Sermon Central
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Fruit Of The Holy Spirit: Love, Joy And Peace
Contributed by Geoffrey Foot on Jul 25, 2024 (message contributor)
Summary: Prayer is an essential part of our daily lives and sharing prayer is an ideal way to grown in faith. The Church has a manifold resource of prayers from which we can use and adapt and indeed grow in faith. The Revised Common Lectionary collect for the 9th Sunday after Trinity is one such prayer.
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Collect for Trinity 9
Fruit of the Holy Spirit: Love, Joy and Peace
The Holy Spirit is available to whisper to us thoughts of love and joy and peace and patience every moment of our lives.
Our collect for today is a beautiful prayer and so full of meaning and purpose – an ideal prayer for our daily devotions.
Almighty God, who sent your Holy Spirit
to be the life and light of your Church:
open our hearts to the riches of your grace,
that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit
in love and joy and peace;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
And what an opening statement it says it all: The Holy Spirit is the life and light of the Church
The Church that is alive grows and goes places – it is evident in the way in which its members react to worship and take that worship away with them as they leave the Church.
We need the life blood of the Holy Spirit so as to grow in Grace just as much as we need air to breathe and blood flowing through our bodies in order to live.
The Holy spirit is the life blood of the Church and each individual member and its gifts are evident in each one of us.
Today the Church is facing many controversial issues, where many decisions have to be made and whatever the outcome, whatever way we decide – it will be wrong in the eyes of some and right in the eyes of others – we can’t win.
We are, as they say, between a rock and a hard place.
And this is where we need the light of the Holy Spirit to guide and direct our thinking and above all our actions.
Indeed we all need that light in our daily lives to guide us through the day’s toil and the decisions that we have to make.
And scripture has a unique place to play in shedding this light – as the Psalmist says, ‘Thy Word is a lantern unto my feet and a light to my path.’ (Ps. 119:105)
And so we pray that the Holy Spirit will: Open our hearts to the riches of Your Grace.
The important aspect of all this is to realise that we must be prepared to let God speak to us through His Holy Spirit – we have to be receptive!!
We all have our likes and dislikes and this is especially true when its connected with the Church but we mustn’t let our bias dictate.
We must be open to ideas and new ways of Glorifying Almighty God.
We must NOT shut the door but keep it open so that we and everyone will be enriched by God’s Grace so that we will bring forth the fruits of the Spirit.
Sometimes we have to seek a compromise and look to way of mixing the old with the new as we want to grow and NOT decline, as Jesus said to His disciples: Every Scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old. (Matt. 13: 52)
Indeed we have our own saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ but it might need a polish or a good clean – its all about balance and thinking through the consequences of your actions.
And this is where the next part of our collect comes in: Open our hearts to the riches of God’s grace, so that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit in love and joy and peace.
Ironically the first 3 gifts of the Holy Spirit as described by St Paul in his letter to the Galations are love, joy and peace.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Is this list in order of priority? - with love, joy and peace leading the way – the most important.
The fruits of the Holy Spirit starts with love and as Paul outlines in 1Corinthians 13, his hymn of love:
Love is patient and kind, love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things - LOVE NEVER
ENDS.
Love covers many of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in that list: patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – all these are attributes of love.
In the English language love covers so many things but in Greek there are a number of different words that cover the rich meaning of the word, love.
