Fruit of the Spirit: Love

I want to start with something not in my notes. And it's we know who God is and he says who we are, that we are loved. And I just need to tell someone in this room today that that's how he views you.

That's how he views you. He's not ashamed of you. He's not disappointed in you. He loves you. Today we're going to talk about love.

And it's a great reminder of some realities that a lot of us don't spend much time thinking about or talking about when it comes to love. If we haven't met, my name is Josh. I would love to meet you. If we haven't met, please come introduce yourself. And if you're a guest here or you've never really connected here, maybe you've just come and sat in a seat and scampered out the back really quick at the end of the service and haven't connected at all.

This is a community, it's a family. And if you would like to take a step towards connecting here at Whitewater, the best thing that you can do is after this service, just head out these doors and go to the information desk. We got a great team of volunteers there that would love to answer some questions that you have, help get you connected and take a next step here. And I just hope that you'll do that today. If you were here last week, then you know, we just started this series on the fruit of the Spirit and we covered a lot of ground last week.

That is not just to set this series up, but if you missed last week, please go back and listen. One, I don't have a ton of time to review today and look back. Cause we gotta cover so much ground today. But two, if you listen to none of the other sermons in the series last week was such a foundational understanding of of what it is to abide in Jesus and produce fruit. So since we don't have much time, I'm just going to jump right into Galatians 5.

22, where we will remind ourselves of this fruit of the Spirit that Paul gives us. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. I don't think it's a coincidence that Paul starts with love. I think he did it on purpose. And as we'll see with all the fruit, it just kind of wraps back on itself and intertwines with all of the other fruit.

Love is a word that's literally all over scripture. It's just everywhere. The Bible's Dripping with love. I think of it kind of similar to the way that scientists have identified carbon and as the primary building block, the primary element of life in this world, even calling it the building block of life. I think that love is the most foundational element for us who want to live a life in God.

Here's how important Paul says It is in First Corinthians 13, starting in verse one, he says, if I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I'm only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, if I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship, that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. We talked about this last week. This is the fake, plastic, wood, wax, fruit activity.

That's not real fruit if it doesn't have love. Paul says that all the seemingly most impressive things that we might be able to do or be capable of if we don't have love, they're nothing. Nothing. Not, hey, they count for a little bit. They're nothing.

He goes on to describe some of the essence of love, which we'll look at here in just a few minutes. But he closes the chapter with these words. He says, and now these three remain faith, verse, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. And I find myself asking the question greater than faith and hope.

I mean, Paul says over and over and over that the only way that we come to salvation is by grace, through faith. I mean, faith is a required element to salvation. And yet Paul says that greater than that, more important, most superior, is love. Jesus said the greatest and second greatest commandments are love the Lord your God, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. He said, this is the fullness of the law, and it's the fullness of what it looks like to seek first God's kingdom.

And if all of this is true, then I have to conclude that it would be of greatest consequence, at least to those of us who wish to understand God and live for him to misuse or misunderstand or certainly lack love. So what is love? Baby, don't hurt me don't hurt me no more. Sorry. Thank you.

I appreciate that. So what is love? Well, I think first we need to know or be reminded of the fact that unlike the English language, Greek, which is the new Testament language is in that language, there are at least seven different words for the word love. There's a word for erotic love. There's a word for the long, slow building love that exists between a husband and a wife.

There's brotherly love, and there's self love. But this word here is the word agape, and it's a very specific word. Agape love is characterized by three key ingredients. It is selfless, it is sacrificial, and it is unconditional. It's selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional.

This is how Paul describes this kind of love. Further, in First Corinthians 13, he says, Love is patient. Love is kind. It is not jealous. Love does not brag.

It is not arrogant. It does not act disgracefully. It does not seek its own benefit. It is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered. It does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.

It keeps every confidence. It believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. This kind of love never fails. Again, this kind of love is selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional. So let's keep digging and find out a little bit more about this love.

Last week we looked at John chapter 15, and Jess reminded us in Communion that Jesus spoke of the ultimate expression of this love. In John chapter 15, he says, Greater love has no one than this. When Jesus says, hey, this is the highest form of this love, to lay down one's life for one's friends. Because agape love is selfless and sacrificial, I think Dallas Willard does a fantastic job in general of distilling giant ideas down to clear and concise definitions. He does this with love.

He says, love is to will the good of others. Love is to will the good of others. Now we know what love is. We've looked at that. But let's look at what love is not.

What is the opposite of love? I think all of us come up with that word, hate. Hate is the first word that comes to mind. But I think that the opposite of agape love isn't hate. The opposite of agape love is ego.

It's ego. Ego does not will the good of others. Ego only wills the good of self. Ego leads us to exalt or prop up ourself above everything else. Ego is what causes us to place ourselves at the center of the universe.

We are the main character of every story that's being lived out in this world right now. And God and everyone else, they're supporting characters in our story of being the center of the universe. This is ego.

Ego is selfish rather than selfless. It's self serving rather than self sacrificing. Ego is all conditional. As long as self gets what self wants. We love, but our love is very conditional, our love for ourselves.

Ego causes us actually to resent and become enemies with God and all of his precepts and all of his ways and all of his laws, because none of that supports us being the central character of the story. Would you believe that the creator of the universe has the audacity to want to be the center of the story?

This is what we described last week as walking in the flesh. Romans 8:7 says, the mind governed by the flesh is hostile or enemies to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. But even further, our resentment and our enmity with God and our lack of need of God and His ways does something to us. It causes us to devalue and objectify and commodify all the people around us.

We simply see them as pawns, expendable resources, a means to an end of exalting ourselves. Of course, we don't say that out loud, we just do it right? We don't have to try. The result of that is described many times in the Bible. We looked at one of these descriptions a few weeks ago in Romans chapter one.

It says they have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They're gossips, slanderers, God haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. They invent ways of doing evil. They disobey their parents.

They have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. We read about this as well. The result of this from the Paul describes to us the fruit of the flesh before he describes the fruit of the spirit. He says it looks like this sexual immorality, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy. And as we drink our ego smoothie for breakfast every morning and we walk out the door into our relationships with others and they all do the same, it just turns into this massive vicious cycle of posturing and using and exploiting and bartering and manipulating so that all of us can remain the central character of the story.

This is the order of ego. This is the way of the world. Tell me you don't see this living out every day, all over. Just hang out with a toddler for 10 minutes and you will See what this looks like. But just as there is an order of ego, there's also an order or a way of agape of love.

And it doesn't start with self love. In fact it starts with God loving us. That's where it starts first. John 4, 9, 10 says, this is how God showed His love among us. He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him.

This is love. Not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Ephesians 1:4 5 says, for he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight in love he predestined us or pre chose us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will. And something even more incredible about his love for us is that God loves us with unmerited love. Love we did not earn, love we do not deserve.

We did not prove ourselves to be a needed commod to God. And that's why he loves us. In fact, he loved us in our sin. He loved us even as we were or are enemies to him. Romans 5:8.

But God demonstrates His own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. But it is in our recognition of this love that things start to change. And what happens next is that his love for us stirs up in us an ability and a desire to love him back first. John 4:19 puts it so simply.

We love because he first loved us. He chose us first. He chose us. And when we realize the implications of his love for us and and we start to want to love him back, we also realize very quickly that we need to start showing this love to others. This is the order of love.

1 John 4:7, 8 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love. And this order of love doesn't end there, it keeps going. Our love for others causes others to see God's love for them, which opens their lives up to want to love Him.

And in turn they recognize that they must love others and they have to extend that love back into us. This is the cycle of love. This is the community we read. No one has ever seen God. But if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete, complete, perfect, whole in us.

This is the order of love. And while it starts with God, it's only made complete or perfect or whole when it spills out into the context of community. Because true agape love is a community love.

Now, I want to take a minute to look at two things that we brought up last week. Two things. First is the false or the plastic fruit of love. We'll talk about what that is. And that often looks like good activity that isn't actual good fruit.

We said that last week. And second is I want to look at the evil twin of love, the fruit of. So the fake plastic fruit of love is harmful affirmation and tolerance. Harmful affirmation and tolerance. See, the world and the enemy have done an incredible job of convincing us that to disagree with someone's choices is the greatest sin that we can commit against them.

But this is a lie, and to do that is false fruit church. If someone is willfully living in what the Bible defines as sin, then in fact the very most loving thing that we can do is to not affirm them. The least loving thing that we can do is affirm their sin. There are dozens of Bible verses that praise truthfulness, even in and especially in confrontation and difficulty. Why is it considered loving to correct a child when they want to touch a stove?

But it's not considered loving to call out an adult who's surrounding themselves with people who are encouraging their sin? Why is it considered loving for a coach or a physical trainer to correct an athlete's bad habits? But it's unloving for us to do that for our in their sin. If we do not speak the truth, we prove that we do not love. But.

But before all the fiery legalists in the room get really excited and start to show their teeth and salivate, let me remind you that the fruit of the spirit is not truth, but it is love. And it is kindness, and it is patience, and it is gentleness.

I like how John Piper puts it. He says that when it comes to speaking the truth in love, that love aims at truth and truth aims at love. We must love people enough to be honest with them, but we must also love them enough to be gentle and patient and kind as we do. And then there's the fruit of the flesh. That's the evil twin of love.

When it's small and young, it is desire. And when that grows up and matures, it becomes lust.

See, love wills the eternal good, not the perceived good, not the desired good, not the felt good, but the actual eternal good of others. But desire and lust, all they will is the temporary gratification of self. Love gives desire and lust Takes love builds desire and lust destroys. Love aligns with God's will. Desire and lust twists and manipulates God's will.

So as we pursue agape love in our lives, we must not confuse it with the fake plastic version of harmful affirmation and tolerance or the fleshly version of desire and lust. Now remember we said that the whole point of all of this fruit is for one thing, there's one end in mind. The whole point of this fruit is that over time, through the work of sanctification, the Holy Spirit will form us more and more and more and more into the likeness of Jesus. This is the whole point of being a Christian. So how does agape play out in Jesus life?

Well, let's look at it. Remember we said that agape is selfless, sacrificial and unconditional. We could spend a whole series looking at all the ways that Jesus was selfless and sacrificial and unconditional, the ways that Jesus expressed his love for us. He stepped down from heaven. He humbled himself and became a human.

He healed, he loved, he gave of himself unconditionally. He had meals with the least of these. He gave the ultimate sacrifice, sacrifice of becoming obedient to death on the cross for us. But I don't think that we actually have any trouble understanding or thinking about or remembering all the really loving things that Jesus did. Even the world seems to be willing to view him as the nicest guy that ever walked the planet, even though they don't believe at all that he's the Son of God.

He said stuff like, if someone harms you, then you should turn the other cheek. He said, if someone asks of you, then give freely. If someone wants to borrow from you, then lend freely, even with expecting nothing in return. Jesus was nice. He was inclusive.

He was caring. And the world tells us, if all of us hypocritical, judgmental, legalistic Christians would just be nice like Jesus was nice, then the world would be a better place. But this is at least an incomplete view of who Jesus was, if not an entirely false picture of Jesus. If he was just so nice and loved and accepted everyone, why did they hang him on a cross?

Why did not only the political leaders, but but also all the religious leaders want him dead?

It's because he did some not so nice things and said some not so nice things. It's because he was so confrontational. It's because he called people out, he spoke brutal truth in love, and he had ridiculous expectations for anyone who said that they wanted to follow him. But here's the thing. All of that was love.

All of that was love. You know how I know? Because we just read in 1 John, God is love and Jesus is God. Colossians 2. 9 says, for in Christ, all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form.

All the fullness of God and his likeness is in Jesus. Jesus himself said in John 14:9 that anyone who has seen him has seen the Father. Everything that Jesus did was an act of love. And nothing that Jesus did or said was anything less than love. Because Jesus is love.

So if this is true, what do we do with some of the seemingly unloving things that Jesus did and said? I mean, he said some terrible stuff to the Pharisees. He called them hypocrites, snakes, whitewashed tombs. He told them that they were like a cup that was clean on the outside and filthy on the inside. He was brutally honest with the woman at the well when she opens up her heart and says, I don't have a husband.

And he says, yeah, I know, you've had five. And in fact, the guy you're sleeping with now isn't your husband. That does not sound very loving to me. He made a whip and flipped tables in the temple and drove out the money changers. This sure doesn't look like turning the other cheek to me.

He called Peter one of his closest friends. He called him Satan. He said, get behind me, Satan. Try that with your wife.

In the book of Luke, this guy comes up to Jesus and he says, hey, I want to follow you, but can I go bury my dad before I follow you? And Jesus says, let the dead bury the dead.

He goes on and says, if anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even their own life, such a person cannot be my disciple. What do we do with all of this? And while we like to think of all the people that Jesus healed, think of how many people he didn't heal. Think of all those he just walked by. He could have healed them.

And he didn't. Think about all the people who got to watch the lame man get up and walk and grapple with why he chose not to heal them. And all this forces us to deal with this difficult reality that maybe Jesus wasn't, after all, the nicest guy that ever walked the planet. Of course, my point isn't that he wasn't the most loving person who ever lived. My point is that somehow all of these difficult words, these difficult realities, these puzzling actions were love.

They were love because Jesus is love. When Jesus said that loving God and loving others is the fullest expression of the kingdom, he knew that he was asking us to do a very complex thing that wasn't so simple. When he told us to turn the other cheek and love our enemy, he did not mean that there is no time ever to stand up against injustice and evil.

Let me put it in real terms for us today. Let's say a young woman walks into my office this week sobbing, her face battered and bruised by her abusive husband. What is the most loving thing that I can do for her? Maybe that one's too easy. What's the most loving thing I can do for her husband?

What does it look like to will the eternal good of her husband? Let's go back to Willard's definition, to will the good of others. Am I more interested in willing the good of her or her husband because those things might be at odds with each other? Do I tell her that Jesus would want her to turn the other cheek?

No. In fact, for me to will the good of this abusive husband is to call the police and to have him abruptly confronted with the serious consequences of his sin. This is actually a greater act of love than anything else I can do for him. And for her. Is there grace and forgiveness?

Absolutely. More than he could ever need. But the very best good for him is to have to deal with the sin in his life. That's what it is to will the eternal good of this man and for me to pray and hope that this will be a turning point for him in his life. Jesus shows us that sometimes love isn't nice.

Sometimes love is confrontational. Sometimes love doesn't feel good to its recipient.

And still the world and most of us are still convinced that to be like Jesus is to only ever be nice. But that's not the Jesus of the Bible, at least not in full. Now, as we quickly run out of time, I don't want to miss out on talking about the unconditionality of God's love. Agape love is very different than how most of us love. Most of the time, our love turns out to be nearly perfectly conditional.

You don't believe me? Then think back on how many things or people in your life that you were once enamored by or in love with that got cast to the side when they did not provide what you thought you were owed. Now, this comes in trite things like our favorite restaurant or our favorite sports team that we kept coming back to and they kept disappointing us until we moved on to something else to the much less trite things like a best friend who stabbed us in the back and we rode off, or our marriage or our marriages that eventually got to the point that they were costing us more providing for us. I had a professor in college who coined the phrase disposable relationships. And what he defined that as is those relationships in your life, that the cost to maintain them or restore them is greater than the perceived value of having them.

We're all guilty of revoking our love, aren't we? Of course, the point isn't that I'm shaming us for these things. The point is that these things are just true. But this is not how it is with God. The Bible says that God's love is unconditional in every way.

It is not earned by us. We did not prove our value or work or hard enough. We didn't produce enough. God's love for us does not grow or shrink. It is constant.

And remember what we said earlier. God's love pre exists us. It's contingent on nothing. He chose us before, we chose him now. All this reminds me of the moment that each of my children was born.

I was there when each one of them came into the world. And each time that happened, the same thing happened. After nine months of waiting and waiting and waiting and after a lot of work from my wife, while I just sat there and did nothing, a little baby entered the world. And with each kid, there was a moment that I got to hold them for the very first time. And I have to tell you, I was immediately and completely and explosively in love with this tiny little person I had never met.

I'll tell you what I did not do. I'll tell you what did not happen. I did not hold them out at arm's length with disgust and say, it's so loud and slimy.

What do you want me to do with it? What kind of tricks can it do? Does it have a job? I did not look at that child and say, you got about 48 hours to prove your value for me to take you home. I did not do that.

And what could any of these little babies do for me? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. All a baby can do is take. They take sleep from you, they take energy from you.

They take peace from you, they take money from you. And all the while they can produce nothing except stress and dirty diapers. They can help with nothing. And on top of all of that, they can't even understand or put inside of them any level of gratitude or thankfulness, let alone express it to you. And still, even though all of this was absolutely true, my love for this loud, needy, weak, fragile, slimy, expensive little person was immediate.

And it was insatiable.

It was unshakeable. And to this day, I cannot fathom something that my children could do that would make me even consider no longer loving them. You know why?

Because they're mine. And they will mess up and they will say things that are mean to me, they will hurt my feelings, they will let me down, they will drain my bank account. But they are mine. And I chose them before they chose me. And too many of us listening right now, sitting in this room, we think we're the slimy, weak baby that God is holding out at a distance and saying, if you could just get cleaned up and not be so loud and needy, then I'll hold you.

If you could prove in the next 48 hours, I'll take you home. And we're living this life believing that God views us this way. And we have a God who has this explosive, insatiable, unshakable, unconditional love for us.

Have you looked in the mirror? How lovable are you? I'm not very lovable. I'm slimy and needy and gross and whiny. I'm weak and I'm broken in his love for me.

Pre exists, all of that. This is the unconditionality of God's love for us. And maybe you're thinking, well, Josh, you clearly have not experienced God the way that I have.

See, because there are lots of things that God did not save me from. There's all this pain and hurt and drama and baggage and difficulty and loss and grief that he has not taken from me. And in fact, Josh, my perception, my view, my experience with God is that all of this proves that he doesn't love me.

And first I just want to say I am so sorry. I'm so sorry that you're carrying that weight, that burden, those wounds with you. I am so sorry. But I love you enough to tell you that if you want to blame God for every bad and terrible and grief filled piece of baggage that you have in your life, then you also have to blame him for every beautiful and good and wonderful and fantastic thing in your life. Because if he is in control of all things, then he's in control of those things too.

And maybe it's time to look at Him a little bit differently than you have been.

And if he is in fact who he says he is, if he has in fact done what he says he has done, if we are in fact who he says that we are, then he has proven that he loves us with an unconditional love that's with us through the pain and the dark and the baggage and the grief and the suffering. And his promise is that one day he's going to come back. And when he does, he will undo all of those things. He will make all things new. He will heal all things and make them right and whole and perfect again.

Church God does not mind the cost of loving you. He doesn't mind the cost of loving you. He looked at the books. He knows what you're worth. He knows what it costs.

And he said, yes, that's worth it. He said that you are worth it because his love is selfless and sacrificial, unconditional. Ephesians 5:1 and 2 says, Follow God's example therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love. Just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Every week when we come together in communion, this is what we celebrate, this perfectly unconditional, unmerited love.

If you didn't receive a communion packet when you came in, just raise your hand. Our team would love to get you one.

The small wafer in the top, it represents Jesus body given for you. And the juice in the bottom, that represents his blood poured out for you, given to you as a gift.

This is the proof that says that you're worth it.