Fruit of the Spirit - Love
Over the next few months, we are going to spend time exploring the Fruit of the Spirit. The goal in this series is for all of us is to understand what each quality of the fruit means, how Jesus exemplified each, and how they are to manifest in our lives. Before we get into that though, I think it’s important for us to understand where this idea of Holy Spirit produced fruit comes from.
Grafted into Christ
Read John 15:1-5
When we place our faith in Jesus, we as the branches are grafted onto the vine. There is a supernatural joining together that happens. And like a branch draws life from the vine that draws life from the root system, so we draw life from Christ and produce supernatural fruit in our lives. If we don’t bear fruit, Jesus says we are cut off and thrown to the side, and later in this passage says those branches are collected and thrown into the fire.
So we either bear fruit or we don’t. But bearing fruit is not an action that we choose. Bearing fruit is a natural outpouring of the Holy Spirit that indwells us.
Indwelling of the Holy Spirit
Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit as a Helper that would live in us and be with us. Paul reiterates this 1 Corinthians 6, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?”
The truth is that Jesus promises the Holy Spirit, and when we place our faith in Him, we receive the Holy Spirit in our lives. That Spirit has many roles in our lives, one of which is producing fruit.
So with sharing in the life of Jesus and being empowered by the Holy Spirit as our foundation, let’s turn to Galatians chapter 5 and read in context how Paul lays this out for us.
Read Galatians 5:16-24
Paul lays out a very clear distinction between the desires of the flesh and the desires of the Spirit. In fact, it is impossible for the 2 to live together. They are in opposition to one another. What this means, then, is we either live by our flesh, OR we live by the Spirit. It cannot be both. And we don’t need to deep-dive into each of the works of the flesh to understand the corruption they bring. The works of sinful flesh bring spiritual death and destruction into our lives. But when we submit to Christ and are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, our lives are now marked by the nature of God.
And we often think of this list as distinct and separate fruit. In reality, the Greek word is the singular use of “fruit” which means that all of these are wrapped up in one single Spirit-gifted fruit. One pastor said to “think of the fruit of the Spirit not as nine separate jewels, but as nine separate facets or sides on one single shimmering diamond.” This should totally change our perspective on what Paul is saying. We have been gifted, by the Holy Spirit, to magnify Christ through how we love, how we choose joy in difficulty, how we let peace rule in anxious times, how we exercise patience in high-intensity moments, how we show kindness to those that may not deserve it, how our lives are marked by moral goodness, how we remain faithful in a shifting culture, how we respond in gentleness, and how we express self-control when others wrong us. And ALL of these are evidenced in the life of the Christian.
And so this is our aim. To understand the privilege of magnifying Jesus in a dark world because of the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, coming with humility to hear from the Spirit where growth is needed. Why? Because the world desperately needs a different way, and that is the way of Jesus.
Love
Paul naturally begins with love because love is the very essence of God. In fact, 1 John 4:8 says that “God is love.” We can’t minimize it simply to something that God does. God loves because that is who He is. This love is agape love, self-sacrificial love. And understanding this type of love will make all the other facets of the fruit flow more naturally out of us. Because when we are others-focused, it’s easier to have patience, peace, self-control, and so on. So love is where we must start. But it’s also a massive one to tackle. Depending on your Bible translation, love is mentioned between 310-800 times. The ESV that we use here has 684 uses. Even with all of those uses, though, I want to start with what Jesus says to His disciples in John 13:34-35:
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
1.. Love Requires Sacrifice
Now this command that Jesus gives here will eventually lead to the early Christians behaving in radically different ways, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But Jesus begins with “A New Commandment.” Now, conceptually this is nothing new. We see back in Leviticus the command to “love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” So if it isn’t new conceptually, why does Jesus say that it is new?
Judaism had become loveless. They loved only those that they chose to love because they saw them as equals. So even though the Law commanded love for neighbor, the Jewish religion in practice had drifted from that. And so in effect it was new because culturally it was not the norm. Jesus had given the disciples an example of what love was meant to look like. Love had been elevated to another level with Jesus. He touched and healed the untouchables, and ate meals with the outcasts. And now, He’s on the brink of offering His life as a sacrifice for sin, and that’s love at the pinnacle. Jesus Himself said, “greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down His life for His friend.”
There is no greater example of self-sacrificial love than to die for somebody else. This is what Jesus did. “Just as I have loved you,” He said. So, we are to love like Jesus. And while most if not all of us won’t physically give up our lives for someone else, we still have the command to love sacrificially. In fact, Jesus said that the world will know who we are based on how we love. What a privilege!
The early church believed that this command from Jesus was non-negotiable. It was said of them by Julian the Apostate, “[They] support not only their poor, but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.” So while others were neglecting the poor, the early Christians were taking care of them.
The church historian Eusebius observed during the various plagues that killed many people, ““Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead. But with the heathen everything was quite otherwise. They deserted those who began to be sick, and fled from their dearest friends. They shunned any participation or fellowship with death; which yet, with all their precautions, it was not easy for them to escape.”
The great theologian Augustine said of the Christians care for the orphans, “Again, sometimes foundlings which heartless parents have exposed in order to their being cared for by any passer-by, are picked up by holy virgins, and are presented for baptism by these persons, who neither have nor desire to have children of their own.” People that did not want to have children believed that the love of Jesus meant that they were to sacrifice their own wants and desires for the good of someone else!
The sad reality of the Western Church, based on a recent Barna study, is that only 21% of non-Christians have a positive perception of the local church, while 50% of the non-Christians don’t trust local pastors. 50% of millennials would even say that the local church is detached from the real issues people are facing in their communities
There seems to be a disconnect between society’s perception of the early Christians and society’s perception of the church today.
2.. Love Requires Truth
Read Ephesians 4:11-16
To attain unity, brought to maturity, measured in fullness to the stature of Christ, no longer being tossed around by the waves of worldly doctrine and human cunning, cultural “truths.” One of the ways that we ensure that we are all focused on maturity in Christ, discerning what is biblical truth and what is culture’s version of truth, is by speaking the truth in love.
We tend to think of this as the attitude with which we present the truth. We are to be delicate and gentle, so as not to offend. But that isn’t what Paul is saying. What he is saying in this verse is that because we love one another, we speak the truth. We don’t shy away from the truth. Our love for each other, our desire to see people grow in faith and understanding sometimes means we have to speak the hard truth. And sometimes this truth is hard to hear.
Proverbs 27:5-6 - “Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.” “Open rebuke refers to confronting someone’s misbehavior frankly and truthfully.”
Church, we need friends in our lives that are not afraid to call us out when we mess up! We need friends that are not afraid to speak truth into our lives even when we don’t want to hear it! We need friends who are willing to steer us back to the truth of the gospel when we are tempted to let culture determine our truth. Those are faithful friends. Those are loyal friends. Jesus Himself says in Revelation 3, “those whom I love I rebuke and discipline.” This is one of the hardest things about parenting. We correct and discipline our children because we love them. And along those same lines if we love someone, then we should be willing to receive the truth that they bring to us.
Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth. The rich young ruler came to Jesus and asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Scripture tells us that Jesus loved the man, but told Him a difficult truth. “You are holding too tightly to your material possessions. You need to let them go. In fact, go sell everything, give some of your money to the poor, then come follow me.” Even Peter, one of Jesus’ closest friends, was rebuked multiple times by Jesus. Did it mean that Jesus didn’t love him? No! We need to be willing to love people enough to tell them the truth with the goal of maturity in Christ.
Application
Love is Patient. Love is Kind. Love does not Envy. Love does not Boast. Love is not Arrogant. Love is not Rude. Love is not Selfish. Love is not irritable. Love is not resentful. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing. Love rejoices in truth. Love bears all things. Love believes all things. Love hopes all things. Love endures all things.
Love requires sacrifice. Love requires truth. Let us be a people that is know for this kind of love for one another, and those who Jesus has sovereignly placed in our paths.
