The Worry Free Life

Fruit of the Spirit

This month we will be begin a series on this important verse. The fifth chapter begins by reminding us that we are free in Christ. The opposite of Christian freedom is moral slavery. He then continues by contrasting moral freedom and moral slavery with lists for each. Paul stresses that Christianity is not about following the rules (vs. 4). It based on faith. However, he then surprises us by saying that faith is not based on belief (to which many contemporary Christians ascribe). Faith must be expressed through love (vs 6). Paul is saying here that our faith does not depend on our belief system but our overt actions. It is these overt actions that express the Fruit of the Spirit.

Love

Paul leads off his list with love. Although we can prove that being first on the list meant Paul thought is was the most important fruit. However, it was not uncommon for list makers in his day to put the most important item on the list in first place.

So much has been written on love that we might seem presumptuous to add our small bit to the world’s literature and sacred writing on the subject. Of the many different varieties of love C. S. Lewis identified four from the Bible and classic literature), Christian love, or agape, is the most difficult to grasp and almost impossibleto practice.

Christians do not have a monopoly on love. In fact, we often act in ways that are definit ely non-loving. Many Bible scholars believe that this is our greatest sin in need of the most forgiveness. If we are known by our fruits, and love is the first-fruit, then we compromise our faith when we act in ways that exclude love.

We all know easy it is to love certain people: new babies, friends who treat us well, people who can make our lives better, people we are “in love” with, people who agree with us, people we admire. When we add up all these people, they are a small subset of humanity.

This “tribal” love was important thousands of years ago when survival was an everyday occurrence. It was a love that had boundaries to help protect us and our loved ones. It worked. Love and hatred operated in tandem to help us surmise who to avoid and who to let in.

Jesus turned this arrangement on its head. Living in a society where tribal love was the norm, he associated with the unloved, those who lived on the margins of society. Not that he hated those in power, Jesus rebuked them because they were unable to love the outcast. Because there was no love for these people, the powerful couldeasily manipulate and use them for their own purposes. Jesus set the standard for how we are to love theunlovable.

The Enemy wants to turn back the clock to have us live a life of tribal ethics. When we let our resentment and bitterness run rampant, we reject Jesus’ teachings. Our upcoming book is designed to help you defeat the Enemy and see that regardless of what people do, they still have infinite worth: “For God so loved the world . . .” By fighting the Enemy, we can learn to discriminate between anger (about someone’s behavior) and resentment (about their worth). Only then can we begin to enjoy the fruit of the Spirit.

Worry Is Ageless

Getting people to worry is the most powerful weapon of the Enemy. It is the major reason we are kept from living the abundant life. The Enemy knows that worry is the cause of such debilitating emotions as depression, guilt, and clinical anxiety, to name a few.

When you have learned how to conquer the Enemy in your life, you are able to be concerned rather than to worry. Concern involves a more realistic understanding of God’s creation. One of the Enemy’s tricks is to get people to begin worrying at an early age. This is unfortunate because one of the most precious gifts God has given us is our children. Recent research has shown us that worry really can begin at an early age. Genetically, some children are prone to worry and this can often be seen the moment a child begins to speak. The Enemy can get children to worry about matters that never touched the lives of parents.

KidsPeace is an organization that helps children who have experienced a crisis. They attempt to teach these children new coping skills that the children can manage their personal crises. Recently, this organization sponsored a survey of 1,023 children whose ages ranged from 10-13. Barna Research is a business that doesresearch for church ministries.

These children were asked to talk about the things that worried them. You can probably guess that the most common worry for these children was thinking about the death of their parents. Over two-thirds of the children surveyed worried about this possibility. Among the worries that troubled over fifty percent of the childrenincluded: doing poorly in school (57%); getting AIDS (54%); becoming poverty stricken (53%); dying too young (51%); and being kidnaped (50%).

To realize that their innocent child of God must feel and live with the pain of these worries can break the heart of any parent. Fortunately the Bible provides us with the antidote to this dastardly device of the Enemy. The Bible tel ls us continually that love is the most potent force in the universe. As adults we have all experience the healing power of love whether from God or people who love us. Even though we love our children we can forget how to express our love when our children tell us things that pull at our own emotional heartstrings. The good news from the survey found overwhelming majority of the children (93%) believed their parents loved them.

Sometimes showing our live can be difficult when our children tell us about distressing topics. It is during these times when our automatic response is to give our children advice on how to handle their worry. What topics could distress us the most? Precisely those topics which are part of the culture to which our children belong:drugs, sex, and alcohol. When our children bring up these topics, we parents are susceptible to making some critical mistakes. We can instruct them to “just say no” to these temptations. We can quote them Bible verses. We can condemn their friends who are involved in these activities — or even worse, tell them our children they can no longer see our friends.

What can parents do about these worries? First of all, make certain that your children know you love them regardless of what they do. Repetition is the key, especially for fathers. Often men’s brains are not hardwired to feel the need to express their love on a continual basis (unless they want sex). With the world so volatile and changeable, our continual expression of love to our children makes the ground they stand on more firm as time passes. Mothers tend to be better at this automatically. This may be why more of the boys and girls in the study were more prone to share their worries with their mothers more than their fathers. Dads need to put more effort into being more available for their children rather than leaving this job solely to their wives.

Your children also need to constantly know that no matter how much their behavior upsets you, you will still love them unconditionally. This means they know this even when you are angry or disappointed with them. When your child wants to talk with you about a matter you may find personally distressing or even sinful, you must stillaccept them as a flawed, but loveable human being. This means easing up on interrogations and putting more emphasis on listening non-judgmentally to whatever your child wants to tell you. Good eye contact, relaxed body posture and a tone of voice that says “I still love you” are important.

Often our automatic response to correct our children when they bring up painful subjects. Our rule-of-thumb for parents is the following: The more serious the problem is for your child, the less you talk and the more you listen empathically. Girls, especially, need to feel connected to their parents. Even though the Bible talks about correcting children, this must never be done in a way that is unloving. When we correct our children, our behavior speaks more loudly than our saying we love them. To paraphrase Paul’s insistence in his letter to the Corinthian church that love is the most important human activity, we say Connection Is More Important than Correction.

Prediction Pete

Pete was not a free man. He was trapped in the prediction prison constructed by the Enemy. Pete was constantly predicting what was going to happen to him. Every time he felt an ache or pain in his body, he knew for certain that he had a terminal illness. When his boss frowned, he know that he was going to get a poor performance report. If his wife was quiet for a day, he was convinced that she had decided to leave him.Forgetting something was proof that he was in the early stages of Alzheimers.

Sound familiar? Making negative predictions is a spec ial kind of worry. The Enemy knows that if you can waste your mental effort on making predictions, you will have difficulty experiencing God’s grace. Predictions are common among Christians and non-Christians alike. What is interesting is that this habit of making predictions isalmost always focused on negative future events. Even if an event has good odds of turning out well, people like Prediction Pete focus on the one percent that may be negative or painful.

People who spend time making negative predictions are seen as living a life of doom and gloom. They are not fun to be with and eventually act as wet blankets in a group of people. The mechanism the Enemy uses to maintain this outlook on life is something psychologists call confirmation bias. This is the tendency for humans toaccept information that confirms their beliefs and to reject all other valid information. Prediction Pete carries this to the extreme. For all the facts which would prove that he is not very good at making accurate predictions, Pete rejects or distorts this information. Negating opposing information helps him to maintain his life in a world of the Enemy’s making.

If you find yourself trapped in this painful lifestyle, you can begin to make changes by keeping a Daily Prediction Log. Write down all the negative predictions the Enemy makes to you during the day. Next to each prediction write the probability that the Enemy applies to the prediction. Do this for two weeks. In order for this strategy to work, you must be diligent and note all predictions. At the end of each week make a note of which predictions actually came true. The more specific you make the Enemy’s predictions, the more effective this exercise becomes. For example, if you predict that something bad will happen today, the prediction is so vague that anything could make it come true. This is another Enemy trick. Most often, predictions are ill-defined andambiguous.

By comparing these predictions with actual events, you will b egin to see that the Enemy’s ability to know the future is severely limited. You will also notice that life is not nearly as negative as the Enemy wants you to think. As your view of a negative future begins to change, you will begin to experience the freedom offered in Jesus Christ.