Tag Archives: fruits of the spirit

day 2959: Assessing Personalities

“When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these… But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

There is so much work being done on the matching of employees and culture that it’s hard to stay on top of the latest.  I’ve even got a project of my own going on that I think is pretty unique if anyone is interested. It’s hard, scientific and intuitive work to get it right.  I’ve learned a lot about this area.  The “Big Five Test” ( which is said to be the the gold standard among scientists who study personality), assesses people on these five traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, open-mindedness, and neuroticism.  How they boiled us down to these five is over my pay grade (no P.h.d here), but I can see how these are distinctive identifying areas to be understood. I’m also fascinated in how any of these Big Five tend to get exacerbated by situation or environment in the moment.  I know that my own personality can vary around those five as different issues arise.  It’s good that we are cognizant and sensitive to who people are and what is going on around us as we think about matching and grouping people together.

I’ve copied above the Fruit of the Spirit and also the verse just before, which I like to refer to as the Rotten Fruit Not of the Spirit. As we each assess how we show up and work better with others, can we try harder to be sure that it’s the Fruits of the Spirit that others see in our personality?

Reference: Galatians 19-23 (New Living Translation)