Sermon Central
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The Fruit Of The Spirit - Love Series
Contributed by David Troyer on Apr 28, 2018 (message contributor)
Summary: This sermon deals with some of the many passages in the Scriptures which deal with Love including I Corinthians 13.
Today’s Key passage of Scripture comes from: Galatians 5:22-23
While you are turning there…
See if you can remember all of the fruits of the spirit.
Hopefully many of you can.
As we look in Galatians 5:22-23 this morning, we read…
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,
23 Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
This morning we are going to look at the first one in this list
(1) Love
As Christians, The Bible is our foundation.
It is the final authority on all matters
AND
It alone should direct our life!
And if you boil the Bible down
To one core message…
To one central theme…
It can strongly be argued that
That one central theme
Would be that of LOVE!
In fact,
Love is mentioned 442 times throughout the Bible
That is more than any of the other fruits of the Spirit!
And that is not even to include the 24 times
when the Bible uses words like Charity
or other words which mean love!
AND when you compare it to
All of the other fruits of the Spirit…
Peace being mentioned 420,
Faith 336,
Joy 187 times,
And all of the others are mentioned 35 times combined!
When God gives us something in the Bible
It is for a reason.
Perhaps Jesus taught on hell
More times than He taught on Heaven
So that we would pay attention to it!
Perhaps we are told about LOVE
More times than
Any other fruit of the Spirit
Because
WE ARE TO EMMULATE
God’s Love for us
In a consistent manner throughout our lives!
Romans 5:8 teaches us…
8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
When God made all of creation
It was good!
God was happy
And so was mankind.
Adam and Eve were running around
And having a great time in the
Garden of Eden.
But then
They as the representatives of all mankind
Chose to break that fellowship with God!
They chose to do the opposite of what He had commanded them
Although He had shown them His love by giving them a beautiful garden to live in
And filling it with
All kinds of awesome animals,
Some of which were extinct before we were even born
So that we will never have the joy of seeing them ourselves
Despite all of that
They chose to break that fellowship with God!
But as Romans 5:8 tells us,
God commended, OR showed
His love towards us
He made the first move
And He has been showing us His love ever since!
Remember how things were when you were dating?
Remember that no matter how great a relationship was destined to become…
There had to be that initial meeting.
Then there had to be that initial getting to know you stage…
And finally, there was the
“I Love You” stage…
You know, the one where
One person or the other had to say
I Love you to the other.
For God,
Dealing with mankind may seem a bit like that.
Here He is,
The creator of all things great and small…
He gave us everything we could ever need
And then we reject Him.
Then, later on,
He writes us
A huge book
Fills it with poems and songs and stories about how much He loves us…
And now He is waiting for us to respond to Him!
God has told how much He loves us
So much that I could probably
Preach an entire year worth of sermons just on Love!
But I won’t do that. There are plenty of other
Things God told us,
So today’s sermon will have to suffice for now!
CHARITY
As I mentioned earlier
The Bible uses different words to refer to love
Sometimes as well.
If you’ve been a Christian any length of time
You should already know what is found in
This is called the LOVE CHAPTER
It starts off in verse 1 saying
1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
If we talk about how much we love others
And all of the wonderful things we are going to do for them…
And yet we don’t follow through,
We are just making a lot of noise.
If you want to make a comparison to that
It is the person who is always bragging
OR
It is that little yippy dog that
Someone has.
It can make all of the noise in the world when you
Come to the door and ring the doorbell.
It will sit there and bark in the window all day long.
