Posts by R.L. Wilson
The Fruit of the Spirit – Gentleness
“But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Gentleness is a difficult fruit to live out, because it requires you to have an honest opinion of yourself. Paul tells us in Romans, “by the grace given me I say to every one of you:…
Read MoreThe Fruit of the Spirit – Faithfulness
“But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). In his commentary, Galatians For You, Timothy Keller describes faithfulness this way: “Pistis = faithfulness, loyalty, courage, to be utterly reliable and true to your word. Its opposite is to be an opportunist, a friend only…
Read MoreJesus: The Servant of God
Each of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) focuses on Jesus from a slightly different perspective. They include or exclude details about His life as they paint their own particular picture of who Jesus is. It has been suggested by many scholars that the picture painted by Mark is of Jesus as the…
Read MoreThe Fruit of the Spirit – Goodness
“But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). In the Bible Knowledge Commentary, Donald Campbell suggests “Goodness may be thought of both as an uprightness of soul and as an action reaching out to others to do good even when it is not deserved”…
Read MoreThe Fruit of the Spirit – Kindness
“But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). The dictionary defines kindness as “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.” That’s not a bad starting point. But as I was researching for this article, I found some astonishing information. More on that later.…
Read MoreThe Fruit of the Spirit – Patience
“But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Patience, or as the version I quoted above puts it, forbearance. In other versions of the Bible you’ll find the word longsuffering. But I rather like how the Amplified puts it. There we find patience clarified…
Read MoreThe Fruit of the Spirit – Peace
“But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). When the apostle Paul mentions “peace” as a fruit of the Spirit, he is not talking about a world where there is no war, or a home where there is no tension, or a person who…
Read MoreThe Fruit of the Spirit – Joy
“But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). We used to sing a little chorus when we were kids: “If you’re happy and you know it, say amen.” Remember that one? We can all remember times when we were happy and we knew it.…
Read MoreThe Fruit of the Spirit – Love
“But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). What is love? It’s kind of hard to tell when we say we “love” our spouse, or our children, or a day at the beach, or a strawberry milkshake, or the latest movie, or,… So I…
Read MoreThe Aseity of God – Part 2: Making it Personal
In Part 1, I gave a definition of aseity. Essentially, it means that God simply, and eternally, is. J.I. Packer puts it this way, “Our Maker exists in an eternal, self-sustaining, necessary way—necessary, that is, in the sense that he does not have it in him to go out of existence.”[1] Our first takeaway from…
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