Take My Hand Inspirations
Fruit of the Spirit Series
And the remnant who have escaped of the house of Judah shall
again take root downward, and bear fruit upward (2 Kings 19:30 and Isaiah
37:31).
Remember
from our last discussion (Blog #16), that you, being rooted
and grounded in love . . . may be filled with all the fullness of God
(Ephesians 3:17-19).
As
you allow yourself to be watered daily in God’s nourishing Word, you will grow
strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God [is] upon you (Luke
2:40) to mature and bear His FRUIT OF JOY
because now He lives in you.
So
let’s enjoy ourselves in this soul conversation. What is joy? The world defines joy as great happiness; and
happiness is defined as a feeling, showing or causing pleasure or
satisfaction. The source of this joy
appears to come from outside stimuli—a situation or event that occurs around
you and eventually enters your heart to make you smile.
Don’t
get me wrong. Holding your high school
or vocational school diploma or your first university degree certificate; or that
first kiss on your wedding day; or watching your child forcing his or her first
wobbly steps; or slowly swallowing a chocolate, vanilla and strawberry banana
split with walnuts, rainbow sprinkles, chocolate syrup and cheery cherries on
top on a hot summer day can bring joy unspeakable to the body and to the soul!
But
this kind of joy is stored in your short and then long term memory box, and must
take effort to be consciously recalled, or remembered if not forgotten by other
extraordinary events or outside circumstances (good or bad). What makes us smile or laugh by what we see,
hear, taste, touch or smell is temporary.
It won’t last long; and most often has to be replaced immediately, or
else we fall into that deep pit of despair or depression, a terrible, lonely
sadness.
That
is why a lot of folks always need people around them, either to talk to or to
talk about in the absence of those same people they need. This transient emotion of happiness is based
on what you get from outside of the inner you.
DO NOT ALLOW PEOPLE TO CONTROL YOUR
JOY. DO NOT DEPEND ON PEOPLE TO SUPPLY YOU WITH JOY.
In
Christ, the FRUIT OF JOY does not
come from outside. Its source is from deep within . . . you. And it comes from
God’s taproot—being rooted and grounded in love.
The
FRUIT OF JOY of the Holy Spirit of God
is one of the seeds planted in your heart, which over time, germinates into its
maturity so that when the winds of worry, doubt, frustration or bitterness
blow, you can temper it with the JOY OF THE LORD. Study Nehemiah and allow his testimony to
sink into the depth of your meditation (chapters 1-6). After all the mocking and barrage of
intentional indignities that Nehemiah and his team of devout builders endured
during the re-building of Jerusalem’s wall by archenemies Sanballot, Tobias and
their band of cruel cohorts, at the end of the day, the wall was completed (in
record time), and Priest Ezra exhorted them: Do
not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength (Nehemiah
8:10c).
Nehemiah
was minding his own business, busy doing the ordained work of the Lord with a
peace-filled heart, loving his God and his people; and here come the
haters. This is the way it is, dear
Christian. Not everybody’s going to love
you or admire what you’re doing for the Lord.
Even fellow Christians, based on their fruit’s level of maturity, can
attack you with their eyes, words, and covetous callousness though they greet
you with pithy praise and artificial appreciation.
YOU
MUST STAND STRONG IN THE JOY OF LORD FOR THIS JOY IS YOUR STRENGTH. And this joy must mature from within your
soul, watered by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit which guides you, covers you, uplifts
you, and shows to all creation the beauty of His fruit, bearing its work in you revealed outwardly as a testimony, a
witness, of how far you’ve come on your Christian journey. And this FRUIT OF JOY
can never come from outside of your soul; neither does it take conscious effort
to be remembered because it stays moving in you pumping in your blood
circulating all through your body always, ever-present, never-ending as long as
the Holy Spirit lives in you.
It
magnifies from the inner, deepest part of you. It thrives from a contrite heart, a heart that
does not possess any hardness or haughtiness, but is open to being re-molded
and re-formed by the Potter on His wheel. It may take years for this fruit to
push its way through all the multiple layers of your years of agonizing pain,
but if you allow it to, the fruit of joy will burst out as a great explosion
from a place you never knew it was.
And
the pangs of rejection, regret, resignation, and pure anger, bitterness, and
depression will never sting you as it did prior to the maturity of the FRUIT OF JOY. You will feel “different” when people talk
about you, accuse you, or just get on your nerves while you hold nothing in
your soul against anyone.
That
“different” is called JOY—a
still calmness that elicits a great peace, a humbling acknowledgement that it
is God who grew this in you, because you no longer fret over the works of
evil-doings. Instead, you seek with all
your might to forgive the transgressions thrown at you; and when you find you
can’t forgive, you turn the whole matter over to the Lord and wait patiently
for Him to work it out; as you continue loving Him and yourself and that same person trying to steal your
joy.
Then
when the Lord vindicates you, by showing to those attacking you how wrong they
were about who you are and the work you do, that’s when you “eat” the purity of
that fruit’s sweetness. Jesus endured
all the attacks and accusations all the way to the cross and even hanging
between two conniving criminals on the cross.
Yet, minutes before He took His last earthly breaths, one of those
contentious criminals finally realized who Jesus was and humbly pleaded for
salvation.
Vindication is to prove that what someone said or did was right
or true, after other people thought it was wrong. And the FRUIT OF JOY
is fulfilled in the Lord’s vindication of you.
You can’t vindicate yourself, though we constantly try to prove how
right we are to others all the time.
But when God—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—opens His mouth and
moves His hand in your matters . . . He will turn your enemies’ reproach on their own heads.
In other words, back to sender!
May
all those who falsified your character, and who tried to damage your dignity
and renounce your reputation while you were on the potter’s wheel, being re-born
and re-shaped into the image of Christ Jesus, be put to shame as the Lord
vindicates and validates, you--in Jesus’ Name.
Keep
on, dear Christian, bearing your FRUIT OF
UNSPEAKABLE JOY. After overcoming
the layers of trauma, trial and troubles, ENJOY!
(And don’t you dare feel “bad” about it!).
© 2017 by Take My Hand Inspirations, a
division of PepParadise Society Ltd Publishers.
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Unless otherwise stated, all scripture
quotations are from The New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas
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Take My Hand Inspirations
