Category Archives: Fruit of the Spirit

Joy to the World!

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“I bring you good news of a great joy which shall be to all the people….” (Luke 2)

God is a God of great joy.

There is great joy in God’s presence. (Psalm 16:11)

That joy has a name: Jesus Christ.

Wherever Jesus Christ is honored, joy is the dominant element in the atmosphere. (Acts 8:8 and 15:3)

When Jesus Christ enters a life, that person is filled with joy.

Joy is the flag flown from the castle of your heart to show the King is in residence.

Joy is something other than happiness, for that quality depends on happenings.  The joy of the Lord is of a higher quality and superior to all others.

The joy of the Lord is the strength of His people.  (Nehemiah 8:10)

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Ignorance plus arrogance? Move back and give it some room!

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“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” (Is that in the Bible? It ought to be. Smiley-face goes here.)

Here’s one that is: “I am also convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able also to admonish one another.” That’s Romans 15:14, and we sure wish we knew whether the Apostle Paul had tongue firmly planted in cheek when he said this or was dead serious.  It appears to us that the recipients of this Roman letter, as with so many of the others Paul wrote, were deficient in some areas of knowledge of spiritual things. We’re glad they were, of course, because in addressing these issues for them, Paul ended up instructing us.

One wonders what it must be like to be “filled with all knowledge.”

After all, “knowledge puffs up” (I Corinthians 8:1).  Modern translations say, “knowledge makes arrogant.”

Ignorance does too, oddly enough.  In fact….

Ignorance coupled with arrogance makes for a deadly combination.  When you see that monster coming down the road, get out of the way because it bloodies everything it touches.

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Why God tells us to be perfect but doesn’t expect it

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(Part 2 on this subject)

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Would the Lord issue a command He does not expect to be obeyed?

We may as well raise the question before some reader does it for me and uses it to dismiss everything that follows.

Short answer: He’s trying to get something across, to teach us something important, by issuing the command.

Longer answer: everything that follows.

In His”Sermon on the Mount,” the Lord Jesus sets the bar alarmingly high for all who would live as His disciples.

–When persecuted, we are to rejoice (Matthew 5:12).

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Do what you do best, pastor: be you.

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Pastor, you have not been called by the Lord to be Abraham or Moses, David or Jeremiah.

He did not call you to be David Jeremiah, either.

Not Charles Stanley, or Warren Wiersbe.  Not Mark Driscoll, Stephen Furtick, Andy Stanley, or Louie Giglio–and not their clone.

Speaking of Louie, he says, “You are not a reprint or a lithograph. You’re a one-of-a-kind, original creation of God.”

What a marvelous creative inventive (someone get Roget’s Thesaurus down and finish this list!) God we have.  Billions and billions of human beings, no two alike, each one an original! Each one known by Him, and each loved, with a unique place in His divine plan.

Mull on that a while.

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A rhapsody on a theme of grace and mercy

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Mercy is God NOT giving us what we deserve. Grace is God GIVING us what we do not deserve.

Like that? It’s the truth, but it’s not the whole story.

Think of mercy as the restraint of God, His holding back on the judgment we have coming.

Think of grace as the generosity of God, HIs pouring out His blessings on the undeserving.

After God gives us mercy (forgiving us), we are still in need of grace (transforming us).  Mercy is the judge not sending the defendant to prison but suspending all charges and setting him free. Grace is the judge then recommending him for a training program and inviting him to his church where he will share a pew with a banker and his family.

God is a God of grace and mercy.

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The abrasive Christian

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“The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance, leading to the knowledge of the truth…” (Second Timothy 2:24-25)

This week, in Lynne Olson’s “Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941”), I found this interesting depiction of Harold Ickes, a member of FDR’s cabinet during the Second World War:

“According to T. H. Watkins, Ickes’ biographer, ‘a world without something in it to make him angry would have been incomprehensible to him.’ A disgrunted Republican senator who had been the target of one of Ickes’ verbal assaults called him ‘a common scold puffed up by high office.’ To one cabinet colleague, Ickes was ‘Washington’s tough guy.’ To another, he was the ‘president’s attack dog.'”

Olsen tells how an assistant secretary of state once refused to shake hands with Mr. Ickes and described him in his diary as “fundamentally, a louse.”

Having such an irritating person in high government office is one thing; having them in church leadership is quite another.

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Why some preachers have oversized egos. What to do about it.

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A pastor friend who serves a large church pulled together a half-dozen preachers who serve some of the largest Protestant churches in his city. He had a burden for unity within the Christian community and felt a good place to start would be with these shepherds to whom everyone else looked up.

He opened by saying, “I’m going to ask you to leave your egos at the door.” He paused a moment, then added, “And there are some mighty huge egos in this room!”

They laughed, no one was offended, and they did business together.

Now, before anyone reacts to that, we need to say that not all ego is bad.

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The Lord has built a redundancy into the Christian life

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“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing….” (Ephesians 1:3)

You want someone to drive you to town and both my brother and I show up at the same time in separate cars. You can ride in only one car; the other is redundant.

The word “redundant” means something unnecessary, maybe just a little too much.

In design and engineering, redundancy is the act of building in safeguards to compensate for the failure of the primary system. The backup system you installed as a redundancy may never be used. But if it’s needed, it’s there in place, just waiting.

Say for instance, if an automated system of some type goes out due to a power failure, but there’s a hand-crank to work with. It’s slower but gets the job done.

I’m thinking today about the redundancy the Father in Heaven has built into the Christian life.  He saves us, writes our name down in Heaven’s book, we are adopted, and born again. He promises that He will never leave us, that nothing can ever snatch us from His hand, and that the life we now possess is everlasting.  He indwells us, overshadows us, goes before us, comes behind us, and undergirds us.  He gives us the Bible, the church, assignments to accomplish in this world, and teachers to show us how as well as colleagues to accompany us.  He tells us we are saved forever, that we have become “Sons of God” even, and that we shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever.

The Father fully plans for us to arrive at His home safely.

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I met a pastor who does not smile.

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“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy….” (Galatians 5:22)

“Now, look me in the eye and give me a smile. I want to see your teeth.”

That’s my typical request of whoever is sitting before me for a quick sketch.  If they hesitate, I explain that everyone looks better with a smile on their face, that a smile lifts the sagging face, changes the shape of the jawline, and adds a gleam to the eye.

“I don’t smile.”

Usually, the one saying this is an insecure teenager who has been warned off smiling by the mirror, an unkind friend, or a critic.  That’s one thing that pulls me onto middle and high school campuses, to do my program and try to get across to them that “there is not a person on the earth who does not look better with a smile on their face, including you.”

One man told me, “My grandmother told me when I was fifteen that I did not have a nice smile. I went twenty years without smiling.”

I said, “What a mean old lady.”

We can understand teenagers having esteem problems that often make them withdraw and want to hide.

But a pastor?

More than once, I have been drawing at denominational gatherings where most of the subjects are pastors. And I confess to being knocked speechless by those who say, “I don’t smile.”

If they have time and are not rushed, I’ll speak to that.

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Why we don’t like grace

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Anything that puts us down, we automatically shy away from. For many, grace does that.

Oh, we don’t mind singing about it, but the concept of grace itself is repulsive to our natures and offensive to our pride.

Something in me wants to be self-sufficient, to believe that whatever comes up, I’m able to handle, that as the poem says, “I am the captain of my soul.”

The cry of a four-year-old–“I can do it myself!”–is the insistence of the stubborn will of the adult child.

That’s why, even though we sing about it and say we love it, something inside us resists the idea of grace. That same something insists that I am sufficient for my needs, that my good works will accomplish everything necessary to land me in Heaven, that the rest is just so much religious talk.

The sinful heart of man is an atheist, an egotist, an idolator.

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