You were running well. Who prevented you from obeying the truth? This persuasion did not come from the One who called you. A little yeast leavens the whole lump of dough.     Galatians 5:8-9 HCSB

In our Scripture passage, Paul is speaking to the Galatians. He begins this chapter by telling them, “Christ has liberated us to be free. Stand firm then and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Paul wants them to be successful.

If we consider this from Paul’s perspective, Paul was a well-educated young man who began with a career of persecuting Christians. He did this because he thought he was doing a good thing. It was only when Jesus Himself confronted Paul on the road to Damascus that he realized he had been wrong.

Once he realized the error in his ways, he wanted others to find the peace and joy he had found in following Christ. He spent the rest of his days here on earth preaching the gospel and leading others to Christ.

If you read his letters to the churches he founded, you will see he has great concern for them to not be deceived and fall back into their old lives of sin. In our Scripture passage, he has concerns that someone is leading the church members astray. He worries they will not be able to successfully complete their mission.

What is their mission? Well, it’s the same mission we have. It is to get to spend eternity in heaven with God our Father and to encourage others to do the same. To reach this goal, we must successfully navigate life here on earth. We must have a recipe for success.

If you set out to cook a meal, you know how important the recipe is. You may be a well-trained cook that simply uses a pinch of this and a dash of that, but you still follow some type of recipe whether it is written down or in your head. You know that using a cup of salt when a recipe calls for a cup of sugar or vice versa will ruin the dish.

It’s important to put the right ingredients in so you achieve the desired results. Our life in Christ also requires the right ingredients for the desired results.

Just as I can’t put a cup of salt into a recipe and expect it to get sweeter, I can’t put the wrong ingredient into my Christian life and expect it to bring forth good results. Paul wants the Galatians to be successful and in verses 22-23, he gives them the recipe for success as Christians.

The main ingredient is fruit, not mangos or pineapples, but the fruit of the Spirit. There is a war between the Spirit and the flesh being fought for our souls. Paul tells the Galatians if we walk by the Spirit, we will not carry out the desires of the flesh (Galatians 5:16).

In our recipe for success, we must have the fruit of the Spirit which Paul describes as love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control.

We want to avoid dumping any ingredients which are works of the flesh into our recipe. These include sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar.

The fruit of the Spirit leads to eternity in heaven while the works of the flesh can lead us straight to a fiery eternity in hell. Anything we acquire on earth is temporary. True success in Jesus Christ gives us an eternity in heaven with our Lord and Savior.

It seems like a no-brainer to me, but you must decide for yourself. I spent many years of my life dumping in the wrong ingredients with horrible results. I encourage you to pay careful attention to what you put in; if you do so, you will be much happier with how it turns out.

Have a great day!