[Eagle] will be authoring a series of posts, which will be featured here at TWW, in which he will describe his journey. However, that may be a number of weeks in coming. We guarantee that that you will be stunned by the path his life has taken. Some of you will be moved to tears.
* * *
Though I have been in regular communication with our friend Eagle, he has been absent by choice from Internet Monk for awhile. He had some important things to do in his own life and felt like he should take a break from active commenting.
I received the following announcement from him recently, and thought you all would like to hear it. I asked his permission and he said yes. There will be some follow-up posts later with more background and information.
Okay-
It’s official…
I’m registered to be baptized at Fairfax Community Church on Nov. 24 during the 11:15 service. You can put this on your calendar if your in the DC area. Or pray for it if you are unable to attend.
We are, of course, thrilled that Eagle has found a way in the midst of his own wilderness. Please pray for him as he prepares to be cleansed in the waters of baptism.
Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” (Genesis 2: 15-17, NASB)
The promise given to Abraham and his children, that one day they would inherit the world, did not come because he followed the rules of the law. It came as a result of his right standing before God, a standing he obtained through faith. If this inheritance is available only to those who keep the law, then faith is a useless commodity and the promise is canceled. For the law brings God’s wrath against sin. But where the law doesn’t draw the line, there can be no crime. This is the reason that faith is the single source of the promise—so that grace would be offered to all Abraham’s children, those whose lives are defined by the law and those who follow the path of faith charted by Abraham, our common father. (Romans 4: 13-16, The Voice)
I would like to continue a thought from last week, that of the results of our choosing to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As we discussed last week, when we plucked the forbidden fruit, it was as if God said, “If that’s how you want to play, so be it.” For hundreds of generations after, we had to follow rules if we were to follow God. An angel with a flaming sword was placed in the Garden to keep us from the Tree of Life, the Tree we were meant to eat.
And to reinforce the consequence of our decision, God gave us very specific laws so we could fully taste of the fruit of right and wrong. “You chose your way over my way,” said the Lord. “So here are the rules.” The Garden became a desert of regulations that covered every aspect of life down to the finest detail. And, being the contrary people that we are—thinking we know better than our creator how to run creation—we constantly ignored the laws we had chosen to live by.
Then in the fullness of time, God reopened the Garden. At the incarnation, the angel with the flaming sword joined the heavenly host in proclaiming the Tree of Life was one again open to us.
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life.” Jesus is, and always has been, our Tree of Life. Jesus was crucified for our sins before the world was created—the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. If we had but eaten of LIfe instead of desiring to know right from wrong … And now, that offer is once again extended. Jesus is still the Tree of Life, and he invites us to eat of his fruit, the only fruit that leads to life everlasting.
Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.
Yet we continue to dine on what cannot satisfy. We prefer law over faith, even though we know that the law leads to death. We insist on understanding right from wrong rather than simply trusting God, leaving all to him. We keep going back to the forbidden fruit after all this time. Why is it we think that after thousands of years, this time we will get it right? This time, we will be satisfied with the knowledge of good and evil?
All is forgiven. The Garden is once again open. We are once again invited to eat from the Tree of Life. Come to the table of the Lord, eat and drink and live.
Greetings, fellow iMonks. Well now, it has been a week here at the iMonastery. We have harvested the fields and put up into barns and even started the canning process. All that is left now is the gleanings. And those we call our Saturday Ramblings.
Well, let’s get right at it, ok? Mark Driscoll said Jesus is not a pacifist or a pansy. He said, “Some of those whose blood will flow as high as the bit in a horse’s mouth for 184 miles will be those who did not repent of their sin but did wrongly teach that Jesus was a pacifist. Jesus is no one to mess with.” Really. That’s what he said. The floor is now open for your thoughts.
Here is one man who definitely is not a pansy. It must be hard to go to church when everything in you fights against it. And for those who are not familiar with Aspergers, here is the short version.
Prince George was baptized this week. Oh you know Prince George, right? He may be the new poster baby for baptisms. The number of baptisms has been on the decline for some time, and here are some reasons why.
Oh those crazy French. For all these years they have been praying a blasphemous version of the Lord’s Prayer. But now they are going to do it right. I think. It’s in French, after all, and I don’t speak French. But I’ll take their word for it.
You know that German bishop who spent 31 million euros to redecorate his digs? Pope Francis has told him to take some time off while he considers his fate. But it seems to be a symptom of a larger problem in Germany. Just where do the German Catholics get all of their money?
One more European stop. Just what do you think is the number one name for baby boys in Italy? It’s not Jeff or Mike or Adam.
As I have said on a few occasions, I’m terrible with money. I don’t really care about it (sometimes until it’s too late!) and I have never been ambitious to have a lot of it. I simply assumed that God would take care of me and my family when I went into ministry, and he has proven faithful, in spite of my laissez faire mentality and sometimes slipshod financial management approach.
That has caused me some regrets over time:
I wish I had been able to be more available to my children at times when I could have helped them.
I wish I had been able to support our churches and friends in mission work more generously.
I wish our family had had enough resources to have a retreat somewhere where we could have gone for rest, recreation, and building memories.
I wish I could do a lot of my ministry work gratis and never have to talk to my church or employer about my salary.
I have a couple of illustrations from other pastors that I always come back to.
When I read A.W. Tozer’s biography, I learned that he never had an automobile. There came a time in his ministry when the church wanted to honor him for all his years of service, and they presented him with a car. Never one to worry about offending sensibilities, Tozer immediately and publicly refused to accept the gift, handing the keys back to the presenter. He didn’t need it, didn’t want it, didn’t care to have it. He thought it an extravagance and a waste of the congregation’s money. He probably could have been more polite, but he certainly held his ground against materialism!
W.A. Criswell, the well-known pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, a megachurch before there were megachurches, gave back every penny of the salary he earned in over thirty years of ministry. This was a theme from the beginning of his career. When he preached his first sermon, the deacons took up a collection and gave him $10. He handed it back and told them he didn’t preach for money. Then, at the end of his career, having made money through writing books (in a much different publishing world than we have today) and wise investments, he paid back the congregation more than $600,000 as a testimony to them that he had preached the Gospel freely and not for reward.
This freedom from the love of money and a generous spirit is something I admire in a more contemporary Southern Baptist pastor, Rick Warren. He did the same thing as Criswell, adding up what he had received from Saddleback and giving back to the congregation. He has always been committed to frugal living and giving away a large portion of the money that comes to him through various ministry efforts.
And then there’s Stephen Furtick, who represents many of today’s megachurch pastors (we’ve mentioned James MacDonald on this site too, as another example). He has fallen under scrutiny for a 1.7 million dollar home he is building in Charlotte, NC, where he pastors Elevation Church.
Christian Post spoke to Ole Anthony, the president and one of the founders of the Trinity Foundation, a nonprofit foundation that monitors and investigates religious fraud. Anthony detailed the money-making operation that preaching in a megachurch and selling books and videos has become.
“What happens is these pastors are on television or on radio and they write a book, and it’s based on their sermons,” Anthony told The Christian Post on Thursday. “But then what happens is the church is paying for the time and the place to write the book, and then the church is paying for the airtime to advertise the book. And it’s just unseemly.”
He continued: “There are a lot of pastors like him (Furtick), who have an assembly of like-minded pastors. They are on each other’s board of directors and they all speak at each other’s churches for big speakers’ fees. And it’s a situation in which there’s no oversight, there’s no transparency. And it becomes just another secret money-making option for the pastors who are supposed to be the servants.”
You can read more about Furtick and the situation in Charlotte in several posts over at The Wartburg Watch.
When many of the Dead Sea Scrolls faced delay in publication, conspiracy theories started to abound: What was it in the scrolls that the Vatican wanted to keep secret? Were they harmful to the church? Did they dispute the claims of Christianity? In fact the truth is a little more boring than that. The original scholars assigned to the translations were just a little too possessive. They wanted to be the ones who produced the first translations and commentaries, and as a result did not want to make the scrolls publicly available.
I need to be careful not to fall into the same trap when editing Michael Spencer’s writings and sermons on the Gospel of Mark. At first I thought could complete it alone. When I quickly realized that transcribing the sermons alone would take me weeks, 35 readers of Internet Monk stepped up to the plate to assist. When completing the editing looked like it was going to be an impossible task I brought Scott Lencke on board to assist. His help has been and continues to be appreciated. However, even with his help we were still were not moving forward quickly enough, which resulted in last weeks appeal. I don’t want to be like the scholars who were assigned the Dead Sea Scrolls and have this project not be completed because of ego.
So, thanks to all those who responded. It looks like we are going to be able to move forward quickly now. I still have to figure out the details of how we are going to proceed, but proceed we shall. I will have soon have a further personal update to those who have expressed an interest in helping complete the book. Thanks also to all of those who have said that they are interested in purchasing this commentary when it is available.
The request for help is still open if there are others who would like to take advantage of it. The same email address, MichaelSpencersNewBook@gmail.com, can also be used if you would like to be contacted when the book, Reconsider Jesus – A fresh look at Jesus from the Gospel of Mark, is available for purchase.
I ask’d thee, “Give me immortality.” Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills, And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me, And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was in ashes….
– “Tithonos,” Alfred Lord Tennyson
* * *
“Tithonos” is Tennyson’s poetic adaptation of an ancient Greek myth. It tells of a man who was given immortality and then cursed by the gods to live forever as an old, withered man. To add to his pain, he had to live in his lover Aurora’s presence as she was renewed each morning, thus remaining forever young.
Long life, yes, but “all I was in ashes.”
On the other hand, I love the ancient Hebraism of the Scriptures that describes the death of Abraham: “Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people.”
This is my hope. Should I live to “a good old age” (or not) I long to be a soul “full of years.” I take that delightful phrase to indicate a heart, mind, and spirit filled with pleasant thoughts, good and meaningful memories, peace in relationships, contentment regarding one’s contribution to the world, and above all, gratitude for God’s providential care and saving grace in Christ.
“Full of years” — I can imagine sitting there with my family, and saying, “Do you remember the year when…?”
Do you remember the year we met, honey? I still remember walking into that practice room and seeing you at the piano.
Do you remember the year when at Christmas, everyone had the flu? The house looked like a hospital ward.
Do you remember the year we went on our first overseas mission trip together? Do you remember what it smelled like when we got off the plane in India?
Do you remember the year our daughter got married, and so much went wrong that day? But then when she danced with me she said, “Dad, it’s ok, this is just a wedding. It’s really about our marriage.”
No matter how many calendar years I live, I want a million of those “years” to think about, every one of them a vivid reminder of God’s goodness. And may God in his mercy restore any “years the locusts have eaten.”
As a hospice chaplain, I meet folks whose lives are not “full of years.” Just a few weeks ago, one of them told me she found herself crying uncontrollably more and more. She was wracked with guilt and regret over her past drug abuse and selfish lifestyle, the way she had treated her family, the rage she had displayed and the curses and abusive words she could never take back.
There is only so much a hospice team can do. We cannot recover those wasted years and bind up all those wounds. Perhaps one kindness is try to help our patients and families have a comfortable and easeful final season of life. Then those who cannot die “full of years” may at least have some days of peace at the end.
One can live many years without being “full of years.”
I believe the Bible speaks with greater clarity and greater authority than what I believe I see or what I believe I experience. Where many interpretations of science appear to contradict a literal six-day creation, I am not ready to re-interpret a clear and natural reading of Scripture to make it fit with these observations. The Bible is infinitely more stable than science and infinitely more reliable.
There has also been another chapter in the back-and-forth between Biologos and Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis.
In turn, Biologos penned a brief editorial that included a personal reflection by Hamlin on the controversy.
I encourage you to read the original pieces, but here’s a summary of what has been said.
In 2006, Daniel Hamlin got involved in a local debate about evolution and creationism as a defender of the young earth creation perspective. He soon realized he didn’t know much about evolution. So he determined to learn all he could so he could answer it more effectively. Except that he became convinced of the other position: “After months of reading and studying numerous books, online articles and scientific journals, I realized that the Theory of Evolution accurately described the development of life on earth.”
This caused him to seriously question his faith. He almost threw it out, but he simply couldn’t deny what God had done in his life. So Daniel Hamlin began to try and reconcile his inner conflict. One of the most fundamental questions involved the Bible. He began to see that the writers of the Hebrew Bible were writing from within their own worldview and reflecting an ancient understanding of the universe and its makeup. After further consideration of how Christ became incarnate and was both fully God and fully human, he started thinking about the Bible in an incarnational way.
“The original authors recorded God’s self-revelation as he interacted with humanity and the people of Israel. As these interactions were recorded, they were written within the worldview of the author and in terms that the original audience could understand. Because of this, parts of scripture contain evidence of an ancient understanding of the world. However, God accommodated this understanding so that his story could be told, his message understood, and his love displayed.”
Ken Ham excoriates Nazarene universities for having compromised on creationist teachings, and responds to Hamlin’s testimony by saying, “With such disregard for the authority of God’s Word on creation by many Christian college professors, it’s no surprise when I read testimonies like Hamlin’s and see the destructive effects of evolutionary ideas on one’s Christian faith.”
Ham notes Hamlin’s automatic instinct to reject Christianity when he accepted evolution and implies that the two are indeed mutually exclusive — accepting evolutionary teachings will most certainly undermine the Bible’s authority. He then rejects Hamlin’s “accommodation” view of the Scriptures:
This is a false argument, and it is certainly not a new argument. BioLogos regularly claims that God “accommodated” His Word to the supposed primitive understanding of the Israelites. In essence, all that means is that God lied to His people, that the One who created language wasn’t able to communicate His own message truthfully to humans in a way we could understand. This is a clear example of man’s word being lifted above God’s Word. Such a view also undermines the perspicuity of Scripture. [Note: the link here will take you to an AiG page explaining their view of this doctrine.]
He contends that Moses wrote under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration to counter the ancient myths of the nations by writing Genesis as history, and links to another article from AiG which makes this argument. Ken Ham thinks people like Daniel Hamlin, who don’t agree with this, are undermining Biblical authority, will lead many away from the faith, and will one day have to answer to God for it.
* * *
And so the creation wars continue, especially here in the U.S.
Today, I will try to follow Tim Challies’s example of brevity and give you a few main reasons why I am NOT a six-day creationist.
I’m continuing with some thoughts on my journey out of evangelicalism into Catholicism. These are my thoughts, and this is my journey. I am certainly not trying to talk anyone into following in my steps.
The morning after I became a Christian, I woke up and reached for my Bible. It was an old Bible handed down from someone in my family—perhaps one of my uncles. I read it instinctively. Weren’t Christians supposed to read the Bible? I think I started in John—someone the night before told me that is where I should start. I really didn’t understand a thing I was reading, but I knew I was supposed to read it. That is what God expected of me. I tried to work up a good spiritual feeling while reading it, thinking that just letting my eyes rest on each of these sacred words was going to do something in me that reading, say, a book about baseball wouldn’t.
As I began attending church, I found the Bible was a book to be studied. The pastor broke down verses word-by-word, and we were encouraged to take notes on what he said in the margins of our Bibles. (Woe to anyone who didn’t bring their Bible to the service.) We were told how liberal Christians (wrongly) interpreted a passage, and how true Christians were to understand it. Verses were only seen as black or white. Liberals were black and wrong and going to hell, our church was white and right and pleasing to God. “Textual criticism” was just a liberal code phrase for not believing what every Christian should believe.
The word “inerrant” became a part of our vocabulary, as well as “infallible.” Inerrancy meant there are no errors in Scripture; infallible meant there cannot be any errors. Anyone who questioned the truth of anything stated in Scripture was playing with fire. Oh, did I mention that the only true and reliable Bible was the King James Version?
This was how my faith was shaped. For years, decades really, I held firm to this teaching (though I did quickly move on from the KJV when other translations and paraphrases were available). I approached the Bible as something I was supposed to read in order to please God. I tried each time I picked it up to work up a good spiritual feeling. If I were reading a book on say, the Civil War or some modern-day political issue, I would question the author’s intent and choice of words. I would check facts that didn’t seem to line up. I might even dismiss the author’s thesis if it were not defended well. But when it came to reading the Bible, I was afraid to ask questions. I was scared to compare an event described in Kings with the same event in Chronicles. Did Jesus clear the temple early in his ministry like John reports or later in his ministry as Mark and Luke report it, or did he do it twice? If I were to think, Maybe one of the Gospel writers got the order of things wrong, I felt I was in sin.
Sin. A sinner. That is what I was, and that is what the Bible was there to point out. Everything I read either pointed out that I was sinning, or that I was lacking faith in some area. The Bible was God’s standard, the bar was set very high, and I was still at ground level. I read the Bible because I was supposed to, but it brought me no comfort whatsoever.
There is a stream of sound teaching, sound doctrine, sound theology, that runs all the way back to the Apostles. It runs through Athanasius and Augustine, through Luther and Calvin, the great Reformation and Reformers, and the Puritans, and everything seems so clear to them. Through the Westminster divines and the pathway of Spurgeon and David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and S. Lewis Johnson, and Jim Boice, and to R. C. Sproul. That’s the stream of sound doctrine. The heroes of this generation are people in that stream. We know who they are. You’ve been hearing about them this week. We go back to John Rogers, and the 288 Marian martyrs. Those are our heroes.
This is John MacArthur’s vision of Church History. What a narrow and simplistic view it is!
His portrayal of a “faithful remnant” providing an unbroken stream of sound doctrine has more in common with the Landmark Baptists and their “trail of blood” than it does with an accurate depiction of the messy and complicated communion of saints across the centuries. It is apparently the Reformed Baptist version of apostolic succession.
Michael Spencer wrote about “the little red book” that describes Church History from the Landmark Baptist point of view. In that post he quoted a passage that brings us right to the bottom line of their view of history:
Only Scriptural Baptist churches can make a legitimate claim to an unbroken succession back to the time of Christ and the apostles. Christ only built one kind of church and that church is described in detail in the New Testament. The only churches meeting the requirements of that description today are true Baptist churches. Baptist churches have existed in every age since their founding by Christ, though they have not always been known by that name. We do not deny that there are those in other so-called “churches” that have been born again by the grace of God. We do deny, however, that these man-made organizations are true churches of our Lord Jesus Christ.
MacArthur doesn’t go nearly that far, but the spirit and approach is the same: define who’s “in” with severely limited requirements and express serious doubts (at least) about everyone else.
One of the problems with this approach is that, like the Landmark Baptists, you have to ignore the details. Just as the LB’s include all manner of groups in their “trail of blood” that they would not recognize if they sat down and talked with them for five minutes, so John MacArthur has to overlook a lot of contradictory evidence to include the members of his “faithful stream.”
Let’s take a few of the “heroes” in the quote above, for example.
I’m sure when John MacArthur points to Athanasius, he is admiring his faithful stand against Arianism. But Athanasius is also considered one of the four great Eastern Doctors of the Church by Roman Catholics and is honored as the Father of Orthodoxy by the Eastern Orthodox. Surely they do so with appreciation for many aspects of Athanasius’s teaching and practice that MacArthur would abhor! Would the biblicist MacArthur think it appropriate to participate in an ecumenical church council to determine sound doctrine? Or to appropriate Greek philosophical terms to define a fundamental doctrine about Christ? I doubt he shares Athanasius’s enthusiasm for aceticism and promotion of monasticism. Would MacArthur embrace the apocryphal books that Athanasius included in his biblical canon? The fact is that Athanasius was a leader in a philosophical and ecclesiastical world that John MacArthur would not recognize and more than likely would not accept. The real Athanasius would have little in common with MacArthur’s iconoclastic biblicism.
People who call themselves “Calvinists” revere St. Augustine for his teachings on original sin and divine grace. But once again, we are talking about a Catholic Christian who also believed in apostolic succession and the one true institutional Church. I wonder what John MacArthur would think of Augustine’s sermon in which he proclaimed, “No man can find salvation except in the Catholic Church.” St. Augustine’s non-literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis would be anathema to a young earth creationist like MacArthur. The Bishop of Hippo also rejected premillennialism and became the father of what is now called amillennialism, and how could a dispensationalist possibly approve of that? He believed in purgatory. He wrote more about Mary, the Mother of God, than any who came before him. Does MacArthur know that Augustine polluted the “stream of sound doctrine” with all this stuff?
It amazes me when a Reformed Baptist cites Luther as a model of sound doctrine. Surely that gives evidence that he is honoring only a caricature who said “The just shall live by faith,” and not the actual human being who remained a Catholic and a monk, whose teaching on justification by faith included baptismal regeneration, who fought his whole life against anyone who denied Christ’s real presence in communion, who excoriated the Anabaptists for practicing believer’s baptism alone, who spoke uncharitably about certain books of the Bible, and who held a high view of Mary that retained most of the traditional Roman Catholic teachings about her, including her Immaculate Conception, perpetual virginity, and status as Theotokos (Mother of God), and who maintained devotional practices venerating her and said all Christians should honor her as “the Mother of us all.” That’s your great Reformer in the flesh, Pastor John. You can’t just cherry-pick a few of his ideas.
And then there’s Calvin. We’ll forget for a moment that, although John MacArthur cites both Luther and Calvin in the same breath, the two Reformers and those who followed them had bitter disagreements, particularly over the nature of the Lord’s Supper. (I guess their common opposition to Catholics is detail enough to include them both.) But of course, like all the magisterial Reformers, Calvin believed in baptizing infants (for different reasons than Luther), which MacArthur and all Reformed Baptists find unacceptable. He was also non-millenarian. Though Calvin certainly did believe God created the universe in six days, he also said that Moses adapted his language so that some things in Genesis 1 reflect the perceptions of ordinary people and not the findings of astronomers, which may indeed be factually different. Though his thinking about civil government planted seeds for future developments in separation of church and state, he most certainly did not advocate religious freedom in a way that modern Baptists would recognize.
We could go on, but let me focus on one name in John MacArthur’s list that I find especially intriguing in the light of the “Strange Fire” conference that John MacArthur has been hosting: David Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2: 8,9 NASB)
Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. (John 15: 4,5, NASB)
The Spirit however, produces in human life fruits such as these: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, fidelity, tolerance and self-control—and no law exists against any of them. (Galatians 5:22, Phillips)
One of the things I love about fall is the taste of fresh apples. I’ll admit, I’m a bit of an apple snob. I can barely eat Red Delicious. Gala and Fuji are ok. I could eat Honeycrisp apples until I burst. About twenty years ago when I was a high school teacher in Ohio, our principal brought in a bushel of Black Twig apples. I fell in love with those apples, but once they were gone, they were gone. I have never found them again.
In the spring my tastes turn to grapefruit. I love the tartness of grapefruit. Through some connection I’m not really clear on, my son-in-law’s step-grandfather gets fresh-picked grapefruit from Texas each spring, and a bag of it usually makes its way to me.
In the summer, raspberries, blackberries and peaches make me very happy.
In other words, I like fruit. And unlike Clark Bars (which I also like), fruit is good for me. Fruit boosts the immune system, acting like a wall to keep out harmful things (I hope I’m not losing you with my medical jargon) and strengthens the good things in my body. If you don’t eat enough fruit, you can get dry hair and skin, be susceptible to illness and disease, or even end up with scurvy. (Not only pirates get scurvy, you know.) Fruit is vital to our health—fortunately, God made it delicious for us to eat.
Even more vital to our health, our spiritual health, is the fruit born of the Holy Spirit. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Generosity. Fidelity. Tolerance. Self-control. These are actions, responses and character traits that are produced by the Spirit of God in those who are branches attached to the Vine. These are not traits we are to work up in ourselves. This is fruit only the Spirit can create in us.
The Internet Monk Archives 