For every attack of the enemy, there is a fruit of the Spirit given to us, an attribute of God that we can practice overcoming it and growing in our spirit.
Nothing works against the fruit of the spirit, so when we actually practice the fruit of the spirit nothing can work against us, but for us.
The nature of god sets us free from the enemy. Everything that works for us in Christ automatically works against the devil.
The fruit of the spirit is an encounter with God that leads us into an ongoing experience which opens us up to the fullness of who God is for us and becomes the lifestyle that he takes the greatest pleasure in.
THE UNCHANGING NATURE OF GOD
What God is offering us is his unchanging self. So that we too can become unchanging in our way of life, that means unchanging in our nature and character, unchanging in the sense of I am going to become like Jesus no matter what occurs. And I am unchanging in that desire.
In the new birth of our spirit, we receive the nature of God in seed form in our spirit. This nature begins to grow within us when we learn how practice it and walk in it.
As we learn how to walk with God we become constant and consistent in our approach to people and circumstances regardless of whether those circumstance are good bad or ugly.
The fruit of the spirit gives us confidence in our relationship with God. As we commit ourselves to practicing the fruit of the spirit, we are sowing into his character and reaping back from his favor.
Nothing can separate us from the love of God, so the fruit of the spirit is where we learn to abide in God’s nature.
The fruit of the spirit is in the power of God to enable us to become Christ like.
THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT
love is exclusive affection. Jesus becomes our first love, and in that encounter and experience, we can also direct that love to someone else. The Love of God is relational and is always directed to someone, or His creation. Love is about cherishing; it is about treasuring. Love is the tangible favor and goodness of God.
Love demonstrates loving-kindness. It is about having a regard for someone with benevolence attached to it. It is about taking delight in someone or something, so that we cause that person to feel beloved just because we are a friend in their life.
Joy is who God is. When we rejoice in the Lord, we experience who He is. Joy is about an intensity of gladness. We simply cannot help but smile.
Joy is about delight; it is bigger than us and it is bigger than all our circumstances. This is why James said to count everything as joy, overflow your circumstances with the joy of the Lord. Overwhelm your situation with the happiness of God. There is an intensity of gladness, there is a delight, joy is about rejoicing over somebody or something.
Joy is who God is, rejoicing is our response to who God is. When we are worshiping, we like to rejoice in the fact that God is the happiest person we know.
Joy is about elation; it is about having a sense of wonder. It is taking absolute pleasure in someone or something, it is being jubilant, it is being cheerful, triumphant, celebratory.
When we are practicing joy, we are learning the art of celebration. We are excited about Jesus. What are we celebrating? God is for me, He is with me, He is for me, He is on my side, He is in me, He surrounds me, everything about Him is for me and He will help me. I am rejoicing in the fact that I know what God is like.
Peace is a state of being quiet, it is about learning to be calm, to be restful, it is freedom from disturbance, it is an ease of mind. It is about stillness, having an inclination towards calm, so that when we are walking into a troubled situation we bring the peace of God with us. When we walk into a room it should make a difference in the atmosphere. Peace is about being undisturbed, untroubled, content, composed, and free from strife. All these things are encounters and experiences that make us Christ like.
Patience is the quality of being able to persevere under pressure with a good heart and mind. It is about endurance without complaint, not easily provoked, having a calm expectation. Being even tempered. A quiet persistence in the nature of God.
Kindness is about being considerate, being thoughtful towards someone, being benevolent, compassionate, generous, loving, showing superior qualities of grace.
Goodness is about looking after someone else’s welfare. Acting with honor, being favorable towards someone, blessing them, lifting them up, giving them a divine advantage.
Faithfulness is about being consistent, constant, unceasing, firm in your promise, loyal, reliable, unwavering, keeping your word, being trustworthy.
Gentleness is about having a powerful humility, being meek, merciful, sweet spirited, like a dove, tenderhearted, overcoming.
Self-control is about being restrained, having a good frame of heart and mind, exercising discretion, believing the best about someone. Being composed and disciplined and even tempered, having a moderating influence on people and situations.
These are all the attributes that God regularly practices in his relationship with us. If all of those things work for us and compel us to become Christlike, then they also work against the enemy.
In the kingdom what works for us automatically works against the enemy. How does the fruit of the spirit affect the enemy in our relationship with God when we are in warfare? There is a place set aside for us where we make the enemy weary.
MOVING IN THE OPPOSITE SPIRIT
Everything the enemy seeks to bring against us, we can turn it around by moving in the opposite spirit and inflict him instead.
When we move in a negative emotion or thought we are empowering the enemy against ourselves. The principle is that opposition attaches to what we don’t remove.
God desires to change us because He wants us to get into a place where we are victorious, then He wants to move us into overcoming and then He wants us to be more than conquerors.
Being more than a conqueror means the enemy looks at us and realizes that he cannot beat us, so he doesn’t show up for the fight. He is on a tight budget, and when we practice the fruit of the spirit, we get taken out of the enemy’s budget. No point in fighting because he will lose and he can’t afford it right now, he has limited resources.
When we are in the kingdom, God gives us the wealth of the wicked. The enemy’s budget is reducing every single month. To be more than a conqueror means the enemy fails to show up.
The art of thinking brilliantly is thinking like Jesus.
MOVING IN THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT
By moving in the fruit of the spirit we can affect the enemy and release ourselves into power at the same time.
We can exhaust the enemy with our love for people, with learning to love.
We can depress him by learning joy.
We can weary him by becoming peaceful.
We can demoralize him with our patience.
We can discourage him with our kindness.
We can overcome him with goodness.
We can weaken him with acts of faithfulness.
We can trouble him with our gentleness.
We can dismay him with our self control.
We can disarm him with our faith, weaken him with our mercy, intimidate him with our intimacy, devastate him with grace, paralyze him with compassion. We can cripple him with humility.
He has been doing the opposite of that to us for years. Now is the time to destroy the works of the Devil in our lives and others.
THE NATURE OF GOD IS AGAINST THE PURPOSES OF THE ENEMY
The nature of God is powerful against the purposes of the enemy. When we practice the fruit of the spirit, we become Christlike. And learning how to be an overcomer and more than a conqueror.
We cannot continue to surrender our identity to negative emotions.
What particular fruit of the spirit is God developing in us at this time? When God wants to teach us a particular aspect of His nature, we will begin to encounter it.
When He is teaching us kindness, He will be relentlessly be kind to us until we are so overwhelmed by kindness our personality will change. Every day God will do something or say something to us that is kind.
Whatever God is, He is relentlessly. He is not temporal about his pursuit of us. He will be pursuing us forever.
WE ARE DESTINED TO EXPERIENCE GOD
The lord is not content until we are overwhelmed. Until the framework of our personality is totally interpenetrated, to affect every part, spreading throughout, with who He is.
Until we are overwhelmed in our heart, in our thinking, in the way we see and speak, stand, walk, the way we engage with people, the Lord will not be content.
He will not be content until we are completely and thoroughly possessed by love, joy, peace, patience, with all of those things, because then we will feel the nature of God in our life.
We are destined to experience God in our emotions. We get to believe God for things. When our words, thoughts and emotions line up with the will of God a power is released through our faith.
Faith is a fruit of our spirit; our emotions are a part of our soul. We first sense things or know things in our spirit and then we feel them in our soul. We rejoice in our spirit and then we magnify the Lord with our soul.
We don’t have to believe God in our emotions, trust him in our emotions, we get to feel him in our emotions.
God gave us emotions so that we could feel things. Love is an emotion; we are supposed to feel it. We are supposed to feel peaceful. We are supposed to feel joyful and patient. God wants us to feel things.
We are supposed to come to know God in our emotions. Don’t let anybody talk you out of a living an actual real experience of God.
God gave us emotions so that we could know Him. He wants to touch us emotionally. He wants to make us emotionally whole. It means we end up being as happy as He is, that we are as peaceful as He feels that we are as loving as He is. That we experience Him in the depths of who we are.
LEARNING PEACE
When God wants to teach us peace, the prince of peace will come into our lives and never leave. We cannot trust the Lord and be worried at the same time. Because those two things cannot exist in the same space together, one of them has to go and we get to choose.
The beautiful thing about the fruit of the Spirit is that our emotions have been chosen for us by the Lord. We can feel Him moving in our life; God gives us the fruit of the Spirit so that we can have encounters with Him emotionally.
He teaches us how to think like Jesus thinks, He teaches us to think brilliantly, so that we can spiritually appraise everything mentally and our whole mind can be free of anxiety, worry, anger and all those things.
So, when God renews our mind, it is so that we can think in line with our emotions.
God wants to teach us faith by using our emotions, the bible says faith works by love. God wants us to feel love in such a dimension of strength and power that our automatic response is to believe Him. Faith works by love.
If we really want to get into a high place of faith, we must learn how to be the beloved. We must feel His love for us specifically.
It is not our going I believe, help my unbelief. It is I am so loved that I trust you. Thank you for the incredible love you have for me, I believe you.
God wants to touch our emotions to such an extent that faith is a result. The joy of the lord is a source of strength. The happiness of God makes us feel powerful, that we can do anything, and take anything on because we are strong because we feel happy. Rest is a weapon. We persecute the enemy with our peace. He can no longer get us to worry.
CULTIVATING HIS CHARACTER
To cultivate is to prepare the land so that it grows crops. If we do not understand the parable of the Sower, we will not understand the rest of Jesus’s parables.
We must purify our heart by appropriating the fruit of the Spirit so that all of the things in our heart that prevent the word or seed of God from producing fruit we be removed.
All our circumstances are about cultivating the fruit of His character and nature in our life experience. We are to practice the fruit of the Spirit on every person we meet. We become Christ like by practicing the fruit of the Spirit on people.
God has allocated a particular fruit of the Spirit to all the negative experiences of life. One of the laws of the Spirit of life in Christ says that we cannot have a negative situation without having a fruit of the Spirit present with us to appropriate.
One of the laws of the spirit of life in Christ says that every time we experience a negative emotion an antidote is present right there, right then and it is going to be one of the fruits of the Spirit.
God will bring certain people into our life to teach us about His nature even if they don’t like us. Every person we meet can empower us directly or indirectly to become like Jesus.
This is one of the great games of the Holy Spirit. But His games are of a serious nature, to teach us something. Mr. Enthusiasm loves games; He makes everything a game, because we seem to learn better by that. The Lord has a sense of humor, at times I hear Him laughing as I go through life experiences and I realize He is trying to teach me something, and I learn a lot faster when I realize that God is not made at me, but laughing with me, as I learn the lessons of growing in the divine nature.
God has allocated a fruit of the Spirit to us for all negative circumstances and relationships. We are to love our enemies and bless those who persecute us.
We are going to have some enemies, and the purpose of an enemy is to teach us to love better, to teach us how to move in the love of God.
Persecution teaches us the power of blessing. Rather than coming under persecution, we come under the empowering presence of blessing.
Once we realize in that moment, our choices are to come under persecution and be diminished, or under blessing and be elevated, to be lifted up in our spirit.
The purpose of the enemy is to lay waste to our life, but if in that moment we discover something amazing about the love of God and use it straight away, to be elevated in the spirit.
LOVE IS AN ACTION
Heb 10:24 let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good works. Love is an action. Love is doing something. Love is involvement.
Rom 12:20 if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty give him a drink, for in so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head. In the spirit it is called retribution by kindness, turning the heart of an enemy to repentance by repaying him by kindness, for the wrong that he has done. Releasing him from the wrong and loving him because that is who God is. God has allocated a fruit of the spirit to every negative situation.
John 16:33 in the world you will have tribulation, but cheer up, I have overcome the world. When you have tribulation, I want you to shout for joy, to walk around with a big smile because you have some tribulation in your life, it is here to teach you how to be cheerful.
Count it all joy, we are to overwhelm every situation with the joy of the lord. We are to relentlessly practice being happy. To relentlessly practice the joy of the lord. God gives us permission to count everything as joy. It doesn’t matter if it is good, bad or ugly that is irrelevant, everything is a source of joy, when we know who God is for us. If God is for us, who can be against us. We are going to find the joy of the Lord in everything. So, when the lord says seek me that is what He is saying. You need to go looking for My joy here because it is present. My joy is present in every single situation or relational encounter that you are going to have in all of your life because my joy is a constant.
John 14:27 peace I leave with you, we don’t ask the lord for peace because He has already left it with us. My peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give to you, do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful, it is not an option.
Being anxious, having a troubled heart, a fearful mind is not an option because the lord left His peace with us so that we would not have to be troubled, so that we wouldn’t have to be fearful.
When you feel troubled or fearful, My peace is present, go looking for the peace that is present, stop praying, it is right there. Peace is already in our life we need to lay hold upon it. We need to learn the art of laying hold of it and keeping hold of it.
We expect to see it because He left it with us. It is around, we go looking for it. When we lose our keys, we go looking for them. God has allocated peace to us, so that we never have to be troubled or fearful, we just need to learn how to use it.
If we use it, like everything else in the kingdom, it grows by use. God is not content with us being filled with peace, He wants us to overflow with it, so that it produces an atmosphere around us. God has allocated peace to us like a river, that we can go into troubled neighborhoods and start giving the peace of God to that neighborhood. Releasing peace in a neighborhood is more powerful than the presence of the police in that neighborhood. The kingdom overwhelms everything in the world.
2thes 3:16 may the lord of peace himself continually grant you peace in every circumstance.
PRACTICING THE TRUTH
If we don’t practice the truth, we don’t REALLY believe it. If we don’t practice the Word, we don’t know it. In the bible knowledge and experience are the same thing.
Go doesn’t want us to just know things in our head, he wants us to know it in our heart, to know it in our spirit and in our life and through our eyes, the way we see people, the way we talk to people, the way that we walk around this world. He wants us to have experiences of Him that touch people around us. He is granting us peace in every circumstance.
GOD HAS GIVEN US PATIENCE
God has allocated patience to us in all those situations. We have people in our life whose role seems to be to empower us to become longsuffering or patient.
2tim 2:24 the lord’s bondservant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all able to teach, patient when wronged.
When we are wronged, we all want to defend ourselves; we want to let everyone know that we have been wronged, but what we really need is to practice patience.
Defending ourselves is a human reaction not a divine action. We need to stop trying to defend ourselves, and let God defend us.
Rom 15:5 may the God who allocates-gives patience and encouragement, grant you to be of the same mind. God is giving us encouragement and patience in all of our circumstances.
We are more familiar in the way that the world works than we are to the way heaven-kingdom works. We are citizens of heaven living here on earth we are in the world but not of it. At some point we have got to stop taking our cues for life from the world around us. The world around us has nothing to teach us about living properly with Jesus.
In heaven people live a certain way, the law of the spirit of life governs the kingdom of heaven. We are taking our cues from the kingdom of heaven because we are citizens of heaven living here on earth, that means we have an altogether different opinion or judgment compared to the people who are in the world.
And things are available to us that are not available to people in the world and the lord wants us to be overwhelmed and full of those things so that the world can catch the overflow.
So that when we walk into someone’s life, we can make a difference just by being there. We can bring the peace of God, the joy of the Lord, we can bring the love of God into someone’s life because we are overflowing with the presence of Jesus because that is what it means to be made in his image. It is an overcoming lifestyle.
THE DIVINE ADVANTAGE
1 peter 2:20 when you do what is right and suffer for it and you patiently endure it this finds favor with God. When there is some unjust thing going on in our life the lord says don’t take retribution on a natural level. If we patiently endure, His favor will come into our life and circumstances, and He will sort it out better than we can possibly imagine.
We are so concerned sometimes that someone is going to take advantage of us. Everybody we do business with has to be advantaged. Everyone we encounter should be advantaged. When we apply kingdom principles in our business the king shows up.
Love your enemies, do good and lend, expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great and you will be sons, for He Himself is kind to evil and ungrateful men. It is just the nature of God.
Col 3:12 put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bearing with one another and forgiving each other whoever has a complaint against anyone just as the lord forgave you so also should we.
We do not have a right to be offended. If we are easily offended it proves one thing, that we don’t have a relationship with the comforter. We are not experiencing God’s presence. We don’t realize the love of God in accepting us, when we were falling short, and how we are to show that same love to others. If we are being offended, we are not being comforted; His love is not flowing in our heart.
We have no right to be wounded; we have a right to be healed. We don’t have a right to be offended; we have a right to be compassionate and forgiving.
We are so good at exercising all our negative rights, thinking that we have a right to be angry, because they did that. He made me so angry; we are justifying it because they made me angry.
No one makes us angry, we yield to it, and we choose it. Through our spiritual connection with God, we can choose love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, mercy and so forth. We could have chosen all those brilliant things and we choose anger, that is foolish.
Some people do the anger thing prophetically, if they say this, then I am going to be really angry. We are planning to get angry. Is this our response to life? We are planning to be angry even if they don’t do anything. It is on our agenda.
Gal 6:10 talking about goodness says, while we have opportunity lets do good to all men, especially to those in the household of faith. We are not to ration ourselves in goodness. We plan to do good to everyone in some way. Their heart can be touched by the goodness of God.
Eph 2:10 God has prepared acts of goodness we can step into. When we get in difficult situations, the lord is right there saying act of goodness prepared.
We need to be able to hear the lord giving us instructions, because He is right there with us.
FAITHFULNESS OF GOD
2tim 2;13 if we are faithless, yet he abides faithful for he cannot deny himself.
God loves faithfulness so much that even if we are being faithless to him, he will still be faithful to us. He cannot deny who he is. He enjoys faithfulness so much; he is going to let us have it even if we don’t deserve it.
Rom 3:3 if some did not believe, their unfaithfulness will not nullify the faithfulness of God.
God is going to be faithful no matter what we do, so we need to get over our self. God has allocated specific fruits of the spirit, so that we may not come under a negative mindset and reaction but instead we can learn to grow up into Christ by practicing the nature of God in our life and to people in all of our life situations. Practicing the fruit of the spirit allows us to develop self-control in the inner man so that we are not taken in by the schemes of the enemy.
2 peter1:5 if these qualities are yours and increasing they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our lord Jesus Christ. As long as we practice these things we will never stumble.
CHOOSING THE SPIRIT AND NOT THE FLESH
Moving in the opposite spirit is a vital part of our development in Christ, and the fruit of the spirit is essential to that growth. Self control empowers us to overcome negative emotions and unstable thoughts so that we become free to portray the nature of God. So God allocates a fruit of the spirit to a negative so that we can choose the spirit and not the flesh.
The kindness of God leads us to repentance. It is impossible to repent unless we have experienced the kindness of God. The goodness of God brings people to repentance so that when we observe a person’s sin our only act of judgment is to in love determine how much goodness and kindness is required to empower that person to be touched by God.
When people behave unrighteous towards us, we do not have to move in judgment our response is how much goodness and kindness does this person need in order for them to receive a touch from you. And what the lord tells us is what we give them. It is called moving in the opposite spirit.
In every relationship we ask how much grace does this person needs. How much love does this person need. How much peace and joy do you want me to give away into this person’s life.
It is vital that we wage war on all negativity in our own lives so that when we are free of negativity, then we wage war on negativity all around us. And we do that by walking and moving in the fruit of the spirit.
GIVING THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT
Replacing a negative by a fruit of the spirit causes us to grow up into who Jesus is. The fruit of the spirit is a gift that we can give to someone else.
The lord gives a word to a woman who does not yet know him, you have been in mourning for over seven years and it has been too long and whether you agree with him or not, He is releasing joy and happiness back into your life. Her husband had said the same thing last night so she said tell the lord ok.
When we impart the Spirit of God to a person, a touch of peace, joy, love, they then have a connection with God through us.
SOWING AND REAPING THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT
A fruit of the spirit changes the atmosphere in our heart, it encourages a climate of faith, it develops a relationship with a person. When we are only up for positive things and we are not going to engage in anything negative ourselves, it makes us different to be around.
People will begin to modify their behavior with ours. The more antagonistic you get the more I am going to love you. We will win because there is an inexhaustible supply of love behind us. We wear people out with our kindness. When we choose no matter what other people do how we want to show up nothing can work against us.
When we start to practice the fruit of the spirit and give ourselves to it we will see a difference in ourselves. We get stronger and bigger, we become more like Jesus. As we practice the fruit of the spirit more and more of the nature of God gets developed in us.
As we sow the fruit of the spirit into someone’s life, we have to reap it back into our own. You cannot sow potatoes and reap rhubarb. What we sow we reap. If we sow peace, we are going to get peace. If we sow love, we are going to be loved. If we sow joy, we are going to receive joy. If we sow negativity, we are going to receive that as well. Opposition attaches to what we don’t remove.
A guy seemed perpetually angry. In his communication why does he prefer anger to love? There is no answer for it.
A guy was perpetually exasperated with people around him, to the point where he was sarcastic and syndical in his comments. He was ugly to be around. It was like everyone was stupid.
The lord says your exasperation is killing you and it is killing all your relationships around you, and you are going to meet him before you should.
He had practiced exasperation for so long that it got a hold on him. My friend said a lying spirit has just got a hold of you, let me just take it off you. Get off him in the name of Jesus. I am going to pray for you, and you are going to feel the presence of God and then we are going to talk.
So, I he prayed for him and he starts feeling the love of God. Do you want to keep that feeling? Then you must practice it. It is a simple thing called abiding.
When we have a spiritual connection or condition, then we can maintain it. If we abide in it, it gets easier and easier to practice it. The more we practice the more we abide, the more we abide the more we practice. It is a cycle, God loves cycles, he is a cyclist.
The fruit of the spirit allows us to have self-control. It empowers the presence of God in our circumstances. And it allows us to partner with the spirit of breakthrough.
FINDING VAULE IN PEOPLE
The fruit of the spirit is already in us, and we can release it to any situation that we want. We may know someone who is astonishingly irritating. So, we allocate patience to him.
He has value in the kingdom and if we allocate patience to him, we are going to see something that we can speak into.
So, we begin confessing the word over him. Rather than pushing him off or away or ignoring him. If we can allocate patience to him we can impart that value to him and we will be blessed. This is a great challenge to patience. We are determined to win. Every time we hear the person’s voice, we say in our heart I am allocating patience to you.
There are people we have a love-hate relationship with. We love to hate them; they hate to love us. We think of the irritating people in our life and ask the Lord what particular fruit of the spirit do you want me to allocate to that person.
What are the situations around our life that are causing us distress? What if we can allocate a fruit of the spirit and turn that whole thing around?
An enemy can become a friend because we choose love. Nothing can resist the fruit of the spirit, and nothing will work against it.
We need to take the fruit of the spirit for a spin, see how far we can go and how fast in it. We need to start moving in patience. We don’t have to ask the lord for permission. It is ingrained, it is a given. The fruit of the spirit is in us, we need to use it.
We don’t ask the lord to give me patience with this person. Don’t say that because you have already got patience. When we use it, it is like anything else in the kingdom, it gets bigger. We can be a giant or a grasshopper in patience, it depends how much we want to use it. If we use it, it grows and comes back to us.
We need to practice a fruit of the spirit on each person we are involved with. We allocate a fruit of the spirit to the person and see what happens. We will see what happens in us, and we will see what happens in them. If we have any resistance to that it is because the practice of negativity has got a hold of us.
Practicing the fruit of the spirit is fun. We are going to see some amazing turnarounds. Some things are going to be extremely comedic; we are going to have some fun; we are going to hear God laughing. We are going to make the Holy Spirit incredibly happy, because now He doesn’t have to deal with all our negativity.
If growing up in God is not our priority, then we are destined to repeat every situation and every test we face. The only true victory is not the resolution of our circumstances, it is in becoming like Jesus in the processes of life.
Moving in the fruit of the spirit means we have to stop complaining, whining, self-pity, don’t play the victim, quit moaning because that is all the worship language of the devil. We are in the kingdom, so we are rejoicing, praising, worshiping and giving thanks. You cannot do both, you have to choose one.