A Gardener’s Guide to Spiritual Growth | Organic - Growing the Fruit of the Spirit

Hello everyone and thanks for tuning in to Trinity Sermons.

Here at Trinity, we're a church of ordinary people learning to love Jesus, live like Jesus

and lead others to Jesus, and we want to share the good news with you.

Today is Pentecost Sunday and we are beginning a brand new sermon series called Organic,

Fruit of the Spirit.

Today and for the next several weeks, we will be looking at the various fruits, as described

in Galatians 5, that we bear when the Holy Spirit is with us.

Thanks again for joining and we hope you enjoyed the message.

God bless.

I'm reading this morning from Galatians chapter 5, verses 16 to 25.

Galatians 5:16–25

So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives.

Then you won't be doing what your sinful nature craves.

The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants,

and the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires.

These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your

good intentions.

But when you are directed by the Spirit, you are not under obligation to the law of Moses.

When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear.

Sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling,

jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild

parties and other sins like these.

Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit

the kingdom of God.

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives, love, joy, peace, patience,

kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

There is no law against these things.

Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature

to his cross and crucified them there.

Since we are living by the Spirit, let us follow the Spirit's leading in every part

of our lives.

This is the word of the Lord.

Well, as we've already said, today is Pentecost Sunday.

And I hope you know what that means.

It means that today is a day of celebration.

We have so much to celebrate today.

And just in case you don't understand what we're celebrating, we're celebrating the fact

that the Holy Spirit has come into this world and come into our lives.

And that Spirit enables us to do things that we could never do without the Spirit's power

and become a kind of people that we could never become on our own strength.

And you might say, well, what kind of people is the Holy Spirit making us into?

And I'm glad you asked.

We just read it.

The fruit of the Spirit is...

You guys probably sang this as kids, as a song.

Let's just say them all together.

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

gentleness, and self-control.

See, this is what happens when the Spirit of Jesus gets a hold of your life and starts

to form you and starts to change you and transform you.

So if Jesus is in your life, this is what your life should look like, right?

This is what we're celebrating today.

Wonderful.

And I think actually, I might as well just save us all a lot of time and just end the

sermon right here and just say, okay, everybody, go and do this, right?

Go and be this, go and live this way.

Let's pray, end of sermon, right?

Nope, not right, not right.

Because if we are honest with ourselves and honest with each other, we know that very,

very often our life does not look like this.

And maybe at moments, maybe at moments it does look like this.

We see some of the love and some of the self-control that you see up there, but not always and

not often.

And that can be very confusing and very frustrating.

And what is going on here?

We are just told that when the Spirit of God comes into our lives, that we become these

kind of people and yet I look at my life and I do not appear to be that kind of person.

I still struggle with anger and I still struggle with envy and pride.

And I have all these addictions and all these problems that are chasing me around, right?

Where is the fruit?

Why isn't it working?

What is going on here?

So while a Pentecost Sunday is a day of celebration, it is also for many of us a day of some resignation.

We are like, it doesn't work.

It doesn't work.

It sounds good, it looks good, but all this stuff about this great fruit coming out of

our lives, it just doesn't work.

I have been following Jesus for years, you might say, and I still don't look like that.

And it may not even matter whether you came to Jesus all of a sudden and you had this

marvelous moment and you were changed and your friends even said, you are different.

There is something different about you.

You seem more loving and more joyful.

Or maybe for others of you, you came to Jesus a bit more gradually and slowly and bit by

bit and you did see some of this stuff, some of this, whoops, the spirit that was growing

in your life.

However, what happens is after one year or two years or five years or 10 years, right?

All of a sudden, all those issues that you thought you had dealt with and left behind,

they come back.

Those character flaws, right?

Those attitudes, those undesirable traits, they just came back.

They just came back.

And it's not that they just came back, but they kept coming back.

And Paul understood, Paul understood this feeling of resignation that we feel and maybe

you feel.

Our sinful nature is always doing what is contrary to the spirit so that you do not

do what you want to do.

So what do we do on a day like Pentecost Sunday, this day of celebration?

But also I would say a day of some resignation, a day that we say, yay, the spirit came.

And then the next breath say, meh, but I'm still the same.

What do we do?

Well, I think there is another option.

And here is the other option to say that this is not just a day of celebration.

We don't have to pretend it's a day of celebration and we don't have to wallow in our resignation,

but today could be a day of explanation, a day to actually ask the question, why is this

happening in my life?

And let's figure it out.

And today's the best day to do that because Paul is writing in Galatians about this very

thing, right?

Paul says, he says, hey, listen, let me explain to you.

Do you want to know why?

Do you want to know why you can have the Holy Spirit living in your life?

And at the very same time, you are constantly struggling and you constantly feel unchanged.

Do you want to know why, Paul says?

Let me give you an example.

Let me give you a metaphor.

And then what Paul does is much like Jesus would do all the time is he almost has a parable.

He has this metaphor that he uses.

I'm going to use this metaphor to explain to you why that tension and why that struggle

exists.

And the metaphor he grabs onto is the metaphor, the example of a garden.

And he's going to use the garden imagery as a way of explaining both how the Holy Spirit

works and why it's so hard and why we stumble so much.

So over the next seven weeks, please join us as we try to unpack this really, really

important issue.

It's a brand new series.

It's called Organic, and we're going to be looking at how the fruit of the Spirit can

actually grow in the garden of your life and grow in the garden of your life as well.

So come with us, you know, get on some gardening clothes, pull out your gardening gloves, get

your gardening trowel and whatever.

And let's dig into this really, really important topic.

Okay.

Now, I don't know if you have a garden or if you're the type of person that has a garden,

but this year at our house, we decided we're going to make a proper vegetable garden.

So I went down to what?

Home Depot, got some two by sixes and some dirt, and we screwed it all together and hammered

it all together and filled it up.

And then we said, okay, what are we going to plant?

And so we've been planting things already for well, over a month, you know, we're always

going out to see what's growing out there.

I thought, I'm quite proud of it.

It was a lot of work, but I'm quite proud of it.

So I thought I'd show you a few of the things that are growing.

So this is our lettuce that is coming up.

And just behind that, we have some garlic that is growing.

So we're enjoying watching that.

And then these are, anyone know what these are?

Peas.

You guys are good.

And so you can see our peas are already coming up and we put a little trellis there so the

peas can start climbing.

And then this, anyone?

Spinach.

Yes, it's some spinach just coming up.

Cute, lovely spinach.

And then does anyone know what these are?

Peppers.

You got it.

Peppers are, we planted those.

Whoops.

Then let me just go back one.

We've got, this is some cabbage.

This is some red cabbage.

These things are just getting started.

And then we've got these lovely little baby beets that are just popping up on us.

We love our little baby beets.

They're going to be lovely when they grow.

It's all coming along quite nicely.

And you might think, oh, gardening's not that hard.

Just go get a bit of seed, throw it on the ground, walk away for six or eight weeks and

come back and you'll have this wonderful salad just waiting for you to eat.

I mean, it would be great if it worked that way.

But if you actually tried to grow something that way, what would happen is you would come

back six or eight weeks later and you know what you would find?

You would find a whole lot of weeds and not much fruit at all.

No, if you actually, if you actually want to make the ground, produce a lot of fruit

or a lot of veggies, then you have to develop the skills of a gardener, right?

You actually have to learn things like plant spacing and seed depth and you know, watering

schedules and how to weed and you'd have to learn with how to deal with, you know, changes

in temperature or how to how to deal with diseases.

And one thing that we have discovered is you have also got to learn how to deal with pests,

how to deal with predators.

So here's for example, we planted a few strawberry plants, mostly because we read that when you

plant strawberries, they create lovely flowers.

The flowers attract these beneficial wasps, which then will eat all the nasty bugs on

your other plants like, you know, caterpillars and larvae and stuff like that.

So we planted a bunch of these, these strawberry plants in our garden and then, you know, we

thought, great, we went away.

We came back a few days later and we discovered that something had gotten into the garden

and dug up one or two for sure of our strawberry plants and they're actually kind of useless.

They couldn't even be rescued.

This is what one of them looked like when we finally, when we finally got to it.

And we thought, oh no, this cannot be, we cannot do this.

And of course we immediately suspected rabbits, right?

Because for some reason in streetsville, there are rabbits everywhere.

I swear streetsville is built on a rabbit Warren.

It could be the squirrels, but we thought it was rabbits.

And so what we did is we went back to Canadian Tire or whatever and we bought some of this

stuff.

This is like a green kind of garden fence, right?

And we said, okay, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to put this garden fence all around our garden.

That's exactly what we did.

And we thought, okay, now we've dealt with that problem.

And we went away and we came back a few days later and we discovered more problems.

Our garlic bulbs, some of them had just been pulled right out of the soil.

And again, the peas had been attacked yet again.

So we thought, how is this happening?

We just put up the garden fence.

And then we thought, ah, it could be that our enemy is coming from the skies.

It's birds.

Birds are coming in and creating this problem.

So we went back to Canadian Tire and we bought some of this, this netting, this bird netting.

And you can hardly see it there.

Oh, you can see it.

Yeah.

So we, we used a bunch of twist ties and we put this netting over top of the garden.

And we thought, okay, good.

We got the problem solved because now we got things protected from the side.

We got things protected over top.

And we're all good.

So we went away.

Everything was good for a couple of days.

And then we came back and guess what?

More damage in the garden.

Cabbage was nibbled.

Bean seeds that we had literally just planted had been dug up.

And we thought, how on earth is this possible?

This is how it happened.

We found this, that something had actually chewed right through the green fence that

we had put there.

And we thought, oh gosh, we started putting twist ties to kind of cover the gaps that

they had cut in the fence.

But we decided we needed a more severe, a much more drastic plan.

And that's when we enlisted the help of a doc.

We said, we're going to, we said, Holly, listen, listen, are you listening?

She said, yes.

I said, you're going to guard this garden.

Do not let anything come in there.

Do you understand your job?

She said, yes.

We nodded her head.

And then we said, we went away.

And then we came back.

And of course the next day more fence nibbled, more plants damaged.

And now my friends, they were going after the baby beets.

Not the baby beets.

Yes, the baby beets.

We said, how did this happen?

And then we said, this is how it happened.

This dog is completely useless.

You know, for just about a moment I was like, you know what?

Maybe I do like cats more than dogs.

But then no, I came to my senses.

I thought, what am I saying?

Whoa, that was a wow.

And instead what we did is we went to Canadian tire.

And again, this time we got the chicken wire, the chicken wire now to go around the whole

thing.

And I have to say everybody so far, so good, so far, so good.

So now here's the question.

Here's the question.

What the heck?

What the heck is going on here?

All we're trying to do is grow a little bit of food, people.

But between the weeds and the rabbits and the squirrels and the birds and the lazy dogs

and all this, all these forces, all these forces are working against every day and every

night something is trying to destroy what we are growing.

Now I said what we are growing, but is it true that we're actually growing this?

I mean, we think about it, if all this works, let's say the fence and the netting and the

other fence and everything actually works and weeks later we come back to our garden

and I'm able to eat a great big salad, can I honestly say I grew this salad?

Can I say I grew these onions, I grew this lettuce, I grew these tomatoes?

I think the answer has to be no.

I didn't grow this stuff.

I'm just the gardener.

My job was to provide an environment where the fruit could be grown, but I didn't grow

it.

Now just pause there for a second.

That is the perfect way to understand the work of the Spirit in our lives.

We can't transform ourselves.

We can't change ourselves.

Only God can do that.

What we can do is tend the garden of our lives so that the Spirit can do that transforming

and growing work and make us more like Jesus.

Another way to put it is this, is that God is the grower and we are the gardeners.

I do not control the sun.

I do not control photosynthesis.

I have no control over the genetic makeup of these plants and these seeds.

That is all on God.

And Paul even says, so it's not important who does the planting or who does the watering.

What's important is that God makes the seed grow.

And yet, and this is really important, and yet at the same time, my role is crucial,

isn't it?

I did not grow the fruit, but as a gardener, I can either help or I can hinder that depending

on the part that I play.

So in the same way, in the same way, think of it this way, the same way, the Holy Spirit

is trying to change me, trying to grow me, trying to influence me to make me more like

Jesus.

And I can either garden my life in such a way that that kind of growth and all sorts

of good stuff can grow up within me, but if I ignore my job, that's just not going to

happen, right?

So if I want to grow good stuff, if I want to grow love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,

faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in my life, what do I got to do?

How do I have to garden my spiritual life to make that happen?

Well, just in the time I got left, I want to suggest there's three important steps we

all got to do.

And let's start with this one.

As with every garden, the first step in a garden project, in the garden project, which

is your life, is to plant the seed of the Spirit within you.

Now that seed of the Holy Spirit can be planted in a moment or it can be planted over time.

Maybe the seed of the Spirit was planted in you when you were a child and your parents

would read to you stories of Jesus and pray with you at night and the seed of the Holy

Spirit was planted in your life.

Maybe it was a Sunday school teacher, like right now happening downstairs here at Trinity.

There's teachers, there's volunteers who are teaching our little ones about Jesus and the

seed of the Spirit maybe is being planted in them.

Or maybe it was at youth group or maybe it was in university.

You had a late night coffee and a long conversation with a friend and they were explaining to

you who Jesus was and what the gospel is all about.

And you finally believed it for the first time in your life and they prayed a prayer

with you and the seed of faith got planted.

The seed of the Holy Spirit got planted into your life.

Or maybe it's actually you just came to church one day.

One day you came to church and you'd heard it all before, but on that day it all just

made sense.

It clicked with you.

And when it came time for communion, you know what?

You came forward, but it was different this time.

This time you were coming forward because you had given your trust and your allegiance

to Jesus.

And when we give our trust and when we give our allegiance to Jesus, something happens.

The seed of the Holy Spirit goes into us and gets buried deep within us.

Now I just want us all to hear this clearly.

When you believe in Jesus, something actually happens.

Something actually happens.

Paul puts it this way.

He says, when you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit,

a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance.

When you believed, something actually happened to you.

It might have been dramatic, might have been gradual, might have been fast, might have

been slow, but the presence of Jesus took a residence within you.

The spirit of Jesus was planted deep in the soil of your life.

And that spirit began the work of guiding you and forming you and changing you and influencing

your life and directing you.

That is all God's work, by the way.

That's all God's work.

We don't do any of that, but that's the first thing, planting the seed of the Spirit.

So I have to ask this question.

If you're not seeing the fruit of the Spirit in your life, have you actually planted the

seed?

Have you actually by faith put your trust and given your allegiance to Jesus?

Because it's really hard to grow anything in a garden if you don't plant the seed.

All you're going to get is weeds otherwise.

So that is the important first step.

The important first step is planting the seed of the Spirit.

But once the Spirit has been planted, then now we do have a very important role to play.

We become gardeners tending to our spiritual life.

In other words, we need to be providing the right environment now for that seed to grow,

determining how much influence the Holy Spirit is actually going to get in my life.

In other words, we now need to create the conditions for growth in our lives.

And so this is the mystery.

And this is why so many of us struggle on days like Pentecost, because yes, on the one

hand, we receive the Spirit as something completely outside of us.

It is God's work.

It is God's seed.

And yet at the same time, if I want fruit, I've got a job to do, right?

Just as I can't expect the sun and photosynthesis to do everything for me at home in my garden,

you can't expect the Spirit to just do everything for you.

You've got to become a gardener of your life.

That's what Paul is getting at when he says stuff like, since we're living by the Spirit,

let us follow the Spirit's leading.

Let's walk by the Spirit.

Let's be led by the Spirit.

He says you have to garden your spiritual life in such a way that the fruit of the Spirit

can grow more and more and more.

And you might say, well, how do I do that?

What kind of things do I do to make my life hospitable to the growth of the Spirit?

How do I garden?

Well, let me just go back to my garden at home.

When we were working and planting on our garden, we chose, first of all, an environment that

worked for growth, a sunny spot, not a dark, shady spot.

We had to water that garden.

We actually even created the exact right soil.

We brought in some topsoil, some triple mix, and some manure.

We mixed it all together to make just the right mix.

And then, of course, we did.

We put in some trellises and stuff like that to support the growth and help these plants

climb.

And in the same way, I want to say you need to provide the right environment in your life

for spiritual growth.

Put yourself in a sunny place.

Put yourself in places where God's love can radiate down in your life.

Don't hang out in dark and dingy and dank places in the world.

There's plenty of places we could be that just aren't going to give us God's life-giving

energy.

And then secondly, feed and fertilize the soil out of which you're growing, right?

We just did a whole series on reading the scriptures and how the last thing we talked

about was how you need to feed on the scriptures, how you need to eat those scriptures.

Are you feeding yourself with God's word?

And then thirdly, just like we put a trellis up, you need to put some structures into your

life that are going to enable and help you to grow.

Make some decisions.

Put some structures in.

Those might be like worshiping every single Sunday, maybe joining a life group.

These are structures that you're putting into your life, ensuring that you have a time of

prayer with God every day, ensuring that you have a chance to sit down and read your Bible.

Maybe you practice the Sabbath.

Maybe you practice solitude.

You can do all of these things.

And what's happening is you're creating structures.

You're creating the environment.

You're providing the kind of conditions for growth.

You can't transform yourself.

I'm not saying that.

But what you can do is create the conditions for transformation and growth.

And so that's the second question I have to say to you.

If you're frustrated and you're like, I never see any growth, I never see any love, joy,

peace, patience, kindness, goodness in my life.

The question is, are you providing the right kind of environment for that growth to take

place?

So how do we grow this fruit?

First we have to plant the seed of the spirit within us by faith in Jesus Christ.

Secondly, we got to provide the right kind of environment for spiritual growth.

And the third and the final thing I want to mention this morning is that if you want to

grow the fruit of the spirit, you're going to need to protect your garden from predators.

Protect your garden from predators.

In other words, you have to guard your garden and protect what is inside there from all

the outside forces that are coming in and want to shred and destroy every good thing

that you are trying to grow.

I had to deal with squirrels or rabbits or birds.

I did figure out what exactly we were dealing with.

But in the garden of your spiritual life, it's far worse.

The things you have to face are sin and evil.

I mean, our world's a wonderful place, but it is also a world that is deeply compromised

by sin and evil.

And while Jesus is there trying to pull you up and lift you up closer to God, sin and

evil is always trying to break in and tear you down.

Paul calls this the sinful nature.

He says the sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the spirit

wants.

And these two forces are constantly fighting against each other.

There's the sun and the water of God's Holy Spirit that is that is lifting us up and pulling

us upward.

But sin and evil just want to tear us down.

And there's a battle going on in you and in me right now all the time in this very way.

I'll just give you a quick little example.

Today we're focusing on the spirit, the fruit of the spirit of love.

Let's say you're having a conversation with someone and they say something that's especially

mean to you.

In that moment, all these thoughts go through your head and it really is only a moment.

It's like five seconds.

You think, man, oh man, I could really let them have it.

Man, how dare they?

I could really put them in their place.

I could really embarrass them.

I've got some choice words for them.

In fact, I've got one zinger of a comeback that I have been working on for a long time

and that you're ready to go.

You're ready to let it last.

But then there's this other voice.

And what's that voice?

It's the voice of the spirit of Jesus that is inside of you.

And that voice says, Rob, dude, that is not the kind of human being I'm trying to grow

you into.

Rob, remember how I loved and forgave people?

Rob, remember how I loved and forgave you?

Rob, Rob, Rob, put up a fence, put up a net.

Don't let that stuff into your life.

Rob, get back into the garden of the Holy Spirit.

Come back to the light of my love.

Come back to the soil.

Come back to the water of my grace.

You see, if we're going to grow the fruit of the spirit in our lives, and we've got

to protect our lives from those kind of predators that are there to kind of break it all down.

And Paul actually goes on and he gives us a list of some of the predators to watch out

for.

So please pay attention to this list because they're coming for you.

Sometimes these pests come to us through sexuality, actually.

It's interesting that the first thing Paul talks about as these enemies to watch out

for has to do with our sexuality.

He talks about sexual immorality.

He talks about impurity.

He talks about lustful pleasures.

But Paul's saying, hey, if you want your garden to grow, you got to guard it from these things.

But then he goes on from sexuality to talk about spirituality.

He says, here's some other things you got to watch out for.

He calls them idolatry and sorcery.

Another way of just saying it is if you are in any way trying to get your life from a

spirit that is not the Holy Spirit, if you're dabbling in other kinds of spirituality, that

is going to break in and destroy your garden.

It is not going to help you grow even though you think that it might.

And then thirdly, he lists this whole bunch of things that you would say is not sexuality,

not spirituality, but relation, relationality, I guess.

Look at it, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outburst, anger, selfish ambition, dissension,

division, envy.

Broken relationships are one of the most pernicious predators that are going to try to get in

and destroy what you are growing.

So if you want your garden to grow, invest in healthy relationships.

And if you have unhealthy relationships, then just get those ones out of there.

So this is, look at this list.

This is what you are up against, sexual, spiritual, relational enemies that want to tear up the

garden of your life.

It's a conflict that is never going to let up.

You're going to have to fight this every day of your life.

You're going to have to constantly put up new fences.

You're going to constantly have to patch the holes when they get through and you're going

to have to stand guard the whole time.

In fact, maybe even as I'm saying this, some of you are aware, you already know, you already

know what it is is trying to get in and break down your life.

And maybe you know, it's like there's this addiction.

I just can't let it go.

It's social media addiction, or maybe it's just anger.

You just always so angry.

And listen, you got to get it out of your life.

If there is a weed growing in your garden, do not water it.

Yank it out of the ground and get rid of it.

Don't take your chances.

Okay.

Maybe it's, you know, some rabbit or squirrel is trying to like burrow its way in there,

right?

Chewing through your fence, sexual temptation, greed, envy, whatever.

If that is the case, you know, don't say, oh, what a cute little rabbit.

Isn't that nice?

You know, come on in, come on in.

No, I don't mean this.

You pick that rabbit up and you knock it on the head.

No rabbits were harmed in the filming of this sermon.

And you say, we're having rabbit tonight, everybody.

We're having a rabbit stew or something like that.

But you know, go confess what you're struggling with to someone.

Go see a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a therapist or whatever the case may be, but

don't take it lightly.

These things want to tear down the good work that God is doing.

And if you feel like in a moment of temptation and a moment of struggle, you don't know what

to do, then just pray a prayer like this, just say, Holy Spirit, I need your help.

Holy Spirit, come to me right now.

Help me make the right choice.

Help me make the right decision.

Come Holy Spirit.

Paul says, if you live by the sinful nature, you will die.

But if through the power of the spirit, you put to death the deeds of a sinful nature,

you will live.

Do you want to see the fruit of the spirit grow in your life?

Are you tired of that feeling of resignation that it can never happen to me?

I'm never going to become that better person.

Then let's learn how to be good gardeners.

Remember those three things.

First of all, plant the seed of the gospel deep in your heart.

Turn to Jesus, give him your trust, give him your allegiance.

Secondly, provide the right conditions for your spiritual growth, right?

God's love shining into your life, God's word watering your life, other structures to support

your growth.

And thirdly, protect your garden from the predators that want to tear it all down.

And you know what will happen if one day if you do all this, it may not happen overnight.

If you do all this, one day you're going to look down and you're going to say, oh my gosh,

what is that?

And breaking through the soil, you know what you're going to see?

You're going to see love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self

control, the fruit of the spirit growing in your life.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Thank you for joining us today.

And we hope that as you go out into your week, you will take the message of today's sermon

with you and share it with others as well.

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talks.

Today's sermon was taken from the May 19th, 2024, service at Trinity Church Streetsville

in Mississauga, Ontario.