Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Radiating Faith, the Ministry Subseries on the Couple Nukes podcast. This episode is a little bit different in its sermon style. This is more of a book review, although I wouldn't call it a review. The sermon will be stemming from the book itself, and the book we're going to be going over is called Fruit of the Spirit.
A field guide for discerning the Genuine from the counterfeit written by Watson Taylor. Now I want to give a little bit of backstory before we even get into anything on how I acquired this book. One thing I recommend Every Believer does and that they should do, which is something that I partake of. Is whenever you travel or go to an event, I always pray beforehand and during that, God would align my path with the right people.
Connect me with those who need me, connect me with those I need, and vice versa, structure my night so that the flow of the people I network with are set up to be or is set up to be the most abundant and blessing it can be. Now I was setting sail on the Margaritaville, um, at sea. That's a cruise line, and it was a great time.
But like any trip, I prayed beforehand saying, Lord, you know, connect me to the right people. Five minutes into my time on board, this is day one. Just crossed the brow. I'm walking down the hallway. And here comes a couple wearing shirts from a franchise known as Bucky's. It's a gas station. Uh, it, it's much more than a gas station and if you've never heard of it, you know they're not everywhere.
But it's a pretty popular franchise. It's logo is a beaver that many people know Bucky himself. And so as I'm thinking about complimenting this couple on their matching Bucky shirt. Lo and behold, he makes a comment about my cowboy hat in a positive manner, and we start talking and fast forward, what are the chances he is a veteran.
And an author as well. We even connected on some other things. I won't share a microphone here about some of the mental health work I do and stuff he's currently setting up that I don't wanna spoil. But he's doing some great stuff in the foundation of different ministries and apologetics and you know, I will save that for my interview with him.
But Mr. Taylor and I had an amazing conversation. We even met for a Bible study at one point on the ship. And. It was just a great time. We sang karaoke together. You know, we saw each other throughout the day, but we also connected and prayed together. And again, this was just five minutes into it and there are plenty of other people I met on that ship that surely God had aligned our paths and it's just so amazing.
So I highly encourage you to pray before any event or social event that you go to. That way you can make the connections you need and that they need to be a blessing upon others and to serve one another and to further whatever God has planned for your life. As I mentioned, he authored this book and we're gonna get into it, the fruit of the spirit of field guy for discerning the genuine from the counterfeit.
This is a great book, especially nowadays with everything online, all the different messages from society and the. Many false prophets are out there, so this is great. It's broken up into a couple different parts. We've got the prologue and in three parts, the prologue is called the vine, the branch, and the fruit.
That's what we'll be going over today, and then throughout the future sermons, I'll be building it based off of the second part of the book and the third part, the first part is just a chapter about knowing you are a Christian, kind of defining a Christian and looking at it historically as well as in the modern context.
And then it goes, each chapter goes through the different fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And then we'll be going over some Greek and Hebrew and doing some study, and it's gonna be awesome. The third part of the book is the application, recognizing true fruit and avoiding deception and sharing your gifts.
And then there's a couple app dependencies in the back because he references many great. Christian and faith-based writers in addition to the Bible itself. Without further ado, though, today's focus is gonna be on the prologue, a simple sermon. This is audio only because I'm traveling on the road and I'm about to head out of the country.
And the sermon structure, just so you're following, is basically we're going to get into the fact that counterfeits exist, that real fruit has one source and real fruit has one purpose, and we're gonna get into. An amazing sermon here because like I said, there is so much counterfeit out there, and that has always been the idea of the enemy, deceit and slander.
Now, the chapter here, the Prologue Rather, it starts off with a excerpt from Lamentations. For those of you who are not familiar with Lamentations, it is accredited to Jeremiah. Though we don't know the original author, of course, we believe that he wrote it. It, and it was during the time when we saw the Jewish people being killed and taken into captivity.
It was the fulfillment of the judgment. God had forewarned, generation after generation, Jewish people who refused to listen. But in the middle of Lamentations, just about the middle, there is a message of hope, and we see that here in Lamentations Chapter three verses 22 through 26. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore, I will hope in him the Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. And I wanna focus on those words right there.
We're gonna get into the first paragraph here, which talks about that waiting. It says, to wait. In our modern world, the word itself feels like an irritation, a delay, an inefficiency. We wait in traffic and checkout lines for a webpage to load waiting is seen as the empty space between the moments that matter.
But in an economy of God, waiting is transformative. It is not passive idleness. It is an active living, breathing posture. It is a spiritual discipline of patience. The crucible where faith is proven and character is forged. This book is about that transformative process, the tangible, observable evidence of a life genuinely transformed by Jesus Christ.
More than that, it is a field guide for a world filled with spiritual confusion. It is about the difference between the work of the Holy Spirit and the illusions of our enemy. It is about learning to see. The next part is titled, the Crisis Counterfeit Christianity. We live in an age of profound spiritual hunger and simultaneously profound spiritual deception.
As CS Lewis so brilliantly articulated in the screw tape letters, the greatest evil is not found in overt cartoonish villainy, but in the subtle perversion of the good. The safest path for the Devil Lewis argued is a gentle slope. Soft underfoot without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
This is the state of much of modern Christianity. We're offered a faith that looks right, sounds right, and feels comfortable, but it may be a gentle slope leading away from the truth. We're told to follow our hearts, but the Bible tells us the heart is deceitful above all things, and that comes from Jeremiah chapter 17 verse nine.
We are offered a love that. Accepts everything and stands for nothing. Mistaking spineless sentimentality for the holy, sacrificial love of the cross. We are sold a joy that is little more than circumstantial, happiness, and a peace that is simply the avoidance of necessary conflict rather than the deep of abiding shalom of God.
These are the counterfeit fruits Satan, whom the apostle Paul warned, can disguise himself as an angel of light. Second Corinthians chapter 11, verse 14 is not an innovator. He does not create, he corrupts, he mimics, he takes the divine blueprint of the spirit filled life and offers a cheap plastic molded, knockoff, and we tragically often fall for it.
We pursue happiness instead of holiness. We embrace our truth instead of the truth. We build our house on the sand of cultural trends and emotional experiences, rather than the bedrock of scripture and the person of Christ. Now, this next section is titled The Method Becoming Spiritual Detectives. This book answers that deception with a call to become spiritual detectives to borrow a concept from Jay Warner Wallace.
A good cold case Detective knows how to spot the lie, not by studying all possible lies, but by becoming an expert on the truth. In the same way, we cannot possibly anticipate every one of the enemy's deceptions. Our task is to become so intimately familiar with the genuine work of the Holy Spirit, that the counterfeit, when it appears, is immediately recognizable,
the foundation, the vine in the branch. This journey begins with the most fundamental question. How do I know I am a Christian? And that'll be explored in the first chapter. The Apostle John did not write his first epistle so that we might hope or guess. He wrote quote, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.
First John chapter five, verse 13. This assurance is not arrogant as apologists like William Lane, Craig and John Lennox remind us our faith is not a blind leap. It is a reasonable trust placed in a trustworthy God, validated by the public historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But that external objective truth must have an internal subjective verification.
That verification is the work of the Holy Spirit. From there, we'll embark on a deep chapter by chapter Excavation of the Fruit of the Spirit as described in Galatians chapter five, verses 22 through 23, which reads as. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control against such things.
There is no law. These are not nine separate virtues we must strive to achieve like a checklist of moral self-improvement. Notice how Paul uses the singular fruit, not fruits. This is the singular unified expression of the character of Christ himself growing in us, like grapes reckoning together on a cluster.
You cannot work on patience this week and try for joy next month. This is the holistic, organic result of a life surrendered to God, a branch binding in the vine. As referenced in John 15, we as believers are merely the soil and the branch. The spirit is the one who produces the fruit. Our job is to abide, to remain connected to the life source, to weed out the works of the flesh that choke that life.
The journey exploring each fruit. We'll explore each facet of this fruit drawing from theologians like Alistair McGrath and Peter Kreeft apologists like Greg Koko, so I'm not pronouncing that right. Hold on. Greg K. It's spelled K-O-U-K-L. My apologies. And Frank Turk and pastors like Billy Graham, Ravi Zacharias, and Johnny Erickson.
Tata. We will ask the hard questions. What is the difference between biblical love and worldly tolerance? What is the joy of the Lord in the midst of profound suffering? How can we have peace when the world is raging? What does faithfulness look like in a culture of disposability? Then in chapter 11, we'll put on our detective hats.
We will learn to recognize the genuine fruit in ourselves and others, and just as importantly, to spot the deceptions. Consider these common counterfeits and these counterfeits will be compared to the actual fruit, which in Greek is car posts. And it's a singular, again, a one organic yield. It's not disconnected.
Moral add-ons. And you know, we say to abide, which is to remain, which is. May know it's not a quick visit, right? We want to abide, we want to stay and dwell on this. So this stuff is very important and I wanna start by going through these nine fruit here. And I don't wanna say fruits, right, but these nine parts of the fruit of the spirit starting with love, agape, right?
It's not a mere sentiment. This is covenant shaped love. Then we've got. The counterfeit version is A, that sentimental feeling, which is following your heart, even though again, the Bible warns us against that. Above all things guard your heart, and of course, you know the heart is deceitful. Then we've got joy, which is chara or ra, and it's not mere happiness.
It is a deep gladness, anchored in grace, not mood, whereas the counterfeit version is circumstantial happiness. And then you've got peace, Reina. It's more than a lack of conflict. It's a wholeness, a harmony, a settledness. But the world presents it as an absence of conflict, as avoidance. And we know, and most believers and most non-believers know that Jesus Christ said, my peace I give you not as the world gives you, but as I give you.
And that is part of the fruit of the spirit as well. Then you look at patience, which is my crew through mia, my crew through mia, and that means long tempered, slowly wrath, enduring with people. This isn't about patience. Again, just waiting in lines. This is a different spiritual patience, but we, what we have in place of it is apathy and resignation in this world.
Then moving on, you get to kindness. Which is reto taste or cha reto taste, and that's moral benevolence. It's active goodness and posture and action. But what we have instead in the counterfeit world is niceness in a fear of man.
And then we have goodness, which is Aho a aga. Which instead in this world we have self-righteousness and legalism, and then we have faithfulness, which is peace. And instead in the world we have conditional loyalty rather than covenantal, wholehearted faithfulness. Then we have gentleness, and that is not weakness.
It is strength under control, but the world presents it in the counterfeit version as weakness and positivity. And then we have self-control, which is re, re, and that is mastery over impulses. It's not prideful, self tightening, but what we see is white knuckled, willpower, and pride in the counterfeit world.
I figures like Mike Winger and Cliff, I'm gonna say Nal, K-N-E-C-H-T-L-E. Has spent countless hours parsing these very distinctions and we'll learn. We will lean on their rigorous Bible first approach. We will learn to wield the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, as mentioned in Ephesians chapter six, verse 17, and to discern both good and evil, as mentioned in Hebrews chapter five, verse 14.
The next title is The Purpose Sharing the Gifts. See this journey of knowing and discerning is not for our own selves. It is not so we can become smug fruit inspectors, quote of others. The goal, as we will see in chapter 12 is to share the gifts God has given us as each has received a gift. We are to use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace, as mentioned in one Peter, chapter four, verse 10.
When the genuine fruit of the spirit is present in our lives, it becomes the most powerful apologetic we have. It is the aroma of Christ. In a decaying world, it is the light on a hill that cannot be hidden. This book is not a theological abstraction for me. It is the answer to a question that has defined my life, a question that crystallized for me and my walk with God as I learned what it means to get up again when I fall.
The invitation. A personal word. This book is for anyone who has found themselves face down in the snow, and it's for those who are tired, who have fallen, who have been deceived by counterfeits and who are not sure if they had the strength to get up again. The good news is you don't, but the spirit in you does.
This book is about that journey. The one that starts when you fall in the spirit of God, whispers patience, get up again. And so that's how the prologue ends. And I have a few notes that I wanna make just on this prologue that we read here. I think you know, first of all, Walton Taylor, thank you for this. I think it's really important because there is a lot of deceit in the world with what social media is marketing with, what mainstream media is marketing with what society and different cultures are telling us.
And it's just really important, you know, counterfeit Christianity imitates the fruit of the spirit, but only abiding in Christ. Again, that abiding, staying there remaining dwelling. In Christ produces the real thing and the crisis is that people are spiritually hungry, but they're easily deceived. And we're seeing that because people are looking to church leaders more than ever before.
Yes, there's been more church hurt than that ever before, but as we reach the end times here and the world is falling apart, going to hell in a handbasket so to speak, we know Jesus Christ is coming back as judge and rule of all things. And we see that the natural disasters, the birth pangs of Earth are happening and they are real.
And people don't realize Jesus Christ is coming back soon and it's not the first time he came where it was love and grace. It is judgment because the time has passed where grace has spread and people have had the chance to hear the word, and Jesus is not back yet because he's still giving us as much time as we can to turn to him.
So people are hungry, but they're being deceived. Not everything that looks Christian is Christlike. Not everything. Emotional is spiritual. Not everything soft is love. Not everything calm is peace. Not everything disciplined is self-control. You can be disciplined in things that are unholy. As mentioned earlier, the enemy's tactic isn't to destroy the truth, it's just to imitate.
It is about slandering. We saw in the garden, it was about taking eyes off of abundance of what we do have and putting it on the focus of what we don't have or offering something close to it, right? Look at the fruit. Was just like all the other fruits they could eat, only it had been forbidden. Now this fits well with a couple different Bible quotes that I wanna go over, which is we know from two Corinthians chapter 11 verse 14 that Satan masquerades as an angel of flight.
We know from Jeremiah 17 nine that the heart deceitful, and we know from Matthew seven 24th to 27, right, you have sand versus rock. And so worldly love is approval without holiness. But biblical love is sacrificial truth. Worldly joy is mood based on circumstances. Biblical joy is rooted in God worldly peace is avoidance attention, biblical peace is reconciliation, steadiness, and wholeness in God.
Right? And we went over all the counterfeit versions and we're gonna get into more detail on each individual. One of these characteristics of the fruit of the spirit in the following episodes. Fruit is not manufactured, it is produced. And this is important again, that fruit is singular. It's not fruits.
This is not a spiritual buffet, so to speak, but is a unified life produced by the spirit. The Christian life is not behavior management, alright? It is branch life and we see that analogy throughout of it. The branch does not scream and strain and grow grapes, but it abides in the vine and life flows from the source, right?
We know that a branch. Throughout the Bible is referenced as something that needs to be trimmed and taken care of and that the dead ones get cut and that the ones that are alive stay. You can't just staple or glue or tape fruit onto a dead branch. You have to keep it connected to the divine until life appears.
And so many of us are a branch that think we're connected, but we're actually dead. And all these fruits were getting stapled to us. They're not. Or they're not being produced by the spirit, they're deceit.
You know, I don't want the takeaway to be, try harder to look patient or be patient or, you know, try to pursue any of these characteristics individually. I want you to take away from this to abide deeper in Christ and let the spirit produce what the flesh cannot.
Again, this isn't learning every fake first. This is learning the genuine so well that the fakes stand out. No Christ, no scripture. Know the character of the Holy Spirit. Then the counterfeit becomes easier to spot. Meditate on the word day and night. Let it be a hidden sword in your heart, right? This is why it's so important to read scripture and to pray.
And so many people who are being led astray have never, we read the Bible, right? So many people have not read the Bible. Even believers, especially believers, have not read the Bible. And that is the issue here. Mature people discern good from evil, right? We get that from Hebrews. We know from John that assurance is meant to be known.
And we know from Galatians that there is a war between the flesh and the spirit. Discernment is trained spiritual sight, and we need to understand that. And the fruit is for witness, not vanity. You know, the fruit is for helping one another. God does not grow fruit in us so we can admire ourselves or be holier than thou.
He grows fruit in us so others can be fed, served, and led to Christ. Right from Peter. We know we're supposed to use our gifts to serve one another. And Matthew, you, we know we're supposed to let our light shine. And in Corinthians, we know we're supposed to be Christ-like
counterfeit Christianity can imitate the language of faith, but only a life abiding in Jesus bears the real fruit of the spirit. And we know from Galatians, from John, from Jeremiah, from Corinthians, from Hebrews and Peter, we know the fruit itself, the source of the fruit, why the counterfeits fool people, the reality of spiritual imitation, the discernment and the purpose of fruit in serving others.
And so this is really important. Fruit is evidence of salvation, but does not cause salvation. And we need to know that as well. We are not saved by producing fruit. We produce fruit because we are connected to the one who saves. There are people listening right now. This may be you even who have been living off counterfeits.
We often fall for it. Counterfeit love, counterfeit peace, counterfeit joy, counterfeit faith, and it's exhausting because fake fruit can't feed a real soul. It's like, I'm gonna make a SpongeBob reference. It's like eating the holographic meatloaf, right? It's not real food. It just looks like you're eating.
Jesus isn't calling us to decorate our life better. He's calling us to abide in him. So stop trying to be a dead branch that has fruit being stapled to it. Be a real branch connected to the vine that grows and produces the real fruit we need to return to the vine, right? Counterfeits exist. Real Fruit has one source, real Fruit has one purpose.
And ladies and gentlemen, that is it for today. Again, just the prologue. We are gonna break down each of those characteristics of the fruit of the Spirit in future sermons, so stay tuned for that. Again, fruit of the Spirit, a field guide for discerning the Genuine from the counterfeit, authored by Walton Taylor.
Great guy. And I'll have his email and a description below for y'all to reach out as well. To either get a copy of the book or to do some ministry work with him or if you have any questions. But I hope that this has given you some insight and thought on the fruit of the spirit, and I hope you're able to take a look at this and the others around you and get to good work in serving one another.
God bless.
