We’re halfway through our study on the fruit of the Spirit: so far we’ve considered love, joy, peace, and patience. Now let’s turn our attention to kindness.

We’ve just crossed the official threshold of spring. Time to think of warmer days and an early harvest of juicy fruit. Soon the markets will abound with zesty lemons and sweet strawberries, peaches and nectarines, grapes and bananas and oranges. In the spiritual realm, we can keep an eye out for a fresh harvest, too: of love, joy, peace, and now patience.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at the radical nature of the fruit of the Spirit. First came love, then joy, and now peace. Since this is one of my personal favorites, let’s get right down to it, shall we?

Every believer used to be part of an angry apple orchard, just like the one in Oz. Our natural state was to grow bitterness, selfishness, deceit, pride, fear, and a host of other rotting things from the core of who we were, lobbing them at anyone unsavvy enough to pass by. Last week we looked at how the Spirit moves in and produces new fruit in our hearts, fruit we can’t manufacture on our own. We’ve covered love. Let’s turn now to joy: “a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good” (Webster’s 1828 dictionary).

When’s the last time you strolled through an apple orchard hunting for coconuts? Or bananas? Or peaches? Hopefully never. (If you have, we can schedule a time to sit down and talk.) The fruit you’ll find in nature always depends on the seed it sprang from. Unless you intentionally cut off a branch of the apple tree and graft on a new species in its place, that apple tree will only ever produce apples.