The Spiritual Fruit Bowl: Understanding the Fruit of the Spirit -- Part 7: Goodness

Good is a word used quite callously in today's day and age. It's used for just about anything. It's used to refer to behavior (she's a good girl), quality (she bought a good skirt), taste (that was a good meal), feeling (she felt pretty good), looks (her hair looks good), skill (she is good at math), attitude (she had a good attitude in general), kindness (she was good to him), vastness (she bought a good chunk of land), not being rotten (the raspberries were still good even though they were a few weeks old), comfortableness (she had a good rest), benefit (carrots are good for your eyesight), and many more. We use the word good for just about anything. We use it casually and we use it loosely.

But when Paul listed "goodness" among the fruits of the Spirit in his letter to the Galatians, he wasn't using the term callously, casually or loosely. He was talking about the biblical goodness a Greek-English Lexicon defines as "positive moral quality." Paul wasn't talking about the kind of good that we use when we say, "What a good meal" or "I feel pretty good." He was talking about the goodness of God, the goodness of the Holy Spirit! This is the goodness that we can only obtain through God! No man is good on his own. (Romans 3:11) No matter how good we try to be or how much we try to achieve righteousness on our own, we are never good enough. (Isaiah 64:6) It is only by the power of the Holy Spirit, the source of God's goodness that we can be good.

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law." Galatians 5:22-23