a contrast to the eight works of the flesh that had to do with our brethren! Lastly come faithfulness (or it might be faith), meekness and self-control.

It is remarkable that our Lord Jesus bequeathed these three sweet fruits to us before He left this world. In John 14:27 we read: "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you." In John 15:11 we read: "These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." And in John 17:26 our Lord prays: "That the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them." His peace, His joy, His love. What a legacy! — all made good to us by the Holy Spirit, if we "walk by the Spirit."

"Love" is God's own nature and is rightly placed first. Everything else pales before this. It is that which will abide when not only prophecies, tongues, and knowledge are no more, but when faith and hope have given place to sight and realisation (1 Cor. 13:8-13). "Joy" and "peace" follow naturally. As our souls abide in the divine nature, so we are happy and calm. Things that would otherwise disturb and ruffle our hearts pass by and leave us quite unmoved.

Kindness comes from a lovely Greek word, "Chreestos." Christ in Greek is "Christos." The sound is almost the same. In the old days, the people used to say that "Christians" (from the name Christ which we bear) were also "Chreestians" (from Chreestos, meaning kind), because the Christians were known for their kindness to others.

You will notice that righteousness is not said to be a fruit of the Spirit. You remember the Word says, "Scarcely for a righteous man would one die: yet perhaps for a good man some would even dare to die." Rom. 5:7. So it is goodness, not righteousness, that is a fruit of the Spirit.

There are some persons towards whom one must be unusually careful because they take offense so easily. Such persons have very little meekness. This fruit seems to be especially valuable in the sight of God; for He tells the Christian women to wear the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price (1 Peter 3:4).

This is translated "temperance" in the English Bible, but it really means to have mastery, and the one over which we are to have mastery, is ourselves. I fear that this is a very rare, but very precious fruit.

Works make us think of our own doing; fruit makes us think of another power within that draws its strength from the sunshine, the ground, the air, and forms these things into the "precious fruits of the earth." So it is, that by turning our eyes away from the things of earth, and looking off unto Jesus, we are changed according to the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor. 3:18). And the fruit grows, without noise or labor on our part, by an unseen power within.

Fruit is the character of Christ reproduced in the lives of His disciples. We read in Galatians 5:22, that "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, fidelity, meekness, self-control." These are the very qualities that marked Christ in His path down here, and that called forth the Father's expression of pleasure, for the voice from heaven said, "This is my beloved Son in whom I have found my delight."

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith." Such are the first and weightiest effects produced by God's love. Then he gets down to what would more particularly deal with one another: "meekness, temperance," because these suppose the bridle put upon the evil nature — the self-control which the Holy Ghost works in the soul for the Lord's sake, as evidently being set in this world to be an epistle of Christ, so that we should not give a false character to Him whose name we bear.