Galatians 5:22-23 (NLT)
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!
Goodness. What does goodness mean? The opposite of badness? Now I’m wondering what badness is. Oh boy…
I figure goodness involves being good to people but that’s sort of what kindness is. Since both are listed, they must be different things. I honestly tend to associate the word “goodness” with the word “gracious” and that’s as deep as it goes for most of us (Goodness gracious!). But if Paul thought it was important enough to be its own fruit on the spirit tree, we should probably look a little deeper into what true goodness actually is.
While kindness is something that grows inside of us and changes our way of thinking, goodness seems to be the outward evidence of such a change.
Think of a good car. A good car begins with a ton of intensely thorough analytical work in a design room which carries it into a season of painstakingly tedious construction in a factory. Because of everything that happens before the car hits the lot, it becomes good. If that same car was designed by the “lay-flat collar” division of Hanes and built by a group of Microsoft software designers in my garage, would you end up with the same good car? No way!
In the same way, if we aren’t growing in Christ and the fruit of kindness isn’t growing within us, we won’t have the inclination to do good things for others. And if we don’t have the inclination to do good things for others, we’re either lying to ourselves or we’re insane when we call ourselves followers of Christ.
Ouch.
Choose goodness.
