In the last session, I spoke about the connection between angels and thresholds. One of the reasons they are stationed there is to minister to us in the aftermath of the tests we experience.

The threshold is, quite simply, a place of testing. As we pass through trials and challenges, the Fruit of the Spirit matures in us. Like muscle that develops with resistance training, the Fruit of the Spirit in us grows as we meet and overcome challenges.

I had a friend who I thought was as honest as the day was long. She’d return to a shop if they accidentally gave her too much change; she’d go out of her way to return a lost wallet she’d found. I’d have given her a reference any day, extolling her integrity. So it was a great shock to discover that she’d used her position as treasurer of a social club to defraud it. As I came to grips with the knowledge someone I’d trusted was seriously dishonest, I wondered how I could have been so mistaken. Eventually I realised that I’d been taken in by the old adage that, if you’re honest in small things, you’re honest in big ones. This wasn’t the case for my friend. It was simply that, prior to having access to the bank account belonging to the social club, the financial rewards were just never big enough to tempt her.

Honesty is a virtue that we can only claim if we’ve been subject to a temptation that was genuinely hard to resist. We only become people of integrity when we’ve been through the fire and turned our backs on duplicity when giving in would have been the easy way out of the furnace. 

Although there’s nothing we’d like to avoid more than testing, God’s assays are vital to the growth of the Fruit of the Spirit in our lives. The divine Fruit is essential to achieving our calling—it’s part of the arsenal of weaponry gifted to us by the Holy Spirit to defeat the enemy.

The Armour of God is largely defensive and protective but the Fruit of the Spirit is an offensive group of armaments. When it comes to testing by the threshold guardians, those fallen powers who want to block our way into our calling, we need to be able to discern which Fruit to deploy to overcome the specific enemy we’re facing at a particular time.

Integrity, for example, overcomes Leviathan, the spirit of retaliation. Integrity’s more common ‘botanical’ name in the spirit world is shalom, which we identify as peace.

Many believers want to sneak over the threshold and bypass the tests. But just as Adam and Eve were tested, just as Jesus was tested in the wilderness—so we will find ourselves at the appointed time on a testing ground. More often than not, we fail the test. But, never forget, our God is the Lord of second chances.

This is Grace Drops and I’m Anne Hamilton. May the Lord of Second Chances kiss you today.

Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.