Todays MOPS email (Mothers of Preschoolers) was great reading.

“It’s Not Up To US:
Are you working hard and doing your best to produce the fruit of the Spirit in your life today? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Who wouldn’t want such qualities in her life? But – whew! – they seem so beyond our grasp. Why? Perhaps because we think it’s all up to us to produce.

It’s not! It’s not our job to produce the fruit of the Spirit in our lives or in the lives of those around us. That’s God’s job: fruit production. The fruit of the Spirit grows when we let Him live these qualities in us and through us as we grow in a relationship with Him.

Living out the fruit of the Spirit requires honesty. We don’t have to dress it up to make it better. It admits, “I really can’t do any more today. I’m bushed. But I’d love to help out tomorrow.” It suggests, “A better time for me to commit would be in the early afternoon because then the kids are in preschool”. Naked fruit isn’t 24/7 availability to impossible expectations. But, drawing from a relationship with God, naked fruit does try – openly and sincerely.

Naked Fruit is about getting past the peeling of “nice” Christianity and getting down to the honest, simple truth: the fruit of the Spirit is about being like Jesus.

God makes it simple. We make it hard. We want to grow a life that matters and he wants to grow such a life in us. That’s fruit: minus the peeling. Naked fruit.

There’s more about this that I want to encourage you with, so I’ve taken an excerpt from my book Naked Fruit and made it a free download available at www.mops.org.”