Father, I pray as we look at your word this morning that you would give us the ability to love it. To want what we find here to be part of our lives because in it we would find that we would become closer to you, that you would get glory from our lives, Lord, that's what we desire. And we know that the things that we talk about this morning are the things that go a long way toward that as you work them out in our lives. And so, God, we just are asking that, first of all, you help us to understand, but then, Lord, you give us grace to be changed. And it's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen. If you would look at Galatians 5 verse 22, we'll begin this familiar passage of the fruit of the Spirit we spent last week talking about all of the things that Paul listed that said these are the opposite of the fruit of the Spirit. If you do these things, you're not walking in the Spirit. If these are the practice of your life, then you're not going to heaven, because you don't know anything about God. That was the somberness of what we dealt with last week. And we talked about the fact that we all struggle with things, and that we all sin and have difficulty with that, and we end up constantly in the need for repentance and faith. But if we are, if these things characterize our lives, then there's a good chance that we don't know Christ. And it doesn't matter, the profession that we made doesn't have anything to do with anything. Because the issue is, if this is how you live, then at least over time, in a habitual way, then you can't claim that you know him. And I should clarify that by saying that that's difficult for me as well. I mean, there are many of us in this room, I think, that made a profession of faith when we were children, and our lives didn't look like it for a long period of time. And in my own case, I have to confess that I don't really know when I was really converted you know, was it nine years old down the road here at Faith Baptist or Was it later on when the Lord finally showed me that his word actually meant something But during those years when I did not act like a Christian and I did not care about the things of Christ I have no right nor do any of anyone that I was around have a right to look at my life and say, well, he's just backslidden, but he's a believer. You can't do that. You got to look at it for what it looks like. God ultimately knows men's hearts. But the issue still is that we have to go with what the scripture tells us. And the scripture tells us that people who live like that can't be considered believers over long periods of time. And so there needed to be some clarification because there were some questions and so that's your clarification. It may still not make you happy in terms of what it is that I just said and I'm sorry about that. I have to be true to what I think the scripture is saying. We have to understand that Jesus didn't die on that cross just so that we could live any life that we want to live and at the end of it go to heaven. And if anyone has sold anyone that, then they lied to him. I mean, that's kind of the way that is. But now we're going to deal with the positive aspect. So let's read verse 22 and on. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. Let's stop there because I think we may not get very far this time. A couple of opening things that we should do. So the first is this. Based on the passage we just read, and you may have to go over it, what is the context in which the fruit of the Spirit should be displayed in the believer's life? What is Paul talking about? It is a lifestyle, but particularly when a person is in a certain place, not that we're saying that the fruit of the Spirit shouldn't be demonstrated at all times, but there are a couple of things that tell us particularly what he's talking about here. Yeah, but where? Around what people? That's what I'm getting at. All people is correct, but look at the text. Look at the last verse. that we read. Provoking one another, envying one another. Good. Now who's the letter to? A church. Good. A church. OK. Paul is dealing with a specific issue within this church at Galatia. OK. This is it. These little local bodies are having these false teachers come in. And what he's trying to do is to explain to them the difference in between law and grace in their lives. The fruit of the spirit. Another way of saying that is grace. Now what John said is absolutely correct. Obviously when we walk in the spirit we want these characteristics to come out of our lives at all times. But specifically we want them to come out in our dealings with our brothers and sisters in the local church. And Paul I say that specifically only because that's what Paul is dealing with. Apparently, and this always happens, when you have false teaching, or when you have more of a legalistic mindset, people immediately begin to compare each other to themselves. Well, I'm doing it better than you are. And in this case it would be, I am a little more zealous for following these Jewish rules than you are, and therefore I'm better than you. Right? That's what he's saying. We're not caring about love, and we're not caring about gentleness, and we're not caring about patience. We're not caring about any of those things. We don't focus on the other person, but it's what I can get out of the situation. And of course, in the local church, that can never be our standpoint. That can never be where we start. If we start there, we just wreak havoc. And that's what's going on here. Some people take this passage to say, well, and not altogether. This is not altogether wrong. I don't mean to communicate that. But we take it and we say, well, these are things that I need to be. I need to be more loving and I need to be more gentle and I need to have more joy. Absolutely. We certainly do. But all of these characteristics. How are you going to know if you have them? You have to be around people. You have to. If you're not around people, it's a little hard. I can be really patient if I'm on the cave up here on the side of this mountain with nobody around. You can be a real patient man up there. And I've heard people talk about, you know, well, I just love all of the people in China because I just want them to come to Christ and I love them and I love the culture and everything else. Well, I'm not saying that we discount that completely, but it's real easy to love people you don't know. When you know somebody and you have functioned with them, as in some of our cases, for years within a local body, it changes things. It changes things. Because at that point, we will find all of the things that irritate one another. And yet we still have to stay together because there isn't a plan B. This is how we do it. And a good example of this and again we read that last verse so we're not to be conceited but I bring it up only only to demonstrate a point. The church, the local church, whether you're going or not, has decided that it is important that members that we had here, Trey and Kylie Griffin, need encouragement this afternoon. And this is something that the local church does. And so in that context, this is what we do. And what we're going to do is actually If it were not for the spirit, I would say what we're going to do is kind of nuts, really. Because we're going to do a service this morning, we're going to drive three hours, we're going to go see these folks, we're going to turn around and drive three hours back. Why would you do that? Now, if you're not doing that, this is not a speech in order to make you feel that you need to do it. Practically, God has different things for us to do along the way, and it doesn't mean that everybody all has to do the same thing at one time. But as a church, we have decided that those who can, and those who feel like they need to, need to come do this, right? That's what being part of a local body is, and that's how you demonstrate these fruits of the Spirit. They come out this way, right? You can be patient in your closet if you want to, and you can be loving in your closet if you want to, But it's a little different thing when word gets out that these people, this group of people that Christ has lived his life through, actually love the people that have been members of them for years enough that they're willing to do things that, even in a worldly sense, don't make sense. Right? That's the fruit of the Spirit. And hopefully that will be demonstrated as we do it. But we need to say another couple of things before we actually get in to the fruits. One of them is this. We have to be careful with this list of fruits because what people tend to want to do with these things is to define them the way that they want to define them. What do I mean? Well, the first one is love, and we know that the world defines love often in a very different way than the Bible defines love, right? I mean, joy, patience, goodness even. Goodness is in here, okay? Now, if you define love, because this is the only type of relationships that you've had, you define love, well, I am going to care about somebody because of what they can do for me. Right? So, it's like this symbiotic relationship. And in most worldly relationships, love is like this, where what happens is, yes, I will do nice things for you and I will affirm you, but that is only because you do the same thing for me. And if you don't do the same thing for me, then I'm going to quit doing it for you. And those things happen in marriages. They happen with parents and children. They happen with friends. They happen with, you know, all sorts of different people. My point is this. If you define love that way and then you say, well, I have to demonstrate this fruit of the spirit, which is love, but you have the wrong definition. You don't understand biblically what love is. then you're going to get off the track really quick. Goodness. What is good? We have the scripture to define for us what good is because in our day and time there are a lot of people and we can't say that this hasn't seeped into us as well that call bad things according to the scripture good. and good things, according to the Scripture, bad. Right? So what does goodness mean as a fruit of the Spirit? Well, we always have to go back to the Scripture itself to define those. Now, we'll get to some of that in a minute. I had thought of going really, really in depth with some of that. I don't think I will. I think I'm just going to give you definitions when we actually go through these that may help you. But if you have questions about those, we can talk about those later. The third thing before I start the fruit of the Spirit is this. This is the fruit of the Spirit. What is being talked about here is absolutely and totally supernatural. Absolutely and totally supernatural, and it is apart from what you're able to do yourself. What do I mean by that? Some people might look down through this list, and I don't know of anyone who can say that I do all of these things, but there might be some who would look down through this list and say, well, I am a naturally kind person. Right. I'm a natural. I'm not. But somebody might be. So I'm a naturally kind person. I tend to care about things. I tend to see an animal in the middle of the road and stop my car and go and get it. And I tend to do all of these kinds of things. Those are gifts that God gives us perhaps in a natural way. But that's not a spiritual gift. OK. That's not a spiritual gift. That's something that has already built into you because of God's common grace in your life and the way that he's built and the environments that he's allowed you to be in and those things. And they're good things. We don't discount them but we need to make a distinction in between those things and the supernatural work of God's spirit in the believer's life because those are different. Those are different. So. Let me turn over to my notes here. We're just going to go through the fruit. And the first one we're going to talk about is love. The agape love. It means that we serve a person for their good and not for what that person gives us or brings us. We see intrinsic value in a person because of what God has done in their lives or because he has created them. And we want to serve them, even recognizing that they won't give us anything back. And in fact, what we may get back are things that are not good. And we know and I'll just say this up front because it was another point I intended to make before I started this and is this. We know that all of these things all of these attributes were demonstrated for us perfectly in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so if we want to know how they are how this works itself out that's what you look at. You look at his life you study Jesus's life. So we're going to serve a person. Now we can also help ourselves by giving what the opposite of love is because that will maybe help us define it a little bit better. We're going to try to do this at least with most of these. So if love is serving a person regardless of what we get for it, the opposite of love is fear. That's biblical. The opposite of love is fear. And of course, that requires defining, too. But in this case, we'll just define it by saying self-protection. The opposite of love is self-protection and, frankly, abuse in one form or another. If we're loving people in a sacrificial way, in the way that this fruit of the spirit works itself out, then we will love them like Christ loved us, which means that we will sacrifice our time and we will sacrifice our sleep and we will sacrifice our energy and our money. in all of these situations that God brings into our lives and yes we need to temper some of those with wisdom and that's where again the body of Christ comes in we we have to not do these things by ourselves we have to filter it through the local church so that everybody's gifts can come to bear on the situation that's the that's the thing but here if we're protecting ourselves If we're afraid that our little life and the way that we have set it up is going to be altered in some way that doesn't make us happy, then that's not love. So, I don't know if that helps. It helped me. The first one's love. Now we have, we won't go there, but we have 1st Corinthians 13 that gives us that whole long chapter about what love is. Love is patient. Love is kind. It doesn't seek its own. And if you condense all that down, which is what I tried to do, that's what you're getting in this definition. Love is not, one more thing here that I have here, love is not selfish affection. It's not an attraction to someone that you treat well because of how they make you feel about yourself. Okay? That's not that. This love is supernatural. It comes from outside of human relationships, in a sense. If we're dealing with two believers who both have the Spirit, then yes, we can both sense that coming through as we work together in the body, but This is not a mutual, well, I'm being affirmed here and somebody's trying to follow me around like my little duckling and because I live this life and they want to do what I do and that makes me feel really special. That's not love. That's not love. So, we've only done one, how we doing? And, huh? Yeah. And it's like that to some degree. And when we get to the end of this, and I hope we do today, we're going to deal with how we sort that out. But this is the reality of the Christian life. When we are walking in the Spirit, which is what we are commanded to do, the kind of love that I've just defined for you is going to come through our lives. It's going to come through our lives as we're around people. So yes, when we're with our families and when we're at our jobs, all those things, but particularly as we work together with the body of Christ. OK, so our next one is joy. Now, we know that this is misunderstood by the world. All of us want to feel happy. None of us want to be sad. Right? When you're sad, it's just not good. You're depressed. And in fact, if you're sad long enough, they'll give you a pill so you won't be sad anymore. Which in some cases may be something that's okay, but just understand that those two things don't have anything to do with what we're talking about here. This kind of joy. The first thing that you need to understand, we're going to define it, but the first thing that you need to understand is that the joy that comes through the Spirit, The fruit, this fruit, has no dependence upon circumstance. None. In other words, it doesn't matter what's happening in your life, a fruit of the Spirit can always be joy. It can be. Why? Well, we'll define joy. Joy is a delight in God for the sheer beauty and worth of who he is. That kind of hits you upside the head if you hadn't been thinking about it because you've been and I have been infected by what the world thinks is joy. But that's joy. I get to be in a relationship with God. That's joy. unless you misunderstand, God gives us things. He gives us experiences. He even gives us appetites which are good if not used wrongly. He gives eyes, some of us better than others, and noses and mouths that we can taste and eat with. The ability to have relationships and the ability to have emotions all of those things are of God. He created us that way but all of those have to be Put through this filter of How do I see the Lord Jesus high and lifted up in this thing I That's the issue. Joy is about recognizing God's intrinsic worth and beauty. And He is beautiful. Well, again, we will look at joy. We need to talk about it a little bit because it's one that we have trouble. So the first thing is, it's opposite. What is the opposite of joy? Hopelessness. No hope. Despair. That's the opposite. So, for the believer, when I am in despair, or when I'm hopeless, when I look at a situation either in my own life, in my own family, in this body, in a discipleship relationship, and wherever I'm at, and I say, this is hopeless, there's no way this is going to work out well, then I am not exhibiting the fruit of joy. Because joy doesn't look so much at my circumstance. I may not understand my circumstance. See the problem with us is that we always think that we have to understand everything before we can either be happy or sad about it. But the reality is that most things in life you're not going to understand and most things in life you have little or no control over. God is sovereign and so we've got to get comfortable with the idea that if God takes my life and what I think it is turns it upside down and says you are now working in an inner city somewhere in Baltimore because that's what I want you to do and you're going to plant a church there. And I can get all up in arms and say, God, that's not my natural gift. That's not what I'm about. I don't want you using your natural gifts. I want you to walk in the fruit of the spirit. Now, I should say differently that God gives us natural gifts and that he does use them. But those are not the primary thing. Those are the secondary thing. He uses them. But the supernaturalness of God's work in someone's life, that indicates that they're walking in the spirit. If I'm the adventuresome type who probably, if I'd never come to know Christ, wanted to go across the world somewhere and join the Peace Corps, then it's probably not a gift of the Spirit that I'm willing to leave everything and go. Now God may use that, but I found, and this is just Alex talking, this is not the scripture, I found that oftentimes that person is the one that has to stay in the same place for 35 years. God just does it that way. And the person who is a homebody who does nothing other than want to stay in the same place for 35, 40, 50 years until they're dead, God says, no, you go. I mean, that whole thing is like that. At least it seems to me to be. So joy. Well, it's got a counterfeit too. It's counterfeit is an elation elation that's best on that's that's based on experiencing the blessings of God and not God himself. In other words joy doesn't have anything that this causes this causes the counterfeit is like mood swings right. That's what it is. It's like mood swings. It may depend on an external circumstance. It may depend on some sort of brain chemistry. It may depend on whether I had enough coffee this morning, which, by the way, I did not. I still need to work on that. And if I had had enough coffee, then I would be more joyful, right? I mean, you see how goofy that is? It's not goofy to me. That's actual reality, let me tell you. Some people who've been around me can tell you. But the thing about that is, that doesn't have anything to do with the supernatural work of God in someone's life. Joy doesn't depend on circumstance. All right. Peace. We want to deal with peace. Now, of course, the world defines peace this way. We'll come back to this. Peace is the absence of conflict. If we're at peace, that means we're not at war. And we always want to be at peace, but what we mean when we say, I want peace in my life, what we mean by that is that Want to be okay, you're okay. I'm okay. I want you to think I'm okay. I don't want any problems I don't want conflicts. I don't want issues This is how peace is defined and you see now just as a side note why this is so important to define It's because if I come to someone and I'm giving them the gospel and I'm saying come to Jesus because You're gonna get peace But at least as I spend time with them and as I deal with them over a period of months, we have to define these things. Because you know what they're going to do? They're going to say, you're a liar. I got less peace now than I've ever had in my life. Because I used to didn't care about all this stuff. And now I care a bunch. Peace. There's no peace in this. You see how it looks? We need to be careful that we over time are dealing with folks and training folks and constantly renewing even our own minds because we are fooled by these things all of the time. We need to renew our own minds in the scriptures to define these things so that we understand what's actually being offered and what's actually being promised. Okay, peace. This is a confidence and a rest in the wisdom and control of God. This is a confidence and a rest in the wisdom and control of God, and not your own wisdom or control. That's hard. Right. The other definition is easier. But to say that I have peace because God is sovereign and he is wise and I actually rejoice in the fact that I'm not control. I'm not in control and I'm not wise in comparison to him. We have to get comfortable with that. And when you can live like that, that's super. You see how supernatural that is? That's not just let me tell you six ways you could have peace in your life, right? It doesn't work that way. This is supernatural that I'm going to trust a God that I can't see who has redeemed me and who is in control of everything and who has all wisdom. And that's going to bring about this fruit of the spirit, which is peace. Well, what's the opposite? Anxiety and worry. Anxiety and worry is caused because of circumstances that I can't control that I want to. Right? I mean, that's where those come from. So there's a fake version of peace. And we have to be careful about this, because I've fallen into this too. The fake piece is indifference and apathy, not caring. You see, we think sometimes, and the world tells us this sometimes, that if the way to have peace is just not to care, to be indifferent, to have a certain apathy about everything. Another way to put it, I'm not going to get close to people, I'm not going to get involved in things, I'm not going to do those things, because if I do, I'll just invariably get hurt. So I'm just going to stay away from that, and I'm going to be indifferent. I don't care. But that's not peace that is again a self-protection mechanism that the flesh brings out and It can protect our emotions pretty well Sometimes and we can think that we're having a lot of peace, but we're not living on real peace. We're living on a counterfeit Patience Now, patience is an ability to face trouble without blowing up or becoming angry. I mean, patience is the ability to face trouble without blowing up or becoming angry. And the thing about patience is that what we need to understand we need God to use his word and his spirit to work in our lives because we all have different things that kind of trigger us in terms of what makes us mad what makes us frustrated what angers us it's not all the same thing and so we need to be We need to ask God to search our hearts and be clear because I can watch someone who is Dealing with a certain situation and say boy. That's a lot of patience that they're demonstrating there and they may be They may not but maybe what I'm seeing is is just if I was in that situation I couldn't do it, you know, and maybe that's not their trigger point, but maybe it is and God's done a work I mean, you don't know but the issue is It's easy to be patient as long as you're not facing something that has the possibility of making you impatient. Maybe that's like a duh moment, but patience happens across the board. You don't get, you don't, you just don't blow up. One thing about patience that happens is that you don't have this thing that just comes out that says it's not fair. shouldn't have to deal with this it's not fair. So if that's the case then the opposite of patience is resentment and ultimately if we're talking about the fruit of the spirit we're going to be talking about resentment toward God. And while we would never say God I resent the fact that this this and this is occurring in my life biblically and again this is why we have to get our definitions right biblically when we are Impatient, angry, frustrated about something, and resentful. We may aim it at circumstances, we may aim it at people, but when we believe that God is the sovereign of the whole universe, ultimately when we do that, we are resenting him. Because he's the one who set those things into place. Some counterfeits of patience, and I know a whole lot about this, is cynicism, is a real counterfeit here. Cynicism and lack of caring again. In other words, it's not patience to say, and I think sometimes we've been trained in a worldly way to do this, to say, that's just not a big enough deal to care about. It's a good strategy, it worked. The problem is that it's just sort of a mental manipulation of things. Because who are you to say it's not a big enough deal to care about? Usually when you say, I'm not going to worry about that because it's not a big enough deal to care about, you're saying it because you can't do anything about it anyway. That's that whole thing. Patience, by necessity, demonstrates to us that trouble is going to come into our lives. Adversity is going to come into our lives. Problems. Things that don't go the way that we, within our flesh, want them to go. That's going to happen. And that's another gospel issue because you have to tell people. When you're training them, when you're working with them, this doesn't mean that bad things aren't going to happen to you. In fact, it's likely more of them are going to happen to you, in a sense. Patience. Kindness. Kindness is a lot like love, the best that I could tell. But the difference between the love and kindness is that kindness is really practical. OK? Serving people in a practical way, and I think kindness in this sense is serving someone in a practical way that makes me vulnerable, that puts me out. Right? So this is going to be time, this is going to be money, this is going to be loss of sleep, this is going to be, I wanted to do something else with this time, I wanted to do something else with this money, but I'm going to use whatever it is to serve someone else in a practical way, and that's going to make me vulnerable because, let's just face it guys, I need to tell you that, and many of you have already experienced this over and over again, You think and it's a worldly thing it's not a biblical thing you think that if you demonstrate kindness to somebody that what's going to happen is is that they're going to give you kindness in return. Let me tell you nine times out of 10 in this world that is not true. OK it's just not you don't expect that that's not why you do it right. If you don't understand that, then you're always going to be disappointed. And so what's going to happen is I'm going to reach out there. I'm going to be self-sacrificing. I'm going to do something for somebody. And then it just made me feel like garbage. And so what's the likelihood that I'm going to do that again next time? It's a supernatural free of the spirit that allows the believer to keep doing these things over and over and over again for God's glory, not for the response that they get. It's a deep inner security that is necessary for kindness. A security in Christ. you have to get that he has done everything for your justification for your salvation and for your sanctification and that he will see you through on to glory and it doesn't matter what he calls you to do the response doesn't matter except that we want him to receive glory in the response we want people to come to Christ but other than that it's not why we do it. The opposite of kindness, the opposite of kindness, at least one of them, is envy. When I envy someone. It leaves me unable to rejoice when someone else is successful. I'm not a kind person. In other words, I can be kind to someone as long as I kind of stay up here and they kind of stay down here, and we kind of have this kind of relationship. But if I'm here, or if this is where I think I am, and they start doing this, and I start thinking, hey, wait a minute. They're not more special than me. Yeah, well, that's enviousness. And a counterfeit of kindness. This is taking longer than I thought. I don't care. I think it's valuable. So we'll just do as much as we can. You should know, by the way, I got a lot of help. I wrote most of this out myself because he was wordy and didn't use words like we use here in our little local thing. The idea of defining these things of going back to the Greek and searching them out in scripture That was Tim Keller's idea and it's a good idea and that's where I got this from so I'm using some of his stuff, but mostly I had to change a lot of it because I think it would help us but I wasn't necessarily smart enough to come up with this approach on my own. So you should know that Okay, so counterfeit of kindness Manipulativeness Manipulation. Manipulative people always want to tell us how kind they are. And if we're manipulative, we always want to talk ourselves into being, into how kind we are being in a situation. But being manipulative, all that is, is we're giving out, we're doing good deeds, quote unquote good deeds, doing good for others, so that I can congratulate myself and they can congratulate me too. Pretty much. Yeah. The other reason for maybe doing these manipulative good deeds is so that I can be good enough for God which of course is absolutely totally against what the Book of Galatians is about. But nonetheless that is a lot of the reason that people do good things. Alright. Goodness. Goodness is the fruit of the Spirit. And we need to define goodness. I'm going to give you a one word definition of goodness that I think will help you. Because we define goodness in all ways. Are you a good little boy? You're such a good little girl. What do we mean by that? Now watch this, parents. This is what we mean by that. We mean you don't bug me and you do what I tell you to do. That's what we mean by that. Right. I do it with my dogs all the time. You're a good dog because you're not tearing stuff up and you're not bothering me wanting to go outside and you're just laying there and let me pet your head. That's a good dog. But if you require my attention if you cause me inconvenience you are not good any longer. You see that that's the issue. Your definition for the word good goodness in the scripture is going to be integrity. This is Tim Keller-ish-esque-ish, however you want to say it. Goodness is being the same person no matter where you are. And the same person, of course, we know that's informed by who Christ has made us to be. so that I'm not a like a Hollywood actor. Someone who was hired to pay the part of one of the Holy Bible characters. Jesus. So I may be on my sixth marriage and it's going to be in divorce and I may be doing drugs and alcoholism and running around on my wife and cheating and lying and all those things. But when I come to work because I have been I'm an actor and I have been called to play the part of a holy guy in the Bible, and now I'm very holy and I quote scripture all of the time, and I don't use any bad language, and I don't have any bad thoughts. But as soon as my acting session is over, I go back to what I was before. I go back to what I was before. Goodness is being the same person in every situation. The opposite of goodness is hypocrisy. The opposite of goodness is hypocrisy. Now again, I want you to, I'm glad some of you will remember this and some of you are taking notes, but some of these are bare thinking about, right? Because we have been drinking the Kool-Aid of this world around us so long that we don't have these definitions. We view good as something totally different than having integrity. In fact, good, in terms of its emotional charge, probably has a higher, better emotional charge for you, perhaps, than the word integrity has. Well, integrity's good, but we have trouble with that. But good, boy, that's a wide range. And good means that I get stuff for me. Integrity, oh, that's tough. Not only does it mean I have to tell the truth, it means I can't be a hypocrite. It means I have to be the same person wherever I am. That's goodness. Now again it's supernatural. Please don't take this as I need to work harder on this. You may need to work harder on this but how you need to work harder on this is on your knees with the scripture in front of you asking God to work it out in your life. And then as you come to these situations, He will give you wisdom and He will let you see situations and your thoughts and your motivations for what they are. And then you can deal with them as they come up. Hypocrisy is a real problem. Faithfulness. Faithfulness. I had a hard time figuring out which kind of one word thing I was going to give you for faithfulness. I think I decided on one predominantly, but I will give you the others. Reliability. Reliability. I'm utterly reliable. When you are free of the Spirit, and of course we know this is informed by Christ. We know this is informed by the scriptures but reliability is the issue because the thing is faithfulness means that the one thing I've not been nearly as faithful as I would like to be but one thing that I have seen God do in my life is that there are certain brothers not through my own strength. There are certain brothers through the year and I'll give you an example. And please understand this is all the Lord God I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I thought of this not because I saw it in myself But because someone else saw it in me and really that's how this should be But I have a relationship with Tracy and we don't talk all the time But when we talk he talks to me because he says the thing that I appreciate about you is That you try to do what you said you were going to do and you don't change your mind all of the time about things So that when I ask you for an answer on something, I'm going to get something that's informed by How you've walked with Christ and it doesn't mean that we're stubbornly not going to change wrong things But what it does mean is is that we're just not carried around by every wind like it talks about in James Another another word that I could have used for faithfulness is loyalty and loyalty. So we'll just put them together. Loyalty and courage and reliability. That's faithfulness. It's opposite. The opposite is to be a fake, an opportunist of some sort. Someone who is willing to have a relationship as long as it is beneficial to them. Someone who, in any given situation, is always looking for what the best team is so that they'll get the best outcome at the end of it. That's the opposite of faithfulness. Faithfulness means I know what the truth is, regardless of the circumstance, and whatever it costs me, the truth still stays the truth. That's faithfulness. I think we'll stop there. We'll do the others next time. So what you can look forward next time is we'll define the rest of the fruits. I'm not going to be here this next week. Ron's going to teach for me. So it will be a little bit down the road. We'll define the rest of these. And then particularly I would like for you to study that verse that says that we have crucified the flesh there right after the fruits of the spirit. Those who are in Christ have crucified the flesh. Dig into that and try to come up with what you think that means. is we're going to tie it back to all of these things. Let's pray. Father, we're grateful this morning for your word and particularly these fruits that you say that people like us can exhibit by walking in or by your spirit. And Lord, we have to confess that it must be by your spirit that these things could ever be done in people like us. But we thank you that it's possible. And where we don't desire these things to be growing in our lives, Father, I pray that you would give us the ability to desire it more. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.