chafing, fretting, worrying, short-suffering, quick-temper, hot-temper,
high-spiritedness, unsteadiness, unreliability, lack of control of
yourself. May I ask, have you any personal acquaintance with some of
these qualities? Is there still some need in your life for the other
desirable traits? Well, remember that it is only as the Holy Spirit has
_control_ that this fruit of His is found. For notice that it is not we
that bear this fruit, but He in us. We furnish the soil. He must have
free swing in its cultivation if He is to get this harvest. And notice,
too, that it does not say "the _fruits_ of the Spirit," as though _you_
might have one or more, and _I_ have some others. But it is
"fruit"--that is, it is all one fruit and all of it is meant to be
growing up in each one of us. And let the fact be put down as settled
once for all that only as we tarry and receive the Master's promise of
power can we live the lives He longs to have us live down here among men
for Him.

If that father is so to live at home before those wide-awake, growing
boys that he can keep up the family altar, and instead of letting it
become a mere irksome form, make it the green, fresh spot in the home
life, he must have this promised power, for he cannot do it of himself.
I presume _some_ of you fathers know that.

There is that mother, living in what would be reckoned a humble home,
one of a thousand like it, but charged with the most sacred trust ever
committed to human hands--_the molding of precious lives_. If there be
hallowed ground anywhere surely it is there, in the life of that home.
What patience and tirelessness, and love and tact and wisdom and wealth
of resource does that woman not need! Ah, mothers! if any one needs to
tarry and receive the power promised by the Son of that Mary, who was
filled with the Holy Spirit from before His birth for her sacred trust,
_surely you do_.

Here sits one whose life plans seem to have gone all askew. The thing
you love to do, and had fondly planned over, removed utterly beyond
your reach and you compelled to fit in to something for which you have
no taste. It will take nothing less than the power the Master promised
for you to go on faithfully, cheerfully just where you have been placed,
no repining, no complaining, even in your innermost soul, but, instead,
a glad, joyous fitting into the Father's plan with a radiant light in
the face. Only His power can accomplish that victory! But _His can_.