The Fruit of the Spirit is Love…And Against Such Things There is No Law
Galatians 5:22a&23b
In Galatians 5:22, God says “The fruit of the spirit is love”
And then at the end of 5:23, after explaining how that love overflows in joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, he says “Against such things there is no law.”
Which is kind of a strange thing to say. If I were to say to you, “Bake me cookies, there is no law against it.”
You’d say, “Of course not. Why would there be a law against baking cookies?”
Paul is not just stating the obvious – he is connecting what he has already taught about the law and what it does in our lives with what the spirit does in our lives. And he says that if we bear the fruit of the spirit, we are acting in harmony with the law of God, not against it.
So today I want to talk about our relationship to the law of God as believers, to talk about why its important that we recognize love as the FRUIT of the spirit, not the work of the Spirit, and to call us all to a standard for living that goes far beyond the demands of the law.
God had, in the Old Testament and the New, given commands to us. Any “do” or “don’t do” command from God was a law. That law that God gave, which included things like the ten commandments, was a good thing. Romans says that the law is holy, just, and good.
And God gave his commands for a great purpose:
WHY GOD GAVE COMMANDS
1) REVEAL SIN
Romans 3:20 because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.
Romans 7:7 What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “YOU SHALL NOT COVET.”
God had written his laws on our hearts, so we knew what sin was. There is a universal moral law that is innate, probably part of the image of God in us. But as sinners, we obscured that law, and tarnished it, and our hearts became hard and calloused so that we could no longer recognize what sin is. So God, in his mercy, sent commands to remind us of what sin is, of who we are as sinners, and to make it crystal clear that we’re lawbreakers. If God hadn’t given his law, we might not have recognized sin.
He gave it as a light so we could look at our lives and see what was in them so we could turn to him for forgiveness.
In the house we lived in in Missouri, we had a problem with bugs.
The only time we didn’t have a problem with the bugs was when the lights were off. If you listened real closely you could hear them at night, but for the most part they went unnoticed in the dark.
Then when we flipped the lights on, they went running everywhere. It was only in the light that we could really see the bug problem so we could call the exterminator.
Now the light was not the SOLUTION to the bug problem, it just revealed it.
God’s commands were never intended to be the solution for our sin problem, but to reveal the problem so we could turn to Jesus.
2) REVEAL FAITH
Abraham was given his son Isaac, and with him given a promise that Nations would come from him.
Then God gives Abraham his test of faith, he says, “Abraham, kill Isaac” – that’s a law, a command spoken by God.
Genesis 22: 9Then they came to the place of which God had told him; and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 12He said, “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”
Romans 4:3 “ABRAHAM BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS CREDITED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS.”
God gives a promise: I’ll make nations of you.
God gives a law: Kill your son.
Abraham believes the promise, trusts in the lawgiver, and he OBEYS the law.
Now obeying didn’t make him righteous, believing did. But believing made him obey.
Imagine if God said, “Abraham, kill your son” and Abe said, “God, I believe you, I trust you, but no.” His belief would have been proven inauthentic. But because he had a law, he could see if he really obeyed.
Again, the law didn’t give people faith, it revealed whether they really had it.
It works the same way today: God says “Do not steal.” Now the fact that you don’t steal doesn’t make you a Christian, there are plenty of lost people who have never taken a thing.
However, if you say you have faith but you still steal, you are revealing that you don’t trust God like you should: you don’t trust him to provide, you don’t believe he’s worth more than what you’re stealing, you don’t believe he is a bigger thrill than the thrill you get when you slip something from the store shelf into your pocket and then make it past the alarms and into your car.
The commands of God reveal whether you trust him or not.
So the law revealed sin, it revealed faith, and it also
3) RESTRAINED SIN
You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:14)
What kind of jerk needs this law? What kind of jerk needs to be told not to go around cursing out deaf people and putting things in front of blind people so they trip?
But God gave this law as a safety net for society – if you fall to this point, you know something’s very wrong.
But people abused the law: They used it to make themselves feel righteous because, hey, they weren’t tripping people. They thought “If I keep this law, God will accept me!”
So instead of a light that exposed their sin, they treated the law as the solution that it was never meant to be.
God’s commands are a thermostat, not a furnace.
The thermostat recognizes when the room gets too cold and sends a signal to the furnace to turn on and heat the house.
The thermostat’s job is to say, “TOO COLD”, and that’s it. It is not the thermostat’s job to heat the house (you’re not going to burn your hand on the thermostat), it is the job of the furnace to provide heat.
It is not the job of God’s commands to change your life, it is their job to indicate that your life needs to change. And then JESUS works through his DEATH by His Spirit to change your life and bear proper fruit.
So the commands of God are good, but they are lacking something:
1) RULES CANNOT CHANGE HEARTS. You couldn’t say you had faith and disobey the law, but you could obey the law without faith. You could consistently do the things God’s law told you to do with completely wrong motives. To please people, to try to make yourself righteous, to try to earn God’s favor (all that need to be guarded against today!)
2) RULES CANNOT PROVIDE RIGHTEOUSNESS.
(Matthew 5:20“For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”)
The scribes and Pharisees were thought to be perfect law-keepers. But they weren’t righteous enough for God. And if the best lawkeepers couldn’t make themselves perfect by obedience to the law, and if obeying the law was the way to make yourself holy, we’re all in trouble. A better righteousness was required for heaven, and if you had to be more righteous than the most righteous people, it was IMPOSSIBLE!
So you needed someone to come and fulfill the law on your behalf, Jesus.
3) RULES CANNOT SAVE, BUT POINT TO JESUS WHO CAN. People treated the law like God, if I just go to the law and meet its requirements then I’ll be righteous. It was never meant to do that.
So Jesus came and perfectly obeyed the law on our behalf, then died to pay for all the disobedience to the law, and made those who would trust in him NEW CREATURES.
EZEKIEL 36 26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
The law of God never changed people’s hearts. Some people would obey on the surface and follow the commands, but never really trust in the God who gave them or love the God who gave them.
God gave his law, written on stone, to people whose hearts were made of stone that could only obey on the outside in and of themselves.
So Jesus came in the flesh, and gave all of those who would trust in him hearts of flesh, that are able to obey not because they have to, but because they are a new creation that delights in obeying.
2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
Now that we’re new creatures, we’re dead to the old law. We no longer have to strive to obey it, we have been freed from the law.
But that doesn’t mean we live below the standard that the law set.
AMISH BUGGIES.
Amish buggies probably don’t have speedometers.
How do they know if they’re breaking the law? They just know they’re not because you can’t speed in a buggy – you’ve got a two horse power vehicle.
You always know you’re going far beyond the demands of the law, even in a school zone.
Amish guys don’t have radar detectors. When they see a police car turning on its lights, they don’t say, “Oh man, is that for me? How fast was I going?” I say this not only to make fun of Amish people, but to make a point: They’re built to live above the demands of the law, and so they never worry about breaking it.
We are called to follow one command: LOVE – God and people. And if we’re always doing that, we’re never breaking the law.
Matthew 22:35-40 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law? 37 And he said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.
The law to tithe – If we love God and people, we’ll be giving away far more than 10% so we don’t even need to think about the law: it’s taken care of if we love.
The commandment “don’t lie”: If we love people, we don’t lie to them, and we don’t need a command to tell us not to lie if we love.
Don’t steal: How do you steal from someone in love? You can’t. If you love, you won’t steal, and there doesn’t need to be a command telling you not to.
So we’re FREE from the law, but if we love, we always live above the standard that the law set. If we’re ever looking up at that standard from where we are, we are sinning because we are not loving.
If the furnace runs 24/7, the house is always hot, with or without a thermostat.
And Christians who are staying close to God have furnaces that always run, so we are free from even having to try to keep the demands of the law!
1 Timothy 1:9, the "law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless."
But for the righteous – for people who have come to Christ for justification and come to Christ for the inner spiritual power to love, this role of the law is past. From now on, the place where we seek the power to love is not the law of commandments but the gospel of Christ.
Now that we’re done with the intro, go back to Galatians 5:19.
19 Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, 20 idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, 21 envy, 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. 22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
Notice the pattern: These are the works of the flesh, then these are the _______ of the spirit. You’d expect him to say, “Here are the works of the flesh, and here are the works of the spirit.”
But the Apostle does not call them the “works” of the spirit, but gives them a better name, “The FRUIT” of the spirit. Why? Why not call them works?
When you go to the gym, you see people “WORKING OUT”. And you know what that looks like, they’re sweating, there are veins popping out, they’re grunting, they’re yelling. They’re doing something that they hate doing to achieve a result in their bodies, or a feeling, or a relief of stress. That’s WORK.
But fruit is different. You never walk by a farm and hear the trees grunting as they produce pears. You never see a tree shaking with effort as it works to bear fruit. You never hear a tree talking about all the trouble all this photosynthesis is.
Because the trees are not producing works, they’re producing fruit.
The way a tree bears fruit is not by trying to bear fruit, but by keeping a close connection with a source of water and being exposed to the sunlight.
The way Christians produce the fruit of the Spirit that is all summed up in the term love is by staying closely connected to the spirit.
It is by allowing the Spirit to work in our lives to do the work to produce the fruit. It is more about staying connected to the source of love than trying to produce love.
And then the good deeds that come from love, while they may tire us out as we produce them, are not a burden. If you love God and love people as a result of keeping closeness with God:
it is a joy to witness (though it may tire you out staying up late to talk to someone.)
It is a thrill to read the bible (though your eyes might ache and your brain might have trouble keeping its attention focused.)
So how does the Spirit bear this fruit in your life? What is your role in the whole thing?
Your role is to nurture a deep and abiding love for God. (Do this by reading his word, confessing your sin to God and one another, praying, worshipping, etc.) And then, once you love him, you live a completely FREE life, not even worrying about the demands of the law.
St. Augustine said, “Love, and do whatever you want.”
The fruit of the Spirit working in your life is LOVE. And without having to consult a rulebook, you’ll see the overflow of that love in every area:
Joy will come as you feel the satisfaction that comes from closeness with the God you love.
Peace will come as you trust in the God you love and know your future is in his hands.
Patience will come as you trust God’s perfect timing and his love for you.
Kindness will come as you really believe how kind God was to you, someone who didn’t deserve it.
Goodness will come as you love people as Christ loved you.
Faithfulness will come as you can’t help but want to stay close to the God you love.
Gentleness will come as you trust God to judge, and avenge, and fix all the things you can’t.
You’ll see God controlling you as you allow his Spirit to fill you and lead you to talk in him.
And without even noticing it, you’ll be keeping the law. Not because you have to, not because you are trying to make yourself righteous, but because love always lifts your life far above the restraints of the law.
