Generosity as Spiritual Gift: Part 1 - The moisture meter speaks truth!
I enjoy plants and I’m a herbicidal maniac - the opposite of a green thumb. I use a special tool to see if the plants need water - a moisture meter. This magic device prevents me from overwatering when the surface of the soil seems dry but there’s still moisture deep down. It also protects against the opposite delusion: an appearance of surface moisture when everything is dry underneath. The moisture meter speaks truth!
Checking one’s spiritual condition
This past Sunday, the Scripture text was Galatians 5:22-23. It provides a detailed checklist of one’s spiritual condition:
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. (NRSVUE)
I once had a professor teaching on inclusive leadership and active listening. He talked non-stop without taking time for questions and ran the class past break-times. There was a gap between his words and his actions. He talked like he was well-watered, but his actions showed otherwise. We all have such gaps. It strikes me that this verse talks about the fruit of the Spirit: not the seeds, not the flowers but the mature fruit. The fruits of the Spirit are measured not by the photos in the seed catalog, but by what is actively growing in our lives. Let’s have a look at the first six fruits in the list.
First six fruits
Love, joy and peace require effort. “Seek peace and pursue it” says the Psalmist. No passivity here.
Patience. This is a particularly tough one for me. I have suggested timelines for what God should do when, which God graciously ignores.
Kindness. Kindness keeps the world from spinning out of control, I’m convinced of that. I’m grateful for the kindness of strangers, without which I’d still be wandering in the Atlanta airport. When love, joy and peace seem like too much to try for, start with kindness.
Uprightness of heart and life
Generosity is translated as goodness in some translations of this verse. Digging into this, I found the Strong’s definition - uprightness of heart and life. Uprightness of heart and life. What a terrific definition of generosity/goodness - having one’s heart and one’s life pointed in the right direction!
When generous people tell their stories of how they learned to be generous, uprightness of heart and life always appear. Are our hearts and our lives headed in the same direction? Is it a good direction? Like the moisture meter, the answers to those questions speak truth!
Part 2 of this blog: faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, featuring wisdom from primary-school children.