What is Needed for Successful Spiritual Gardening?

By Robb Brunansky

Published August 19, 2025

As we conclude our study on each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit, it is important to tie them all together and discuss the one thing absolutely necessary for successful spiritual gardening.

By way of review, let us look at the fruit of the Spirit again at a high level:

• Love: A holy, divine affection toward others
• Joy: An unshakeable, dynamic feeling of divine gladness in the Lord
• Peace: The supernatural experience of reconciliation, harmony, and freedom
• Patience: The expression of a heartfelt trust in God’s sovereign plan
• Kindness: Concern for others leading to acts of grace for their benefit
• Goodness: Morally upright generosity toward others
• Faithfulness: An unwavering commitment to the truth
• Gentleness: A courageous, compassionate humility
• Self-control: Mastery over natural desires

There’s one vital part omitted from each of those definitions, which is that the virtue is being produced by the Spirit in all believers, which links all the fruit. The Holy Spirit’s involvement separates Christian virtue from pagan virtue.

The final part of this definition indicates these virtues are true in measure in every Christian’s life. All believers manifest these virtues at some level, and, over time, increasingly in their lives.

Throughout our study, we’ve looked at some practical things we can do to cultivate the Spirit’s fruit. However, in all these strategies, there is one vital thing we have not mentioned, and that factor is foundational to all these virtues. To succeed at cultivating the Spirit’s fruit, we must know who we are as Christians. Paul gives us three things to define believers that are crucial to spiritual gardening and cultivation of the Spirit’s fruit (Galatians 5:24-26).

The first is that we are people who belong to Christ (verse 24).

Many in our culture have a great need to find a place where they belong. There are lots of churches and other institutions around us appealing to peoples’ desires to belong to someone, something, or some place. For the Galatians, the issue of belonging must have loomed large. They were often considered to be on the margins of civilization in the Roman empire. Christians in this society had it even worse, as they were rejected by their own culture and the Jewish people as uncircumcised Gentiles who believed Jesus was the Messiah. Paul thus directly assaults their misguided seeking of an identity within circumcision and the Law, saying that they belong to Christ through faith.

Today, we seek out our identity in thousands of places. Those struggling to see the fruit of the Spirit in their lives may be forgetting their identities are now in Christ, or they may not be saved. Yet, if we would be people who produce the Spirit’s fruit, we must find our identity in once truth: we belong to Christ. We are His people, and He has bought us with his own blood (1 Corinthians 6:19-20, Acts 20:28).

The second thing defining Christians is that we are people who have crucified the flesh (verse 24).

The “flesh” is the sinner in his natural state apart from God’s Spirit. This idea is the part of us that awaits final redemption, and that we battle our desires to do the evil works of the flesh. Paul says we have crucified the flesh, which is a graphic picture of true repentance. The truly repentant person does not have a mild disgust for sin, but he loathes sin with all his being. He sees sin as so offensive to a holy God that nothing short of the cruelest death will suffice to pay sin what it deserves.

Paul is thus saying that all who belong to Christ have turned away from sin with great violence. What’s more, we have sought, not only to kill our individual acts of sin, but to eliminate the very seat of sin in our lives, the flesh. To repent of sin is to abhor it to the point of annihilating its root, source, and cause. Repentance is a destruction of sin in our lives. It is a transformation, not just of external behavior, but of inward desires and motivations.

It is important to understand that when we crucified the flesh, the war against sin was won – but the flesh still yells at and taunts us. The flesh is a defeated foe that is still fighting and trying to win, but Christians always fight from the vantage point of victors, not ones who are defeated. We are not powerless against the flesh since we have the Spirit. Sometimes it might seem impossible to overcome this temptation or that vice, but it’s not. That’s just a lie of the flesh as it taunts us from the cross where it and its passions were crucified.

The third thing that defines believers is that we are people who live by the Spirit (verses 25-26).

Every Christian is alive by the power of the Holy Spirit. For believers, our true spiritual life in Christ is given and empowered by the Spirit of God. With this reality is an implicit contrast with the Law. The flesh did not achieve something that gave us true life. We live because the Spirit has made us alive.

The command, then, that follows is to walk by the Spirit – or to follow the footsteps of the Spirit. He is our leader, guiding us into battle against the flesh and sin. Our success in battle demands we stay in line, follow the Spirit’s lead, and remain in battle formation, refusing to wander away from where He is going or how He is directing us. This action goes beyond even our own power to that of the entire church. If we get out of line, we begin to fight one another, meaning that we stop fighting the enemy, lose our power, and risk defeat. The church, then, needs everyone to stay in step with the Spirit. Our ability to battle the evil one demands we all follow the Spirit’s lead.

If we stay in step with the Spirit, and our lives look like the fruit of the Spirit, we will fulfill the law of God. We won’t violate anything, we won’t lack anything, and we won’t miss anything.

When we forget who we are as believers, we become boastful, begin to take credit for our obedience, and start to challenge each other. However, when we understand we’re alive because of the Spirit – not because of our obedience to the Law, our good works, or anything we have done – it causes us to be humble, not boastful. It makes us lowly, not conceited.

One reason why we fail to see the Spirit’s fruit in full bloom in our lives is because we forget who we are, that we are people who live by the Spirit. We begin to think God saved us because of something in us, something we did, or who we are in ourselves apart from Christ. The next step is always to think we can produce holiness in our lives on our own, because if we are good, talented, and wise enough for God to save us, then we have something we contribute to make ourselves holy. Yet we cannot. We are entirely dependent on the Spirit of God. Christians live by His power. We are alive because of His work, not our works. We are saved because of who He is, not who we are.

If we want to be a spiritual gardener and see the fruit of the Spirit grow to maturity in our lives, we should know who we are as Christians. We must know what is true about us through the gospel and work of Jesus Christ on the cross and through the power of the Spirit in our lives. We belong to Christ. We have crucified the flesh. And we live by the Spirit.