The fruit of the Spirit is an encounter with God that leads us into an ongoing experience of Him, which opens us up to the fullness of who God is for us.
As we learn the difference between our soul and our spirit, we can then live in the Spirit. Once we learn how to live in the Spirit, then we can walk in the Spirit, and begin moving in the gifts of the Spirit.
Living in the Spirit means it is no longer us doing the living, but we are practicing the presence of God and allowing Christ to live through us.
We are allowing the Spirit of God to direct our thinking; we are allowing the Spirit of God to govern our emotions. We are allowing the Spirit of God to direct our steps. We are giving the Spirit of God control over our soul (self), so that we can be led by His Spirit.
This is a process, and it takes practice, we must grow spiritually, and as we reach a place of maturity, we will be led by the Spirit. Then the scripture that says it in no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me will be a reality in our daily lives.
A walk in the Spirit is a flow of the Spirit in our hearts, motivating us and moving us. For this to happen we must be aware of our spirit so that it is continually drawing on the life of God in us. God lives in us, and our spirit must be actively communing with Him.
To live in the spirit, we must learn how not to live in self (the soul, the flesh). Our self-life is in the realm of our soul. It is in the realm of our soul that we have self-consciousness. All the manifestations of self are in the realm of the soul. Our self gets puffed up with self-importance, or self-pity. The ego of our mind has all kinds of thoughts concerning self. There are hundreds of manifestations of self, it is basically manifesting the fallen nature of Adam and Eve.
In Christ we have a new nature, this means we have a yes in our spirit to the will of God, or spirit is willing, and we now have access to the divine nature of God, but we must walk in it. This is a walk with God. Our first reaction will be in the flesh; our brain has been programed that way. But if we learn how to abide in Christ as our life source, then we can learn how to live or walk in the Spirit, responding to people, circumstances, tests and trials with the divine nature and not the human nature.
When we learn how to live in the spirit, we recognize all the thoughts we have concerning ourselves. We must learn how to die to self (the soul life), so that we are no longer aware of self, but aware of Christ in us.
Two lives cannot exist in the same space, so we must learn how to live in God and not in self.
As we begin to practice living in the Spirit, we will recognize the thoughts we have concerning ourselves and will learn how to disconnect from them.
To live in the spirit, we must practice the fruit of the Spirit.
Galatians 5: 22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.
The word fruit karpos is singular not plural, this means that the list given as the fruit of the spirit, are some of the different characteristics or attributes of love which is God’s nature. This fruit is the produce or result of the divine nature being manifest in our life daily.
God is love. This is a self-less love that is focused on others, and never on ourselves because we are the beloved of God, so we see ourselves the way YHWH sees us in Christ in heaven, and it is also how we respond to the circumstances of life.
The fruit of the Spirit is divine love; it is on a higher level than human love. Human love at some point will fail, God’s love will never fail.
Unless we understand God’s nature, we will not understand the true meaning of the false doctrines we have heard in Church, concerning judgement, wrath, and hell. As we get to know God as our personal friend, the Holy Spirit will reveal to us what the truth is concerning these distorted doctrines that are rampant in the church.
We first must accept that God loves us and all his thoughts towards us are loving. He has no negative thoughts towards us. When we find ourselves not liking a person, we recognize, these thoughts and feelings are a manifestation of the self-life, so we look to the lord for the infilling of His love.
God commands us to love our enemies, and this is impossible on the human level, unless we are filled with the Love of God to the point of becoming love.
We must disconnect from self, until in our awareness of the Spirit of God we find His love flowing. We let Christ love people through us.
I am not going to go into an in-depth definition of each of the nine aspects of God’s love or fruit of the Spirit in this message, which is in parts, just some basics.
Love is first an action, but it is also an emotion of God. Love is exclusive affection. Love is about cherishing; it is about treasuring. It is about having a regard for someone with benevolence attached. It is about taking delight in someone or something, so that we cause that person to feel beloved just because we have become friends in their life. Love is the tangible favor and goodness of God. Love demonstrates loving-kindness.
When our spirit is alive to God, we become aware of His Spirit in us, we become aware of His nature, the divine nature which is the fruit of the Spirit and all the fruit of the spirit is interrelated, so we experience all of it, we just tune into a certain aspect of it.
The only thing that blocks the fruit of the Spirit is our awareness of self (things in our soul that have not been renewed, block the flow of the Spirit into it.) So, if we are not continually experiencing the fruit of the Spirit, we will learn the different manifestations of self, which cut us off from the flowing of the life of God in us and deal with them through the Spirit.
But it is through practicing the fruit of the Spirit, that we displace the things in our soul that block the flow of the Spirit, so we focus on the positive and not the negative and when we discover a manifestation of Self, we move in the opposite spirit, which is a fruit of God’s love or divine nature.
Our starting point is with the love of God towards us, if we don’t feel loved of God, then some area of the self-life is blocking it from flowing in us and through us.
God is love so we must focus on the love of God and become aware of it. We must practice the joy of the lord.
Joy is who God is. Rejoicing is our response to who God is. Joy is about an intensity of gladness; it is about delight. We cannot stop from smiling and expressing it in some way.
Joy is bigger than us and it is bigger than all our circumstances. We are to count everything as joy; we must flood our circumstances with the joy of the Lord. Overwhelm our situation with the happiness of God.
If we are not experiencing the joy of the Lord, then some area of our self-life is blocking it, what are we thinking about? Something that has to do with self. We must get our mind off ourselves and back on the lord. We must get out of self and into God.
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, and celebratory. It is about rejoicing over something.
When we are practicing joy, we are learning the art of celebration. What are we celebrating? God is for me, He is with 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, being inclined towards calm, so that when we walk 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 the fruit of the Spirit are encounters and experiences that make us like Jesus.
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. Patience is a quiet persistence in the nature of God.
Kindness is about being considerate, being thoughtful towards someone, being benevolent, compassionate, and generous.
Goodness is about looking after someone else’s welfare, acting with honor, being favorable towards someone, blessing them, lifting them up, and giving them a divine advantage.
Faithfulness is about being consistent, constant, unceasing, loyal, and reliable. Faithfulness is unwavering, keeping our word, being trustworthy.
Gentleness is about having humility, being meek, merciful, sweet spirited, and tenderhearted.
Self-control is the result of practicing the fruit of the Spirit so that we are enabled to walk in the spirit and not in the soul.
If all of those things work for us and compel us to become Christ-like, 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.
Everything the enemy seeks to bring against us; we can turn it around by moving in the opposite spirit and inflicting him instead.
When we move in a negative emotion or thought we are empowering the enemy against ourselves. The spiritual 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 can beat us, so he doesn’t show up for the fight. This is the immunity we are looking for.
The enemy has only a certain number of angles and spirits under his command, and when we continually practice the fruit of the Spirit, the enemy has no place in us, so he is not going to waste his resources, trying to get us to yield to his schemes. No point in fighting them because I will lose, and I 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.
To be able to think like a genius, is thinking like Jesus.
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, by learning to love. We can depress him by learning joy. We can weary him by becoming peace. We can demoralize him with our patience. We can discourage him with our kindness. We can overcome him with goodness. We can debilitate 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.
The nature of God is powerful against the purposes of the enemy. When we practice the fruit of the Spirit, we learn how to overcome and become more than a conqueror.
We cannot continue to surrender our identity to negative emotions.
What particular fruit of the Spirit is God developing in you currently? When God wants to teach us a particular aspect of His nature, we will begin to encounter it.
He will be relentlessly 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 structure of our personality is totally interpenetrated, affecting every part, spreading throughout, with whom 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, He will not be content until we are completely and thoroughly possessed by love, joy, peace, long suffering and patience.
Part of experiencing the Spirit of God is feeling the nature of God in our life. We are destined to experience God in our emotions. We don’t have to believe God in our emotions; without getting to feel him. We get to believe God for things. God gave us emotions so that we could feel His emotions.
Love is a state of being and it is an action, but love is also 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 know God in our emotions. Don’t let anybody talk you out of a living 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 is, that we are as loving as He is. That we experience Him in the depths of who he is.
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 must 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 them; 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 so that we can spiritually evaluate everything mentally and our whole mind can be free of anxiety, worry, lust, 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 how to believe 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, the apple of his eye, the focus of his desire.
When we are living in our mind, we say lord I believe, help my unbelief. When God touches our emotions, we feel so loved that we begin to trust Him. Thank you for the incredible love you have for me, I believe you.
God wants to touch our emotions to such an extent that believing 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 the joy of the Lord. Rest is a weapon. We persecute the enemy with our peace. He can no longer get us to worry.
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 assigned a particular fruit of the Spirit to all the negative experiences of life. One of the laws of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus says that we cannot have a negative situation without having a fruit of the Spirit present 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 has assigned, he has brought 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.
We are learning how to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in our life. We must love the learning, so it helps to see it like a journey and story. We have all sorts of different characters in our life, so we are learning how to respond to them in a certain way. God has assigned 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, because we all need more love. The love of God grows and develops in our life through focus.
The key to walking in the Spirit is focus, we look to the Lord, tune into his nature 24/7 then the fruit of the Spirit flows into our life and we act accordingly. The Moment we lose that focus, we react in the flesh, and reveal our immaturity.
Persecution teaches us the power of blessing. Rather than coming under the persecution, we come under the empowering presence of blessing. Once we realize in that moment, that we have two choices, to come under the weight of persecution and be down cast or come under the blessing of the Lord and to be elevated, to be lifted up in our spirit.
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, responsibility.
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 (mind).
Always remember the function of fire is purification, not torment.
In the spirit it is called vengeance 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 assigned 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, not discouraged and depressed.
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 authorization to count everything as joy. It doesn’t matter whether it is good, bad or ugly, that is irrelevant, because everything is a source of joy. We are going to find (tune in) to the joy of the Lord in everything. This is “the Christ in you” way to live.
So, when the lord says seek me, what is He 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 your life because his joy is a constant. A continual river flowing into our spirit. We rejoice in our spirit and magnify the Lord with our soul.
John 14:27 says My 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 draw 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 by tuning into the Lord, it is called joining our spirit to the Lords becoming one spirit, not two.
When we lose our keys, we go looking for them. God has assigned 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, he wants to overwhelm the situation with peace. God has given peace to us like a river, so 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.
If we don’t practice the truth, we are just a hearer of the word and not a doer. If we don’t practice the word, we don’t know it by experience. In the bible knowledge and experience is the same thing. God doesn’t want us to just know stuff in our head; He wants us to know it in our spirit, heart and in our life. He wants us to know it through our eyes, the way we see people, the way we talk to people, the way that we walk around in 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 patience to us in all those situations. We have people in our life whose role seems to be to empower us to become long suffering.
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, we need to practice long suffering.
Rom 15:5 may the God who gives patience and encouragement, grant you to be of the same mind. God is giving us encouragement and patience in all our circumstances.
We are more clued into 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 in union with God.
In heaven people live a certain way, the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus governs the kingdom of heaven. We are taking our cues from the kingdom of heaven because we are a citizen of heaven living here on earth.
That means we are an altogether different position. 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 and likeness. It is an overcoming lifestyle.
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 is saying 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 come into contact with 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 wonderful things and yet we choose anger, which 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. This is 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 let’s 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. Every 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, Christ is in our spirit.
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 assigned a specific fruit of the Spirit, just for our specific situation 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 on people in all our life situations. Practicing the fruit of the Spirit allows us to develop self-control in our spirit 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. If we practice these things we will never stumble.
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 assigns a fruit of the spirit for 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 the Lord. And what the lord tells us is what we give them. It is called moving in the opposite spirit.
In every relationship we are asking how much grace this person needs. How much love does this person need? How much peace, 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.
Replacing a negative with 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.
When we impart a fruit of the Spirit of God to a person, a touch of peace, joy, love, they then have a experience with God.
A fruit of the Spirit changes the atmosphere in our heart, it encourages a climate of faith, and it develops a relationship with other people. 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 alter their behavior with ours.
The more antagonistic a person gets, the more we are going to love them. And our goodness will overcome their negativity; 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, we want to reflect the divine nature nothing can work against us.
When we start to practice the fruit of the Spirit and an let it flow through us, we will see a difference in ourselves. We get stronger and our spirit gets 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 a fruit of the Spirit into someone’s life, we reap it back into our own.
You cannot sow potatoes and reap beans. What we sow we reap. If we sow peace, we are going to reap peace. If we sow love, we will receive love. If we sow joy, we are going to receive joy. But if we sow negativity we are going to receive that as well. Opposition attaches to what we don’t remove.
When a person is continually exasperated, we need to pray for them, so that they feel the presence of God. When they feel the fruit of the Spirit, then we can teach them how to abide in it. 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.
The fruit of the Spirit is already in us, and we can minister it to any situation that we want. We may know someone who is astonishingly irritating. So, we minister patience to them. This is a great challenge to patience. This causes us to grow spiritually. Every time we hear the person’s voice, we minister patience to them.
When we think of the irritating people in our life, we ask the Lord what particular fruit of the Spirit should we minister to that person.
What are the situations around our life that are causing us distress? What if we can appropriate 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.
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 we have already have 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 minister a fruit of the Spirit to the person and see what happens, it is hard to resist it, but even so, it comes back upon us. If this is not our way of life, we don’t really know what YHWY is like, or we have allowed the practice of negativity to get into our spirit.
Practicing the fruit of the Spirit is fun. We are going to see some amazing effects on people. 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. Now we are dealing with His substance-, He doesn’t have to deal with all of our stuff.
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 must stop complaining, whining, self-pity, and playing the victim, quit moaning because that is all the worship language of hell.
We are in the kingdom, so we are rejoicing, praising, worshiping and giving thanks. You cannot do both, you must choose one.