Pleasant Stone Devotional Meditation: December 4

“The fruit of the Spirit is … longsuffering, gentleness … temperance …” ~ Galatians 5:22, 23a

When Christ comes to indwell us, these facets of this “pleasant stone” verse gradually begin to show up in our lives. Bearing “fruit” does not always mean winning people to Christ. Winning people to Christ is a natural result of bearing fruit of the Spirit in our daily lives.

I [Eugenia Price, the author] watched authentic Christian behavior one rainy morning when my good friend, Lois Warrens, who was driving me home from a speaking engagement the night before, didn’t have time to remember to “act Christian.” Everything happened too fast for that. With just enough time to reach my house before Lois opened her Christian bookstore that day, we stopped at a traffic light, seconds before an old jalopy banged into the back of her new yellow car with such force that the entire side where I sat, had to be replaced.

Lois looked back at the smashed front of the offending jalopy, grinned and said, “Well, by the way he looks, I’d better get out and see what happened to us. The driver of the other car had been admiring his new infant son, and it had come as a complete surprise to both him and his young wife, that we had been up ahead waiting some fifteen seconds for a red light to turn green. Lois operated her bookstore alone in those days and there was no-one to open it. But not once during the almost four hours in which we waited for the police-station for a particular “type” of officer who was in some mysterious way specially equipped to write up our accident, did I see one wrinkle of annoyance or rebellion in my friend Lois Warrens. This was not natural for Lois, but it was for the One who had come to live His life in hers. Patience and self control are both fruits of the Spirit. They are “natural” only to God.

“As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in me.”