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Paul lists the works of the flesh and puts rage in the middle of them. Then he names the fruit of the Spirit, and one of them is a word that means a long temper.
Galatians 5:16-25; Exodus 34:4-6; Exodus 32:19; Proverbs 16:32; James 1:19-20
Opening
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
Galatians 5:22-23 (KJV)
Paul has just listed what life looks like when the flesh is in charge. Now he describes what grows when the Spirit is.
Paul gives two lists in Galatians 5, and he gives them different names.
The first list he calls the works of the flesh. Works are things you do, often fast. A word said in heat. A door slammed. A message sent at midnight that you regret by morning.
The second list he calls the fruit of the Spirit. Fruit is not made. It grows. Nobody stands over a tree and orders it to hurry.
In the middle of that fruit is a word the King James Bible renders longsuffering. The Greek word is built from long and temper. It is the opposite of a short fuse.
The picture inside the word is a long temper. The heat is still there. The Spirit does not turn you into someone who never feels frustration. He grows in you a fuse long enough that the heat does not go off in the room.
This is what a life in Him looks like. It is not a person with no fire. It is a person whose fire has been put under Someone else's care, and who is slowly becoming harder to set off. That happens over a season, not in an afternoon.
REFLECT
Do this today: the next time a tool fails or a plan breaks, take one full, slow breath before you type, speak or move. That breath is the long fuse. Then do the next thing.
A Two-Minute Prayer
Holy Spirit, my fuse is short, and I am tired of what it burns. I cannot make myself patient by trying harder. Grow it in me. Make me slower to flare and quicker to come back to You. Amen.
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
Galatians 5:16-21 (KJV)
The list before the fruit. Read it all the way through, and notice which sins sit next to each other.
Galatians belongs to the CHURCH stretch of the story. Paul wrote it to young churches in what is now Turkey, around the year 50. The exact date is debated. The churches had been taught that faith in Christ was not enough. To really belong, some teachers said, the Gentile believers also had to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses.
Paul spends most of the letter tearing that idea down. Then, in chapter 5, he turns to the obvious question. If we are free from the law as a ladder to God, how are we supposed to live?
His answer is two lists.
The works of the flesh are manifest, he says. They are obvious. And the list begins where you might expect, with sexual sin and idolatry. But read to the middle of it. Hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife.
Wrath sits in the same list as adultery and witchcraft. Paul does not grade them. He does not put the respectable sins in a separate, gentler column.
Most of us would never commit the sins at the start of that list. We might still commit the ones in the middle before lunch. A burst of rage at a screen. A cutting reply to a colleague. A sour, simmering grudge against a client who changed their mind again.
This is written so that you stop hiding your outbursts in the column of things that do not count. They count. Paul put them in the list on purpose.
Verse 21 is sobering, and it is meant to be. Christians have long read it as a description of a life given over to these works, not of a believer who falls and turns back to God. The third day of this week, Romans 8:1, is the other half of that picture.
But notice how he starts the paragraph. Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.
He does not say try harder not to get angry. He says walk. Walking is ordinary, repeated and slow. It is how you get somewhere without heroics, one step at a time. The answer to the works of the flesh is a different companion on the road.
Then he admits the war. The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. If that sounds like tomorrow's reading in Romans 7, it is. Paul knew this fight from the inside.
Today's question is simple. What does life look like when the Spirit is winning? Paul answers with fruit.
The Spirit does not turn you into someone who never feels frustration. He grows in you a fuse long enough that the heat does not go off in the room.
Look closely at two words, two verses apart.
In the list of the works of the flesh, the word translated wrath is thumoi. It is a plural. It means outbursts of anger, flare-ups, fits of temper. Paul uses the plural like this in only two places in his letters, here and in Second Corinthians.
In the fruit of the Spirit, the word translated longsuffering is makrothumia. It is built from two parts: makros, meaning long, and thumos, the same word that sits inside thumoi.
We should be careful here. A word's parts do not always tell you its meaning, any more than an English speaker hears pain inside the word longsuffering. By Paul's time makrothumia simply meant patience. Nobody can prove that Paul chose it to echo the word two verses earlier.
But the picture is still true, and it is worth keeping. Patience in the Bible is not the absence of heat. It is heat that is slow to flare. The short fuse and the long fuse are made of the same material.
There is a strong reason to trust the picture. The Greek Bible that Paul read used the same family of words for God.
When God shows Himself to Moses in Exodus 34, He calls out His own name. The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering. The Hebrew phrase behind longsuffering is erek appayim. Literally it means long of nostrils. In Hebrew idiom, anger shows in the nose: the hot, flaring breath of a person about to lose their temper. God describes Himself as long of nostrils. His anger is real, and it is slow.
The old Greek translation of Exodus rendered that phrase makrothumos, long-tempered. So when Paul names longsuffering as the fruit of the Spirit, he is naming a family trait. The patience the Spirit grows in you is God's own character, shared with His children.
That changes how you pray about your temper. You are not asking God for a technique. You are asking to become more like Him. And He has already said, in His own name, what He is like.
And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone. And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,
Exodus 34:4-6 (KJV)
Notice the first line. These are replacement tablets. Two chapters earlier, the first set was smashed.
The words longsuffering and slow to anger were first spoken in a very particular moment. It is worth knowing who heard them.
Two chapters earlier, Moses came down Mount Sinai carrying the two stone tablets of the law. At the foot of the mountain he found the people dancing around a golden calf. Exodus 32 says it plainly. Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.
The man who carried God's commandments threw them down and smashed them on the rocks.
There is a lot to say about that moment, and much of Moses' anger was aimed at a real sin. But notice what God does next. In chapter 34 He says to Moses: Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.
Which thou brakest. God names it. He does not pretend it did not happen. And then He simply asks Moses to bring new stone, so He can write the same words again.
Then God goes further. He comes down in the cloud, stands with Moses, and passes by. And the first thing He proclaims about Himself, to the man who had shattered the tablets, is this. Merciful and gracious, longsuffering.
Readers have long argued about that moment. Some see a righteous act, the covenant broken in stone because it had already been broken in the camp. Others see a man whose temper ran ahead of him. God does not rebuke him. But He names the broken tablets, and then He proclaims His patience to the man who broke them.
If you have been angry this week in ways you are ashamed of, you are not disqualified from knowing God's patience. You may be exactly the person He wants to show it to. The broken tablets are named, and new ones are carved.
The Proverbs put the goal simply. He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.
James puts the cost of the alternative just as plainly. Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: for the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.
That last line deserves a practical reading. Your anger at the work does not do the work. It does not fix the tool, recover the file or meet the deadline. It burns the energy you need for the next step. Francis de Sales said the same thing four centuries ago, in words that fit a modern office. He wrote that every form of excitement "affects both judgment and reason, and hinders a right performance of the very thing which excites us".
The anger feels like it is on the side of the project, and it is working against the very thing you care about.
So the long fuse is wiser as well as holier. And it is not something you manufacture by force of will. It is God's own name, grown in you by His Spirit, the way He carved new tablets for a man who had broken the first ones.
Paul closes the section with a sentence that is easy to skim. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.
The word for walk here is not the same as the one in verse 16. There Paul used the ordinary word for walking around, for how you live. Here he uses stoicheo. It means to walk in line, to keep in step, to follow in a row. Newer translations render it walk in step with the Spirit.
The picture is not a lone hiker picking his own route. It is someone matching the pace of the one just ahead of him.
This is what a life in Him looks like on an ordinary Tuesday. It looks like a hundred small matchings of pace.
It looks like one slow breath before replying to the message that made your jaw tighten. It looks like closing the laptop for five minutes instead of typing what you are thinking. It looks like noticing, halfway through a sentence, that the heat is rising, and choosing not to finish the sentence.
It also looks like getting back in step after you have lost it. Paul does not say walk in step, and never stumble. Walking includes stumbling. Keeping in step includes catching back up.
Here is a simple way to practise it this week.
Pick the one fruit you most need. For many of us, right now, it is longsuffering. Some days it will be peace, or gentleness, or temperance, which means self-control.
Pray for that one fruit by name, in the morning, before the work begins.
Then, at the moment of provocation, remember the name. Say it silently. Longsuffering. Let the word itself be the pause.
At night, look back without contempt. Where did the fuse hold? Where did it burn? Thank God for the first, confess the second, and sleep.
This is slow work. Fruit takes a season. You are not failing because it is not finished yet.
Losing Possession of Ourselves
Pope Gregory the Great wrote a handbook for pastors near the end of the sixth century. In one chapter he compares the patient and the impatient, and he describes what anger does to a person from the inside. He writes that “fury drives the mind whither desire draws it not, and, when perturbed, it does, not knowing, what it afterwards grieves for when it knows.” That is the experience of anyone who has spoken in anger and regretted it within the hour. The mind is carried somewhere it did not want to go. Gregory then names the real loss. “Thus we learn how great is the sin of impatience, through which we lose the very possession of what we are.” Impatience does not only damage the people around us. It takes us out of our own hands. The long fuse is, among other things, a way of staying yourself.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Gregory wrote the Pastoral Rule around the year 590, soon after becoming bishop of Rome. It was written for clergy, but most of it is about ordinary human character. The quotations are from the translation by James Barmby, published in 1895 in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.
No Turn for Business
In August 1666 a priest named Joseph de Beaufort began visiting a lay brother in the Carmelite house in Paris. He wrote down what the brother told him. The brother was called Lawrence, and he worked in the kitchen.
Lawrence did not pretend to be a natural saint. Before he entered the house he had been a footman. By his own account he was a great awkward fellow who broke everything.
He had worked in the kitchen for fifteen years. Beaufort records that it was work to which he had naturally a great aversion. He did not like it. He was not suited to it.
Then the community sent him on an errand he was even less suited to. They sent him to Burgundy to buy the year’s wine. Beaufort’s notes are blunt. It was a very unwelcome task, because he had no turn for business, and because he was lame. On the boat he could only get about by rolling himself over the casks.
Most of us would have spent that trip anxious and furious. Lawrence did something else. He told God that it was God’s business he was about. The notes say he afterwards found it very well performed.
He had learned to do the kitchen work the same way. He did each task for the love of God, and he asked for grace to do it well. Beaufort watched him in the busiest hour, with people calling for different things at once. He was never hasty, and never loitering.
Lawrence explained it in one sentence.
“The time of business,” said he, “does not with me differ from the time of prayer.”
Lawrence was not freed from the work he disliked, and he was never good at business. He was freed inside it. The fruit of the Spirit does not arrive as a new job with better tools. It grows in the kitchen you already have. These are Beaufort’s notes of what Lawrence said, recorded at the time, not Lawrence’s own writing.
Where This Sits in the Story
ANCIENT TRUTH
Galatians is CHURCH material, written to young communities arguing about whether faith in Christ was enough. Paul’s answer is that freedom from the law as a ladder does not mean freedom to do as we please. It means a new life, led by the Spirit.
The Exodus story stands behind this day as it stood behind the first. God revealed Himself as longsuffering at Sinai, to a people who had just broken His covenant, through the man who had broken the tablets.
MODERN APPLICATION
Modern work gives the flesh a thousand small occasions a day. A frozen screen, a lost file, a tool that ignores what you told it. None of them are large. Together they are where the fruit of the Spirit is grown or choked.
NEW TESTAMENT ECHO
Jesus says the same thing about fruit in John 15. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
REFLECT
Which fruit of the Spirit is most obviously missing in your working day right now?
A Journal Prompt
Take a sheet of paper or a note on your phone. This takes about five minutes, and it is for no one but you and God.
Draw two columns
Label the left one Works and the right one Fruit.
Fill the left honestly
Under Works, write down the moments this week when your temper went off. Be specific: when, where, at what, and what you said or did.
Look for the pattern
Circle what they have in common. Is it a certain tool, a certain person, a certain time of day, tiredness or hunger?
Name one fruit
Under Fruit, write the one fruit of the Spirit you most need for that pattern. Write it large.
Hand it over
Pray over both columns. Thank God that He showed His patience to Moses after the tablets were broken. Ask Him to grow that one fruit in you this week.
Fruit is not made in a factory. It is not made on a deadline. A fig tree does not produce a fig because someone shouted at it. It produces fruit because it is alive, rooted, fed and given time.
That is why Paul does not tell the Galatians to manufacture the fruit of the Spirit. He tells them to walk in the Spirit. The fruit comes from the life, not from the effort.
So if you read today's list and felt the distance between it and your week, do not add that distance to your list of failures. Longsuffering is being grown in you by the One whose own name is longsuffering. He is patient with the growing.
Later in the same letter Paul says it simply. Let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.
In due season. Not by Friday. Not after one good day.
Tomorrow the week turns to the harder question. What about the days when the fruit does not show at all, and you fall on the very thing you prayed about this morning? For tonight, it is enough to know that the heat in you can be tended. It is being lengthened, slowly, by Someone who knows exactly how long His own patience is.
Prayer
Holy Spirit, You know the moments I lost my temper this week, and You know the ones I have already forgotten. I am not going to pretend my anger is a smaller sin than the others. It is on the list, and I have been living on the list. But You are the God who told Moses Your name after he broke the tablets. You are merciful and gracious. You are longsuffering. I want to be like You. I cannot force that fruit to grow, so I ask You to grow it. Lengthen my fuse. Slow my tongue. Help me to hear before I speak, and to breathe before I answer. When I lose my step, bring me back into it without contempt. And let the people who work with me, and live with me, taste the fruit before I even notice it. Amen.
BREATH PRAYER
Inhale: Spirit of God — Exhale: grow Your patience in me
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
Today's Commitment
I will pray for one fruit by name each morning this week, and take one slow breath before I answer anything that makes me angry.
LEAVING AT THE CROSS
RECEIVING FROM THE CROSS
One Question
To whom did God first proclaim Himself as longsuffering, in Exodus 34?
The Voice Behind Today
the leader of Israel's exodus from Egypt, at Mount Sinai
Moses led Israel out of slavery and received the law at Sinai. He was not a calm man by nature. As a young man he killed an Egyptian he saw beating a Hebrew, broke the first tablets of the law when he saw the golden calf, and later struck a rock in frustration when God had told him to speak to it. And yet Scripture remembers him as the man to whom God spoke face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.
I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.
LESSON FOR US
Moses is proof that God does not wait for a person to master their temper before He reveals Himself. The words longsuffering and slow to anger were first spoken to a man who had broken the tablets. They were meant to become his, and they are meant to become ours.
Sources & Further Study
RELATED SCRIPTURES
FOR DEEPER STUDY
Greek: makrothumia, Strong’s G3115, occurs fourteen times in the New Testament; Strong’s derives it from a compound of makros, long (G3117), and thumos (G2372). The plural thumoi, outbursts of anger, appears in the New Testament only at 2 Corinthians 12:20 and Galatians 5:20 (Thayer). Etymology is not meaning: by the first century makrothumia meant patience or forbearance, and no source shows Paul intended the echo with 5:20. Stoicheo, G4748, “walk in line, keep in step,” appears at Galatians 5:25; peripateo, G4043, is the ordinary verb for walking in 5:16. Hebrew: erek appayim, from arek (H750) and aph (H639), literally “long of nostrils,” in Exodus 34:6 and in the same formula at Numbers 14:18, Nehemiah 9:17, Psalm 103:8, Joel 2:13, Jonah 4:2 and Nahum 1:3. The Septuagint renders it makrothumos. James 1:19-20 uses orge both times, not thumos. Sources 1. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life (1609), Part III, chapter 10. Trans. Library of Spiritual Works for English Catholics (London: Rivingtons, 1876). Christian Classics Ethereal Library. 2. Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule, Part III, chapter 9, trans. James Barmby, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 12 (1895). 3. Brother Lawrence (Nicolas Herman), The Practice of the Presence of God, First, Second and Fourth Conversations, recorded by Joseph de Beaufort from 1666. Christian Classics Ethereal Library (Epworth text) and Fleming H. Revell (1895). Further: BibleProject, “Why the Holy Spirit Isn’t Just a Force,” and Timothy Keller, “Patience” (Gospel in Life).
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BEFORE YOU GO
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