Here we look at abstractions of the fruit of the spirit as written by Paul.

Non-fruit is the absence of "fruit".

In the Christmas song, "Twelve days of Christmas", the "nine ladies dancing" is sometimes said to represent the nine "fruit of the spirit" from Galatians 5 that one should evidence to dance through life:

• 1. love
• 2. joy
• 3. peace
• 4. patience
• 5. kindness
• 6. goodness
• 7. faithfulness
• 8. gentleness
• 9. self-control

For more information, see the following: Twelve days of Christmas.

There are nine (9) fruits in the laundry list of fruit/fruits.

Do you have them all checked off?

Are there other fruit/fruits that are not on the list?

And once they are checked off, we are good to go. Is that correct?

As soon as one is presented with a "laundry list" such as the above, the following questions arise.

• Does the list cover everything? Is there anything important that is not on the list?
• Does one need to complete everything or evidence every quality on the list?

For any "laundry list" in the Bible (e.g., spiritual gifts, etc.) one runs into these questions. There are many sermons given that make some type of above assumptions.

Many sermons do not clearly make the distinction that if one has the Holy Spirit, one will evidence the fruits. But one can evidence fruits without having the Holy Spirit. If that is not clear, then use it as a discussion question.

Another place this idea appears is in faith and works. One cannot work their way to faith. If this is not clear, this is another discussion question.

Details are left as a future topic.

Note that the Greek word for "faith" means a "persuasion" or "belief" and not what is today called "faith". Today's meaning of "faith" is what was called "hope" - a well-founded belief with expectation. This is a future topic.

Back to the fruit of the spirit.

When Jesus is asked to summarize all of the law, he comes up with two verses from the Old Testament (e.g., love God and love your neighbor as yourself).

It would be nice to summarize and abstract the fruits of the spirit in a similar manner.

How about the following? "The fruit of the spirit is goodness, righteousness and truth.".

Discussion question: Does this generalization more than adequately replace the above list?

Let us now look at the concept of abstraction and then how it might be applied to generalizing the laundry list of fruits of the spirit.

The fruits of the spirit, in a somewhat abstracted form (in the modern sense), appear in Ephesians 5.

One of the Greek versions has the modern Greek word "πνεύμα" (PNEV-ma) ≈ "spirit" while another version has the modern Greek word "φωτός" (fo-TOS) ≈ "light".

The Latin word "lucis" ≈ "light" is used here so the Latin has the "fruit of the light" as does Wycliffe.

Paul uses "darkness" in verses before and after this verse. Does "fruit of the light" make better sense? How does this compare with "fruit of the spirit"? The KJV (King James Version) decided to translate this abstracted definition of fruits using parentheses, as if it does not deserve to be a complete statement in the sentence.

The generalized fruit list has three parts.

• goodness
• righteousness
• truth

Can we relate these three that Paul lists to anything from Jesus? The generalized fruits of Paul in Ephesians 5 might be related to the somewhat opposite non-fruits of John 16 of sin, righteousness and judgment.