The "Ingredients" of a Christian

Have you ever looked at the ingredients listed on the labels of your favorite foods? Have you ever noticed that they are listed on the packaging in order from most to least as the quantity of each contained in the food item? In other words, the ingredients of your favorite brand of chicken noodle soup will list chicken stock first because there is more of this ingredient than any other one in the soup contained in the can. The next on the list is noodles because there are more noodles than the remaining ingredients and so on down to the preservatives and coloring.
Now, this being said, have you ever wondered about the "ingredients" of a Christian? What makes up a Christian? How does God list them? What qualities does God want us to have? And in what order would he list them in an ingredients list? You can find the answers to all of these questions by studying the Fruit of the Spirit found in the Bible in the book of Galatians, chapter 5, verse 22-23a. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."
It is stated several times in the Bible that love is the greatest. Joy is a presence of greatness that is beyond happiness. Peace is a calm of your spirit that you know something good is at work. Patience is being able to wait and many times with God for a very long time. Kindness is the act of doing something nice for and to others. Goodness is being nice all the time and not doing bad things. Faithfulness is loyalty to what you know in your heart to be right. Gentleness is unharsh and tender, not rough. And finally, self-control is being able to keep it all together.
If you start at the beginning of this list and allow each of these to work together, by the time you get to the end of the list it only seems natural to do all of these because they are so closely knit together as a single fruit. Notice the word God used is "fruit" not fruits. And there you have it, the ingredients of a Christian as composed by God.