WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.160 Well, on Sunday evenings in St. Columbus, we're beginning a new series on the fruit of the Spirit 00:00:06.160 --> 00:00:11.359 in Galatians chapter 5. So if you have a Bible with you, you might find it helpful to have it open 00:00:11.359 --> 00:00:19.839 there in Galatians chapter 5, page 974. We read there in verse 22 that the fruit of the Spirit is 00:00:19.839 --> 00:00:29.120 love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. So over the 00:00:29.120 --> 00:00:35.439 coming Sunday evenings, we're going to try and unpack these Spirit-given qualities together and 00:00:35.439 --> 00:00:40.399 really try and ask the question, what does it look like to live a life that's characterized by love, 00:00:41.359 --> 00:00:48.560 to live a life that is saturated with joy, to live a life that is characterized by patience and 00:00:48.560 --> 00:00:53.840 goodness and kindness and all these different things. Basically, what we're going to do in this 00:00:53.840 --> 00:00:59.760 series is look at what it looks like to live a life that is led by the Spirit, that's growing in 00:00:59.760 --> 00:01:06.079 the Spirit, that's being transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit and how we can grow in all these 00:01:06.079 --> 00:01:11.280 different things in the face of all the challenges and difficulties and temptations we come across 00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:18.719 every day in our lives. Now, just to refresh our minds, two weeks ago, Corey gave us a general 00:01:18.719 --> 00:01:25.679 overview of this chapter and we thought about how salvation is not just about being made right with 00:01:25.679 --> 00:01:33.519 God, salvation is not just about forgiveness. Remember, Galatians is a letter that's written 00:01:33.519 --> 00:01:39.039 to Christians, it's a letter that's written to a church, it's something that's for you and for me 00:01:39.039 --> 00:01:45.120 in living the Christian life. And we saw two weeks ago that the gospel is something that changes you 00:01:45.120 --> 00:01:52.640 from the inside out. It means that you don't need to live under the law but under grace. Remember, 00:01:52.640 --> 00:01:58.320 being under law means that thinking that your performance, your moral accomplishments are the 00:01:58.320 --> 00:02:05.280 ground of your acceptance. It means thinking that your work, your achievements, your ability to do 00:02:05.280 --> 00:02:12.719 good is somehow going to earn you favor or salvation with God. And it's so easy for us to slip into 00:02:12.719 --> 00:02:18.960 that way of thinking. John Stopp, an Anglican minister down in also in London, he said this, 00:02:18.960 --> 00:02:24.159 he said that the false teachers in the Galatian church, they were saying that these Christian 00:02:24.159 --> 00:02:29.280 converts had to be circumcised. And he says in his commentary on this letter, he says, 00:02:29.280 --> 00:02:36.000 you might think that that's a very trivial matter. You might think that circumcision is only a minor 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:41.360 surgical operation. So why does Paul make so much fuss and bother about circumcision? 00:02:41.360 --> 00:02:47.440 Well, John Stopp says because of the theology that lies behind it. The false teachers in Galatia 00:02:47.440 --> 00:02:56.240 were pushing this idea that it stands for salvation by good works. It's salvation in obedience to the 00:02:56.240 --> 00:03:06.080 law. It's essentially a Jesus Christ plus. The slogan John Stopp says of these false teachers in Galatia 00:03:06.080 --> 00:03:14.240 is unless you are circumcised and unless you keep the law, you cannot be saved. And Paul's point 00:03:14.240 --> 00:03:19.520 in Galatians, we saw two weeks ago and time and time again in his letters, is you cannot add anything 00:03:19.520 --> 00:03:25.920 to Jesus. You cannot add circumcision, you cannot add works, you cannot add moral achievements. 00:03:27.520 --> 00:03:32.400 Salvation in the Bible is in Christ alone by grace alone through faith alone. 00:03:32.400 --> 00:03:37.120 In other words, if you're trying to be good, if you're trying to follow the rules, if you're trying to 00:03:37.120 --> 00:03:42.960 be moral with the belief, the understanding that by being moral you'll earn favour before God, 00:03:42.960 --> 00:03:51.120 you'll produce works of the flesh, you'll produce what are called the bad fruit. The passage we read 00:03:51.120 --> 00:03:57.040 in Galatians 5 here is essentially what it looks like to live a life that is not under law but under 00:03:57.039 --> 00:04:05.280 grace, a life that is led by the Spirit. Last Sunday evening, Neil took us through the bad 00:04:05.280 --> 00:04:10.560 fruit in verse 19, the works of the flesh, the sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, 00:04:10.560 --> 00:04:16.159 ideology and all these things. And just to refresh our minds again, Neil said that the works of the 00:04:16.159 --> 00:04:24.079 flesh are like bad fruit and bad fruit comes from a bad heart. And the heart, whether it's good or 00:04:24.079 --> 00:04:30.079 bad, comes from your roots. So when it comes to the fruit of the Spirit, what we're asking is 00:04:30.959 --> 00:04:37.039 what does it look like to have a life that is rooted in good roots, a life rooted in the gospel 00:04:37.039 --> 00:04:46.000 of Jesus Christ, a life rooted in His love and His grace. Well, verse 22 says, the fruit of the 00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:52.479 Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, 00:04:52.480 --> 00:04:59.120 against such things there is no law. So what we're going to do this evening, begin doing this evening 00:04:59.120 --> 00:05:04.160 and then over the next few weeks, is we're going to try and unpack together these qualities. 00:05:05.200 --> 00:05:12.400 And this evening we begin with love. Now, I want to look at love by asking three brief questions. 00:05:13.280 --> 00:05:20.080 First of all, what is love? Secondly, what is counterfeit love? And by that we just mean what 00:05:20.079 --> 00:05:26.319 appears on the surface to be love but is actually something else. And then thirdly, how do we get it? 00:05:27.599 --> 00:05:34.479 So first things first, what is love? Well, there's immediately a problem in our English language 00:05:34.479 --> 00:05:40.959 when it comes to defining love. It's a word that's meaning is so broad. We use it for so many different 00:05:40.959 --> 00:05:47.839 things. For example, if you're someone who's married, the way that you love your husband or you love 00:05:47.839 --> 00:05:52.239 your wife will be different to the way you love your close friends and family members. 00:05:54.959 --> 00:05:59.359 If you say that you love eating pizza, you're hopefully talking about a different kind of love 00:05:59.359 --> 00:06:05.599 than the love you have for your parents or for your children. People use the word love today with a 00:06:05.599 --> 00:06:10.719 range of different meanings. So right away we need to be asking what kind of love is the Bible 00:06:10.720 --> 00:06:17.920 talking about? What kind of love is Paul saying is a fruit of the Spirit? Well, in the original 00:06:17.920 --> 00:06:23.680 language that Paul was writing in, in the Greek, they had lots of words for love. They were far 00:06:23.680 --> 00:06:29.280 more nuanced and far more precise than we were, when than we are. And if you've been around St. 00:06:29.280 --> 00:06:35.280 Columbus for a while, you'll probably have them etched into your memory by now. The words that Paul 00:06:35.279 --> 00:06:42.879 uses here is agape. The fruit of the Spirit is agape. They had different words for different kinds 00:06:42.879 --> 00:06:46.799 of love. They had words for romantic love. They had words for friendship love and brotherly love 00:06:46.799 --> 00:06:53.519 and all these different kinds of things. But the word here in Galatians 5 is agape. Now, what does 00:06:53.519 --> 00:07:00.799 that mean? Well, it's an inherently selfless love that is based on the good of the other person. 00:07:00.800 --> 00:07:06.800 It's not a love that asks, what can I get from you? It's not a love that asks about how can you somehow 00:07:06.800 --> 00:07:14.800 satisfy some needs in me. It's a love that is for the good of the other person. It's a love that's 00:07:14.800 --> 00:07:20.800 defined for us in the Bible. First John 3.16, we might have it on the screen. It says, this is how 00:07:20.800 --> 00:07:28.000 we know what love is. This is how we know what agape is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. 00:07:28.000 --> 00:07:34.240 So agape love is a love that is self-sacrificing. It's saying, I'll lay down my life for you. 00:07:36.000 --> 00:07:42.399 If you want a clear definition of love, we need to look first and foremost primarily to the gospel. 00:07:43.680 --> 00:07:49.360 And there's immediately a contrast there with that kind of love and the love people talk about in 00:07:49.360 --> 00:07:54.959 our society today. I think Friedrich Nietzsche captures 00:07:54.959 --> 00:08:00.479 our society's view of love quite well. He was a German philosopher in the 19th century and he says 00:08:00.479 --> 00:08:08.560 that love is a kind of animal instinct. He says love is an instinctual force related to our biological 00:08:08.560 --> 00:08:13.919 and cultural drives and as such, we can never consider it a moral good. So love is just a feeling. 00:08:13.919 --> 00:08:20.000 Love is just an emotion that comes and goes. It's like a chemical urge. It's like a 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:26.639 feeling. Love is just an emotion that comes and goes. It's like a chemical urge according to Nietzsche. 00:08:28.240 --> 00:08:33.120 And I think a lot of people today view love in that kind of way. This is why C.S. Lewis in his 00:08:33.120 --> 00:08:39.120 book on the Four Loves, he says most people see love as a kind of hunger. It's a feeling of 00:08:39.120 --> 00:08:46.960 wanting to use someone to meet our needs. But that's not agape. That's not the fruit of the spirit. 00:08:46.960 --> 00:08:55.280 Biblical love is not self-seeking. It's selfless. It's not about trying to meet our own needs, 00:08:55.280 --> 00:09:01.200 but trying to meet the needs of the other person. There's a great classic text on love in the Bible. 00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:06.400 First Corinthians 13, Paul's writing there and he's really telling us what love is and what love 00:09:06.399 --> 00:09:17.360 isn't. So I thought it'd be good to read it briefly, but my eyesight is absolutely atrocious. So I'm gonna have to... 00:09:20.240 --> 00:09:25.919 Paul says here in 1 Corinthians 13, and this is a wake-up call for me. I really need to get my eyes 00:09:25.919 --> 00:09:33.919 tested. He says, if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong 00:09:33.919 --> 00:09:40.639 or clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all 00:09:40.639 --> 00:09:46.479 knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I am nothing. 00:09:47.919 --> 00:09:55.360 If I give away all I have and if I deliver up my body to be burned but have not love, I gain nothing. 00:09:56.799 --> 00:10:03.599 Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not 00:10:03.600 --> 00:10:10.720 insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, 00:10:10.720 --> 00:10:15.920 but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, 00:10:16.720 --> 00:10:25.360 endures all things. And we can go on and go on and go on. But the point here is that the essence of love 00:10:25.360 --> 00:10:33.360 is selfless. The essence of love in the Bible is to serve someone else's needs regardless of your own. 00:10:33.360 --> 00:10:40.720 So a gap in love is focused on the object for its benefit. It is love for the good of the other person. 00:10:40.720 --> 00:10:48.960 So secondly, what is counterfeit love? In other words, what might look like love on the surface 00:10:48.960 --> 00:10:54.159 but is actually something else? And I just want to touch on this briefly because Neil preached a sermon 00:10:54.159 --> 00:10:58.319 last week on the bad fruit which you should go and listen to online if you haven't heard it. 00:10:58.319 --> 00:11:03.519 But just briefly, when we talk about the bad fruit, we're talking about the things Paul lists in 00:11:03.519 --> 00:11:10.559 verse 19 and 20. The sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, 00:11:10.559 --> 00:11:16.159 jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things 00:11:16.159 --> 00:11:25.039 like these. Now the first three in that list are related to love, right? The Bible consistently 00:11:25.039 --> 00:11:31.919 contrasts love with this Greek word porneia. Now porneia is where we get the word pornography. 00:11:33.519 --> 00:11:39.919 And really it means to surrender yourself sexually. It means to give in to the lie of counterfeit love. 00:11:39.919 --> 00:11:46.639 It means to give in to the lie that you will find true joy and happiness and love in sexual indulgence. 00:11:47.919 --> 00:11:55.279 We live in a society today that affirms and celebrates sexual freedom. And I think to many people 00:11:55.279 --> 00:12:00.879 today it might appear on the surface to be a good fruit, to be something to be affirmed and 00:12:00.879 --> 00:12:08.639 celebrated. But the Bible says that that is not love. God is so clear throughout the Bible that 00:12:08.639 --> 00:12:16.080 the only place for sexual intimacy is in the context of a marriage. But the point here is that 00:12:16.080 --> 00:12:22.639 our love can be twisted. Human love is intended to be, it's meant to be a reflection of God's love. 00:12:23.919 --> 00:12:30.639 But the image of God inside us has been broken and twisted by the fall. And that's why one of the 00:12:30.639 --> 00:12:37.039 key pitfalls in the Christian life is counterfeit love. It's the dangers of porneia. It's the dangers 00:12:37.039 --> 00:12:45.039 of surrounding yourself to this lie that love is found in sex. Really though that's the polar 00:12:45.039 --> 00:12:52.639 opposite of agape. It's a selfish love instead of a selfless love. It's a love that stops being 00:12:52.639 --> 00:12:58.000 about the good of the other person and it turns it around and says, well, what can I get from you? 00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:06.000 What can I take from you? We can't have this idea of love being about fulfilling some kind of need 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:12.879 inside ourselves. There's a professor in the US, Edmund Clowney, and he's making this point and he 00:13:12.879 --> 00:13:19.919 uses the example of a wife asking her husband, why do you love me? And he says, well, imagine the 00:13:19.919 --> 00:13:26.720 husband answers and says something like, well, you're serviceable. You meet my needs. You tick 00:13:26.720 --> 00:13:32.000 all the right boxes. You're physically acceptable to me. That kind of response isn't going to go 00:13:32.000 --> 00:13:38.559 down very well. The point is that loving someone because they meet some need within us is not 00:13:38.559 --> 00:13:46.080 true Christian love. It's not God's love. It's not agape. John Piper says that this is related to 00:13:46.080 --> 00:13:54.720 the counterfeit love of covetousness. It's a mouthful. In other words, when your heart is set 00:13:54.720 --> 00:14:01.519 on something or someone and you want it, you want this thing or this person and you want it so 00:14:01.519 --> 00:14:10.799 badly, your desire becomes misplaced desire. It becomes lust. It becomes envy. It becomes greed. 00:14:10.799 --> 00:14:20.480 It becomes these bad fruits. So there are counterfeit loves. Another one to highlight, I would say, 00:14:20.480 --> 00:14:27.759 would be flattery. Love can be counterfeited in subtle ways. Even our speech can appear to be 00:14:27.759 --> 00:14:37.279 loving when in reality we're speaking in order to further our own interests. Flattery is defined 00:14:37.279 --> 00:14:45.039 as excessive and insincere praise given especially to further one's own interests. So it's 00:14:45.039 --> 00:14:51.200 manipulative love. It's love for the purpose of control. It's about evoking a certain response 00:14:51.200 --> 00:14:56.639 in a person to serve your own ends, trying to win the person's affection so that you can be built up. 00:14:56.639 --> 00:15:06.000 But true biblical love is not self-seeking. It's selfless. So thirdly, and this is what I want to 00:15:06.000 --> 00:15:12.799 spend most of our time this evening, how do we get it? How do we get that true biblical selfless love? 00:15:15.279 --> 00:15:20.879 How is love outworked in our hearts by the Holy Spirit? And I want to say four things just briefly 00:15:20.879 --> 00:15:29.519 on this. First of all, we need to look at God's love. Every day we need to worship and adore God 00:15:29.519 --> 00:15:36.080 for who he is. Now why do we start with that? Well, it's because this kind of love that we've been 00:15:36.080 --> 00:15:42.480 talking about, it doesn't inherently come from ourselves. True love begins with God. 00:15:43.919 --> 00:15:48.799 And the Bible says a ton about God's love. We could do a whole sermon series on it, but I want to 00:15:48.799 --> 00:15:56.000 highlight briefly just a few things. The Bible tells us that God is love. It's part of who he is. 00:15:56.000 --> 00:16:01.919 It's one of his attributes. We were speaking this morning, Corey was reminding us of God's divine 00:16:01.919 --> 00:16:09.759 attributes. God's attributes are a part of who he is. And we said this morning that we cannot ever 00:16:09.759 --> 00:16:15.919 read our emotional experiences back into God. We can't project our own attributes back into God. 00:16:15.919 --> 00:16:20.719 We have no room to craft our own definition of love and somehow impose that on God. 00:16:22.319 --> 00:16:30.000 God's love is perfect. God's love is inexhaustible. God loved before he created anything. 00:16:31.360 --> 00:16:37.679 God has always been and always will be love. He's always existed, Father, Son and Holy Spirit 00:16:37.679 --> 00:16:45.839 in perfect triune unity and love. Now, last week, we had a quote from J.I. Packer that the primary 00:16:45.839 --> 00:16:53.679 work of the Holy Spirit is presentness. It's to make God present in our lives, to bring him near, 00:16:53.679 --> 00:16:59.919 to bring him close. And the truth is that the more you look at God, the nearser you are to God, the 00:16:59.919 --> 00:17:05.679 more time you spend with God, living in union with him, the more you become like him. 00:17:05.680 --> 00:17:10.720 See, if you spend a lot of time with someone, you're going to start picking up some of their traits, 00:17:10.720 --> 00:17:15.279 you're going to become like them. If you spend enough time in a certain place, your accent might 00:17:15.279 --> 00:17:21.519 change. You might pick up a different turn of phrase. Your vocabulary might change. When I was 00:17:21.519 --> 00:17:27.440 up north the other day, I asked for salt and salt on my chips and the girl in the fish and chip 00:17:27.440 --> 00:17:32.160 shop looked at me like, what are you talking about? And I think it was a sign that I'd been in 00:17:32.160 --> 00:17:38.160 Edinburgh too long. At the point here is the more time you spend with God, the more time you look 00:17:38.160 --> 00:17:43.040 at him, the more time you listen to him in his words, the more you worship him for who he is, 00:17:43.040 --> 00:17:48.640 the more you'll become like him, the more you will change. The Holy Spirit is at work in our hearts 00:17:48.640 --> 00:17:55.840 to shape us and to mold us into his image. So to grow in the fruit of love, we have to look at God 00:17:55.839 --> 00:18:02.720 for who he is. Secondly, to grow in love in the Christian life, we have to reflect on God's love 00:18:02.720 --> 00:18:09.839 for us. We have to look at the gospel. We have to look at what God has done to demonstrate that love. 00:18:09.839 --> 00:18:17.359 Earlier on in the letter in chapter two verse 20, Paul says, the life I now live in the body, 00:18:17.359 --> 00:18:23.039 I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 00:18:23.039 --> 00:18:30.079 Do you ever stop and reflect during your week on how much God loves you? Do you ever stop and just 00:18:30.079 --> 00:18:37.279 marvel at the fact that this infinite and eternal God, this God who made an incredible, vast universe, 00:18:37.279 --> 00:18:44.480 loves you individually? I think it's something that's easy to take for granted in our Christian lives. 00:18:45.759 --> 00:18:50.480 Do we ever begin our day by saying, today the life I live in the body, I live by faith in the 00:18:50.480 --> 00:18:58.880 Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me? In another letter, Paul says in Romans chapter five, 00:18:58.880 --> 00:19:08.160 we might also have that on the screen, he says that in verse five, I think it is, God's love has been 00:19:08.160 --> 00:19:15.039 poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, has been given to us. You see, at just the right time, 00:19:15.039 --> 00:19:21.839 when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous 00:19:21.839 --> 00:19:28.159 person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own 00:19:28.159 --> 00:19:36.559 love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And that love is at the heart 00:19:36.559 --> 00:19:45.279 of the gospel. That's why it's bizarre when Christians think that God loves you because somehow your 00:19:45.279 --> 00:19:50.079 accomplishments or your ability to live up to a moral standard have anything to do with it. 00:19:51.359 --> 00:19:59.200 God never says, I love you because you somehow earned it. While we were still sinners, Christ died 00:19:59.200 --> 00:20:06.640 for us. In the Old Testament in Deuteronomy chapter seven, God comes to his people and he says to 00:20:06.640 --> 00:20:12.480 them, oh Israel, I did not love you because you were the greatest of nations. I did not love you 00:20:12.480 --> 00:20:17.840 because you were the largest of nations, the most able of nations. He says that he loves you 00:20:17.840 --> 00:20:24.720 because he loves you. He set his affection upon you. And if you've come to know Jesus as a 00:20:24.720 --> 00:20:31.200 Christ through the gospel, then his love for you is something that can never be earned, 00:20:31.200 --> 00:20:36.160 but it's also something you can never lose. It cannot be shaped or affected by a single thing 00:20:36.160 --> 00:20:41.279 that you do. God's love for you is inexhaustible. Further on in the letter to the Romans in chapter 00:20:41.279 --> 00:20:46.880 eight, verse 38, Paul says, I'm convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor 00:20:46.880 --> 00:20:54.800 demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything 00:20:54.800 --> 00:21:00.960 else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. 00:21:02.640 --> 00:21:07.920 Now, the point is when you feel like things are going well spiritually, when you feel like you're 00:21:07.920 --> 00:21:13.840 able to read your Bible, you're able to read your Bible, you're able to read your Bible, you're able 00:21:13.839 --> 00:21:17.679 to read your Bible well spiritually, when you feel like you're able to read your Bible a lot and 00:21:17.679 --> 00:21:23.759 you love coming to church and you love worshiping God, then God loves you more than you can possibly 00:21:23.759 --> 00:21:31.439 imagine, but at the same time, when you feel like a total spiritual failure, when you feel dry and 00:21:31.439 --> 00:21:39.439 distant, God does not love you any less. The love that God has for us in Jesus is incredible. 00:21:39.440 --> 00:21:48.160 So, just thinking back to last week, what's your heart motivation? Where are your roots planted this 00:21:48.160 --> 00:21:55.440 evening? If your roots are planted in the gospel of Jesus Christ and what He's done for you and His 00:21:55.440 --> 00:22:03.360 love for you, that will lead you to producing good fruit. Now, I want to think a bit about how that's 00:22:03.359 --> 00:22:09.759 practically outworked as fruit in our lives. First of all, very briefly, in our love for God 00:22:09.759 --> 00:22:16.479 and then secondly, in our love for one another as Christians. Maybe some of you are here tonight 00:22:16.479 --> 00:22:22.719 and you are feeling spiritually dry. Maybe you're feeling apathetic or maybe you're feeling your 00:22:22.719 --> 00:22:28.399 heart is distant from God and you're singing the words but you're just going through the motions. 00:22:28.400 --> 00:22:34.960 Maybe you feel like somehow your love for God has dissipated or has somehow been reduced 00:22:36.320 --> 00:22:40.800 and sometimes we do come to worship and we feel distant, we feel distracted. 00:22:43.120 --> 00:22:49.840 In the Old Testament, God says to His people, you worship me with your lips but your hearts are 00:22:49.839 --> 00:22:58.559 far from me. So what's the answer? How do we grow in our love for God? Well, the Bible solution to 00:22:58.559 --> 00:23:06.240 spiritual dryness is always to return to the gospel. It's to return to what Jesus Christ has done for 00:23:06.240 --> 00:23:12.480 you. Just to remind yourself of what we looked at this morning, that Jesus Christ took the full weight 00:23:12.480 --> 00:23:19.279 of that wrath, the wrath of God against human sin so that you could get the full gift of the 00:23:19.279 --> 00:23:26.799 gift of His righteousness. The solution to spiritual dryness is to stop and think about the costly 00:23:26.799 --> 00:23:34.160 love of Christ. You see, sometimes as Christians, I think our love for God, our love for Jesus Christ 00:23:34.160 --> 00:23:42.720 sometimes becomes love for the benefits, love of getting out of hell, love of a doctrine, 00:23:42.720 --> 00:23:52.160 but cultivating that spiritual fruit of love, it involves loving God as a person. It means loving Him 00:23:52.960 --> 00:24:00.640 in a relationship. And if you love someone, you want to spend time with them. You want to please 00:24:00.640 --> 00:24:08.799 them, you want to grow a strong, a deep, a meaningful relationship with them. And I think that should 00:24:08.799 --> 00:24:14.399 transform the way we view our devotional time, the way we view reading God's word and praying. 00:24:15.200 --> 00:24:21.200 These aren't box-taking exercises. These are not things we do because we feel guilty. These are 00:24:21.200 --> 00:24:26.559 things we should do because we love to do them. We love to spend time with the God who loves us 00:24:26.559 --> 00:24:33.519 with an incredible love. Now, finally, love is outworks the fruit of the Spirit towards one 00:24:33.519 --> 00:24:42.400 another. Galatians chapter 5 verse 14 says this, the whole law is fulfilled in one word. 00:24:42.960 --> 00:24:50.160 You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says a similar thing in Mark chapter 12. He says, 00:24:50.160 --> 00:24:55.680 the most important commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, 00:24:55.680 --> 00:25:06.080 all your might, and love your neighbor as yourself. It's easy. One of the greatest theologians in 00:25:06.080 --> 00:25:11.759 history, John Calvin, said, you can't divide love for God and love for one another. They are 00:25:11.759 --> 00:25:18.400 inseparable things. That's why we read earlier our second reading in 1 John chapter 4. We might 00:25:18.400 --> 00:25:24.799 have that on the screen as well. It says, if anyone says, I love God but hates his brother, 00:25:24.799 --> 00:25:31.200 he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not 00:25:31.200 --> 00:25:36.639 seen. And this commandment we have from him, whoever loves God must also love his brother. 00:25:38.879 --> 00:25:45.519 Calvin goes on, he says this, the truth is that we will never do this. We will never love our 00:25:45.519 --> 00:25:52.480 neighbor with sincerity and according to the will of God unless we turn our own self-love 00:25:52.480 --> 00:25:57.920 into the right kind of love. Our love of ourselves and the love of our neighbor are 00:25:57.920 --> 00:26:06.319 contrary and conflicting dispositions. Calvin says that our self-love produces neglect and 00:26:06.319 --> 00:26:13.120 contempt for others. It produces cruelty. It produces all these bad fruits we thought about last week. 00:26:15.839 --> 00:26:21.839 The reality is that loving each other with agape love, with true love, the love that God has for 00:26:21.839 --> 00:26:30.959 you and me in the gospel is difficult. It's hard. Some people are hard to love. I'm sure you can 00:26:30.959 --> 00:26:35.439 think of people in your life, maybe other Christians who are really difficult work to love. You have 00:26:35.439 --> 00:26:43.359 to really work at it. And of course we all have deep, deep imperfections when it comes to this 00:26:43.359 --> 00:26:51.519 kind of love. It's a fight, it's a struggle, it's a battle. We have to determine every day to 00:26:51.519 --> 00:26:55.680 walk in step with the Spirit to choose to love one another. 00:26:58.559 --> 00:27:04.960 I want to highlight one more thing in Galatians before we close. And that's that in verse 22, 00:27:04.960 --> 00:27:09.039 when Paul's speaking about the fruit of the Spirit, when he says love, joy, peace, patience, 00:27:09.039 --> 00:27:16.400 kindness, all these things, the words in the singular, the word for fruit. Now in English, 00:27:16.400 --> 00:27:21.440 that might not seem like a big deal because English is weird and it can be both singular and 00:27:21.440 --> 00:27:25.200 plural. You can speak about fruit individually and you can speak about a bowl of fruit that's got 00:27:25.200 --> 00:27:31.200 lots more fruit inside it. But in Greek, they're more precise and it's in the singular. So the point 00:27:31.200 --> 00:27:36.960 there really is that these things love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control and all 00:27:36.960 --> 00:27:42.160 these things. They're not completely separate entities. You can't just have one or two or three 00:27:42.160 --> 00:27:48.960 of them. They're a whole. Tim Keller says to think of the fruit of the Spirit like a diamond, 00:27:48.960 --> 00:27:57.200 with many different facets and like windows into the same thing. He says you can look into any of 00:27:57.200 --> 00:28:04.080 them and see the others. They're all part of one piece, really the fruit of the Spirit. We can be 00:28:05.120 --> 00:28:09.759 lacking in some areas, we can be deficient in some areas, but as a Christian, if God's at work in 00:28:09.759 --> 00:28:18.079 your heart, these things, they will grow. But we can certainly be deficient and I think part of our 00:28:18.079 --> 00:28:23.599 goal in this series is to ask ourselves, to examine our own hearts, to look into the mirror of God's 00:28:23.599 --> 00:28:31.599 Word and say where do I need to grow? Where am I lacking peace? Where am I deficient in patience? 00:28:31.599 --> 00:28:39.039 Sometimes as Christians we're deeply, deeply aware of our deficiencies. I was on a train last night 00:28:39.039 --> 00:28:45.359 from Inverness to Edinburgh and we broke down near Pitlockery. So it was some seven and a half hour 00:28:45.359 --> 00:28:51.279 journey and being stuck near Pitlockery for two hours is not exactly good fun, but the rest of the 00:28:51.279 --> 00:28:56.000 train was filled with drunk hearts fans. So I was sitting there, I was thinking I've got 00:28:56.000 --> 00:29:02.319 so half my sermon to finish for tomorrow and the train was stinking as both toilets were clogged 00:29:02.319 --> 00:29:08.799 and we got to Perth and the train terminated. It's like half 11 at this point and I'm lacking 00:29:08.799 --> 00:29:14.799 in patience right now. I'm feeling pretty frustrated with ScotRail and the fruit of the Spirit is 00:29:14.799 --> 00:29:21.599 love, joy, peace, patience, kindness and so on and so forth. The point is that as Christians, 00:29:21.599 --> 00:29:26.319 we're going to lose our patience. There are going to be people we find difficult to love, people 00:29:26.319 --> 00:29:32.799 we maybe neglect to love when we should. Sometimes we will snap back at people when we're angry, 00:29:32.799 --> 00:29:40.240 we'll get irritated. But the Bible says if you walk by the Spirit, if you are motivated by the love 00:29:40.240 --> 00:29:48.159 of God lavished on you in the gospel, then these fruits are things that will grow. I want to just 00:29:48.160 --> 00:29:54.800 conclude with this illustration that Tim Keller uses. He says that the fruit of the Spirit and 00:29:54.800 --> 00:30:03.040 their growth in your life, if you're a Christian, is inevitable. He says there's a story about a man 00:30:03.040 --> 00:30:10.400 who died and when he was buried, he was buried under a marble slab and somehow a wheat acorn fell into 00:30:10.400 --> 00:30:18.320 his grave and was buried with him. And he says over time, gradually and unnoticed, this acorn 00:30:18.320 --> 00:30:26.800 grew and eventually, after years and years, it split open this marble slab. Now he asks, if you were 00:30:26.800 --> 00:30:35.120 to put your money on a big slab of marble or a tiny wee seat, it would be a no-brainer. But he says 00:30:35.119 --> 00:30:42.959 if someone has the Spirit of God in them, if they're a Christian, fruit will grow. A seed, however 00:30:42.959 --> 00:30:48.799 small, will grow. Whatever a Christian's life is like, the fruit of the Spirit will burst through. 00:30:49.679 --> 00:30:56.079 And Keller says this to remind us and encourage us that however marble-like our sinful nature might 00:30:56.079 --> 00:31:04.959 feel, however difficult we might find the transformed Christian life to be, growth by the Holy Spirit, 00:31:04.960 --> 00:31:11.759 is inevitable. But he says it also should challenge us. It should force us to ask, particularly if 00:31:11.759 --> 00:31:18.160 we've been Christians for a while, where's the fruit growing in my life? If I look back over my life 00:31:18.160 --> 00:31:24.160 over the last year, have I grown in joy? Am I more peaceful this year than I was last year? 00:31:26.000 --> 00:31:33.519 He says we are saved ultimately by faith, not by growing fruit, but we are not saved by a fruitless 00:31:33.519 --> 00:31:41.519 faith. A person saved by faith will be a person in whom the fruit of the Spirit will grow. Let's pray. 00:31:44.799 --> 00:31:51.839 Lord God, our Father in heaven, we come before you and we praise you for your incredible, 00:31:51.839 --> 00:31:57.519 incredible love for us. Lord, we pray that tonight we would know in our own hearts the power of that 00:31:57.519 --> 00:32:07.119 love. Father, we thank you that you gave yourself for us. Lord, you are so rich in love. Help us, 00:32:07.119 --> 00:32:12.799 Father, in our own lives to love the unlovable. Help us, Lord, to be selfless in the way that we love. 00:32:14.160 --> 00:32:20.079 Help us, Father, as we seek to grow as Christians, to be looking to you as the one who equips and 00:32:20.079 --> 00:32:26.639 transforms us. Father, help us in every situation you place us in this next week to be people who 00:32:26.640 --> 00:32:32.400 love others and who point others to you. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.