⚡Quick Answer
A gift is something given to you; fruit is something grown in you. Gifts are abilities the Spirit hands out to serve others; fruit is the character He slowly grows — love, patience, self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). A gift can sit in an unsaved man’s hands; fruit cannot. When deciding whom to trust, watch the fruit, not the gifting.
A gift is something given to you. Fruit is something grown in you.
A gift is an ability the Holy Spirit gives a Christian — to teach, to serve, to show mercy, to lead — and it is given for other people's benefit, not for the benefit of the man who has it. It can be sharpened by use or wasted by neglect, but nobody earns it and nobody chooses it; the Spirit decides who receives what. Fruit is not an ability at all. It is what the Spirit slowly makes a Christian into: loving, patient, kind, self-controlled. Nobody can say which week it began. It simply becomes true of him, over years.
Let's first talk about the gifts. Paul sets them out to a church that had made a mess of them.
1 Corinthians 12:7–11 (NKJV)
But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all: for to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of knowledge through the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healings by the same Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of spirits, to another different kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually as He wills.
Three things in that passage tell you what a gift is.
It is given to each one. Not to a spiritual elite. If you are a Christian, the Spirit has equipped you for something, and Peter says the same (1 Peter 4:10). A believer who thinks he has nothing to offer his church has misread himself.
It is given for the profit of all. A gift is not for the person holding it. It is an ability to serve other people, which is why a gift exercised for your own reputation has already stopped doing the job it was given for.
And it is distributed as He wills. You do not choose your gift any more than you chose your height or your voice. Paul's whole argument in the surrounding chapter is that the church is a body, and a body needs a hand and an eye and a foot, so envy of another Christian's gift is as foolish as an ear resenting an eye.
A question follows immediately from that list, and it is worth answering plainly. Some of the gifts Paul names — miracles, prophecy, tongues — are not what most Christians see in their churches today, and that difference has divided sincere believers for a long time. This book takes the position most commonly held in the Reformed tradition, that those particular gifts belonged to a particular season and have ceased. The reasoning is not that God has grown weaker or less generous. It is that miraculous signs in Scripture cluster around moments when God was giving new revelation — around Moses, around Elijah and Elisha, around Christ, around the apostles — and their function was to authenticate the messenger and the message. Hebrews says exactly that: the salvation first spoken by the Lord was confirmed to us by those who heard Him, God also bearing witness both with signs and wonders, with various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 2:3–4). Once the message was complete and written down, the credentials had done their work. God remains free to act miraculously and sometimes does; what has ceased is a class of gift given to accredit new revelation, because there is no new revelation to accredit.
Faithful Christians who love the same Bible read this differently, and it is not a question on which to break fellowship. But it does not change the answer to this chapter's question in the slightest, because whichever gifts you believe are still given, none of them is the measure of a Christian. That is the point Scripture presses hardest.
The first is Jesus, describing the day of judgement.
Matthew 7:22–23 (NKJV)
Many will say to Me in that day, “Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?” And then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!”
Read what those people are claiming. Prophecy. Exorcism. Wonders. If gifting were evidence of salvation, these would be the safest people in the room — and they are the ones sent away. Whatever else that passage means, it means this: a man may exercise remarkable power in the name of Christ and not belong to Him.
The second is Paul, and this is the part most often missed. Between the two chapters where he discusses spiritual gifts, he stops and inserts a chapter about love. That placement is deliberate. He has just finished listing the gifts, and he is about to explain how to use them in a meeting, and in between he says this:
1 Corinthians 13:1–3 (NKJV)
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.
Notice that Paul does not say the gifts become less useful without love. He says the man becomes nothing. Gifts can be held by an empty man. Character cannot.
Which brings us to the fruit.
Galatians 5:22–23 (NKJV)
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.
Look at the first word of the list — not fruits, but fruit. Paul lists nine things and calls them one. This is not a menu from which each Christian is issued two or three according to temperament. It is a single crop, and it comes up together. A man cannot be commended for his kindness while excusing his lack of self-control, or praised for his peace while he is faithless. Where the Spirit is at work, all nine are growing, however unevenly.
And notice whose fruit it is. Paul does not call it the fruit of the disciplined Christian. He calls it the fruit of the Spirit — because that is who produces it. This is the point at which teaching on this subject most often goes wrong, by treating gifts as God's work and character as ours, something we manufacture with enough effort and enough early mornings. Paul had already confronted that thinking earlier in the same letter:
Galatians 3:3 (NKJV)
Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?
He is not telling the Galatians to stop working. The Christian reads, prays, gathers with the church, sits under preaching, confesses sin, obeys. But none of those things manufactures the fruit. They are where a Christian puts himself in the way of the Spirit who does.
One difference matters more than all the others. A gift can sit in the hands of a man who is not saved — Jesus said so plainly. Fruit cannot, because fruit is the Spirit's own work in a man, and He does not do that work in someone who is not His.
Which makes this more than a definition. When you are deciding whom to follow, whom to trust with your family, whom to let teach your children, gifting is the loudest thing in the room and the least reliable. It is easy to see and easy to admire, and it tells you almost nothing. Watch instead for the slow crop — the patience, the kindness, the self-control, the way a man treats people who can do nothing for him. Christians will never all be gifted alike. They should all be recognisable alike.
