Everybody Could Name It

The new kid has rung the paint through at the wrong price for the third time this morning and the line is to the door, and the owner hears his own voice before he has decided to use it.

Saturday at a timber and hardware merchant is the whole week's money. Vans backed up to the yard, a joiner wanting three lengths cut while he waits, a woman with a tin of the wrong white, and the boy, seventeen, second week, on a register he does not understand yet. And the owner, who has run this counter for twenty-two years and knows the price of everything in the building without looking, says the thing. Not loud. He never has to be loud. Hard, and flat, and in front of everyone: how many times, son. The boy's ears go red. The joiner studies the floor. The woman with the paint looks at the shelf behind the counter as if the shelf has said something interesting. And the owner turns to the next customer with his ordinary voice back on, and takes the money, and inside he is saying what he has said a thousand times: there it is again.

He knows the word. He has known it since he was a boy in a church hall reading the list off a felt board, and the one he did not have was obvious even then. His wife could name it in her sleep. His daughter could name it and has. His men could name it, and do, in the yard, when he cannot hear. He has read the books. He has counted to ten more times than he could tell you. He has promised God in the storeroom, out loud, that this week would be different, and it was, until Tuesday.

You know your word. It is on the list in Galatians and it is the one everybody who knows you could say without thinking, and you have been trying to make it for years, and it does not come, and every time you hear your own voice you say the same thing the owner says: there it is again.

Paul did not call them works

Let me show you one word, because I read the Word the way I read a set of drawings, and there is a word in Galatians 5 that has been carrying a load nobody noticed.

Paul gives two lists in that chapter, back to back. The first he calls the works of the flesh, and he lists them, and every one is a thing a person does. Then he turns, and he does not say the works of the Spirit. He changes the word.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.Galatians 5:22-23

Fruit. Not works. And it is fruit in the singular, one crop with nine flavors, growing on one tree, and the tree is not you. It is the fruit of the Spirit. He grows it, on a person attached to Him, the way an apple grows on a branch that stays on the tree, and no apple in the history of orchards was ever produced by the branch straining.

That is the load-bearing word, and you have been reading it wrong for twenty years, and I do not blame you, because so was I taught. You have read that list as nine jobs, eight of which you have made a start on and one of which you have never got off the ground. And you have gone at the ninth with everything a man brings to a job: effort, books, counting, promises in a storeroom. And it has not come, and you have concluded that the fault is in the workman.

You are a branch and not a workshop, and the fruit you have never had is not on your list of jobs, because Scripture never put it there. That is not my reading; Paul chose the word, and it is the Holy Spirit whose fruit it is, and He has not once asked a branch to manufacture what only He grows.

What the branch has actually been doing

Now the pit, plainly, because you have been in it a long time and you have called it by a name that neither Scripture nor the Spirit ever gave it.

You have called it failure. Twenty years of it. Every Saturday the voice goes hard, and every Saturday you file it under the same heading, and the file is thick now, and the heading says I am simply not a gentle man, or patient, or joyful, or whatever your word is. And you have made your peace with the file, in the way a man makes his peace with a bad knee. But it is not peace. It is a verdict you have passed on yourself in the storeroom, with no Scripture under it and no word from the Spirit in it, and it has a sentence attached: keep trying, and expect nothing.

Hear me. The trying was never the method. Not because trying is wrong; because it is the wrong tool for this job, the way a hammer is the wrong tool for a screw. A branch does not attend a course on apples. What a branch does is stay on the tree, and the sap does the rest, and the branch has no idea how. Jesus put it in one sentence: apart from Me you can do nothing, and the one who abides in Me bears much fruit (John 15:5). Bears. Not makes. And I am not going to hand you a practice for growing gentleness, because that would be another course for the branch, and I am not going to tell you how long it takes, because I do not know and neither does anybody who tells you they do.

You have the Spirit whose fruit this is, living in you, right now, and the gentleness that is not in you is in Him, and He is in you. Ezekiel heard God say it long before Paul: I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My ways. Cause. It is His doing, it is written, and His Spirit is the one doing it, and a man attached to that Spirit is not a man with a missing part. He is a branch in a season, and the season is not his to hurry. You were never a man with a missing part. Galatians 5:22 calls the whole list the fruit of the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit named in that phrase is the grower and not the branch.

The one thing you have never done with it

Here is what I want you to see, and it is the turn of the whole thing.

You have tried to make it. You have promised it. You have counted your way toward it. What you have never once done, in twenty years, is ask for it, plainly, as a thing that is His to give and not yours to build.

If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.Luke 11:13

Read what is given there. Not the fruit; the Spirit Himself, whose fruit it is. The Father gives the Spirit to those who ask, and He gives Him the way a father hands a child bread and not a stone. And the man Jesus is describing does not come with a plan. He comes with a request. He names the thing and holds out his hand.

You are a son who has been trying to grow in a storeroom what the Father gives at the counter, and the asking was always yours to do and the giving was always His. It is written in Luke, it is written in James too, that He gives generously and without reproach to the one who asks, and it is the Holy Spirit who is given, and He does not arrive with a checklist for the branch. There is no plan attached to the ask, and there is no timeline attached to the answer, and the fruit, when it grows, is His.

You have a Father who hands bread and not a stone. Luke 11:13 sets the giving against a stone on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is what is given.

And I want to be careful, because I have seen this turned into a new job. Asking is not the eighth thing you do to produce the ninth. It is a branch telling the vine what it does not have and staying put. And nothing about a Saturday when the voice goes hard again is evidence that the ask was refused; the Father does not withdraw the Spirit over a bad morning at the register, and He never once said the growing would be visible to the branch.