My daily routine includes cultivating my character. I try to nurture these qualities in my daily life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It’s not easy being like a fruit tree and traying to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in my life.

The fruit of God’s Spirit is always in season, but it grows best out on a limb that has been pruned many times, not in our comfort zone. It requires God’s pruning and cutting away many of our desires, feelings, and opinions. It requires standing still and not running as He allows stinky fertilizer to be piled around our roots. But I know it is all for our good. God is seeking to change our heart little-by-little so that we can reflect His image and His presence.

Discipleship that cultivates the fruit of the Spirit is heart-to-heart, not brain-to-brain. It is inner transformation, not religious information. There’s a huge difference between learning details about a language and learning to communicate in the language. There’s also a huge difference between learning details about Jesus and learning to communicate heart-to-heart with Jesus and letting Him produce His fruit in you.

Without an ongoing abundance of the fruit of God’s Spirit, Christianity becomes lifeless like a bowl of plastic fruit. When it comes to the fruit of the Spirit, too many Christians have empty fruit bowls. Continually cultivate your heart so that it can flourish as the orchard of God’s Spirit and fill your life with His beautiful spiritual fruit. Let God keep your fruit bowl fresh and filled with the fruit of the Spirit and it will lighten your emotional load. O taste and see!

The fruit of the Spirit can’t grow in a heart that shuts out God’s light. “God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” –1 John 1:5-7.

Where there’s no fruit of God’s Spirit, there’s no spiritual life. Jesus said: “By their fruit you shall know them.” Let God make your life a beautiful fruit of the Spirit salad that feeds all who meet you with the essence of His presence.

Protect your heart from bad fruit. Don’t let it spoil what God is trying to do in and through you. The fruit of God’s Spirit never rots. Any rotting fruit in your heart isn’t from God. Quickly throw it out. Never let it stay. If you let rotten fruit stay in your heart, your life will always be in a bad jam.

God’s thoughts are the healthy trees that produce the fruit of the Spirit in your heart. Your thoughts are the birds and insects that devour it. Bring “every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” See 2 Corinthians 10:5. You can reach the low hanging fruit of discouragement and frustration all by yourself, but only God can develop the fruit of His Spirit within you.

Honesty and humility bear the good fruit of God’s Spirit. Pride bears bad fruit of deception.

The tree of life produces the fruit of God’s Spirit. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil produces human analysis.

If Christians want strong, straight forward speech, perhaps we should direct it toward ourselves and our churches instead of toward the politicians we disagree with. The things that Christians are saying and doing aren’t working to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, and to change hearts and empower multitudes to daily follow and obey the risen Jesus. Let’s drain the swamp of being stuck in routine religion and make Christianity great again and overflowing with the fruit of the Spirit.

Let’s begin to actively and radically obey 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If My people, who are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

Without the shed blood of Jesus, I could never have a relationship with God or taste and see that He is good. I would never be able experience the fruit of the Spirit.