“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” Galatians 5:22-23
Admit it, you want people to think you are smart, you want people to look up to you for your knowledge, for your understanding of God, for you maturity as a Christian. If you right now are saying “No, I don’t” then you are either delusional or a liar.
It is obvious that while we must certainly know Him to love Him and to know Him we must study Him. However that may make what I am about to write seem strange for someone to write who spends so much time trying to “know” God. However the truth is, that no one has studied Him more completely than Satan, and it hasn’t done him a bit of good.
When Paul describes the body of Christ as a body, part of which includes hands, ears, and so forth, we are quick to claim our territory — we are the brain of the church. Leave it to the American Christians to miss the point.
Re-read Galatians 5:22-23 again, ‘smart’ is not one of the fruits of the Spirit. It goes without saying that we are to love God with all our minds. However, we are to love God with all our minds, not simply seek to understand Him. “We do not, of course, increase the intensity of our emotions by reducing the capacity of our brains. Neither, however, will we ever bear the fruit of the Spirit if the seed of the Word is planted only in the rocky soil of our brains rather than the fertile soil of the heart.” Ligonier Ministries and R.C. Sproul.
Unless and until we learn to stop pursuing academic knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and start seeking the kingdom of God, we will not, get better. We are to put behind us all our earthly desires and worries. We are to stop seeking those things that the those of this world seek. Start trying to be the salt.
The fruit of love, in the end, is the fruit of the Spirit. Love begets love. Love bears joy. Love bestows peace. Patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control: all these break forth in the heart. None of these, however, comes from the barren soil of our intellectual curiosity. If I were a doctor I would diagnose the condition that we are suffering from when our knowledge fails at traveling the distance from our heads down to our hearts, as spiritual emptiness. There is not a magic pill to cure that emptiness, The truth is, that we will not begin to get better until we come to embrace this obvious truth: we come into the kingdom not as scholars or students, but as children. www.ligonier.org/tabletalk
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