Summary
Love as a fruit of the Spirit is becoming people who are willing to see our rightful place under God, standing next to our neighbors equal in dignity, equal in guilt and willing to act for the benefit of others. This is both our great hope and the result of the Spirit working in us. One day, God will make us people who love this way naturally and easily, but not today, not yet. We can expect God to work in this area in our lives. We can expect to see this kind of love growing in our lives, but we can also expect to fail.
Key Takeaways:
- The fruit of the Spirit is not feelings that come upon us. They are qualities that grow in us through trial, truth, and the Spirit's work over time.
- Love, in Paul's context in Galatians 5, is primarily about how we treat one another, not an emotional state.
- Love is an action. We know God loves us because of what he did, and we demonstrate love the same way.
- The command to love our neighbor as ourselves is rooted in the truth that we are equals before God, equally guilty, equally in need of grace.
- Self-righteousness is the enemy of love. It lies to us and says our needs matter more and our sins are more excusable.
- The Spirit produces love in us by changing our minds and our worldview, not by generating a feeling.
- We will fail at loving others often. The mark of the Spirit's work is that we want to love this way and keep turning back to God when we don't.
Why Paul Wrote This List
In the letter to the Galatians, Paul corrects the teaching of the Judaizers. They claim that belief in Jesus Christ is not enough to be saved. They argue Gentiles must also keep the law, be circumcised, and live like Jews. Paul corrects that view and says that is not the gospel. Most of the letter is a defense of justification by faith alone.
In Galatians 5, the immediate context of the list, Paul explains why being free from the law is not an excuse to sin. He argues that trying to obey the law on our own resources produces only a fake moral transformation. We are putting something on the outside, but nothing is really changing on the inside.
Freedom in Christ gives us a different motivation to avoid sin. Instead of being under the threat of the penalties of the law, we now have the teaching and guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit changes us from the inside out and makes us the kind of people who love God.
The more we become people who genuinely love God, the more we will want to be like him, and the more we will pursue holiness and goodness and the items on this list. This kind of obedience is a real moral transformation because it results from the work of the Spirit.
Paul also argued that you can tell the kind of obedience promoted by law-keeping is fake because of what it leads to. He gives that list he calls the works of the flesh: self-righteousness, factions, jealousy, strife, anger, divisions, and so forth. True moral transformation can only come from the Spirit of God working inside you. The law was never meant to change us. The law cannot atone for our guilt, and the law cannot solve the problem of our sin the way the cross does.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law, and those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. - Galatians 5:22-24
This list gives us both a picture of the work God is doing in his people and a challenge. It challenges the legalists among us to ask whether we are really interested in the things on this list.
The Fruit of the Spirit Are Not Feelings
The problem for us today is that words like love, joy, and peace can mean many things. We see them on bumper stickers, t-shirts and in advertising slogans. We probably have a vague picture that these words represent some kind of utopian lifestyle where everyone gets along, and most of us think they describe feelings we ought to be experiencing the majority of the time. If we aren't feeling them, we wonder if something is wrong with us.
When we see a list like this, we're tempted to fill in our understanding with all our modern thoughts and philosophies. We start thinking about these concepts in the abstract and fill in the gaps with modern psychology and our own theories.
My goal in this series is to rediscover the mindset Paul had when he wrote this letter. And when we study the passages of Scripture that speak to these items, we find very consistent themes that are not the themes of our modern culture and are not describing feelings.
I'm going to argue this point for every item on the list. The fruit of the Spirit is not a feeling that comes upon us. It is something that grows in us. It grows through struggle and trial. It grows out of the maturing and strengthening of our faith. We aren't instantly transformed and given the items on this list. Rather, these things result slowly over time as the Spirit of God works on us.
These are not feelings. They are a perspective change. The Spirit produces these items in us by changing our minds, changing our worldviews, teaching us truth, and giving us a clearer understanding of God and wisdom. As we grow in wisdom and knowledge, as we learn more truth, our perspective on the world changes. The result of those changes will be the items on this list.
What “Fruit” Means
Before we get to love itself, let's start with what Paul means by fruit. The fruit is the result, the thing that is produced. When you plant an apple tree, eventually it bears apples. The goal of planting the tree is to harvest the fruit. So the fruit is the desired result.
The items on this list are the results of the work of the Spirit. The Spirit works within us to produce the things on the list. When we see those things in our lives, we know the Spirit is at work and we are being transformed.
Love Results From Truth
Most of us have a basic understanding of love. Because we're familiar with the concept, we tend to drift right past it on the list. We think love, joy, peace, check, got that, and we move on without stopping to ask what kind of love we're talking about or what it actually looks like.
Let's start with 1 Timothy 1:5. Paul wrote this letter to one of his young disciples, urging Timothy to remain in Ephesus and continue teaching truth to those who were spreading false doctrine. And in that discussion, Paul says this.
The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. - 1 Timothy 1:5
Paul says love is the goal of his instruction. The aim of teaching is love. That implies love is not a feeling that comes upon you when you first convert to Christianity and never goes away. Love results from learning the truth. Timothy is teaching them the gospel, teaching them the truth, with the goal of producing this thing called love.
By a sincere faith, I think Paul means genuine belief. Love results from true, authentic, saving faith. By a pure heart, he means a heart that is not divided, a heart entirely set on the promises of God and turned away from idols. And by a good conscience, I think he means an understanding of the truth and the conviction that I am following it. I know what the gospel is about, I know what God is calling me to do, and I believe I am in fact walking that path.
The fruit of the Spirit is not a feeling that comes upon us. It is something that grows in us as we go through life facing trials and learning from them.
Love is an Action
The focus in Galatians 5 is on how believers treat each other. Paul contrasts the works of the flesh with the fruit of the Spirit. So foremost on his mind is the love we have for one another, the love we show our neighbors.
You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. - Leviticus 19:18
Loving our neighbor is contrasted there with taking vengeance and bearing a grudge. Vengeance is the external action, bearing a grudge is the internal attitude. If I take vengeance, I am retaliating. If someone hurts me, I hurt them back. If I bear a grudge, I'm holding on to wrongs done to me and refusing to forgive.
In contrast, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are to ask ourselves, if the tables were reversed, how would I want my neighbor to treat me? When we're the ones in the wrong, we want understanding, forgiveness, patience, mercy. So when our neighbor is in the wrong, those are the ways we ought to respond.
Notice that loving our neighbor is how we treat them. We have to choose to be patient. We choose to forgive. We choose to overlook someone else's sins. We choose to be generous and kind, and we choose to act in a way that brings good to our neighbors rather than harm.
This becomes even clearer in 1 John 3.
By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart to him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth. - 1 John 3:16-18
How do we recognize love? We look at how the person is acting. Love acts for the benefit of another. We know God loves us because of the way he treats us. His love for us is active. He reaches out in his love to rescue us and acts on our behalf by sending his Son to die in our place and his Spirit to teach us truth. How do we love our neighbors? We follow our Lord's example and act for their benefit.
Loving Our Enemies
But I say to you who hear, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To the one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also. And from the one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from the one who takes away your goods, do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them. - Luke 6:27-31
Notice that Jesus is not focused on any kind of emotional reaction. The emphasis is on seeking the welfare of someone else. We love others by acting for their good, seeking good things for them, and working to bring those things about even when they act against us. It's probably impossible to have warm, fuzzy feelings for an enemy. But it is possible to choose not to retaliate. It is possible to make a dramatic gesture of reconciliation.
Notice how active the verbs are. Do good. Bless. Pray for. Turn your cheek. Give your shirt. Lend expecting nothing in return. Do to them as you wish they would do to you.
You don't have to be a Christian to understand this concept, and you don't have to be a Christian to act in love toward another person. As Jesus said, even sinners love those who love them. Since we're made in the image of God, we have a certain understanding of love built into us. But Jesus teaches us there's something more. There is a kind of love that goes beyond that general understanding and that kind of love treats others well even when those others are treating us badly.
If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them... But love your enemies and do good and lend expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. - Luke 6:32-35
That kind of love marks you as a person in whom the Spirit of God is working. It marks you as someone who is coming to look at life the way God looks at it.
The Root of Love
Why is this kind of love even possible? The key idea from Leviticus and from what Jesus says in Luke is rooted in an understanding of our essential equality before God.
The idea of loving your neighbor as yourself means we come to realize we are not the center of the universe. Our needs are no more important than anyone else's. We all stand equally guilty before the same God. We need the same rescue and the same saving grace.
Let me offer an analogy. Imagine you're a kid on the playground, a bit of a misfit. You've decided the other kids are losers and not worth your time. Then an older teenager starts running the after-school program and he's the coolest person you've ever seen. He likes you. He treats you with interest and respect, listens to you, loves playing games with you. Life is great because you're in his inner circle.
But being his friend changes your whole worldview. You realize your good fortune comes from the fact that he accepts you. And here's the thing: he also accepts some of those kids you wrote off as losers. He befriends a whole group of them. If you're going to hang out with him, you have to hang out with these other kids too, because now you are all in his circle together. This cool teenager clearly thinks there is no difference between you and these other kids. He treats them the same way he treats you.
So now you face a decision. Are you going to keep thinking you're better than them, or will you realize you are the same because this teenager has told you that is true?
When we become believers, our picture of the world is transformed in the same way. When by the grace of God we accept the truth of the gospel, that changes how we view other human beings. When I accept that God created me, that God is my judge and my Savior, that humbles my view of myself and raises my view of everyone else. You and I together are lower than God, but we are equals standing next to each other.
Self-righteousness is based on the lie I tell myself that I am better. I know I have problems, but self-righteousness tells me to believe that somehow I am more deserving than others. The Spirit comes along and exposes that as a lie.
The Essential Lie
The essential lie we tell ourselves is this: I deserve grace and mercy, but you don't, because my sins are understandable while yours are offensive to me.
We congratulate ourselves for doing one right thing while ignoring the fifty things we failed to do or did wrong. We point out the flaws in others because we have deceived ourselves into thinking we escaped those flaws. It's such a common human experience we could laugh about it if it weren't so tragic.
The Spirit comes along and teaches us that's a lie. We are no different from the person who offended us, who imposed on us, or who took us for granted. If there's room in the world for God to forgive me, there's room for God to forgive you, and I must accept that and forgive you too.
This is exactly Paul's concern in Galatians 5. The Judaizers who pride themselves on law-keeping as a means to win God's favor. They insist everyone else must keep the law too. And he says look at how you're fighting with each other, condemning each other. You're jealous, biting, devouring each other. Self-righteousness encourages the delusion that my needs are more important than someone else's. But the working of the Spirit teaches us that's not true. We're the same. We are equally guilty, equally saved, equally lost, and saved by the same cross.
Everyday Choices
Love is one of those arenas in which we work out our faith with fear and trembling. Our friends, family, neighbors, and strangers confront us daily with opportunities to live out or ignore this truth. Every day we face a choice to be patient, to be kind, to be forgiving, to give when it's costly, or to let someone else have their way.
Whenever a relationship stops giving and starts costing us something, we are tested. Will we live out this truth or not?
We will fail many of those opportunities. But sometimes we won't. When we fail, we repent, apologize, and seek forgiveness. When we succeed, we thank God that his Spirit has taught us something and that we chose wisely for a change.
The fruit of the Spirit that Paul has in mind is becoming people who are willing to see our rightful place under God, standing next to our neighbors, equal in dignity, equal in guilt, and willing to act for the benefit of others in the way that we would want them to act for ours.
One day, God will make us people who love this way naturally and easily, but not today, not yet. We can expect to see this kind of love growing in our lives, and we can also expect to fail. The fact that we recognize we are not yet the kind of people who love like this and that we want to be that kind of person is itself evidence that the Spirit of God is working in us.
The challenge is not, can I be like Jesus in every moment of every day? The answer to that is no. The challenge is, do you want to be like him? Start there and trust the Spirit for the rest.
Key Points
- Fruit represents the thing that is eventually produced. When you plant an apple tree, eventually it grows apples.
- The items on this list result from the Spirit working in believers.
- Love (like all the other fruit of the Spirit) isn't an emotion It is a perspective change brought about by the Spirit teaching us wisdom and truth that results in action and attitude.
- Love as a fruit of the Spirit is rooted in understanding our essential equality before God.
- Love as a fruit of the Spirit is becoming people willing to see our place under God, standing next to our neighbors, equal in dignity and equal in guilt and willing to act for the benefit of others in the way we would want them to act for our benefit. This is both our hope and the result of the work of the Spirit.
- Passages: 1Timothy 1:5; Leviticus 19:18; 1John 3:16-18; Luke 6:27-35.
- Greek Word: Strong’s G26
Please listen to the podcast for more detail and explanation.
Next: Fruit of the Spirit: Love Part 2
Previous: Fruit of the Spirit: Introduction
Series: Fruit of the Spirit
Photo by Bill Williams on Unsplash
Season 24, episode 02
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