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This sermon is a part of our series on the Fruit of Spirit! Each week, we’ll explore a different fruit and how its wisdom can be applied to our lives.
As we consider each of the fruits of the Spirit, we are inviting you to join us in embodying these fruits in specific ways:
- Each week, identify at least one different person every day that you can contact somehow: it might be by snail mail or email, text or phone call, Zoom or Skype, social media, or by delivering them something.
- Encourage them. Let them know you had them on your mind and in your prayers. Also, ask if they have a specific prayer concern that you could pray about on their behalf.
- If you struggle to come up with a word of encouragement on your own, you can use our daily prompts in the Field Guide, in our weekly newsletters, and on social media to start a conversation. (You can subscribe below.)
- Write their names in a journal that can become your prayer list. Make notes about your conversation and any concerns they express. Be faithful in praying for them. Such journaling can become habit-forming and a means of your own personal spiritual formation.
- If you can’t think of 7 different people each week, ask God in your prayers to bring to mind specific people who might need encouragement.
- If you do this for 9 weeks, do the math. 9×7=63. That’s 63 beautiful people in the next two months with whom you will have been privileged to connect.
- If 8,500 people do this, 8,500 x 63 = 535,500. If our online worshipers join us, the number will rise to nearly one million people.
- It’s not really about the number, it’s about the relationships. It’s about being fruitful! The fruit of the Spirit of Christ has exponential possibilities.
Visit bumc.net/fruitchallenge to learn more.
Our Scripture reading: Galatians 5:22-23; Galatians 2:15-21
The Fruit of the Spirit
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.
Jews and Gentiles Are Saved by Faith
We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law. But if, in our effort to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have been found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! But if I build up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate that I am a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.