I’ve been thinking often about my maternal grandmother lately. She emigrated to America with her parents prior to World War I. They left the Austro-Hungarian Empire to seek their fortune here and ended up operating a boarding house in New Jersey. It was there that my grandmother really learned to cook. I still remember her cooking to be the best I ever tasted. In the 1950’s almost everything was fresh and done from scratch and the fast food establishment was still years away.
There are so many Old World, mainly eastern European, dishes that she was an absolute master at preparing but I want to focus simply on her fruit salad. And she was a master at that, as well. She was meticulous about preparation, freshness, proportion and making sure all of the seeds were out of the oranges, apples, cherries, peaches, plums, nectarines, grapes and all other seeds that needed to be removed from their fruit. She had a particular expertise about making it naturally sweet, using the right combinations of different fruits, without using sugar and cutting the juicy fruits in such a way as to keep the juice in the fruit and not in the bottom of the bowl. She was magnificently genius. But even on her best day she couldn’t outdo the fruit salad of the Spirit. I call it salad because I think His fruit comes with the same balance, flavor and uniqueness that Grandma’s salad did. But it comes with one major difference that makes His so completely unique.
A simple word search reveals different fruits from the heart of God that become available to us through the indwelling and infilling of His Spirit. Most are familiar with the Galatian’s list: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. I’ve heard it emphasized that love appears first in this list as if it is the most important and I get that line of thinking. In fact, I believe that it all flows from love since that, after all, is Who He is. But since they are fruits of His presence in us, would self-control, last on the list, be any less important, available or desirable than the rest?
In Paul’s opening prayer for the church at Philippi he mentions being filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ. He declares over the church at Ephesus that now, they are the children of Light and the fruit of that Light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth. And the author of Hebrews in speaking of discipline says it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness. But the verse that got my attention and seemed to cause this delicious tension between Grandma’s fruit salad and His is found in James.
James 3:17-18 But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. ESV
The operative word in that verse that gave rise to this salad story is “sown”. Seeds are sown. Might it just be that the fruit manifested in and through us from Holy Spirit did not have the seeds removed, unlike Grandma’s fruit, so that in revealing Him, we might sow them into the people and circumstances and environments in our world? If so, a harvest awaits.
I’ll have more, please.