Refusing to be average

Pastor Juliet Lyons opens with A. W. Tozer’s call for Christians to refuse to be average and let their hearts soar. That is God’s heart for us: abundant life, the meaning behind Elan Church’s name from John 10:10, and the year’s verse in Matthew 7:17, that every good tree bears good fruit. In days when faith has never been more challenged, believers cannot afford to numb out. What is going on inside us has a direct relationship to what is happening around us. Yet bearing good fruit is harder than it looks, because there is an internal battle between what we know we should do and what we actually do. Her young son’s frustrated admission that he does not know why he keeps disobeying is a feeling grown-ups know too.

Fruit starts as seed

Recalling Pastor Max’s fig tree picture from the previous week, she notes that the fruit everyone sees comes from seed planted long before anyone was watching. The fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, cannot appear outwardly without a revelation of God’s character taking root inwardly. Coating inner anger with outward politeness is what Jesus calls whitewashed tombs in Matthew 23. The fruit of the flesh will manifest regardless of what we say or do.

The battlefield is the mind

Everyone is in spiritual warfare right now, and the battle is located in the mind, though it shows up everywhere. Every person is body, soul, and spirit, and everyone is born spiritually dead with sinful desires leading. When Jesus becomes Lord and the Holy Spirit awakens the spirit, the order flips: the spirit leads, it gains access to the mind, and the body becomes dead to sin. Our sinful desires must not lead us. The Holy Spirit renews the whole person, teaching us to honor God with both our thoughts and our bodies. The mind is the place where sinful desires contend against the leading of the Holy Spirit, which is why Pastor Juliet urges regular fasting, at least monthly, not for selfish gain but to strengthen the spirit the way the gym prepares the body for the day it is needed.

Dead to the law, alive to bear fruit

Romans 7:4 says we died through the body of Christ in order to bear fruit. Like a ticket that cannot be served on the dead, the wages of sin no longer apply to those dead in Christ. But when we live in the flesh, bottled-up passions bear fruit for death, and the acts of the flesh in Galatians 5 eventually explode like a shaken fizzy bottle. Verse 6 says we now serve in the new way of the Spirit, and bondage to Christ is where we flourish.

The mirror of the law

Paul, a Torah scholar, admits coveting exposed him, the one commandment about the inner life, and none of us master the Ten Commandments. The law is holy and good; like a mirror, it does not create the problem but reveals it. The law was not meant to condemn us but to show we are going the wrong way. Self-awareness is the beginning of change.

The war Paul describes

“What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Our sinful desires resist the leading of the Spirit and affect our minds. Pastor Juliet observes that anyone not frustrated by this battle, with no remorse for bad fruit, may still be spiritually dead, because a spiritually awakened person is disgusted by their own sin. Two laws, two principles, are at work in us, and we must fight knowingly rather than ignorantly. Paul’s cry, “Who will rescue me?” is answered: thanks be to God through Christ Jesus, who delivers us through sanctification.

How to win the war in your mind

The mind is malleable and can be governed by sinful desires or renewed under the leading of the Holy Spirit. As the spirit muscles strengthen, the Spirit’s voice grows louder and the flesh grows quieter, though the fight continues until Jesus returns. Pastor Juliet gives three steps: die to your flesh, reject the lies of the world about who you are, including generational patterns, and renew your mind so God can rewrite the story and plant the seeds of the Spirit. She closes with a moment of silence, asking God to hold up a mirror to what seeds are growing inside each person, because we cannot know what to fight for until we know what is happening within.