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

Loving According to God’s Will

“And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.” -Philippians 1:9-11 (NIV)

I’m “into” Paul’s letter to the Philippian church just now, and I find I want to highlight and emphasize almost every verse! How rich in teaching is the book! How relevant for where we are in our Christian walk! In these verses, Paul teaches about what I like to call “Loving According to God’s Will.”

First of all, we know as Christian we are commanded to love. God is love and we are to reciprocate His love—both vertically and horizontally. We love Him because He first loved us. When we recognize how much He loved us, we respond by loving Him. And love is all tied up with commitment to Him, following His purpose. But that’s a deep subject for another time. Our love, obedience, commitment to the Lord God is our vertical love—person to God, God to person. The horizontal love causes us to reach out to others, to allow our love to “abound more and more”. But wait! Paul says we are to use “knowledge and depth of insight”…yes, and even “discernment”…so that our vertical love can be pure and blameless. And for how long? “Until the day of Christ.” (Paul reminds us of that day frequently!) As we love others, we are to keep in mind that Jesus may return at any time. Our love for others should meet the tests of purity, blamelessness, and commitment.

And what qualities does our love have? It is “filled with the fruit of righteousness”? We go to another of Paul’s writings, Galatians 5: 22-23 to enumerate this fruit and see if we are bearing it: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” (KJV). I quote the KJV because it is the version I used to memorize these verses a long time ago. Eugene Peterson in The Message states the verses this way: “But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way as fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion of the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.” (Gal. 22-23 –Msg.) Oh, Lord! Help us love according to Your will!

c Ethelene Dyer Jones; Tuesday, January 12, 2010