How do you know when you are NOT emotionally healthy?
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Monitoring the fruits of the spirit in our lives and see where we need to rest. I actually think it’s a practice to consider on where we need to dig even deeper to see what is lying underneath our emotions and behaviors.
Galatians 5:13-18 MSG says…
It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then? My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don’t you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?
Paul goes on to speak of what it looks like for FRUIT to exist in our lives. I love this version from The Passion Translation. But the fruit produced by the Holy Spirit within you is divine love in all its varied expressions:
joy that overflows,
peace that subdues,
patience that endures,
kindness in action,
a life full of virtue,
faith that prevails,
gentleness of heart,
and strength of spirit.
Never set the law above these qualities, for they are meant to be limitless.
Galatians 5: 25-26 in The Message goes on to say this…Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves (original language here is speaking of envy) with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original.
For me “bad fruit” looks like responding snappy and not gentle. It looks like being critical instead of kind to someone who thinks different than me. It is fear and anxiety instead of a peace that says “I trust you Lord”. When HOLY SPIRIT FRUIT is not being produced in my life there is a reason. It can be an alarm that says “I need rest” but oftentimes it is pointing to something deeper that I am meditating on that is producing “bad fruit” When the Fruits of the Spirit are not being produced in our lives that is the alarm to ask “what is at the root of these emotions and behaviors?” So let’s do a check in within ourselves. Let’s ask God to help us be aware of when the FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT is showing up a little rotten in our life.
Let’s Live Free & Stay Free!
Wildly Free Ministry 