Full disclosure, I am clueless when it comes to gardening.

It's safe to say that I do not have green fingers.

In fact, given the incompetence with which I wield garden shears,

it's remarkable that I have any fingers.

We have two trees in our backyard.

I've taken to calling one of them the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,

because it's rather mysterious, I'm not sure what it is, and I don't want my daughter

eating any of the fruit. The other tree, even I can identify, because it produces these

gorgeous little green limes. And that's the thing about fruit. If you can identify the fruit, then you've identified

the tree. I think that's one of the reasons why the apostle Paul talks about the fruit of the

spirit. He could have talked about the characteristics of the spirit or the evidences of the

spirit, but instead it's the fruit of the spirit. In other words, it's what

you would expect to see growing in a genuine Christian believer. If someone says the tree in my

backyard is an apple tree, but all I ever see on it are limes, then we can assume that it is indeed

a lime tree and not, in fact, an apple tree.

In the same way, if someone claims to be a Christian, but we don't see the fruit of the Spirit,

then it's quite possible that what we're looking at is not, in fact, a Christian after all.

Paul describes what the fruit of the spirit looks like in Galatians chapter 5.

The fruit of the spirit says Paul is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,

gentleness, self-control. So, what should the Christian life look like? Well, there are two ways we might

fall off this particular horse. Two opposite but equally mistaken views of what the Christian

life should look like. One is the legalistic life. That was the temptation that the Galatians were facing.

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