Thursday, May 30, 2019

Fruit of the Spirit - Part 9 LOVE

Friday, May 31, 2019

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 no law against these things!  Galatians 5:22-23

Today we come to the last part of our investigation into the nine-fold manifestation of the Fruit of the Spirit.  These nine characteristic traits are alive and functioning in the believer who offers him/herself fully to God’s care and leading.  So, why did we leave love until the end when it is the first on the list?  That’s a good question and has a great answer.  In the ancient world the most important thought came first and is summed-up in what follows.  For Paul, any description of what God is, does, thinks, or….well, loves are a representation of who God IS.  This concept is hard to get down in a few words, but the Apostle John did it better than anyone else:

…anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.  1 John 4:8

Love, God’s character, is summed-up in that list of the fruit.  Granted, this is not the totality of God…we haven’t even scratched the surface about his omnipotent power, righteous judgment, omnipresence, or omniscience, let-alone his eternal being.  The vastness of this unseen God makes my head hurt when I try to entertain just the beginnings of understanding all of He who sits on Heaven’s throne.  He is the ancient One, unfathomable; no human can even continue to live if we were thrust into His presence.  But if we go to love, it gives us (at least) the starting point of understanding how God applies all His being to His creation.  It shows us what God wants to be in us, and what we can be like as dwellers together in His Kingdom.
To turn John’s phrase, anyone who loves knows God, and from that love spring all the wonders of joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, kindness, self-control, faithfulness, and patience.  And, in a life lived in love, which produces all the rest of that spiritual fruit, there is a resultant absence of selfishness, anger, greed, lust, laziness, envy, and pride, those seven deadly sins.  It is an absolute mathematical equation…as love produces fruit of the Spirit, sin, in all its association with death, darkness and evil, must scatter and die.
So, with no apology to Erich Segal’s Love Story and the heartbreak of Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal, love is not where you never have to say you’re sorry…love is all about knowing your transgressions bring on anger, violence, and a host of every kind of evil, destroying and rotting the fruit of God’s Spirit in you and others.  It is all about re-plowing the field of God’s vineyard in your life…saying you’re sorry, and receiving the reviving of forgiveness, the restoration of fruit-filled love!
For You Today
It’s time to put Hollywood back in their little camera boxes.  They’ve created a whole generational culture where love is a feeling, surrounded by photoshopped, background music and moments to remember.  They wouldn’t know God-love if it dropped from the camera-boom on their silly heads!
All that list of the fruit of God’s Spirit is yours when you choose to love.
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

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[1] Title Image: Pixabay.com  
             Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from The New Living Translation©

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