What will be said of you at your funeral? A sobering question, no doubt. However, to a person, we would hope to be remembered as loving, joyful, kind, generous, and faithful. We would also prefer not to leave our mark as malicious, envious, greedy, or even overly anxious. Best-selling author, David Brooks, often discusses two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones talked about at your funeral. We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. Yet we often spend more time developing the skills and strategies we need for career success than we do those character qualities that would lead to a fruitful and flourishing life. 

Brooks suggests that the more time we spend on building an external career, the more we forget how to build inner character. He writes, “If you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self” (The Moral Bucket List, New York Times, 2015).

Because dignity and intrinsic worth have been bestowed upon us and vested in us as human beings who are created by a loving and powerful God, human history is replete with an exploration of ethics and virtue. From Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hume to Taylor Swift and Beyonce, we have sketched our notions of what a “Good Life” might look like. Christian scriptures and church tradition give us helpful frameworks for this pursuit as well.

The Apostle Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament in the form of letters to young churches, has been called the first Christian Ethicist. Paul’s deeply religious background, experience living in the midst of the Roman Empire, and ultimately, his radical conversion at the feet of the risen Christ, gave him eyes to see the ways we might try to construct and then live out our lives. In the Book of Galatians, Paul unpacks three categories or ways to live a life:

• Living in the Flesh
• Living under the Law
• Living by the Spirit

Because life is full of takes, twists, and turns, we may traipse in and out of these three ways of living. However, if we were to measure our life on balance (and evaluate it honestly!), then we’ll recognize our tendency is to remain on one of these roads. This is the path where we forge our deepest motivations and our truest identity. 

Paul’s contention is that a life lived in the flesh is a life ultimately resigned to empty futility, a life lived under the law is a life consigned to guilt and shame (or perhaps to arrogance if living this way comes with perceived success), but a life lived by the Spirit is a life that allows us the freedom to be who we really want to be. In other words, the Spirit grants us the opportunity to have our lives write the eulogy to which we aspire.

Paul loved the early Christians who populated the churches in Galatia. He loved them as a mother would love a child: “For whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (Gal 4:19). He had watched them become transformed by Christ, rescued from the languishing emptiness of living according to the flesh. He also defended these new followers of Jesus from those who were conscripting these young Christians back into Jewish notions of living under the law. Paul longed that Christian believers would be so filled with the Holy Spirit that Christ himself would actually be shaping their whole lives from the inside out. And this was his aim as he taught about the Fruit of the Spirit.

Over the next several weeks we will explore the varied aspects of this fruit. Our journey together will serve as an answer to the question: What does a Christian life look like? What Christians believe is essential. How Christians behave? Just as essential! In fact, in no uncertain terms, Paul insists in this letter that orthodoxy (what you believe) and orthopraxy (how you behave) are inextricably linked. And, the corpus of his work suggests that people will not pay much attention to what you believe unless they are compelled by how you behave. The axiom proves true: People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.

What is my hope and prayer for you as we work through this teaching series together? Simple: When someone asks, “What does a Christian look like?” In response, someone else will put you forward as an example!

As we explore the Fruit of the Spirit, we will attach each aspect of the Spirit’s fruit to a parable told by Jesus. The parables are carefully selected to put some behavioral flesh on the doctrinal bones. Some of the parables are positive examples of the fruit while others serve as cautionary tales. At the conclusion of this overview guide you will find the weekly topics and passages and a brief description of each aspect of the Spirit’s fruit. However, before you jump to the end, it seems helpful to briefly explore four topics in the effort to gain clarity as we embark together: (1) The Fruit of the Spirit, (2) Living by the Spirit, (3) Conflict, and (4) Freedom.