3 Colors of Love

Now it is time to get personal...
NCD provides tools for assessing and improving the health of the church but it also has tools for looking at our personal spiritual health and one of the best is in Christian Schwarz's book, "The 3 Colors of Love", with the Fruit of the Spirit Test.

The book's basic premise is that "the" fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23 is love. The other eight "fruit" mentioned are parts of love. Like the NCD survey, the Fruit of the Spirit Test finds the "minimum factor", the area in my life where I am blocking the Holy Spirit's work, i.e. the way I am most unloving.

And that brings me to the second premise of the book; the biggest problem thwarting God's blessing in both the church and in my life, is lack of love. So by letting the Spirit flower and fruit in the particular part of "love" that I lack, I will become more healthy spiritually (and so will my church).

I'm not going into detail but I want to share my Fruit of the Spirit Test results then report how I'm going at letting the Spirit work.

I did the test on December 15, 2012 (I'll tell you in the next post, why I put off working on it).

I am 55 years of age, male, a Seventh-day Adventist Australian.

Fruit of the Spirit Profile
(the higher the value, the better)
   Name of the fruit, Profile Value
1. Gentleness 104
2. Patience       103
3. Peace           99
4. Goodness       96
5. Kindness        96
6. Faithfulness 82
7. Joy              82
8. Self-control 79


Color Area Profile
Justice (Green)         267.2
Truth (Red) 221.8
Grace (Blue) 261.6

To sum up:
My minimum love value is Self-control.
My weakest area of love is Truth.
So these are the areas to "work on" so I can "grow in love".

Some reflections:
All the scores down to Kindness are grouped around average, 100, then the dropoff to around 80, which is the bottom 2.5%. Pretty dramatic!
Self-control, joy and faithfulness make up most of the Truth area. So no wonder it is lowest.
I neglect Truth so have a tendency to Deception. This is where I am most unloving.
I lack the primary virtue of Trustworthiness
By overemphasising Justice and Grace I have become Anarchic and Hypocritical.