The Bible Study podcast, episode 498, we continue a study of Christian maturity, and we talk about the fruit of the spirit.

Welcome to the Bible study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. I think many of you are familiar with the verses from Galatians 5 that talk about the fruit of the spirit. Galatians 5 verse 22 and 23, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

And the idea here is that in the same way that a tree bears fruit as it matures, that we as mature

Christians should be bearing fruit, and this is the kind of fruit that we should be bearing.

And I feel like at that point, this episode is done, but let's do this in a little more context and a

little more depth.

One of the things to understand here is Galatians.

I don't know if we've done a study on Galatians yet in the Bible study podcast, but it's a book that is written to people who were being influenced by the Judaizers.

And what that means is this is early Christian church, that there were people who went around after Paul and said, you became a Christian and you were Gentile,

really you need to become Jewish to become a Christian. Remember, for the first 10 years,

if you were a Christian, the first 10 years after Jesus ascension, if you were a Christian,

you were Jewish, and you followed the Jewish laws, and

then you were a Christian on top of that. It was a Jewish sect. I was just in Jaffa, outside of

Tel Aviv, and in Caesarea, the Caesarea National Park now in Israel, just last week.

And Jaffa was the place where Peter was when he had this vision that God sent him,

where a sheet comes down with a bunch of clean and unclean animals, and God says,

go ahead and eat.

And he says, no, I would never, I would never eat anything unclean.

And this happens three times.

And God keeps saying what God calls clean, don't call unclean, and this happens three times, and God keeps saying

what God calls clean, don't call unclean. Right as that vision finishes, he gets a messenger

saying that he's being sent for by a centurion from Caesarea, so he travels up there, and God shows

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