Love, a Fruit of the Spirit

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.” –Galatians 5:22-23

The Holy Spirit of God works within the Christian to help each believer become more and more Christ-like. Paul the Apostle used a harvest metaphor to indicate how the Christian can bring forth spiritual fruit. In Luke 3:7 we have this command: “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.”

Once I was youth leader in a church for a group of energetic, faithful, loveable and challenging youth. When we came to these verses in Galatians 5:22-23 in our Bible study, I wondered how I could help the youth see how the characteristics described by Paul to be spiritual fruit.

For a visual image, I had a youth in my group with great artistic ability draw a cluster of grapes on the vine (with nine grapes on the sluster). On her picture, I wrote the nine characteristics of Christ-likness to which we all should strive. There they were, all nine of them, ready for the Christian to take to make him/her strong. We talked about the meaning of each word in this cluster of ripe grapes. We discussed how each should strive to attain all the attributes the Christian should have. We talked about how Paul put love at the beginning of the list of Christian characteristics. We felt this was a significant and necessary place to put love—first. Without love in our heart, we could not easily attain the other eight fruits.

I then assigned a Spirit characteristic to each youth in the group. We stood up, and, walked around the room, saying aloud at the same time the characteristic assigned to each participant. As we thus walked, it was representative of “walking in the Spirit” as Paul had commanded in Galatians 5:16 and 25.

Later, as adults, several of the youth told me they remembered this image and action of producing love and the other eight spiritual fruits in their lives. They had learned a valuable lesson.

“Since we live in the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” (Gal. 5;25)

And love is the first of the nine spiritual characteristics for which we should strive in our daily walk.

c Ethelene Dyer Jones; Wednesday, February 10, 2010