Galatians 5:22
Galatians 5.22 is where we find
the fruit of the spirit is love. That’s on page 975 in the pew
edition. If you’re using that copy, we’ve
been thinking about living by the spirit and not the flesh.
Remember the flesh is our remaining sin, our remaining corruption
in Christ. Our sin has been pardoned. Our
sin has been subdued. And in the rest of our Christian
life, God is at work sanctifying us by his word and spirit. It’s
a fight, it’s a battle that we participate in. The spirit wins
out over the flesh, but until we are glorified or made holy
and perfect, we have this continual and daily battle. So we looked
in the weeks past at the deeds of the flesh. Today, we want
to begin looking at each of the fruits or the fruit of the spirit
individually, so today, We look at love and Galatians 5.22. We won’t read the whole bit,
but we’ll simply read this. The fruit of the spirit is love. Amen. The word of the living
God for us. Yesterday morning, I had to make
a little run to pick up some groceries for my dad on the way
over to his house and was surprised to pass the candy aisle. The
peeps were out. The Cadbury eggs were out. The
Reese’s shaped Easter candies were out. And I got to thinking,
wasn’t it just Valentine’s? Did they sell it all? What’s
the deal? You can tell, though, when a
store knows the season, what’s out, what’s candy. So Valentine’s
had just passed. You drive through the town of
Graham, and on Court Square, on the side of a building, it
says, love is love. That seems to be one of the new
slogans of the day. Love, love, love is all over
the place. Remember the Beatles, love is all you need. We say,
I love ice cream. We say, I love the Tar Heels.
I love the Blue Devils. I love golf. I love Jesus. I
love my friends. I love country music. I love
Susie. We throw love around. So which love? Are we speaking
of when we read the fruit of the Spirit is love? Is it brotherly
love? Like Philadelphia, the city of
brotherly love. Is it the Philia? Or is it Eros? That would be married love. Or
is it Storge? I love ice cream. Or is it the
word agape? The word for Christian love.
That’s the word we want to think about today when we think of
the fruit of the Spirit is love. We want to think about agape
or the love of God and the love of God’s people to one another.
We’ve been thinking in the last weeks about walking by the spirit,
being led by the spirit, living by the spirit, keeping in step
with the spirit. We’ve been thinking a few weeks
about not growing weary in our well-doing that is living by
the spirit. We want to think about the great
and grave command that we looked at a few weeks back, do not gratify
the flesh and commit the deeds of the flesh. And we’ve been
thinking about how do we cultivate Or how does God cultivate the
fruit of the spirit in us? It’s not something that we can
work up. It’s not something we can go get. It’s not something
that is already in us and just needs to be watered and fertilized. No, it’s a gift of God through
his word, through his sacraments, through his prayer. He fills
us and moment by moment, day by day, week by week, year by
year until he calls us home, the fruit of the spirit is produced
in us by God himself. We put ourselves in the path
of his word and graces. We work the spiritual disciplines
of Bible and prayer and church and keeping the faith, but it
is God who gives us the ability to bear the fruit. And as we
think today about the fruit of the spirit is love, We think
for just a moment about its opposites. The opposite of agape, the opposite
of Christian love is being selfish. It’s being self-absorbed. It’s
being bitter and jealous and strife, full of strife and hatred
and envy and enmity. You’ll remember Paul’s warning
to the Galatians a few verses back. Be careful that you do
not bite and devour one another. Take heed lest you fall. And
so we have within us the struggle with the flesh to not be lovers,
but haters. We have the struggle within us
of not only the flesh, but around us, the world. And it says, love
yourself, treat yourself. You deserve this. And so it’s
a very self-centered world. And then we have the devil who
wants to destroy any Christian relationship. And so we have
lots of pressures around us. And so today, as we think of
the fruit of the Spirit as love, we want to set our mind on thinking
and set our purpose on loving and setting our behavior towards
bearing the fruit of the Spirit in conformity with the reality,
the new reality that we all have as being new creations in the
Lord Jesus Christ. And I wanna suggest to you that
love is best shown not defined. Yes, there’s a definition to
love, and the definition to the love of the Bible, agape, is
self-sacrificing, serving others’ love. It’s saying, I love this
person, I’ll give them 100% and expect nothing in return. It’s
most clearly displayed in the work of Jesus Christ. It’s most clearly displayed in
the love of God the Father. And it’s most clearly displayed
in the love of the Holy Spirit as he applies the redemption
purchased by Christ to saints. This love of God shown helps
give definition to Christian love and we find it rooted in
the fellowship of the Trinity. In eternity past, before creation,
there was God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit,
and they enjoyed rich, deep fellowship within the Trinity, and desiring
to share, excuse me, share that love with others. You find in
the opening pages of scripture, let us make man in our own image. And so the Trinitarian eternal
love, the perfect love we find in God, the Father, God, the
Son, God, the Holy Spirit is poured out in the love of the
saints and made manifest before a watching world. I want us to
think about love in four ways today. The love of the Father,
the love of the Son, the love of the Holy Spirit. And then
finally, the love of the saints, which is really what Paul is
getting to when he says the fruit of the spirit is love. Well, how do you best show the
love of God the Father? How do you best show what a kind
of God he is like? I think the best way is to remember
the story in the gospels about a father who stood on the porch
and his eyes were fixed on the roadway leading up to his home.
And he was waiting for the return of his son. He was waiting for
the return of the son who said some wicked things to the father
and did wicked things to the father. What he said to the father
was, Hey, old man, give me what’s coming. Give me my inheritance.
Give it all to me now. And he took it. He went to a
far away country and he spent that inheritance in revelry and
partying and drunkenness and in all kinds of manner of evil,
the deeds of the flesh. you might say appropriately for
Galatians 5. And he spent it all. He spent
his inheritance and he spent his body. And he found himself
one day among the pigs. And he was wanting to eat even
the food of the pigs and that wasn’t even available to him.
And he came to his senses, the Bible says, and he says to himself,
not a servant in my father’s house goes without. And so I
will arise and I will go to my father and I will say, father,
I’ve sinned against heaven and against you. Make me a servant
in your house. And at least I’ll have food to
eat. At least I’ll have a place to sleep. And I won’t be longing
for pig pods and sleeping among these nasty beasts. Well, this
father, had been standing, his father had been waiting, his
father had been watching and anticipating. And it shows to
us the rich love of God the Father. He has been scorned by us. He’s given us every good gift,
every good grace. He’s made the world and everything
in it. He’s put us in it. He’s given us food to eat, clothes
for our backs. He, to Israel, made them a nation. Though they weren’t the greatest
of people, they weren’t the most in number. Deuteronomy 7 says
he set his affection upon them. He set his love upon them because
he wanted to. Nothing in them and nothing in
us brings about God’s love. We are unlovely people, but God
chooses to love us. and to make us in Christ Jesus
lovable creatures. And so the love of God the Father
is best seen, I believe, well, in all kinds of ways in the Bible,
with the father on the porch gazing down the road, waiting
for the return of the prodigal son. And you remember the father’s
response. Did he say, okay, that’s fine,
you go to the stables and muck the stalls, go out in the fields
and collect the harvest. No, before the boy could get
the words of repentance out of his mouth. The father said, quick,
bring a robe, bring a ring, bring shoes for his feet, kill the
fattened calf. For my son was lost and is found. He was dead
and he was now alive. There’s a book in recent history
titled The Prodigal God. It is God in the story who is
prodigious. It is God in the story who is
lavish and extreme and extravagant. What the son did with his inheritance
and with his life, was extravagant in human terms, but what God
has done for us is quite extravagant, and he is a prodigal God. And
it’s good to be reminded that the father never stopped loving
the son. The father didn’t do what, well,
we often do. We dust our hands off and say,
fine, be that way. You go on and do that and see
if I care. Now, when God chooses us in eternity
past, he, according to Ephesians 1, says he chooses us in love.
He chooses us in Christ. Before the foundation of the
world, God loved us. We were unlovable in the condition
we would be born in and remain in because of sin, but God loves
us with an everlasting love. Our God plays for keeps. He’s
a God of steadfast love, mercy, and patience. And so before the
foundation of the world, the whole scripture shows that God
loves us and keeps his promises. Now, sometimes we wonder, does
God love us? Maybe he’s disciplining us for our sins, or he’s chastising
us as a good father would, or perhaps he’s putting us through
a testing where he wants us to prove ourselves, perhaps like
Abraham when he was called to sacrifice Isaac, or like Job
when everything was taken from him, because remember, Satan
said, he only loves you because you give him stuff. God says,
fine, take it all away and see. He still loves me. He still calls
on my name. The Lord has given, the Lord
has taken. Blessed be the name of the Lord. And so God, in his
love, sometimes puts us through hard things. He puts us through
discipline. He puts us through tests, but
his everlasting love, his steadfast love, his covenant love is a
love that never ever goes away. And so we want to keep that at
the forefront of our mind. As we define love, we see it
displayed in God, the father. I think this next point you will
understand well, love of the son. The scripture says, greater
love has, excuse me, no man than the one who would lay down his
life for his friend. You know, most of us will go
to a certain extent. You know, we won’t loan somebody
our car or our money, and we might not give them a whole day,
but you know, we’ll drop them off somewhere. We’ll do a little
something for them. Not so Jesus. The scripture says,
while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. The scripture says that God so
loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that whosoever
believes in him should have everlasting life. Jesus is a God who goes
on a mission to seek and save the lost. He left the riches
of heaven. We sing at Christmas sometimes,
thou who was rich beyond all splendor for our sakes became
poor. that we might become rich. That’s
right out of second Corinthians. Jesus left the riches of heaven.
He came and suffered and died in our place in order that we
might be raised up to his condition. One day we’ll be resurrected
to everlasting life. And God so loved the world. God
so loved mankind who was at enmity with him. He so loved the world
that said, give me what’s mine. Never want to see you again.
And we went off and squandered it. And he so loved the world
that Jesus through his active obedience and through his passive
obedience, through his suffering and death as the second Adam
showed us and demonstrated love in such a way. It’s not just
at the cross, though, that we see Jesus’ love. We see His compassion
in His entire life and ministry. He saw the poor. He saw the blind,
the deaf, the dumb, the weak, the lame. He saw those who were
stuck in sin and trespasses. He saw those who were demon-possessed,
and He looked them in the face, eye to eye. He called them by
name, and He rescued and redeemed them from their sin and sin’s
maladies. and brought them to faith in
Him. And so we see through Jesus that love is a giving love, it’s
a sacrificial love, it’s a serving love. We see it in His mission,
His ministry, and at the cross. Now this third area, love of
the Holy Spirit, I think is something we probably don’t think about
much. In fact, we think of God the Father and all that He does,
His love, we think of Jesus and His acts of love, but do we really
think much about the Spirit? and what the Holy Spirit does
in our lives. Imagine the Holy Spirit’s much
unknown to us and as good Presbyterians, you know, we’re a little afraid
because, you know, he might make us stick our hands up or clap
or, you know, sway side to side in church. And, you know, we’re
the frozen chosen and don’t like that sort of thing. But we realize,
I think perhaps as you’ve been through the recent Sunday school
class, the theology of Paul, and you think through the order
of salvation and you think of all those New Testament words,
many of them very technical words that speak about what Jesus accomplished
at the cross. He accomplished redemption. And
then the Holy Spirit comes and applies that redemption to us
and what love God has to create. the solution and to see that
the solution is seen through. You know, we live in a world
that likes to say, um, God made salvation possible and I was
smart enough to take hold of it. We’ve been, we’ve been thinking
about that in the ladies Wednesday class a good bit the last couple
weeks. We, we, we thank the Lord for
making salvation possible, but we pat ourselves on the back
and say, you know, I’m just, I’m so glad I thought to love
God. I’m so glad that I thought to reach out to him and say,
you know, this life I’m living is not great. No, it’s the Holy
Spirit who comes like he did to Paul on the road to Damascus
and he knocks us upside the head. He takes the blinders off. He
softens our dead hearts. He persuades and enables us to
freely embrace Jesus as he’s offered in the gospel. And the
Holy Spirit does so much in the life of the believer. He’s the
sanctifier. He’s the teacher. You remember
when Jesus ascended back into heaven, he told his disciples,
don’t worry, you’re not going to be alone. I’m going to send
the helper. I’m going to send the spirit.
I’m going to send the paraclete, the one who comes alongside.
I’m going to send the one who is wisdom. I’m going to send
the one who is adoption, the one who is holiness. And he’s
the comforter and the advocate. And he’s the one who hears your
sighs and groans that are too deep for words. It’s his spirit
inside you that cries out, Abba, Father, and confirms to us. That
we are the children of the living God. He is the spirit of faith.
He is the spirit of grace. And he is the spirit of glory.
And so we see father, son and Holy Spirit in different ways
and connected ways and all in mighty ways. God loves us with
an eternal and everlasting love. And he sends the son into the
world to seek and to save the lost. and it’s by the Spirit
these things take place. So when we come to a passage
like Galatians 5.22 and it says, live by the Spirit and walk in love, live by the
Spirit, you will not gratify the deeds of the flesh. The fruit
of the Spirit is love. We have to think of the love
of the saints, but we can’t think of the love of the saints without
the love of the Spirit, the love of the Son and the love of the
Father. We talk in theology, about God has attributes. God
is holy. God is love. God is powerful. God is all knowing. We speak of all these attributes
of God. God is love. And we say that there are attributes
of God that are not communicable. They are attributes that we can
never have. You can’t be omnipresent. You can’t be everywhere at once,
but God can. You can’t be omniscient, know everything all at once,
but God can. So there are things that are
true about God that are not true about us. But as image bearers,
there are things that are true about God that can be true of
us. If God is love, we in a small finite way, we can be love to
others. And so we want to imitate God
as the spirit works in us. One of the questions that pops
up in the Bible When we think about the love of the saints,
one of the great passages, well, is really John’s three little
letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. We’ve been reading through them
on Sunday nights over the last couple months. And we’ve been
reading them really verse by verse instead of section by section
because it’s very powerful. And one of the questions that
John, the old apostle, writes is, how do you know I’m a Christian?
How do you know you’re a Christian? You know you’re a Christian according
to John, if you love God and you love the saints. And he says
in sharp contrast, if you don’t love God and if you don’t love
the saints, then you must not know God. God is love. Christ is love. And so the gifts
and graces that we display show that God has been at work in
our lives. Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter
13, it’s the famous love chapter, he says, you might have gifts
of prophecy, you might have gifts of knowledge, you might have
these extraordinary gifts in the church and people recognize
them, but if you don’t have love, you’re a noisy gong, you’re a
loud and clanging cymbal. And so we as Christians can bear
evidences of being saved, evidences of knowing God. But if we don’t
have love, we’re missing a key ingredient. In fact, the fruit
of the spirit is love is perhaps the capstone. It’s the, it’s
the foundation. It’s the stone that holds the
arch up. It’s, it’s the important stone in the fruit of the spirit.
In fact, Paul says to the Colossians, clothe yourselves with compassion,
kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and above all, he says,
put on love, which binds everything together. It’s the key ingredient
in the life of the believer. We read in Paul’s letter to the
Corinthians about what love is and what love isn’t. Love is
patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast.
It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own
way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing,
but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes
all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. A lot
of times we hear that read in the context of marriage, but
remember when Paul was writing the letters to the Corinthians,
he wrote four and we have two. He was pretty upset with them. They were living like pagans.
They were fighting like cats and dogs and they were putting
others in higher positions and others in lower positions. And
so when you get to chapter 13, he’s saying, look, y’all got
to love each other. You got to quit killing each
other. You got to quit putting yourselves first. You’ve got to quit living
lives of hostility and hatred and jealousy and envy and strife
and, and living as if you are the only person on the face of
the earth, and so love is some things, love is not some things. I have a sheet of paper up here
that says at the top, love one another, and it’s a summary of
all the one another relationships that are spoken of in the scripture,
and there are 43, 43 one another relationships spelled out in
the New Testament. Most of them tell us in their
context, that we are to love one another as Christ has loved
us. Just a few of them. Wash one
another’s feet. We are members of one another.
We’re to be devoted to one another. Give preference to one another.
We’re to have the same mind toward one another. Do not judge one
another. Build one another up. Accept
one another. Admonish one another. Greet one
another. Care for one another. Through love, serve one another. Show forbearance to one another
in love. Be kind to one another, forgive
each other. Speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs. You see, one of the key aspects
of the Christian faith is love. And I mentioned earlier, it’s
hard to define, but it’s easy to show it. And we see it in
the father who waited on the porch for the lost son to return.
We see it in the great shepherd who leaves the 99 and goes after
the one missing. of the 100. We see it in the
parable of the lost coin, where the lady had a stack of coins,
one was missing, and she swept the house clean until she found
it. That’s the love of God the Father. He doesn’t let a one
of us go missing. We see the love of the son as
he stretched out his arms on the cross. We see the love of
the spirit to stay with us in this hostile world, applying
all that Jesus earned for us at the cross. And God knows when
he commands us to bear the fruit of the spirit. The fruit of the
spirit is love. He knows of the remaining flesh
in us to be self-seeking and to be self-serving. He knows
of the world and all that it offers us. Be true to yourself. Treat yourself. You deserve this. And he knows the voice of Satan.
And it stretches all the way back to the garden, doesn’t it?
God doesn’t love you, Eve. God is withholding from you and
Adam. You take that fruit, you eat that fruit, and you become
like God, knowing good and evil, and, well, you go, girl, as we
might say today. That’s the flesh and the world
and the devil that God knows we deal with. And so may he give
us a determination, a desire, a willing heart, and a compassionate
heart, just as he has for us to do the hard things and the
right things. I think the greatest example
Jesus gives of love in the scriptures is the parable, it’s not a parable,
it’s a real event in the life of Jesus. He’s eating in a Pharisee’s
house. And apparently the Pharisee offered him no water to wash
his feet. Apparently the Pharisee offered him no oil with which
to anoint his head from the heat of the day and to cleanse himself
and prepare for dinner. And so as he’s reclining at table,
a woman, a sinner, A woman of a poor reputation comes into
the house and with her tears and her hair, she washes Jesus’
feet. And then she pulls out an expensive jar of perfume and
she anoints him. She gives Jesus the smell he
needs rather than the one he has after he’s been out on the
street and in the dusty conditions of his world. And one of the
people present says, what a waste. You could have sold that and
given it to the poor. They complain about this woman and what she’s
done. And Jesus says, hold on a minute. This is a beautiful
thing. This is a woman who’s a great sinner and she’s been
forgiven much. And so she loves much. And I think that’s the key, isn’t
it? To being a Christian who loves much. We realize that we’ve
been forgiven much. I think one of the truths, the
Christian life is that the longer we live, the more we understand
how sinful we are. The longer we live and the more
gracious God is to us, he shows us maybe inch by inch, day by
day in small increments because it would crush us otherwise,
but he shows us how sinful we are. He shows us what’s really
in our hearts and how it can rear its ugly head. And I think the longer we live
in this spiritual condition, we’ll realize how much we’ve
been saved from. And he says, those who’ve been
forgiven little don’t forgive, but those who’ve been forgiven
much, love much. Remember that most of the New
Testament, all of the New Testament was written and the gospel was
spread under the Roman empire. We think sometimes, I believe,
that our world is the darkest. Perhaps our culture is the rottenest,
but this was a pagan empire. This was a dark time and Christians
stood out in this dark culture. And I think one of the things
we as believers must face is we’re headed for some pretty
dark times in the next 50 years or so. Now, some in the room
may not be alive for the end, but you can pray for and encourage
those who will remain over the next 50 years. We’ve got to understand
the times and be faithful in hardship. And one of the great
blessings, I think, of being a Christian is when those dark
times begin to subside, it’s always the Christians who rise
to the top. It’s always the Christians who
love God, who love his word and proclaim Jesus. And they have
a heavenly and eternal perspective. It’s they who make it through
these difficult times. And so I imagine there’s an opportunity
for American Christians to be faithful in hardship in the next
50 or so years. There’s an opportunity for us
to be different. And I want to end what we’ve
thought about today with a quote. I’ve got it here on a plaque. I tried to copy it and it turned
out black. So I just took it off the wall and thought I’d
bring it in and read it to you. This is a quote by Aristides, who
is a non-Christian, and he’s just describing the Christians
to Hadrian. They love one another. They never
fail to help widows. They save orphans from those
who would hurt them. If they have something, they
give freely to the man who has nothing. If they see a stranger,
they take him home and are happy as though he were a real brother.
They don’t consider themselves brothers in the usual sense,
but brothers instead through the spirit in God. That’s a pagan writing to another
pagan describing Christians. I wonder if today in our pagan
world, by God’s grace and by the blessing of his Holy Spirit,
They may see this in us. May it be so by the power of
God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit, who
is love in perfection and eternally so. Let’s pray together. Lord,
we thank you for showing us love, for demonstrating love to us.
We think of all that you are and all that you’ve done, all
that you’ve given, and how much we’ve taken advantage of you,
how much we’ve taken you for granted, And how much we’ve done,
we think behind your back, but it’s to your face. And yet you
stand on the porch and you wait and you watch and you expect
a return of your prodigal children. Lord, we have been in the far
country. We have done foolish and ridiculous things given our
station in life by your grace. And so help us today to remember
that you are love and we are to be loved to others. Lord help
us to remember also it’s by your grace, by your strength and help
us may it be so we pray in Christ’s name, amen. We want to think
of God’s love as we sing together number 499 and we’ll stand to
sing.