The Fruits - Cultivate Them All!

The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, 

goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Gal 5:22

I used to pray for specific fruits - patience when I'd lost my temper, self-control when I was trying to diet, love when I found someone difficult, etc.  I used to pray, "Lord if I have your Spirit I should have this fruit."  But I've come to see that the fruits of the Spirit all go together.  For example:

How can we have self-control if we haven't got patience?

It would be hard to have joy if we haven't got peace. 

If we have kindness we've probably got goodness.   

And without love we probably couldn't have gentleness or faithfulness.

We couldn't have gentleness if we didn't have patience.

Without patience we can't have peace.

To have peace we could do with goodness.

For goodness we surely need love.

And so on!

So this is why I came to the conclusion that we need to cultivate all the fruits.  So my prayer now is, "Lord, fill me with your Spirit.  As your life fills me there will be less of me and more of you so the fruits of your Spirit will grow in me".  Thank you, Lord.

Here's my art journal page inspired by these thoughts.

 This page came together quickly.  Blue acrylic scraped on with a credit card leaving the odd white patch.  I have a lovely script stamp of the fruits of the Spirit which I stamped in white and the red is acrylic through a Crafters Workshop mini mosaic stencil.

I typed up the words and tore them out.  It was a really fun page to do.

Bless you and happy growing!