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Being Juicy Fruit
Galatians 5:22-25
November 15, 2009
We have spent a lot of time talking about and emphasizing a lot of personal competencies for emotional health. They provide the foundation for the rest of life. They provide the foundation for dealing with the next level of competencies: how we relate to others.
The Shema of Jesus has been our guide for several years now: Love God with all our being and love your neighbor as yourself. Basically, much of what we have emphasized through the sermons have been focused on how to love ourselves emotionally and spiritually. But the goal of loving ourselves is so that we can learn to better love others. If we do not turn our focus outward, we will never growth beyond ourselves but stay stuck in a narcissistic view of life where everything is about me. This is a sure sign of emotional immaturity that has stunted our spiritual growth: when everything is about me (often expressed corporately as in churches by being about “us”).
Turn to Galatians 5:22. As you find your place, I remembered a video that we showed a while back that made a humorous poke at how “Christians” sometimes stay emotionally and spirituality immature.
22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. 25Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 26Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.
Our neighbor had a pear tree. The interesting thing about fruit trees is that they make beautiful flowers in the spring but it takes the entire summer for those dead flowers to turn into fruit. It takes time and patience. It takes plenty of rain and water but not too much.
Then when the pears are formed, it takes time for them to ripen. When they get ripe, they soften somewhat but not too much. When they get over-ripe, they start to ripen from the inside out. Outside they look fine. The skin looks nice but when you reached up to pick it, you find out that inside it beginning to turn to mush. When the inside completely rots, the skin turns brown eventually shriveling up. Often though unless an outside force shakes it, it will remain attached to the tree.
Sometimes we are like those pears. We are cleansed by the blood. We are forgiven. We are given a new way of living. We even start to bear fruit. But we don’t deal with certain issues. We allow the past to haunt us. We stuff our feelings. We don’t express our feelings appropriately. We poison ourselves and the others around us.
But God calls us to bear fruit that lasts. We are called to be juicy fruit not dried up fruit. We are not called to be rotten fruit that looks good on the outside but is basically full of rotten, sour, bitter mush on the inside. We shouldn’t be provoking others. Pushing their buttons. That is simply conceit. It is self-centered not Christ-centered living. People who go around pushing other people’s buttons are simply jealous (just as the Scripture says) of other people’s happiness, peace, or love and want them to feel just as miserable as they really feel inside. By seemingly controlling the way others feel, they feel as if they might be at least be good for something.
Remember the saying: Hurting People Hurt People.
Only then can we truly live out the way of Jesus to love others as we love ourselves. Only then can we be filled with the Spirit of God to bear the fruit of the Spirit.
I want to note one quick thing in regards to the text: fruit is singular. It is not plural. There are not several different types of fruit where some people have some of the qualities but I’m excused from having others. All these qualities make up one piece of fruit. They are all qualities that come together to make up a whole. God’s Spirit will produce all of these qualities in every person that is filled with God’s Spirit. In other words, one cannot claim to be kind but then say that they do not have any self-control because that is not their “fruit.” It is true that some of these qualities this one fruit may need more work in cultivating but we should ignore some of them and make lame excuses for not having them.
With that said, let’s look at what it means to cultivate this fruit of the Spirit. What does it look like? What actions might one notice? What emotional competencies accompany a person who exhibits a fruitful life?
Being Juicy Fruit
• Empathy
Sympathy is to feel bad or sorry for someone. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Empathy is to actually enter into their pain. It is sensing what other people are feeling and then taking an active interest in their concerns. Sympathy is more passive. I can express easily express sympathy for someone that I don’t know when someone has lost someone that they love. It is much harder to enter into their pain when I do not know them.
It takes a very emotionally and spiritually mature person to enter into a person’s feelings and feel with them. Most people can’t do this without intentional effort and practice and without being incredibly self-aware. Otherwise we end up transferring our feelings onto them or try to get them to feel the way we think they should feel (“Suck it up. Deal with it. Move on. Get on with your life.”).
It is through our own emotional awareness and out of our own feelings (usually painful but not limited to pain) that we can enter into their emotional world. Henri Nouwen, theologian and author, wrote a tremendous book called, The Wounded Healer. Just as God entered into our pain through Christ, we are called to enter into the brokenness of others through our own painful experiences not to claim that “we know what you are going through” (which may or may not be true but is usually perceived as arrogance and absurdity) but to show it by our presence, actions, and occasionally words.
This is such a huge competency that I can only give you introduction here. It could be it’s own series of sermons but it really better suited for small group discussion. Second:
• Listen well
Most of us don’t really listen well. We sometimes hear but we don’t listen. We are usually formulating our response while the other person is talking because we already know what they will say. What arrogance! Not that I can claim to have this skill down. I have improved because I have been intentionally working on it. But it has taken a lot of painful work to make the little progress that I have made. Of course, it helps tremendously when you can practice listening skills with people in situations that you are not emotionally invested. But it is still hard when Kendra and I have a personal discussion to not fall back into a pattern of arguing my side instead of listening to her perspective as well. This takes self-control to learn to do it well.
Practice reflective listening. I know it is sort of mechanical. But this is basically what good listeners do. They restate what the other person said in order to determine that they heard them. “You hurt me when you made the joke about my shirt.” “So when I told the people at the party that you look like Bozo the clown in that red shirt, you felt… betrayed or angry or embarrassed.”
In premarital counseling, we practice this. Most think it is sort of stupid because it is forced and does not naturally flow. But all new skills feel that way. Think about skills you have learned that started out awkward but now are second nature. Typing? Manual transmissions? Using a computer mouse? Playing a musical instrument?
But it is much more than that. Because people do not state one idea at a time, we need to send the message that we are attentive to them. It means reading their social cues and responding appropriately. Maybe through our facial expressions or through a nodding of the head or maybe vocal cues that suggest “I’m with you. Keep going.” “Yeah. Uh-huh. MMMmmm.”
I do have advice here. There is great irony here. Don’t give advice. “You should…” We might suggest some ideas or respond with our own experiences. But telling people what to do rarely works. Either they rebel immediately or they will blame you when your idea doesn’t work out.
There are many other competencies but these are the two most important. These are the two that flow out of a fruit-full life. Others evolve out of these like serving others, developing others, collaborating and cooperating with others (as opposed to competing with others or being the lone ranger). They are many more.
But when I think of biblical emotional maturity in terms of our relationships and the social sphere of our lives, empathy and listening are the two absolute most important skills to grasp. If you think of the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control), these are qualities are always manifested in those who empathize with and listen to others.
Sam wasn’t emotionally mature and was considered pretty insensitive. He just did not want to or could not pick up on what people were expressing. Sure he went to church every Sunday morning and evening. He was an usher every week. But he was stunted spiritually. He often understood what the scriptures said and could give the right answers but sometimes it just seemed that he didn’t get it. He thought that he was compassionate at least for a guy. Most people perceived him to be a good guy who would help you do something but also blunt and direct even to the point of being harsh. He made no qualms about it but justified it as “calling them like he sees them.” He was speaking the truth.
One evening the phone rang. On the other end was a woman who asked for Sam’s wife. She was sobbing and could hardly get her words out. “Jeez,” he thought to himself, “She should get her act together before she gets on the phone and makes a fool of herself.”
“Just a second,” Sam told the caller. Since he didn’t know where in the house his wife was, Sam just bellowed out in an irritated voice, “Marge, it’s for you!”
How about the surgeon who described how the surgery to remove a blood clot in the women’s leg could result in the possibility that she might lose her leg? He was obligated to inform her of this possibility but offered no reassurance or tell her that this happened in only a small percentage of cases.
She burst out in tears that she might lose her leg. His response: “If you’re going to cry, you’ll have to find another physician to treat you.” So she did.
When the Kimberly-Clark corporations sent observers to watch parents and toddlers use their diapers, they asked questions, listened to the parents, and noted the struggles that many toddlers and parents were having. They sent the info back to the research and development department and they came up with a rather innovative solution and product: Huggies Pull-Ups. Because of empathy and listening, this new product generated $400 million in annual sales before the competition caught up.
The first is to be filled by the Spirit. Ask Jesus to send you his Spirit to live in you that God may dwell in you and guide you. With the Spirit in you, God can search you and your heart. I know people who listen well and empathize well but don’t live up to their potential because they miss what God is doing. When a person is emotionally mature and listens well while empathizing, this person has the incredible opportunity to be healing presence in other people’s lives. They show Christ and truly begin to live out what it means to be an ambassador for Christ. Lives are touched and changed not just for a moment but for eternity. Isn’t that the sort of impact that you would like to have with your life?
