Well, today we've come to the end of these two weeks when we've been thinking together about the fruit of the Spirit.

And I'm going to read Paul's words for the last time.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,

self-control.

Against such things, there is no law.

Fruits are all different, aren't they?

Not only so, but each piece of fruit has its own distinctive

shape and size, and sometimes even taste. And whether you ever drink wine or not, it's

interesting, isn't it, that wine experts can even tell you where the grapes have been grown

that produce the wine and the very year of their production.

Sometimes I think the different fruit of the spirit are just like that.

Each one has its own special quality.

You might even say each one leaves a kind of taste in your mouth when you meet someone

who shows it.

And sometimes you can almost tell what kind of church they've been in, or even whose

ministry has influenced them. God produces far greater variety of fruit than fruit farmers,

of course. And that's such an encouraging thing to think about and even to look for in people.

The last variety of fruit is self-control. thing to think about and even to look for in people.

The last variety of fruit is self-control.

Now, we could get the wrong impression here.

Self-control was a virtue that was admired by some of the philosophers and moralists of antiquity, especially those we know as Stoics.

For them, the model person had self-control.

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