What Is the Fruit of the Spirit?

The fruit of the Spirit is a list of nine virtues provided by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 5:22–23. They come in response to a long list of sinful vices (“the works of the flesh”) that paint a dismal and grisly picture of human existence—things such as anger, dissension, and envy (Gal. 5:19–21). In contrast to this, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” This succinct list has direct bearing on the totality of who we are and what we do as Christians. There are virtues that describe our relationship to God (love, joy, peace), those that speak to our relationships with others (patience, kindness, goodness), and even those that describe our internal disposition (faithfulness, meekness, self-control). Of course, there is significant overlap in these categories, though it can be helpful to consider how different virtues have different emphases.

In short, the fruit of the Spirit highlights the ways we are to feel, think, speak, and act that are distinct from and different than the world. Perhaps a more pressing question than what these virtues are, however, is to ask how they work. To answer that, we should examine more closely the two key words employed to describe these graces: Spirit and fruit.

First, and most important, we must appreciate that the Apostle Paul calls these qualities the fruit of the Spirit. These are realities that the Spirit of God produces in us, not standards that we are expected to live up to in our own strength or by our own effort. The fruit of the Spirit is not a to-do list. It’s not God’s demand upon believers as much as it is God’s declaration to believers of what is true of them when they have the Spirit of Christ. The declaration comes even more clearly in the verses immediately following the fruit of the Spirit, when Paul writes that “those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). In other words, the fruit of the Spirit is a call to enjoy the victory Christ has won for us at the cross, where He destroyed the works of the flesh and brought us to share in His own holiness. The Spirit brings to life in the hearts of believers the sanctification found in Christ alone. Interpreting the fruit of the Spirit in any other way can lead to a torturous works-based relationship with God. It is the fruit of the Spirit, not the works of the Christian.

The metaphor of fruit also teaches us important lessons about sanctification. First, it’s worth noting that when Paul employs the metaphor of fruit, he avoids the word “fruits,” instead using the collective noun, which is singular in form but plural in meaning. What’s the significance here? The individual graces that God instills and forms in us belong to a greater whole—namely, conformity to the one Son of God (Rom. 8:29). Therefore, no Christian will have some of these virtues but be void of others. Though we know people who are perhaps more loving or more kind than others, believers will have all these graces to some degree or another because they have Christ, who is the fullness and fulfillment of all of them. We don’t get a partial Christ, but a whole Christ. It could be helpful then to consider these virtues not as distinct jewels in a crown, but as various facets of a diamond, each side and angle adding glimmer and beauty to the single jewel. To have the Spirit is to have Christ (Rom. 8:9), and to have Christ is to start to look like Him—all of Him.

There is at least one other lesson to learn from this metaphor. If you wanted to grow apples, you would not plant seeds in your backyard and come out the next morning hoping to find a full orchard ripe for picking. In the same way, we should not expect immediate results in our sanctification, but rather steady growth over time. The idea of God’s graces as fruit in our lives should instill two things in the earnest believer: grace and hope.

First, we should be gracious to ourselves and other believers when we do not see what we know God expects from us. We are all works in progress, called to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18, emphasis added). That will take time. Second, we should have hopeful expectation that what we see lacking in our lives will one day be put in place. Through reliance on God’s Spirit and the means of grace, we will change, because “He who began a good work in you will see it to completion” (Phil. 1:6). The seeds that God plants always come to fruition. The fruit that He cultivates never dies on the vine.