Reinventing Your Walk in the Fruit of the Spirit
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SESSION 4
I am going to talk to you this evening about one of my favorite subjects. It is about the Fruit of the Spirit. I am going to read to you from the Bible, alright. You ready? If you don’t have a copy of this book I suggest you get one.
But the Fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such things there is no law. Galatians 5:22
What that means is nothing works against the gifts of the Spirit, the Fruit of the Spirit. Nothing works against the nature of God. Nothing works against the Fruit of the Spirit.
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. I Corinthians 13:1-8a
All the introverts in the room were having pictures of God right there because that is what we do best. We think our way into scripture. We think our way into the Word of God. We think our way into worship. Extroverts just rejoice that all those things are absolutely true and wonderful – I am involved in all that, and I am part of all that. And, you know what, when I read those things there is going to come a time when I read those things and I will be thinking about me, because there will be change from glory into glory. The more we become like Jesus, the more scriptures like this resonate in us, because what resonates is our own experience encountering scriptures in a very different way.
Everything that works for us, automatically works against the devil.
When you do not know God all that well, then you have to think your way through things like that. When you are experiencing God, your spirit resonates with scripture in a very, very different way. It is like your heart is being played like a harp, and you feel the tug – you feel the vibration of scripture affecting you because you know, that you know, that you know, that this is true. It is the nature of God that sets us free from the works of the enemy. Everything that works for us, I love this thought, everything that works for us automatically works against the devil.
The Fruit of the Spirit is an encounter with God that leads us into an ongoing experience which opens us up to the fullness of who God is for us, and becomes in itself the lifestyle that He takes great pleasure in. What God offers us is His unchanging Self, and that is one of the things I absolutely adore about the Lord. He never changes. You always know where you are with God because He never changes. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. I am the Lord, I change not.
He is the same towards you on your worst day as He is on your best. He does not change; He has no plans to change, because He likes who He is. He likes the way that He is.
I remember a time in the early days of my walk with the Lord when I was not as sanctified as perhaps I am now, and there were some areas in my life where I was rebellious and I knew some of the things I was doing was wrong, but I did them anyway. God kept on blessing me like normal, and kept on loving me like normal and kept on talking to me like He normally did. I was not expecting that. I was expecting God to be like all the other human beings I have ever met, and if I disappointed them, they would let me know. He never did. He carried on as though nothing had happened. This is a long time before I realized that when God says something is dead, He means it is dead.
When my old man was on the tree, it is dead to God. It took me a while to realize that. I was expecting God to chastise me for my behavior, but He carried on doing the same things. I did not quite know what to do with myself so I chose to be angry with Him – like that was going to work. The Lord said to me, “So what are you getting angry about?” “Well, You know that I am rebelling. You know that I am being disobedient, and You are blessing me anyway. So what is the deal?” And He says, “Graham, this is who I am, live with it.”
You know what; I found that I could not. I could not live with it. It broke my heart that God kept on loving me and pouring out His grace upon me. It broke something in me that I had not realized until then, because God had never spoken to me about it. I had not realized that in the kind intention of His will that is exactly what He was up to. He was breaking something in me, but using kindness, using goodness. He was overcoming my stupidity or my evil with good. He was breaking something in me with kindness, with patience, with faithfulness. He was being faithful to me when I was not to Him, and it broke my heart.
I remember standing there with tears pouring down my cheeks, and saying, “Lord, I cannot handle Your goodness.” And true to form, He just totally laughed at me. He laughed at me; He was not laughing with me, He was laughing at me. He was saying, “I know. I know. It is good that you are crying; does that feel good?” “You know it feels awful.” “It looks good to Me. Son, something is breaking in you. It is a piece of hardness in your soul that is just coming away, being dissolved.”
I started to understand some things about the nature of God – that He is not like any other human being I have ever met. And the reason for that, He is not human. He is divine. He is altogether different. And so therefore for me what that meant was I should never try to make God in my image. I never try to make Him like all the people who have ever disappointed me or betrayed me. That He is altogether different. I need to be with Him in a different way than I have ever been with anybody else in my whole life.
That was a journey. That was a revelation to me. That was a wake-up call that I have to walk with God differently than I have ever walked with anybody else, ever. Then I realized that as I began to walk with God differently, I could walk with other people differently.
So my walk began to change from one of imperfection, moving towards a place where I wanted to be mature in my relationships and express my heart to people in the way that God expressed His heart to me. That has been my journey for quite a while, realizing that God offers us His unchanging self.
The Fruit of the Spirit gives us confidence in His relationship with us. As we commit ourselves to practicing the Fruit of the Spirit, what is happening is, we are sowing into His character and reaping back from His favor.
Love
Nothing can separate us from the love of God. The Fruit of the Spirit is where we learn to abide in His nature. The Fruit of the Spirit is the power of God to enable us to become Christ like. So we are learning love, and love is an exclusive affection. You do not use love generally for everyone. There is a point of exclusivity in love where you exclusively love every individual differently according to where they are, according to their journey. It is an exclusive love. None of us can say, “Well, I love everyone.” I mean that might be generally true, but love is a specific act. It is never a general thing.
So you have to love people exclusively in the area or in the place where they are. You have to love them in a particular and peculiar way. You have to find a specific love for that person in their specific situation. And even if that person is irritating you, then there is an even more particular way that you should love them. And finding that way, to love someone individually and exclusively, is really joyful.
Love means cherishing, it means treasuring.
So what is it that we cherish in people? What is it that we treasure in people? Those are the things we should be talking about in love. Those are the things that God talks about to us in love. When we prophesy, we prophesy out of some of the nature of God. Love is tangible favor and goodness in someone’s life. It is demonstrating loving kindness. It is regarding someone with benevolence.
I have been in the prophetic ministry for, this is my forty-first year. In that time I have had well over 50,000 really horrendous pieces of hate mail. You know, I get average hate mail as well. This is something like a little more poisonous. It has kind of slackened off recently. I kind of miss it.
In the early days of prophetic ministry – because I was the first person in British church history to do a school of prophecy – and it is not going to make some people happy when you are the first at anything – so I got thousands of pieces of hate mail. I used to read them and just get mad – get angry before the Lord. I could never figure out the whole thing of “be angry, but do not sin.” I never knew where the line was, it kept moving on me.
One guy sent me a particularly horrendous letter cursing my family and my children. For several days I was composing letters in my head, my heart, my liver, my spleen, and typical Lord, He shows up and says, “What are you doing, Graham?” I said, “Well, nothing much.” He said, “It does not feel like nothing much. What are you doing?” I said, “Lord, I am trying to write a letter to this guy. I mean, have You read this thing?”
And the Lord said, “Yes, I was watching over his shoulder as he was writing it.” “And you did not stop him?” “No.” “Okay. We will talk about that later when I am in a better mood.”
And Lord says, “Well, you know that letter that you are composing?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Please do not send it. It is going to hurt you if you send it. This is what I want you to do; I want you to give the letter to Me. I want you to sit down, and I want you to ask Me how I see him. And I want you to write that down and send it to him.” I said, “You are kidding, right? This is a game, right? I do not like this game.” “Will you do it for Me?” “Ah, no.”
He just laughed and said, “No, seriously, would you do it for Me?” I said, “Seriously, Lord, no.” He said, “Brilliant. That is funny. Would you do it for Me?” I am thinking, “I know He is relentless; we could be here all year.” So in the end I said, “Okay then.”
So I sat down and I wrote him the best blessing I could possibly give him. I just wrote to him and said, “Dear so and so, thank you for the letter.” That is all I said. “Hey, I was praying about you today, and the Lord showed me this.” And I wrote something absolutely amazing. I signed it and I sent it. I never heard anything back, but the effect on me was huge.
I learned something else about the Fruit of the Spirit. I learned something else about the nature of God. We are never justified in doing anything nasty. We are only justified in the beauty of God.
Love takes delight in people. Love causes people to feel that they are the Beloved.
Joy
Joy is this intense gladness. It is a delight. We are manifesting delight when we are being joyful. It is not like, “Well Lord, I am joyful.” You cannot be joyful and talk like Eeyore. (Eeyore is a character in Winnie the Pooh children’s books. He is always downcast and sad.) It just does not really work.
You have to step into joy, you know, so it is a delight. It is a rejoicing over someone or over something. It is elation. It is having a sense of wonder. It is taking pleasure in something. It is being jubilant, tearful, and triumphant, having a sense of celebration, looking around and taking the pleasure in something – seeing the joy in something.
Peace
Peace is a state of being quiet. It is about being calm and at rest. It is a freedom from disturbance. It is ease of mind – a stillness. It is being undisturbed and untroubled, content, composed, free from strife, peace – and all of those are encounters and experiences that make us Christ like.
Patience/Longsuffering
Being patient is the quality of being able to persevere under pressure with a good heart and mind. It means endurance without complaints. Patience is not easily provoked, having a calm expectation, being even-tempered, having a quiet persistence in the nature of God. Patience.
Ever wonder why there has never been a conference on patience? No one would go. “I am not going to learn that for a weekend.” I am not sure if I would go even if I was speaking.
Kindness
Kindness. It means to be considerate, to be thoughtful, compassionate, generous, loving, showing superior qualities of grace.
Goodness
Goodness means looking after someone’s welfare, acting with honor, being favorable, giving a deliberate blessing to someone, lifting somebody up, giving someone a divine advantage.
Faithfulness
Faithfulness means to be consistent, unceasing, firm in your promise, loyal, reliable, unwavering, keeping your words, being trustworthy.
Gentleness
Gentleness is about having a powerful humility, learning that meekness is not weakness, it is strength under control, being merciful, compassionate, sweet spirited, dove-like, tender hearted, overcoming.
Self-control
Self-control is about restraint, having a good frame of mind and heart, being discreet, believing the best, being composed and disciplined, even-tempered, having a moderating influence on people in situations.
These are all the attributes that God regularly practices in His relationship with us. If you want to know what God is like, play back that part of the message. He loves to be all those things to you. No, seriously. He loves to be all those things to you. Becoming like Jesus means that we love to be all those things to everyone regardless of who they are, regardless of what they are doing, regardless of whether they are with us or against us, regardless of whether they are friends or enemies. We treat everyone in the way that God treats us.
We love to treat people well. There is something healing about all of that for us. When you practice those things, you find yourself changing and adjusting to the nature of God.
Everything the enemy seeks to bring against us,
we can bring against him by moving in the opposite spirit.
If everything that works for us also works against the enemy, how does the Fruit of the Spirit affect the enemy? How does the Fruit of the Spirit work in our relationship with God and how does it work in warfare?
I think the Fruit of the Spirit is a more powerful weapon against the enemy than the Gifts of the Spirit.
There is a place set aside for us where we can make the enemy tired and weary. Did you ever think about that? I think about it all the time. When I am tired and weary, I want to push that on to the enemy. That is when joy and rejoicing mean something. Joy gives you energy.
Everything the enemy seeks to bring against us, we can bring against him by moving in the opposite spirit of what is coming against us.
When you move in a negative emotion or thought, you empower the enemy against yourself.
One of the principles of warfare is that opposition attaches to what you do not remove. By moving in the Fruit of the Spirit, you can seriously affect the enemy and release yourself into power at the same time. Think of it this way, you can exhaust the enemy by living in love. You can depress him with your joy. You can weary him with your peace. You can demoralize him with your patience. You can discourage him with your kindness. You can overcome him with goodness. You can debilitate him with your faithfulness. You can trouble him with your gentleness, dismay him with your self-control, dishearten him with your faith, weaken him by using mercy, intimidate him by your intimacy, devastate him with grace, paralyze him with mercy, cripple him with your humility. Isn’t that a brilliant way of thinking?
Everything that works for you works against the enemy.
But here’s the thing, the other side of that coin is also true. He does not want you walking in love so he plans to exhaust you. He wants to depress you so you will not be joyful, weary you so you cannot find peace, demoralize you so that you do not have any patience to stand, discourage you from being kind, and overcome your goodness because he prefers evil. He wants to debilitate you so that you are not faithful, trouble you so that you are not gentle, dismay you so that you have no self-control, and you become just like him, railing against things, being angry at things, and judging things. He wants to dishearten you so that you do not have any faith, weaken you so that you do not show mercy, intimidate you so that you lose the ability to worship, devastate you so that you never move in grace. He wants you to justify your anger, because if you are justifying your anger, you have no plans to be gracious. He wants to paralyze you because he detests mercy. He wants to cripple your integrity so that you never display humility.
around us so that we can
practice the Fruit of the Spirit.
Everything that God gives you works against the enemy; but the enemy has a vested interest in stopping you from becoming all those things. And that is the nature of the war that we face. The answer to that warfare is the nature of God. It is being made in the image of God, and you are going to get opportunities day in day out, week in week out, month in month out to express the nature of God.
Let me say again what I said earlier today. It is really hard to become Christ like when everything is going well. But on the days when things are going badly, God gives you a double portion on those days. He gives you something that totally ruins the enemy’s day, it disarms him, and it defeats him.
We cannot continue to surrender our identity to negative emotions.
So what Fruit of the Spirit is God developing in you at this time?
Growing Grace
Usually you will find that you come into situations where God may say over these next few months, “I want to develop this particular Fruit of the Spirit in you.” I remember the Lord talking to me about His kindness. He said, “Graham, I want to teach you about kindness.” So I said, “What does that mean? How do I partake of that; how do I partner with that?” He said, “Every single day for the next time frame – He would not tell me how long it was going to be – every person, every situation that comes, I want you to express the kindness of God.” Then He made sure that there were enough horrible people coming into my life because He wanted to give me an upgrade really quick and those people will just about do it.
Grace-growers help you grow in grace. That is their job. Difficult people are your grace-growers. God sends difficult people around us so that we can practice the Fruit of the Spirit. It is great to love your friends, but they are your friends. You have to have a few enemies. You have to have a few idiots. You have to have some people that you would cheerfully garrote – strangle – and FEDEX to Jesus. You have to have those people in your life because they are a short cut into something wonderful in the nature of God.
So He began teaching me about kindness and when God does something, He does it relentlessly. He is relentless about everything. That means He never quits, He never gives up. If He says He is going to do something, He is going to do it no matter how you are engaging with it or not. He will still do it.
So I met with Him every single day, and now here we are 16, 17 years later, and this is my testimony. God is the kindest person I have ever met in my entire life. There has not been a day in 16 years plus when He has not said something or done something in my life that was not rooted in kindness. Until you get to the place where you are so overwhelmed – it is like kindness is in all the pores of your skin. You feel saturated by it. You feel marinated in it. Your heart and your mind are in sync with God in a way that you were not ever before.
I remember when He said, “Graham, I want to teach you about resting.” All I know is the Prince of Peace came in one day and never left. The Lord has told me how to practice my peace every single day. I cannot remember the last time I was anxious about anything. I do not know, 12, 13, 14 years ago maybe. I lose count. I should be anxious about it, I suppose. I cannot be bothered, really.
God wants to give you signature times when He is teaching you a particular Fruit of the Spirit. So my question I guess is, what particular Fruit of the Spirit does God want to develop in you right now? That will be a good question to ask, because then all your circumstances are about cultivating the Fruit of His character and the Fruit of His nature and the Fruit of His Spirit.
In your life experience, there is no law that can work against the Fruit of the Spirit. The enemy is defeated when you practice the Fruit of the Spirit. You are saved, sanctified, and justified quicker when you practice the Fruit of the Spirit on people around you.
The thing I love about this is that when you read through scripture you understand that God has allocated a particular Fruit of the Spirit to all the negative circumstances of life. This is life in the Spirit. God will never have a negative in your life by itself. He will allocate a particular Fruit of the Spirit to a particular negative emotion.
In Matthew 5:44 Jesus said,
Love your enemies. Bless those that persecute you.
So in times of persecution and enmity, God has allocated love for you to use on those people. That is what it means.
Hebrews 10:24 says,
Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good works.
Love is something you think about. It is something you talk about and it is something you do every single day. There needs to be tangible expression of you loving someone. Do not get out of the habit of loving someone every day, get in the habit.
Let me read you this from Romans 12:20,
If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink. For in so doing, you will heap burning coals on his head.
What does that mean? It means retribution by kindness. It means turning the heart of an enemy to repentance by repaying him with kindness for the wrong he has done and releasing him from the wrong.
I worked in India for 11 almost 12 years, up and down the country. I love kids, so I kind of collect kids everywhere. I get involved with churches and leaders and their families. There is one particular girl who I had known since she was about 2 years old. When she is 13 years old, she gets raped by four men. As the fourth man is getting up from her, she notices that one side of his face is totally scarred. She reaches out with her hand, touches his cheek and says, “Be healed in Jesus name,” and he is instantly healed! That is what we are talking about.
We are talking about you becoming as extraordinary as God. We are talking about amazing love. We are talking about incredible kindness. We are talking about a fullness of love and a fullness of kindness that is not found in this world in quite that way. It comes to us from a different domain. It comes to us from a different Spirit, living on the inside of us.
It is so easy to get angry. Even an idiot can do it. It does not prove anything and it certainly does not manifest anything of the nature of God.
Jesus said about joy in John 16:33, He said, Hey,
in the world you are going to have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.
What is He saying? “When tribulation comes, I have allocated joy for you on that day.” All we ever do is get occupied with the tribulation, when the reality is, there is a different provision there. What if you could get preoccupied with joy so that you became cheerful? If it was not possible, He would not have said it. We are so marinated in the world around us that we respond negatively to negative circumstances. We hone in on the negativity, the tribulation, we talk about it. This is bad, and that is bad, and this is terrible. We never imagined that God has actually allocated joy for days of trouble.
What if there was a double portion of joy? What if the Lord is saying do not major on that, focus on this? If you focus on this, you will find a way through that trial that will utterly amaze you.
All your training is joyful!
James put it this way in James 1:2,
Count it all joy when you fall into different kinds of circumstances and fiery trials and everything else.
Find the joy because joy is present. A Fruit of the Spirit is present in every negative circumstance. You have to find it. It means you have to look for it. That is why it is important that we stop the moaning, the whining, the complaining, the pity parties, and that we start actively looking for the Presence of God.
You know, we say, “Well, I am pursuing the Presence of God.” Well, the Presence of God is the Fruit of the Spirit. So when you know that God has allocated joy on days of trouble, if you are pursuing the Presence of God, then you are pursuing the joy and not the trouble. Jesus said, “My peace I give you. I am not giving it to you as the world gives, but My peace I give you.” What He is saying is, “I am allocating peace to your life. I have so much peace and I am making sure that you get a regular benefit of peace in your life. I am giving you peace in all adverse situations so that you will not worry, so that you will not be fearful, so that you will not be anxious, so that you will not panic, you will be in peace instead. I am allocating peace.” That is what He means when He says, “I give you peace.” He is saying, “This is your allocation. I’m allocating peace to you right now.”
If you are going to be a GameChanger, you need to receive from God, because if you do not, you will receive from the world around you. If you do not receive from God the Fruit of the Spirit that you need in that particular situation, you will default to a negative emotion. Being a GameChanger means that you understand why He is present in every situation.
May the Lord of Peace Himself continually grant you peace in every circumstance. 2 Thessalonians 3:16
In every difficult person or situation, there is a Fruit of the Spirit available
to you that makes you turn that situation into something wonderful.
So what if peace is constantly available 24/7? Now what are you going to do? Really? What are you going to do?
At some point you have to reach the tipping point, which is where you forget to worry. You forget to be anxious, and then later on you realize that you are so far from worry, you cannot even remember what it used to feel like. You are living in peace.
Let me read you something from Colossians chapter 1:11
That you be strengthened with all power according to His glorious might for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience joyously.
Only God would put patience and joy next to each other in your circumstance. What He does not want is you kind of like frantically being patient. You know? I am patient. I am patient. I have not blown my top yet. I am patient.
May the God who gives patience – the God who allocates patience, and encouragement. Romans 15:5
There it is again. Patience rarely comes by itself. It always comes accompanied. It is like patience is always friends with everybody. You know? It is friends with joy. It is friends with encouragement. May the God who gives patience and encouragement grant you to be of the same mind. God has allocated patience to us. The sign that patience is available is that person that gets right up your nose, you know that one? The one that gets right up your nose, that person is here in your office.
There is a guy that years ago I would have said, I am afflicted by him; but that is a reverse truth, so I am not having it. There is a guy that is in my life, and he is a delight to me, because I get to practice patience on him every time I meet him. He is obnoxious, he is arrogant, he is full of himself, and he is there to correct me in everything. He wants to be my mentor and he is utterly convinced that God has put him in my life to mentor me, and he is probably partially right, because he is mentoring me in patience. That was not what he had in mind, but that is exactly what is happening.
Every time I go into this particular gathering, he is going to be there. He is going to make a bee line for me. He is going to tell me his latest revelation. He is going to tell me why he is such a better speaker than I am, blah, blah, blah, and I stand there allocating patience with encouragement. So, for me, it is just a simple matter. I go into that meeting and I allocate patience to him because I can do that. Right?
I can allocate patience. Why? Because one of the Fruits of the Spirit is self-control. What that means is that I can control the urge to throttle him. Self-control means I have the negativity stuff under lock and key, and I am not bothered about that, because I have no intention to use those things. My intention is, dude you are here, I am so going to practice my patience on you. And in the end, that is what it is about. I am totally going to outlast him. I am going to be the last man standing, patiently. It is turning out to be an amazing opportunity because I am getting to grow like crazy in patience.
to the atmosphere,
positively or negatively.
When we are in situations, you know, you need to be allocating a Fruit of the Spirit to that situation or to that person. So think about the people right now that you are finding it difficult with. What Fruit of the Spirit do you need to allocate to that relationship? Then move in that Fruit of the Spirit. Do not do anything outside of that Fruit of the Spirit. Practice the Fruit of the Spirit, because this is where you become Christ like.
Some situations require joyfulness; count it all joy, so you have to plan your joy. You have to allocate joy to that situation.
Here is the thing, the Fruit of the Spirit is in you and self-control means you get to control how you use that Fruit. So you get to allocate it, okay? Alright, I am allocating this to you. I am allocating peace in that situation. What does that mean? I am looking for peace, I am expecting peace, I will be in peace, I will think in peace, I will speak in peace, I will be peaceful, that is my intention. I am allocating peace to this situation.
In my office when we will practice this whole thing – that there are no problems in Heaven. I was talking about it to Jenny one day. Jenny is my personal assistant. She comes into my office and says, “We have an exciting possibility!” It was so funny, but immediately for me, it put our situation from here right to here. She was not joking; well, she might have been, but she did not look like she was joking. She said, “No! We have an exciting possibility.”
I do not like people coming into my office in anxiety, in worry, or in fear. Why? Because we are believers and that is illegal behavior. Some people come in and they have this thing going on and you know they are all anxious and what are we going to do and oh my goodness. And it is like, “Whoa, time out. You need to leave my office right now because you should not be in my office in that state. You need to leave my office, go and sit at your desk. Allocate a Fruit of the Spirit to come into my office with, and then come back when you are ready.”
Why? Because I do not want to deal with your anxiety, thank you. You are supposed to be dealing with it. So I want you to come back here in peace or in joy or something. I am not expecting you to come back into my office with anxiety, with fear, with panic or anything else. Get a hold of yourself.
When we were in Vacaville, a guy came into my office and he was like, you know, crazy worried about something. I just looked at him and said, “You are not Jesus! Get out!” He looked at me, he went, “What?” I said, “Dude, you are not Jesus to me, get out.” He said, “What does that even mean?” I said, “It means only Jesus comes in my office. You are coming in with anxiety and all this kind of stuff. Get out. Get out; come back in when you are in your right mind.”
What am I doing? I am saying, “You know what, that is not acceptable.” That is not acceptable. We should never be in a situation where we think that worry, anxiety, and fear are acceptable or that they are justified – not when you have the most powerful Person in the universe living on the inside of you. It is not acceptable. Sorry, but no. I am not having it. So, I do not want you – I am in my office practicing the Presence of God, and you are bringing this stuff? No thank you. Appreciate it, but no. This is where the rubber hits the road, right?
We have to think about this stuff, because here is the thing, we are always contributing to the atmosphere, positively or negatively. Now in our offices or in our families in our homes, we should be thinking about what kind of atmosphere do we want in our place of work or in our home. All of us are contributing to the atmosphere. That means we all make certain things illegal so we do not do it.
We realize that anyone that comes in my office has to come in in one of the Fruits of the Spirit, because I am just going to send you straight back out if you do not. Why? Because we are all contributing to the atmosphere. It is really important that you see yourself as a contribution to the emotional state of the home or the place where you actually are at any given point in time. What is your contribution?
So as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other. Whoever has a complaint against anyone, just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. Put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility and gentleness and patience. Colossians 3:12-13
While we have opportunity, let us do good to all men especially to those in the household of faith. Galatians 6:10
We are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand so that we could walk in them. Ephesians 2:10
Think about that for a minute. God has already worked on a lot of your scenarios and prepared things beforehand so that you could walk into them. What does that mean? He has allocated certain resources to every one of your situations. He has allocated good works. He has allocated His Presence. He has allocated the Fruit of the Spirit to your situations beforehand. He is ready and prepared for everything; the question is, are we?
This is how a GameChanger thinks and feels and moves through their day. We think about the atmosphere that we are creating and we contribute to it. I know that my walking in a room can raise the level of peace without me even saying anything. I can raise the level of faith just by being in the room. Why? Because I am practicing that lifestyle. I do not expect to be a negative contribution.
I am not saying I am perfect in these things, but I am practicing because I want to be a GameChanger and GameChangers think about the environment in which they live, and the atmosphere that they are contributing to. You are a GameChanger; change the atmosphere.
Every situation is designed to make you Christ-like.
If you do not like the atmosphere in your house, you change it. If you do not like the atmosphere in your place of work, you change it. One person walking with God is always in the majority. You change it. Do not moan about it; do not complain about it, change it. Speak into it. Jesus said, Speak to people the way that you would want them to speak to you.
We are learning the Fruit of the Spirit. We are learning gentleness. We are learning faithfulness. The thing that fascinates me is the faithfulness of God. Two of my favorite scriptures on this are:
If we are faithless yet He abides faithful for He cannot deny Himself. 2 Timothy 2:13
That is the crux of the matter, really, when it comes to the Fruit of the Spirit. You do not want to deny the Presence of God. You cannot say, “Well, I am pursuing the Presence of God” and yet deny God the opportunity to be beautiful in a difficult circumstance.
We are getting to a place where we cannot deny who we are. We are GameChangers. When you understand your identity as a GameChanger, then you are in it 24/7, because you cannot do this gig part time. It is a lifestyle, and we are practicing it. We do not want any luxuries of worry, and lack of peace, and anxiety, and panic, and fear. God always put a Fruit of the Spirit next to a negative. So, perfect love casts out fear. See, you never deal with fear. If someone is fearful, the worst thing you can do is minister to the fear. You need to minister perfect love because perfect love will cast it out. If you minister to their fear, you will entrench it, and you will establish it in a deeper way, because whatever you focus on, you give life to.
Crash Course
You know what is happening right now? You are getting a crash course in being brilliant. You are getting a crash course in being amazing. You’re getting a crash course in terms of how you can change the atmosphere all around you – how you can actually prosper in every single relationship you have or even the non-relationships you can prosper by. Everything is useful to you.
If you do not have that philosophy about walking with God, that everything works together for your good, then things will definitely work against you, and they will work against you well. You either use situations or you get used by them. Practicing the Fruit of the Spirit puts you ahead of the game, and you are a GameChanger!
You need to be in that place. You need to be the one leading in something. You need to be the one that is the visual aid of what God is doing in that situation. You cannot say things like, “he makes me angry.” That is not your confession any more. Your confession is, “he makes me peaceful. When he gets angry, I get peaceful. When he is this, I am patient. When she is that, I am joyful.” You have to have your own response.
We don’t regulate our life by what people are doing against us;
we take charge of the circumstances because of what God is releasing in us.
You cannot have your response dictated to you by the world around you. You have to receive it from the Kingdom that is within you. You have got an internal atmosphere in the Presence of God that you need to let out into the space around you so that people get touched by it – people get affected by it.
Love your enemies, and do good, and lend expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be proven to be sons of the Most High, for He Himself is kind to ungrateful men. Actually, He says, He is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Luke 6:35
Let me read you this last piece of scripture and then we will find a place to land this plane.
Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he who lacks these qualities is blind or short-sighted, having forgotten his purification from his former sins. Therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choosing you; for as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble. 2 Peter 1:5-10
This is the essence of game changing right here. You are practicing a lifestyle that causes grief to the enemy and makes sure that you never stumble once in your journey.
Accountability is not about calling people out on their behavior,
it’s about calling them up to their identity.
And you notice all the Fruits of the Spirit – they pile up on each other. You can get to a place where you can be expressing three or four of them in the same situation or with the same person. What happens is you become secure in who you are, and in the confidence of who God is for you. That allows you to be untouched by their behavior. Actually it provokes you to be something in Christ so that you can touch them, but you are not being touched by them in any negative way. It puts you in charge of the situation.
The Fruit of the Spirit is brilliant for dealing with all the difficulties of life – difficult people, difficult circumstances. This is the truth, you get to allocate the Fruit of the Spirit that you want to give or bring into that person’s life. If they come attacking you, you can allocate a Fruit of the Spirit so you can deal with it.
What happens is when you allocate that Fruit, you know, it is like, well this guy that I am practicing patience with right now, it is not that I am trying to stop myself, you know, I know what it is going to be like. You meet his personality like from 30 yards away. It is coming off him in waves as he is striding towards you.
I am not trying to get to a point where I am deflecting what he is doing – I am not at all concerned about what he is doing – I am concerned with who I am becoming in that moment. So my part is, “Thank You Father for patience. I am so going to be patient with him. I allocate patience to him in the name of Jesus.” When he comes, all I am thinking is patience, patience, patience.
When you feel yourself getting tense, move in patience. Do not try and fight the tension. Give in to peace and patience. “Thank You, Lord, that I’m patient.” You do not have to bite back. He will say something horrible just to try and get a rise out of me, but I am not going there. I just go, “Uh, really?” I am allocating patience. Then I want to be able to say something to him that just slips under his guard and touches his heart. So I can say things to him – I can say some things to him now that I like about him and I genuinely do like those things. You know, he is angry, but he is angry because he is a deliverer and he does not know it. What you are angry about is a clue to what you are supposed to deliver.
Moses got angry with an Egyptian overseer for beating a Hebrew slave. At that time Moses had no idea that the reason he was angry is because he was a deliverer in the making.
When the guy in my office starts telling me that he is angry about the church all the time, I am saying to him, “The reason you are angry is because you are a deliverer. The church does not need your anger. It needs that deliverance. How are you going to manifest that? You have to manifest it in peace.” “I cannot be at peace about…!” “Yeah, but, this is who you are, man. You are a deliver. That is why you are angry. It is a clue. You are a deliverer – be a deliverer. Do not kill them.” You do not deliver people by killing them because I am thinking if it was true, I would have killed him weeks ago.
Your emotions are often times a clue to your identity and calling. What you grieve over is what you want to redeem – what you want to see redeemed. Jesus grieved over, He wept over, Jerusalem as He wanted to redeem it. So there are clues in our negative makeup that tell us something of who we are and what God has called us to.
You are a GameChanger and this game really matters. Not letting people get away with their negativity does not mean you call them out on it, it means you call them up from it. “Hey, you do not need to be doing that. You can be living in the Fruit of the Spirit. What Fruit of the Spirit would you want to choose right now?”
It is a question, but it puts them on the back foot in terms of their own negativity. It is a habit, stop them in it. “Why are you manifesting worry when you could be manifesting peace? What’s going on? You make a wrong choice or something? Why don’t you turn around three times, jump in the air, smell roses and talk to me? You know, break the state that you are in, and let us think about peace right now. You need peace not anxiety. And thank you, but I do not need anxiety in my life. I could always use a bit more peace. How about making a contribution?” It is a conversation.
Here is the thing, you only have to have that conversation with someone three or four times and they are going to get the message. “You cannot come into my space with that attitude, because I am not standing for it. I do not want it. I am not standing for it because I think you are better.” This is the only way that any of us ever really gets changed – someone lovingly confronts us with who we are supposed to be. We do not confront each other on what we are not; we confront each other with, “Hey, this is you, right? This is who you want to be?” Yeah, we call people up; we do not call people out. It is really important that we call people something, right? What are you calling the people around you?
What if you, as a GameChanger, could take control of your circumstances by allocating a Fruit of the Spirit to someone or to a situation? Just the allocation of that Fruit means that self-control evolves in you and grows up a little more. Self-control is saying, “No, I am not giving place to this, this is what I want.” So you are the traffic police in your own situation. You are saying no to this, and you are saying yes to this. Yes? Self-control says none of that, all of that. Yes? So you are directing traffic emotionally around your circumstances.
Self-control puts you in control in a positive way. You control the atmosphere where you live, so control it. Speak into it. Go after the atmosphere that you want around your life and do not let anything come in that will prevent that from happening. Do not let the atmosphere or the environment around your life be ruined by default. Take charge of it.
GameChanger changes the game. Change the game, guys. Change your own game. Understand that for every negative thing God has allocated a Fruit of the Spirit. You can do the same because it is a part of your identity and it is a part of your allocation in the Spirit. It is a part of your upgrade. It is a part of your inheritance.
The Fruits of the Spirit are available to you right now, all of them. Learning to step into those things is the business end of being made in the image of Jesus.
You are awfully quiet. You understand right now how much God is messing with you – in a loving way? You are all having those “OMG, I hate this moment. I want to shoot that English dude, FedEx him to Jesus, talk to me about controlling my life.” This is it, though.
What if this is first-stage warfare? The devil is the prince of the power of the air – he lives in the atmosphere. We have to take him out of our atmosphere and we do that with the Fruit of the Spirit.
Let’s pray. What you are learning is that you are so much more beautiful than you realize. You are so much more powerful than you imagined. The real power in your circumstances is only a finger touch of self-control away.
What if you are more in control of things than you ever thought?
What if it is just the constant joyful practice of the Fruit of the Spirit that leads you out of all those dark places into the light? What if that light could shine more and more and more gloriously every day? What if you could fill your home with light, fill your business or place of work with light, or your church with light? What if you could take that light with you everywhere – that everywhere people meet you they meet something of the nature of Jesus in you?
What if you could absolutely adore practicing His nature? What if it could become the best game in town that changes everything?
You are a GameChanger. This is where we change the atmosphere. The atmosphere in our Lighthouses needs to change. The atmosphere, the environment in our regions, they need to change. In our offices, the atmosphere needs to change; in the head office it needs to change – that we see ourselves as a contribution to this environment, and we are deliberately pursuing the Presence of God and creating the atmosphere of Heaven here on earth.
Father, I thank You. Here is the thing. If you are understanding that the Lord right now is nose-to-nose with you, and He is looking right into your eyes and he is smiling and winking at you saying, “How about it? You want to work with Me, or do you want to keep working against Me?” What are you going to say right now? You can say it by standing up.
What we are saying by standing up is, “This is my intention. I intend to put this area right. I intend to get started today. I intend every day to think about this atmosphere and be asking the Lord questions about family, friends, neighbors, work colleagues, enemies – nobody is safe from a blessing, right? Nobody is safe from the Fruit of the Spirit. The Fruit of the Spirit – nothing works against it so we need to be thinking deliberately, “Lord, what Fruit of the Spirit should I allocate to this person or that situation?” Then you are off and running and you are learning how to be consistent in those things. What will happen around you is, you will consistently start to change the atmosphere within, and the atmosphere without.
So, Father, here we are and we are standing because we are saying to You, “I want to change this game in my life. I realize that I have lost a lot of games in this area. I have had lots of – if I was a baseball franchise, I would be having losing seasons every year – but I want to have a winning season in my home, in my place of work, in my neighborhood, in my church – I want to have a winning season. I want to change my internal game. I want to say, Lord, that I am not available to negative emotions. I realize that You have planted a Fruit of the Spirit next to all of them and I have the power to choose.
Lord, I am choosing right now to partner with the Holy Spirit, to partner with Him in the Fruit of the nature of God, so that I have the joyful responsibility to allocate the Fruit to any person or any situation I choose, to live in that space with them until my space, my allocation changes me, and changes them.
Lord, we commit to You to changing the game emotionally in our own lives. We commit to moving in the Presence of God in every relationship that exists around us. We commit, Lord, to joyfully establishing Your persona in every situation and every relationship we are a part of until the atmosphere changes, until the environment has been upgraded. Then we are going to maintain that, so that every person, every relationship we have, becomes a place of blessing, becomes a place of fruitfulness.
In the name of Jesus, Father, we want to say to You, “I commit to changing the game in the emotional state of my life. I commit to being a GameChanger and to bringing the Fruit of the Spirit to every single person and every situation that I meet, so that everything becomes about me hosting the Presence of God not just pursuing it. We commit to that, Father, for Jesus’ sake, because He deserves to be represented by a people like that. We ask it in His name.”
Amen.
