INTRODUCTION
• How do I know if God is working in me? What evidence do I have to shows me that God’s Spirit is in me?
• How can others see God working in me?
• Today we are going to being a sermon series that will help us to answer the above questions.
• SLIDE #1
• Today we are going to begin to look at the fruit of the Spirit. The first fruit we are going to examine is the fruit of love. Today we are going asking the question, “How is your love life?”
• In Galatians 5, the text we will begin with each week, Paul talks to us about the contrast of walking by the flesh verses walking by the Spirit.
• SLIDE #2
• Let us look at Galatians 5:19-21
• Galatians 5:19-21 ( ESV ) 19Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, 20idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, 21envy,£ drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
• Paul says the things in verse 19-21 are the deeds of the flesh. In other words those are the way in which we can tell if we are controlled by the flesh.
• The works of the flesh are the works of man; the fruit of the Spirit are works from God. When God is in you, and you allow His Spirit to work in you, these are natural by-products of Him working in you.
• Now let us focus on verses 22-23 to look at the fruit of the Spirit.
• SLIDE #3
• Galatians 5:22-23 ( ESV ) 22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
• Notice in verse 22 the items listed, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are called to fruit of the Spirit.
• These are called the fruit of the “Spirit” because the Spirit is the cause or source of the fruit.
• The use of the singular form of the word “fruit” shows us that God wants us to know these qualities are in unity, like a bunch of grapes, the bunch of grapes comes from the same vine branch.
• These qualities are to be found growing in ALL Christians.
• When the indwelling Spirit of God Himself begins to express His mighty power in the inner being of believers, good things begin to happen.
• The nature of God himself begins to manifest itself in our lives.
• What is presented to us is a choice, we can choose to live by the flesh or we can live by the Spirit.
• The first fruit, love can tell you a lot about how much God has control of you.
• During Paul’s day, Greek was the language of the day. In that language we find four predominate words for love and they had fairly distinct meanings.
• In English, we have one word for love and you must know the context in which it is used in order to know what is meant.
• In the original language of the New Testament, that is not true, you can identify the word and generally know what is meant by looking at the word.
• How is your love life? What is the basis of your love for others? Let us look at four types of love. In doing so, we will understand what kind of love qualifies as being a part of the fruit of the Spirit.
• SLIDE #4
SERMON
Is your love based on:
I. WHAT OTHERS DO FOR YOU?
• This is a selfish kind of love. It is a love that is rooted in what another person can do for you.
• This is the lowest level of love. This is the type of love in which people would be accused of being pigs for.
• Notice in the picture how happy the pig is because he is in the dirty water.
• In the Greek the word used is “EROS” from which we get the word erotic. By the way as far as I can find, this word is not used in the New Testament.
• This kind of love was a passionate love that was often tainted by the lust for fleshly gratification. This kind of love always tries to use the object of love to fulfill its own hunger for excitement and emotional intoxication.
• This is the young man who “loves” the cheerleader because of what she does for him. He “loves” her because of how she makes him look when she is on his arm.
• He will “love” her as long as she takes care of his physical desires.
• You see a lot of movies with this kind of theme, movies like the “Wedding Crashers” where men look to use women for their personal gratification.
• It is so easy to fall into the trap of loving others only because of what they can do for us. It is easy to “love” someone because they can give us what we want.
• When we have this type of love for others, we tend to use people and value things.
• If we have this type of love for others, we will not do what is best for them, we will use them for our own gratification.
• This type of love is not from God, it is of the world.
• SLIDE #5
• 1 John 2:17 ( ESV ) And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
• This type of love is totally selfish in nature; it is always looking out for number one!
• This type of love is not a part of the fruit of the Spirit.
• Let’s look at another form of love.
• SLIDE #6
Is your love based on:
II. THE ATTRACTIVE QUALITIES OF OTHERS.
• This second type of love is a bit better than the first one, but it can still be a little bit selfish. It is, “I love you because…” and you fill in the blank.
• Have you ever gone out to pick a puppy to take home? The ones on the screen are cute. You pick one up and you decide it is a little too big, then you go to the next one and you do not like the color of the fir, then the next one has a funny looking face.
• Finally, you find the one you want, it is perfect, it has all the qualities you want and then you say that you “love” this one.
• Philia was the broad love of both friendship and romance, it was the highest secular Greek word for love. This love was less selfish than mere carnal sexuality, and could be a rather noble attraction to someone or something that had lovable qualities.
• Philia is the warm love which we feel for our nearest and our dearest; it is a thing of the heart. It is the kind of love that is expressed by a kiss.
• This love typically was one you had because someone or something had attractive qualities.
• Eros was flesh driven; Philia is more emotional in nature.
• This one does not sound bad, but think of the puppy illustration again. Remember the one that was too big? How long before your perfect puppy is bigger? How long until his fur is the same color as the other one you did not like.
• Aristotle noted that “when the loved one’s beauty fades, the philia sometimes fades too.”
• Relationships built only on this will fail because the object of your love will change.
• This type of love has some dependency in common interests also.
• SLIDE #7
• James 2:23 ( ESV ) and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God.
• God calls man his friend (phı́los), as He did Abraham (James 2:23), when man has adopted God’s interests as his own, just as Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son even as God did His own.
• This love is better than the first one, but it lacks because when the object of your love changes, your love will change also.
• SLIDE #8
Is your love based on:
III. FOCUSING ON THE FAMILY.
• This third type of love was a more narrow term (storega), reserved for family love that is confined to the family circle. This love resisted embracing outsiders.
• This is a love that says we will only love those in our family.
• In the church, we must make sure that we do not fall into this trap.
• If the church is not careful, we can become inward focused to the point that the only ones we love are those who are in our church family.
• We can tell if this has happened to us when we loose our passion to reach the lost people to the point that we have to have everything the way we want it regardless of what that may mean to our mission of reaching lost people.
• Churches that are inward focused die because they do not really show God’s love to those “outside” the circle.
• SLIDE #9
Is your love based on:
IV. THE STANDARD THAT GOD HAS SET.
• John 3:16 ( ESV ) 16“For God so loved the world,£ that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
• This is the love that we are to have for others; this is the love that will be evident when the Sprit is working within us.
• According to the College Press Commentary on Galatians, agapē became almost exclusively the Christian word for love. For people familiar with agapē in the New Testament, it is startling to discover that this great word is “almost completely lacking in pre-biblical Greek.”
• A verb form was used occasionally by the Greeks, but they found in it “nothing of the power or magic of erōs and little of the warmth of philia.”5-43 Thus, at the end of the Greek classical period the language had a word for love that had been little used as a verb, and as a noun not at all.
• Agapē is a love that is chosen by the will of the lover, not the loveliness of the one loved. It is a love that is freely given without counting the cost nor calculating one’s own profit. It goes deeper than mere emotion, lasts longer than mere attractiveness, and reaches wider than mere bloodline.
• Agape, means unconquerable benevolence. It means that no matter what a man may do to us by way of insult or injury or humiliation we will never seek anything else but his highest good.
• It is therefore a feeling of the mind as much as of the heart; it concerns the will as much as the emotions. It describes the deliberate effort-which we can make only with the help of God-never to seek anything but the best even for those who seek the worst for us. (Barclay)
• God loves us because of who He is, not who we are. God will always do what is best for us.
• God discerns and takes care of our needs, when we love with God’s love, we will discern and meet people’s true needs.
• We should realize the need of people to be changed through Christ’s grace, and do everything possible to bring them into a saving relationship with Jesus!
• It is interesting in Matthew 5:44, Jesus tells us to love our enemies.
• SLIDE #10
• Matthew 5:44 ( ESV ) 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
• He uses the word agape, not phileo. For the Christian, when we deal with people who are lost, we need to see their need of faith and we must do everything that we can to meet that need in their lives in whatever manner.
• Jesus does not use phileo because we are to never befriend people by adopting the system of the world, we must connect them to God. Witnessing on the barstool will not win you too many people.
• WE must lead them to where they need to be.
• When you start to love by God’s standard, the standard He used when choosing to love you, your life will change.
• You will accept people as they are and love them too much to let them stay that way.
• God does not love you because of your looks, or what you can do for Him, God loves you because God chooses to love you in spite of you!
CONCLUSION
• LEAVE POWERPOINT- CLICK TO NEXT VIDEO
• AFTER VIDEO CLICK TO FILLER SLIDE.
• Fruit is a by-product; it takes time to grow and requires care and cultivation. The Spirit produces the fruit; our job is to get in tune with the Spirit. Believers will exhibit the fruit of the Spirit, when they simply allow the Holy Spirit to work in them.
• The fruit of the Spirit separates Christians from a godless, evil world, it reveals a power within them, and helps them become more Christlike in their daily lives.
• How is your love life? Let the Spirit control you and you will love like you never loved before!
