Moments of Quiet Truth

     I grew up in the church. I'm a pastor/missionary's kid. I've been exposed to times of worship since before I was born. I graduated from a Christian university, have attended multiple doctrinally solid churches, but one thing none of that experience trained me for was worship in the Spirit. Oh, it was something we were expected to do to please God but no one ever told us how! Like so many phrases in the Bible that we were expected to understand and incorporate without explanation or definition or with a definition that fell short of the reality, to 'worship in Spirit and in truth,' was another in a long string of vague, nebulous phrases.      The Lord began to teach me several years ago about the Spirit and what life looks like in relationship to the Spirit. He gave me the gifts of praying in tongues, prophetic dreams and visions, and began to teach me how to commune with Him. He then took me across the ocean to a small surfing town on the coast of France and

     I've been reading Thessalonians for a new Bible study group that I have begun to attend. Faith and the Holy Spirit are two themes that have caught me as I have worked my way through. (I'll address the latter and we'll see if I get to the former in this particular post.)      One of my, not exactly pet peeves, but frustrations is when I read or hear talk of the fruits of the Spirit as though they are things that we are working on, that we produce, that we need to do.   This is foolish, misleading, arrogant, and not Biblically accurate. There is a reason we get frustrated when we try to work them out in our own lives.. We are very aware of our lack but I wonder how well we are aware of His sufficiency? This reality - that they are His fruits  - is not one often discussed or, if it is, it is done in language that is so dry and academic that one despairs of their reality. Love (agape), Joy (chara), Peace (Shalom), and the others - they are not the fruits of Lynne McCon