Who do you think you are?
I wonder what you wanted to be as a child. In my case it was to be a brain surgeon. Quite why this ambition became the centre of my life I can’t recall, but I do remember my lovely parents suggesting that I practiced on my own brain first. Later on when I realised that science wasn’t really my bag, I switched over to banking. I also realised that I wasn’t the most dextrous of people and while I could mess up changing a light bulb, it might not be so good to mess up brain surgery. I actually spent the next 40 years of my life in banking, at least 20 of which I really enjoyed. I got to travel across the world and saw countries that I never expected to see. Yet for a lot of that time I also dreamed of being a writer and in pursuit of that wrote quite a number of plays, none of which were ever produced (although I did get some plays performed in church). Banking ended in redundancy and it was then that I felt God calling me into full time church ministry where I am today.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted my career to be, but far less time on what kind of person I wanted to be. Jesus of course takes a very different perspective on me. He is far more concerned about my character than my career. He is far more concerned about how I live and love. How I treat friends, family and work colleagues. The Bible talks a lot about what it calls spiritual fruit. Just as a well watered garden produces good plants and flowers so a life well lived produces good spiritual fruit. The Bible itemises this fruit as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self control”. Quite a list! Surprisingly it doesn’t say that we produce these qualities naturally, but only as we let Jesus’s Spirit work in us.
When I look at this list two fruits leap out at me. Patience and self control. To be perfectly honest with you all I have spent a lifetime battling against lack of both and I couldn’t hack either of them on my own. Yet slowly (and sometimes very painfully) Jesus is dealing with those two attitudes via his Spirit living in me. I am by no means perfect , but I am better than I was. And you see that’s the difference. Jesus doesn’t just give me a set of rules to obey and leave me to get on with it. Instead he works with me and within me to make me more like him.
You see Jesus is not purely about regulation, but transformation.