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BY Glenn Pease
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
MESSAGE ON GAL.5:13-26
INTRODUCTION
TO THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT
A doctor, an engineer, and an attorney were debating whose
profession was the oldest. The doctor
said, " it's obvious the medical profession was the first. The Bible refers to God creating Eve from
Adam's rib, and that is surgical procedure." But the engineer said, "No! before that, God created the
world out of chaos, and one must be an engineer to create a world." "But wait," said the lawyer,
"where do you think that chaos came from?"
Lawyer's do create a lot of chaos, because the very nature of
their profession involves the chaos of broken laws, and the resulting broken
lives. Chaos is their bread and butter. One lawyer had a bumper sticker that read,
"PLEASE HIT ME‑I'M A LAWYER." The complexity of the law is so
vast because, as judge Harry Shafer writes, "we have fifty million laws
trying to enforce ten commandments."
There has to be a law against so many human actions because they are
offensive and harmful to other persons and their property. Paul lists fifteen acts of the sinful nature
of man in verses 19‑21 of Galatians 5.
But then in verses 22‑23 he lists nine things which he calls the
fruit of the Spirit, and he ends verse 23 with this statement, "against
such things there is no law." Laws
are to restrain people from certain behavior, but there is no need to restrain
from these nine things.
In all the huge volumes of laws around the world you will
search in vain to find a law against love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self‑control. So it is not true that everything good is
either illegal or fatening. None of
these nine fruits will add a pound to your body or any guilt to your
conscience, for there is nothing illegal or fatening. There is no need for laws to control the growth of this fruit,
for in contrast to the acts of the flesh, these acts and attitudes do not hurt
people in any way. They help and heal,
and they add beauty and pleasure to all relationships. These fruits are a foretaste of heaven, and
the goal in this life is to become a garden where they grow in abundance.
The Greek word for fruit is KARPOS, and it is a very popular
word in the New Testament. It is used
66 times, and Jesus uses it more than all the rest combined. It was one of His favorite words. I looked up a number of the texts where
Jesus used the word fruit and discovered that sometimes he said fruits, in the
plural. At other times he used the singular to convey the plural. The singular
and the plural are used interchangeably. My conclusion is that there is no
basis for the debate over which is most correct to say, the fruit of the
Spirit, or the fruits of the Spirit. It
makes no difference if you call them the fruit of the fruits of the Spirit.
Either way you are dealing with nine distinct values.
Fruit is a very positive word, for it brings to mind the images
of delicious and tasty food we enjoy. God started the world with a very healthy
environment, for the basic food was fruit in the garden of Eden. Fruit is basic
to the good health of the body. The Bible ends with fruit as the key food also,
for in the book of Rev. we see the Tree
of Life, and it bears twelve kinds of fruit‑one for each month of the
year. If the Bible begins and ends with fruit, that ought to be a good clue as
to what a healthy diet is in the eyes of God. There is no image of paradise anywhere
that does not include fruit as a major factor in its beauty and pleasure
The word fruit comes from the Latin word FRUCTUS, which means
enjoyment. Fruit got this name because it is the source of such quick and easy
pleasure. You just grab an apple off the tree and sink your teeth into it and
enjoy it right now without any preparation or cooking. So it is also with many
other fruits. In contrast, grains, vegetables, and meats call for delayed
pleasure until they are prepared for eating. It is the instant nature of their
enjoyment that is a distinguishing characteristic of fruit.
This is the case with the nine fruits of the Spirit also. They
give instant pleasure to the soul. Like physical fruit, they may take time to
develop, but when they are ripe they give immediate enjoyment to both producer
and consumer. People who eat only fruit are called fruitarians. In this series
on the Fruits of the Spirit we are going to be Biblical fruitarians, and strive
to consume all God has revealed about spiritual fruit.
The Fruits of the Spirit are actually superior to the Gifts of
the Spirit. The Gifts can be abused and need laws to regulate them, lest they
do more harm than good. And if you have gifts but not the fruits, they are
worthless, as Paul says in ICor. 13. You can have the gift of tongues, and
speak like an angel, but without love you are just a noisy gong and clanging
cymbal. You can have the gift of prophecy and knowledge and understand all
mysteries, but without the fruit of love, you are nothing. Even if you have the
gift of faith and can do miracles like moving mountains, but lack love, you are
no asset to the kingdom of God. The point Paul is making is that the Gifts of
the Spirit need to be under the direction of the Fruits of the Spirit, or they
lose their value Gifts have to do with what you do, but Fruits have to do with
who you are. Being comes before doing. Doing the right thing can be done even
by the most evil of people, but being the right kind of person is what God is after. Being Christ
like has to do with character and not just conduct. The Fruits focus on
character and the inner being and not just on conduct.
The really good news about the Fruits of the Spirit is that
they are available to all Christians. So many of God's people feel they have no
gifts, or certainly none that are spectacular. But Paul makes it clear that
nobody is second class when it comes to the Fruits. The gifts are like body
parts. The eye has the gift of seeing, the ear the gift of hearing, the feet
the gift of walking, and so on. Each has a specialized function that the other
members of the body may not have. But the Fruits of the Spirit are for all
members of the body, equally.
No Christian can say that they do not have the capacity to
love, feel joy, have peace, etc., like other Christians. They may not have the
gifts of others in the body, but all have equal access to these fruits. These
are not exclusive to any part of the body. They are for all parts of the body,
and every member of the body is expected to grow these fruits. You and I can be
just as loving, and just as joyful, and just as peaceful as Billy Graham, or
Mother Teresa, or any other well‑known Christian you can think of. There
are people in every church who have just as many Fruits of the Spirit as the
best known leaders around the world. Many people can walk into their back yard
and pick an apple off a tree that is just as good as any of the name brand
apples you can get in your supermarket. So there are masses of marvelous fruits
in obscure places that almost nobody knows about, but they bring pleasure and
beauty to those who do know of them. Every Christian is a potential fruit
producer.
You know an apple tree by its fruit. If there are no apples on
a tree, but pears instead, you know it is a pear tree. All fruit trees are
identified by their fruit. So the Christian is to be identified by the fruit
they bear. How do you know if a Christian is growing in Christlikeness? You
cannot tell by the position they hold in the church, or by the gifts they
display, or by the awards they may win.
You can only tell by the fruit that they bear. If they are not adding to the
pleasure and beauty of the kingdom, but are adding strife, and negatives of all
kinds, they may be gifted leaders even, but they are not fruit bearing
believers. This is to be our primary goal. Nothing else matters if we do not
produce the Fruits of the Spirit. These
are the nine marks of the growing Christian. These are the nine signs of
spiritual maturity. These are the nine evidences of Christlikeness.
The importance and significance of these fruits is all the
more magnified when we read the words
of Donald Gee, the Pentecostal theologian who writes from a charismatic perspective.
He makes it clear that Pentecostals make a major mistake in thinking that the
gifts are all that matter. He writes,
When the great Forth Bridge in Scotland was
nearing completion we are
told that one dull, cold
day the builders tried
unsuccessfully all day long
to bring certain important
girders together. Every
available device of
mechanical power was used,
without success, and at the
end of the day they re‑
tired completely baffled.
But next morning the sun
shone in summer warmth upon
the great masses
of steel, and the expansion
thus produced soon
enabled them to make the connection. So it is with
much of the work of the
Spirit: His power some‑
times works more
irresistibly in the silent
influences of love, joy, and peace, than in the mightier
manifestations of miracles
or prophesying.
That is a powerful testimony coming from a Pentecostal
charismatic, for he recognizes that the power of the fruit available to all
Christians may be greater than the power of the gifts available to the few.
There is no doubt about it, the study of the Fruits of the Spirit can be the
most important study of our lives if we allow the knowledge we gain to be
transformed into actual fruit. The
study of love is only of value if we become more loving, and so it is with each
of the fruits. Our prayer need to be like that of the poet who wrote,
Love through me, Love of
God,
There is no love in me,
Oh Fire of Love, light thou
the love,
That burns perpetually.
Flow through me, Peace of
God,
Calm river, flow until
No wind can blow, no current
stir
A ripple of self‑will.
Shine through me. Joy of
God,
Make me like Thy clear air
Which Thou dost pour Thy
colors thro'
As though it were not there.
Oh blessed Love of God,
That all may taste and see
How good Thou art, once more
I pray:
Love through me, even me.
All of these fruits hang together like a cluster of grapes on
the vine. You can't pick and chose
which ones you will have and leave the rest alone. They come together, and you have them all, or you don't have them
at all. You cannot say I'll be loving
and joyful, but I'm not going to be kind and good. This is a package deal, and although your personality may favor
some of these over others, they all have to be a part of your personality for
you to be Christ like. The lack of any
one of them can spoil all the rest.
They are one, and that is why some prefer the singular of fruit rather
than fruits of the Spirit. They are
like nine segments of an orange. They
are parts, but together they make one orange.
There is one fruit of the Spirit in nine segments.
Even the man of the world might have some of these fruits, but
they will be offset by the works of his flesh, and so he will not be Christ
like. The Christian is to be in glaring
contrast to the man of the world by having the whole package. If one or more is missing we know we are
quenching the Spirit. We are keeping
some part of our soil in our own soil bank to raise what we want to raise
rather than the fruits of the Spirit.
To have the full crop we need to surrender our whole being to the Holy
Spirit and allow Him freedom to produce in us all that He desires.
This means all of life can be seen as an opportunity to grow
one or more of these fruits. If life is
going great and all is smooth sailing, let your life grow abundantly in love,
joy, and peace. But if life gets hard
and there are trials and battles galore, let the Holy Spirit produce in you
patience, faithfulness, and self‑control. The point is, rain or shine, the Christian needs to learn to use
all weather for growing these fruits.
Ian Barclay tells of the girl who read an article in a
gardening magazine about a fruitless apple tree. She showed it to her father who was frustrated about his tree,
which was just like that. The article
said to drive a few nails into the trunk of the tree. He decided to try it, and the next year the tree bore fruit like
never before. Sometimes pain and
suffering can be productive. It is like
pruning a tree. Do not waste hard
times. Ask the Holy Spirit to use them
as fertilizer to encourage the growth of some fruit. The fertilizer may be awful, but the effects can be wonderful, if
the end result is growth of the fruits of the Spirit.
Remember, these are not our fruits, as if we could produce
them by our own efforts. They come to
us by the working of the Holy Spirit in us.
Our task is to open up our lives and let Him work. It is a matter of submission and surrender
so that He can change us from within.
Can we resist the Spirit, and quench the Spirit, and hold our life down
to the level of scrawny crab apples rather than big red delicious apples? Of course we can! That is why we need to study these fruits. Billy Graham preached on these fruits many
years ago, and he said in that message, "now these things, these nine
things, nine clusters of fruit, are to characterize the life of every Christ‑born
child of God....But what do we find? We
find in the average so‑called Christian today, the very
opposite." The very opposite being
the works of the flesh. Graham is
saying Christians can be so worldly there is no way to distinguish between them
and the world.
In order to make a
difference in this world, Christians have to be different, and the key to that
is the production of the fruits of the Spirit.
Christians are to be in the fruit business. Why was Israel replaced by the Church to fulfill God's plan? It was a fruit issue. In Matt.21:43 Jesus said to the leaders of
Israel, "Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away
from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit." One of the key reasons Christianity has been
superior to Judaism is because it has been more fruitful. The Jews chose to be exclusive, and keep God
for themselves. The Christians said,
God loves the whole world, and we must heed the command of Christ to go to all
people with the good news of His love.
God chose the Gentile world because they would prove to be
more fruitful. God is a wise investor,
and He wants to get a good return on His investment. He wants fruit, and when He gets it He gives more resources. As we let the Holy Spirit work in our lives
to produce fruit, we will be blest by more and more of the grace of God. Fruit produces more fruit until there is a
bountiful harvest.
The motive for developing the fruit of the Spirit is both for
pleasing God and for self‑advancement.
The most selfish thing you can do is yield yourself to the Spirit of
Christ, for He will do with your life what you could never do. He will produce in you that which could never come from doing your own thing. The Christian wants life to be full of the
joy, pleasure, and happiness just like the non‑Christian. The non‑Christian seeks it primarily
by means of the works of the flesh. The
Christian is to find it primarily by the Fruits of the Spirit. That is the goal of the following nine chapters.
Howard Thurman in Disciplines Of The Spirit, tells of one of
the most unusual jobs. A large General
Hospital hired a high school girl to be there mice petter. Her sole occupation was to take white mice
out of their cages several times a day and pet them. They had learned that when mice are made to feel loved and secure
they give much more authentic results in experiments. When they are relaxed and given a sense of well‑being, they
better cope without panic.
Science is confirming all the time that God is love. It is finding that all God made needs love
to be at it's best. People who love
their garden and their plants produce better crops and more beauty. Love is the universal need of all life. Dogs and cats can admit their need for
love. They thrust their heads into your
hands and face, and demand to be loved.
But man likes to be independent and not admit to needing others, even
though it is the number one need of man for happiness. There are endless numbers of movies and
novels where people delay love and even lose it because they will not admit
their need. This is the ultimate in
pride, for God Himself is willing to admit He needs love. The first commandment is that we love God
with our whole being. Paul in Romans
8:28 says that God works in all things for good for those who love Him. In I Cor.2:9 he writes that no mind can
conceive of what God has prepared for those who love Him. In time and in eternity the best is reserved
for those who love God.
Jesus did not hesitate to declare His need for love.. He needed the love of His heavenly Father,
but He also needed the love of man. In
John14 He repeated His need often. In
verse 15 He said, "If you love me you will obey what I command." In verse 21 He said, "Whoever has my
commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love
and show myself to him." In verses
23‑24 Jesus sums it all up with these words, "If anyone loves me he
will obey me, if anyone does not love me he will not obey me."
If God the Father and God the Son long to be loved, it is the
height of folly for any man to deny his need for love. Ashley Montague writes from the point of
view of a scientist‑
"The study of love is
something from which scientists long shied away.
But with the increased
interest in the origins of mental illness, more and more attention is being
paid to the infancy and childhood of human beings. What investigation has
revealed is that love is, beyond all cavil or question, the most important
experience in the life of a human being.
Show me a hardened criminal,
a juvenile delinquent, a psychopath or
a "cold fish," and
in almost every case I will show you a person resorting to desperate means in
order to attract the emotional warmth and attention he failed to get but which
he so much desires and needs.
"Aggressive" behavior
when fully understood is, in fact, nothing but love frustrated, a technique for
compelling love‑as well as a means of taking revenge on the society which
has let that person down, disillusioned, deserted and dehumanized him. Hence, the best way to approach aggressive
behavior in children is not by aggressive behavior toward them, but with
love. And this is true not only for
children but for human beings at all ages."
The Scripture and science agree, the greatest of these is
love. Love is the highest virtue man is
capable of giving or receiving. You
cannot give God or man any higher gift than the gift of love. The highest goal of life is to be like
Christ. The only way to approach this
goal is to be a person filled with love.
This is the same as saying one needs to be filled with the Spirit for He
is the source of love. The fruit of the
Spirit is love. The more we are filled
with the Spirit of Christ the more we will have the fruit of love.
Many say that the sign you are filled with the Holy Spirit is that
you will speak in tongues, but that is an experience that occurred only in
Corinth and was not an issue in any other church of the New Testament. The real sign of being filled with the Holy
Spirit is the fruit of the Spirit, and the first fruit and main fruit is
love. The most loving Christian is the
most Spirit‑filled Christian.
Paul links the Holy Spirit and love in Romans15:30 where he writes,
"I urge you brothers by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the
Spirit...." In Col.1:8 he writes to
them and refers to "Your love in the Spirit." The Holy Spirit is the channel by which the
love of God fills the heart of man.
Paul makes this clear in Rom.5:5 where he writes, "God has poured
out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom He has given
us."
The love of God that enables us to love our neighbor as our
self, and to love one another, and to love our enemies all comes into our heart
by means of the Holy Spirit. He
produces the fruit. We cannot make it
grow by works. All we can do is to let
the Spirit have control, and He makes this Christ like fruit grow. We can plant and we can water, but God gives
the increase. We cannot make fruit
grow, but we can provide the cooperation that makes it possible for the Holy
Spirit to use our hearts as fertile soil that will be fruit producing. We can't make anything grow, but we can
provide the environment for things to grow.
We are responsible for preparing the soil of our hearts. We do this by clearing it of the rocks,
trash, and brush that makes growing anything unlikely. Our soil gets hard and the seed cannot penetrate and take root. We get stubborn and set in our ways, and do
not yield to the Holy Spirit.
Christians need to be flexible and ever open to the winds of the Spirit,
and to the new fires He may wish to kindle in our hearts. Lawrance Kusher gives us an illustration on
the human level.
"When my wife and I
were first married, for example, we believed
that our "true
love" enabled us to read one another's minds. Based on
this youthful fantasy, we
spent great amounts of time and energy
choosing the wrong birthday
presents for one another, each pretending
we loved gifts we didn't.
As we grew older and our
love matured, we gradually realized
that even great love only
rarely penetrates another's soul.
Indeed,
I suspect, real loving
stands reverent precisely in the mystery of
another's unknowable,
unfathomable self. And so, as an act of
love, we reached a mutual,
unspoken decision: We began to drop
not‑so‑subtle hints
about what we really wanted. This not
only
made shopping easier
("This is exactly what she wants!")
But
receiving presents became
much more fun ("Why this is exactly
what I wanted!") If you really love someone, don't make them
guess what to give you."
Love grows by communication.
God did not just let His people guess how to love Him. He gave them clear instructions. The Tabernacle and Temple where they were to
show their love in worship, sacrifice, and praise were revealed in most minute
detail‑nothing was left to guess.
God gave His Word and Jesus gave His teaching so we could know exactly
how to love Him by obedience. For the
Holy Spirit to produce the fruit of love in us, we need to be listening to the
Word and applying its truth to our daily lives. Listening, learning, worshiping, praising, living a life pleasing
to God, these are all part of the atmosphere we provide for the Holy Spirit to work in to produce love. When love is produced in us, like other
fruit it has seeds, and will reproduce itself in others.
Chuck Swindoll gives us an illustration in his book, Simple
Faith. "Among the many plays and
musical performances I have attended, none has ever gripped me like Les
Miserables. When these playwrights and
composers decided to put Victor Hugo's classic novel on the stage in the form
of a dramatic musical, a masterpiece was created for the public to enjoy. When my family and I saw the performance, we
were moved to tears...literally. To
this day, its scenes and songs often return to mind, bringing fresh
delight." He goes on to tell the
gist of the play. Jean Valjean is
released after 19 years in the chain gang, and is treated kindly by a saintly
Bishop. But his prison experience has
scarred him and hardened him, and he repays the Bishop by stealing some of his
silver. Caught and brought back by the
police, Valjean is shocked when the Bishop tells them he gave him the silver. This act of love that kept him a free man
had an impact on him like nothing before, and he vowed to never be the man he
was.
The policeman, Javert, however, hated him and was determined
to put him back in prison. Javert
treats him with contempt, but Valjean will not retaliate. He turns the other cheek, and he loves his
neighbor, and he lives a life of love.
In the end he overpowers his enemy, and overcomes evil with good. The last line in the theatre production
captures the essences of it all‑"To love another person is to see
the face of God."
I think it says even
more clearly‑"To love another person is to let them see the face of
God." The love of the Bishop
helped Valjean see the face of God, and he was changed forever, and his love
then helped others see the face of God.
God is love, and so wherever love is seen you are getting some glimpse
of God. That is the beauty of this
first fruit of the Spirit. It makes us
attract others to see God and desire to taste of the fruits He can produce in
lives. Love is the best witness there
is, for nothing is more attractive and enticing than love.
All the works of the flesh that Paul lists in Gal.5:19‑21
are the efforts of man to get love without God. All sexual immorality is a hunger for love. All the hate, jealousy, and envy of others is
a hunger for love. We get angry and
create problems because we want love.
Studies show that almost all, if not all, anti‑social behavior is
a cry for love. Man in his flesh seeks
the food of life‑love, but what he gets is garbage instead. Only love can meet his deepest needs. The Christian is to reveal to the world an
example of true love in contrast to the devil's fakes.
What is true love? It
is feeling and doing what Jesus would feel and do in the same situation. Jesus was Spirit filled and thus always
loving. If you can honestly say I am
feeling and doing what Jesus would feel and do, you are being as loving as you
can be. When you love you are as near
to God as you can get, for God is love.
It is the number one characteristic of God's nature, and to be a channel
of that nature in the world is to fulfill the ultimate purpose of being a
person made in the image of God. This
is also the ultimate pleasure.
Remember, fruit means enjoyment.
It is from the Latin fructus, which means enjoyment. Where love is joy is right behind. The greatest pleasure in life is love. You cannot find a greater pleasure, for it
is a taste of God's greatest pleasure.
We are forced, however, to look at the paradox of love. If it is the ultimate in enjoyment and
pleasure, why did it become so costly to God to love man? It cost infinite pain and thus we are stuck
with the paradox of love being both pleasurable and painful. In a perfect world love is only pleasure,
but in a fallen world love hurts, for love desires the best for its objects no
matter what the cost, and this means pain.
God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, and Jesus so loved
lost men that He gave His life on the cross for them to be restored to the
favor of God. It was painful, but also
the highest pleasure. Jesus endured the
cross with joy, for He looked to the eternal result for Himself and the
redeemed. Love's goal is always the
highest peak of pleasure, but to get there it often has to go through painful valleys
of suffering. This is true, not only
for God's love, but for the love of parents and mates.
Love often hurts in a fallen world, but love is willing to
hurt, for that is the price for ultimate pleasure. One who will not suffer for another does not love the other in
any meaningful way. All God‑like
love is willing to bear pain for the sake of another's well being. The Good Samaritan was good, and was used by
Jesus to illustrate love, because he was willing to pay the price of
interrupting his own plans for the sake of another who needed help. The Priest and the Levite may have had
better theology than the Samaritan, but they were not willing to suffer any
pain for the sake of the injured man.
They may have had gifts, but they were of no value to the kingdom of God
without the fruit of love.
The Good Samaritan was despised and rejected by the leaders of
God's people, but Jesus made him a hero.
Why? Because he had what really
matters to God. He had the first fruit
of the Spirit, which is love. He had
the kind of love that is willing to suffer for the pleasure of God and the
pleasure of man, and this is the fulfillment of the whole law. Loving God with your whole being and your
neighbor as yourself means to be willing to suffer pain for their
pleasure. The goal is always pleasure,
but the means to it may be painful.
Love will pay the price of pain to gain this pleasure.
What this means is, love is a chosen self‑limitation
for the sake of another. God and Jesus
both made choices that limited their sovereign freedom to do as they pleased by
creating man, and then redeeming him.
If God was unloving and self‑centered He would have ended the plan
with Adam and Eve, or at lease by the time of the flood. He would have taken Noah and his family
also, and called it quits. To pursue
the plan of salvation all the way to the cross was love beyond our
comprehension. We cannot match the love
of God, but we can grow this same fruit, and be willing to limit self for the
sake of others.
This is what parenthood is, and what marriage is, and what
ministry is. All forms of love are
choices to limit yourself for the sake of others. It sounds like sacrifice, and it is, but it is also the way to
the greatest pleasure for the self.
Those who want only self‑pleasure, and will not limit their
pleasure for the sake of others, will end up with very little pleasure. Those who limit their pleasure for the sake
of others will end up with the greatest
pleasure. This is the way of love and
love always ends up with the greatest pleasure.
Ibsen in his poetic drama Peer Gynt, has a hero who is a
reckless and irresponsible dreamer whose motto is, "To thyself be
enough." He visits a lunatic
asylum where he believes people are not themselves, but the director says it is
here that people are most themselves, themselves and nothing but
themselves. They are all totally self‑centered
with no tears for others woes, or cares for any others needs. He realizes he has been a failure by being
self‑centered. He finds healing
in the love of the heroine, solveig. It
is a message, on the human level, that without love life is barren of all fruit
that will last.
Even the secular world knows the truth about love that is why most
secular songs, plays, and movies are about love. The problem is, the highest love man knows without God is sexual
love, and when this becomes ones highest value, it becomes an idol, and leads
to all sorts of perversions. It is not
that human love is bad, for it is God‑given and one of life's greatest
gifts, but when it is seen as the ultimate it becomes an idol, and leads to
depravity.
Some wise men have seen that all human love is to be a means
to a greater love. Plato said,
"All loves should be simply stepping stones to the love of God." If men would just realize this, and keep on
stepping up the stairs of love to the love of God they would find that love
that never fails. We sing that Jesus
never fails, and Paul in I Cor.13:8 says that love never fails. Love that
reaches the God‑like, and Christ like level, because it is the fruit of
the Holy Spirit is the love that never fails, and is always the right thing to
do.
It does not succeed in the sense that it always wins its
object. Jesus failed to win many that He loved, and He wept because they would
not accept Him. The point is, Jesus
never made the wrong choice. His love
never failed to keep Him in the center of God's will. He could love His enemies, and though He could not always win His
enemies, He never failed by being unloving to them. Because Jesus never failed to love, He never failed to be a true
representative of God the Father. This
is to be the goal of everyone who wants to live a life pleasing to God, for
this is a life filled with pleasure for the self as well.
Love never fails, does not mean the loving Christian succeeds
in all he or she attempts to accomplish.
It means they always please God without fail. God never says, "I
am not pleased with your loving spirit toward your brother or your
enemy." God is always pleased with
love, and, therefore, love never fails to achieve life's highest goal, which is
to please God. That is why Oswald
Chambers said, "Love is the beginning, love is the middle, love is the
end." God made us in His image,
and thus, we are made to love, and when we do we fulfill our very purpose for
being. It is life's highest success.
What is the purpose of life?
It is to become what God made us to be‑images of Him. This is achieved by bearing the fruit of the
Spirit, for these nine fruits are love displayed in all of its aspects. Someone has described them like this‑
Joy is love's cheerfulness.
Peace is love's confidence
Patience is love's composure
Kindness is
love's consideration
Goodness is love's character
Faithfulness is love's
constancy
Gentleness is love's
comliness
Self‑control is love's
conquest.
The point is, the more these nine fruits characterize your
life, the more you fulfill your purpose for being, for you are a reflection of
His love, which is to say, you are
Christ like. Some years ago New York
city had a murder mystery that was finally solved by the arrest of several
notorious criminals. One was Jack Rose,
who after he was convicted and imprisoned said, "I always believed that
there must be a God somewhere. But when
I gave Him thought, I felt He was so far away, and so occupied with great
things, that He knew nothing about me.
I am sure I never would have become a criminal if the thought had ever
entered my mind that God cared anything about me." The world is filled with people who do not
know that God loves them because there is no Christian who is communicating
that love to them. The poet says‑
Do you know the world is
dying
For a little bit of love?
Everywhere we hear them
sighing,
For a little bit of love.
When we make choices to communicate the love of God to the
lost, then we know we have gone beyond natural love to bearing the fruit of the
Spirit. Every Christian needs to be
praying the prayer of Dr. Will Houghton, former president of Moody Bible
Institute.
Love this world through me,
Lord
This world of broken men,
Thou didst love through
death, Lord
Oh, love in me again!
Souls are in despair, Lord.
Oh, make me know and care;
When my life they see,
May they behold Thee,
Oh, love the world through
me.
Even the desire to pray this prayer is a sign that you are
growing in the garden of your life the fruit of love.
Martin Clark said every church should have a humor committee
because there are more funny things that happen in church than in a zoo, for
people are funnier than the animals. God
made man to be the only creature on earth who can laugh because of his sense of
humor. Christians need a sense of humor
to deal with the reality that they are so fallible. If all the mistakes pastors make were compiled in a book, it
would make the unabridged dictionary look like a postage stamp in
comparison.
One of the funniest mistakes I have ever read about was of the
young pastor who just moved into the parsonage next to the church. On his first Sunday they were having communion. So he and his wife poured the grape juice
into the little cups, and they thought they were ready. But when it came time to serve, the pastor
saw that they had not poured enough cups for the size of the congregation. He leaned over the front pew and whispered
to his wife, "Run next door and get that bottle of grape juice out of the
refrigerator. If you run fast enough
you can be back before the deacons serve the cups." She batted out the side door and flew to the
parsonage. She did not bother to even
switch on the lights. She just grabbed
what she thought was the bottle of grape juice, and tore back to the
church. What she had was a bottle of
green persimmon juice.
The young pastor, with complete faith in his wife, did not
bother to read the label. He just
uncapped it and poured its contents into the cups for himself and the
deacons. It was perfect timing, for
just as he finished, the deacons were marching down the isle with their empty
trays. The pastor then served the
deacons and led the congregation in drinking the juice. Suddenly his lips began to pucker and he
knew he had a problem. He leaned over
and wheezed, "deacon Jones will you please lead in closing
prayer." Deacon Jones was having
his own problems, and was barely able to smack his lips and get out,
"Please excuse me!" The
pastor surveyed the situation and could see none of the deacons were able to
pray. The congregation had no idea what
was going on, for they had perfectly normal grape juice. Finally the pastor motioned all to stand and
said, "Well, friends, let's whistle the doxology and go home."
Murphey's law has not been repealed for the church. Even in the most solemn and sacred moments
Christians leaders provoke laughter by their slips of the tongue. Billy Graham in a message in Atlanta roared
out, "David slew Goliath and then he turned around and killed
him." Another pastor prayed,
"Oh Lord, make us more offensive‑‑I mean Lord, put on the
offensive." Another introduced the
new music director with these words, "We are delighted he is coming to
lead us in our sinning." At a
testimony meeting on the campus of a Christian college a tearful freshman
concluded his personal testimony with what he thought was a sincere
request. He said, "Please pray
I'll not be found sleeping with the five foolish virgins when Jesus
comes." At every homecoming since,
this is remembered as a choice moment of laughter.
There is no end to the laughter producing goofs of Christians,
but my point in sharing these is to make it clear that this sort of laughter is
not what we are dealing with, as we consider the fruit of the Spirit, which is
joy. You do not need the Holy Spirit to
see the humor in life. This is a gift
God has made available to all men. The
non Christian can have as good a sense of humor as the Christian. Jews have always been the major contributors
to the world of comedy. So Christians
do not have a monopoly on laughter.
Laughter is a universal gift.
But joy is something else.
Joy is much deeper, for joy is based on love and not laughter. Joy is the feeling that even if I blew it,
and made a blunder that everyone laughed at, I am loved and not rejected for my
mistake. That is a good feeling that
lasts after the laughter quickly passes away.
Laughter is momentary, but joy is a state of mind that is
permanent. Joy makes you happy even
when there is nothing funny to laugh at.
We see this all through the New Testament. This was the joy of Jesus.
He is about to go to the cross and suffer on a level we can never
comprehend, yet He says to His disciples in John 15:11, "I have told you
this so that my joy may be in you and that you joy may be full." Again in His great prayer in John 17:13 He
says, "I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in
the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within
them."
Jesus was loaded with the fruit of the Spirit, and He had all
the joy one is capable of possessing.
But you will notice, it was not because life was funny, and He was
having a ball. He was facing the worst
life could throw at Him with evil, suffering, pain, hate, injustice, cruelty,
and betrayal. Yet, Jesus had fullness
of joy. We see it also in Paul and
Silas in Acts 16. They were attacked and
beaten, and we read in verse 23, "After they had been severely flogged,
they were thrown into prison; and the jailer was commanded to guard them
carefully." So he put their feet
in stocks so they could not move. It
was not what you would call a fun day at the park. It was a terrible day, and these men had to be in pain. Nevertheless, we read in verse 25,
"About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God and
the other prisoners were listening to them." This is when God sent an earthquake, and the jailer was converted
with his whole family.
Joy is not a positive feeling that life is going great. Joy is a feeling that no matter how hard
life is, I have the best that life can offer in Christ. Anyone can feel good and be happy when all
is going well and life is free of negatives.
But with the fruit of joy you can rejoice in the Lord always, even when
life is full of negatives. This is not
man generated joy, but the joy of the Lord which is our strength.
Madam Guyon was thrown into prison in France, and she wrote‑
"I passed my time there
in great peace, content to pass the
rest of my life there, if
such were the will of God. I sang
songs of joy, while the maid
who served me learned by
heart as fast as I made
them, and we together sang Thy
praises, o my God. The stones of my prison looked in
my eyes like rubies. I esteemed them more than all the
gaudy brilliance of the
world. My heart was full of that
joy Thou givest to them that
love Thee in the midst of
their greatest
crosses."
Her poetry, which she sang in prison, is still read and sung
today, thou she died in 1717. She wrote
forty volumes. Here are just a few
lines‑
Tho my foes have combined
and my body confined
yet my soul is with liberty blest.
I am humbly content
With whatever is sent
For I know that Thy pleasure
is best.
Thy wondrous defense
Makes a cell seem immence.
It sheds so peculiar a
grace.
Such a pleasure abounds,
Such a glory surrounds,
And the joys of Thy kingdom
embrace.
This is not natural joy but the fruit of the Spirit joy. The joy that can only grow in the life of
one who knows, that no matter what, they are loved by God. Joy grows out of love, the first fruit of
the Spirit. Joy is not the laughter of
the sense of humor, but the laughter of love which says, nothing can separate
me from the love of God. This joy does
lead to laughter, and what we call happiness, for it fills one with a sense of
optimism. It is a denial of Christ's
joy to make Christianity a solemn and somber faith.
John Wesley said, "Sour godliness is the devil's
religion." Jesus said in the
Sermon On The Mount, that even when Christians are persecuted and slandered,
they are to rejoice and be glad for their reward is great in heaven. Joy in hard times is a Christian
obligation. That is why we need the
filling of the Spirit, for we cannot produce this fruit on our own. Paul says in I Thess. 5:16, "Be joyful
always." He does not say ninety
per cent of the time, or ninety eight per cent of the time, but always. That is not natural, but is of the Holy
Spirit. Augustine said over 1500 years
ago, "There is a joy which is not given to the ungodly, but to those who
love Thee for Thine own sake, whose joy Thou Thyself art."
Jesus was the most joy‑filled person ever to live on
this planet. We are told this in
Hebrews 1:9, where it says of Christ, "...your God, has set you above your
companions by anointing you with the oil of joy." In other words, there has never been another
above Jesus in joy. He had the highest
level of joy possible, and none has never matched it. An apple is an apple, and a pear is a pear, but not all apples
and pears are equal. Some are better
than others. They are bigger, juicier,
and sweeter than others. So it is with
joy, and all the fruits of the Spirit.
They grow like fruit, and so there are all different stages of
growth. Jesus had the perfect fruit of
joy. This is what all believers will
have in heaven. This was the hope of
even the Old Testament saints. David
says in Psalm 16:11, "You will fill me with joy in your presence, with
eternal pleasure at your right hand." Until then, the goal of the
Christian is to be filled with the Spirit, and get as near to having the joy of
Jesus as possible.
The New Testament has 11 words for different aspects of joy,
and they are used 326 times. It is a major theme of God's Word, and a major
obligation of the Christian life. There
is a wealth of English synonyms for joy‑bliss, buoyancy, cheerfulness,
delight, ecstasy, elation, exuberance, felicity, gaiety, gladness, glee,
hilarity, jubilation, rapture, and rejoicing.
All of these can be summed up in the word happy, which the New Testament
calls blessed. Vernon Grounds, the well
known evangelical theologian, commenting on Paul's declaration in I Tim.6:15,
that God "is the blessed and only Potentate or Ruler", says,
"Since blessed means happy, Paul is here affirming that God is happy. The Happy God! God in Himself is a shoreless sea of vibrant glory, a fathomless
ocean of sheerest ecstasy...God Himself is the Rejoicer who before the hosts of
heaven reacts with a thrilling happiness that baffles the language and logic of
earth. Infinitely joyful, He is the
Source of all genuine joy."
Does this mean the Christian has to be a pollyanna, and be
blind to the reality of a fallen world?
Not at all, God knows the evil of man like no other, but He is by nature
happy and joyful, in spite of His knowledge.
Joy is not a denial of evil and a pretense that all is well. It is a conviction that life is a comedy and
not a tragedy, and that in Christ good will triumph over evil. History is His‑story, and it will have
a happy ending.
Listen to Cyprian, the Christian leader of the church at Carthage
in A.D. 200. He wrote,
"This is a cheerful
world as I see it from my fair garden...But if
I could ascend some high
mountain and look out over the wide
lands, you know very well
what I would see. Brigands on the
highways. Pirates on the seas. Armies fighting. Cities burning.
In the amphitheatres men
murdered to please applauding crowds.
Selfishness and cruelty, and
misery and despair, under all roofs.
It is a bad world, Donatus,
an incredibly bad world. But I have
discovered in the midst of
it, a quiet and holy people who have
learned a great secret. They have found a joy which is a thousand
times better than any of the
pleasures of our sinful life. They are
despised and persecuted, but
they care not. They are masters
of their souls. They have overcome the world. These people,
Donatus, are Christians, and
I am one of them."
There is no blindness here to evil, but eyes wide open to the
good news in Christ which produces the joy that overcomes the world. The Christian deals with his fallen nature
in a different way than the world does.
Leslie Flynn and his book, Gift
of Joy, says the way the world deals
with sin is to‑
1. Minimize it. It is no big
deal, everybody does it.
2. Rationalize it. They blame their genes, parents, or their mates,
or the world situation.
3. Anesthetize it. By a
constant round of activity, or by drugs.
4. Neutralize it. By doing
good to counteract their bad.
Christians are not immune to any of these. David, after his great sin, tried all of
these routes, but they were dead ends, and he lost the joy of his
salvation. He learned the hard way,
that the only way to deal with sin is to recognize it for what it is, and seek
the grace of God. We need to confess
our guilt and receive the forgiveness made possible by the atoning sacrifice of
Jesus. This is the only way to deal
with sin that leads to joy. David did
get there, and he sang songs of joy again, but he took the long hard route of
the world before he took the short cut of grace, and he suffered a great lost
of joy because of it. His folly is
recorded that believers might learn to avoid his mistakes, and come to Christ
for cleansing and renewal right away
David prayed in Psalm 51:7‑8, "Cleanse me with hyssop and I
will be clean; wash me and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones
you have crushed rejoice." Then in
verse 12 we read, "Restore to me the joy of your salvation..."
When a Christian falls and fails the Lord, he or she is to
immediately get right with the Lord and be restored, so the fruit of joy does
not wither on the vine, as it was doing with David. The Christian who delays
confession and forgiveness will see the fruit of joy wither and they will be a
poor witness to the grace of God. Lack of joy is a sin that is seldom
recognized. R.W. Dale, the great
English preacher, said, "We ask God to forgive us for our evil thoughts
and evil tempers, but rarely, if ever, ask Him to forgive us for our
sadness." Sadness is not just the expression on our faces, but the
negative views of life that rob us of joy in the midst of so much fallenness.
The face is not the key factor. Jesus often had a sad face as he wept over the
lostness of the world, and the weakness of His disciples. Sadness of face and
sorrow over sin and death did not rob Him of His joy.
Joy is deeper than
sadness, and can be real even when the face is not expressing it. It is
superficial to suggest that Christians should always have a smile to show their
joy. Optimism of the mind and soul goes far deeper than the face. This does not
mean it is okay to go about looking like a sad sack. Spurgeon said to his
students training for ministry, "When you talk about heaven let your face
light up with a heavenly glory. When you talk about hell, your everyday face
will do." This was a rebuke of their everyday face, for it usually
reflected pessimism and not the optimism of Christian joy, and was thus, a
quenching of the Spirit.
If you have people who know you who think you are a pessimist,
you are probably quenching the Spirit, and have ceased to produce the fruit of
joy. Joy is deeper than mere laughter and smiling, but these are still ways by
which we can express that joy to the world. The external ways of letting people
know of the inner joy is important in our witness. You may not always feel like
giving an external witness, but it should be a common part of your witness. Joy
that is never seen is not the kind of fruit that makes others hungry to taste
it.
One of the major purposes of worship is to help us develop our
expression of joy. Praise is the twin of joy, says John Drescher. Praise is the
joy we express to God, but in so doing we water the joy in our own lives and
help it to grow. The goal of all worship is to grow the fruits of the Spirit.
This pleases God and man, and the self. Pulsford said, "There is no
heaven, either in this world, or in the world to come, for people who do not
praise God." Praise is the fruit of joy turning toward the Son of heaven
to receive that light that makes it even more luscious and appealing to the
world. The goal in going to church is that you might become more optimistic
about life and how God can use you to make a difference in this fallen world.
Just as natural love is not enough, so it is not enough to
have just natural joy. The fruit of the Spirit love enables you to love those
who are not loving, but who are even enemies. Fruit of the Spirit joy enables
you to be optimistic even in the trials of life, and, thus, be a witness to the
world of a joy that is beyond what man can produce. Henry VanDyke said it
profoundly, "There is something finer than to do right against
inclination; and that is to have an inclination to do right. There is something
nobler than reluctant obedience; that is joyful obedience. The rank of virtue
is not measured by its disagreeableness, but by its sweetness to the heart that
loves it. The real test of character is joy. For what you rejoice in, that you
love. And what you love, that you are like."
If worship is a bore and service is a chore, it is because you
have lost your first love, like the Christians in Ephesus that Jesus rebuked in
Rev. 2. Worship and service are pure joy to those who do not quench the Spirit.
Frank Lauback, who has helped millions learn to read so they could read the
Bible, said, "I have had more fun than any other man in the world."
It was such joy to serve Jesus because he loved Jesus and he loved the world.
He carried a globe of the world in his arms as he spoke, for he loved the whole
world. His love was the source of his joy. You cannot skip over the first fruit
of the Spirit and expect to get to the others. They all grow out of the main
vine, which is love. When you are loving, which is to say, when you are Christ
like, then you will also be growing the fruit of joy. The most loving
Christians are the most joyful Christians.
I have a good number of books by Norman Vincent Peale, and almost
every one of them has a chapter on peace. The reason is, Peale appeals to the
masses and peace is a topic that has universal interest. Dante, centuries ago
said, "I am seeking for that which every man seeks‑Peace."
Peace of mind drugs are the most popular, for that is one way man can generate
his own peace. For many, their only hope to cope is dope.
Much, if not most, of the social turmoil of our culture is due
to a hunger for peace, which is sought for in all the wrong places. According
to Ronald Hutchcraft, the Director of Youth for Christ in New York and New
Jersey, in the next thirty minutes‑
57 kids will run away from
home.
29 children will attempt
suicide.
22 girls under 19 years of
age will receive an abortion.
14 teenage girls will give
birth to an illegitimate baby.
685 teens will use some form
of narcotic.
These tragic statistics reveal that we are a nation in
perpetual war. The spiritual battle between light and darkness is everywhere
and one of Satan's greatest weapons is to get people to think they can find
peace in tranquilizers. The problem is he has a point. False and fake peace
does have an element of reality. Tranquilizers work because they reduce or
eliminate the inner reaction to stressful stimuli. They do not change the
environment in which you have to live. They change your response to it and this
makes a world of difference. If you do not respond to what is negative and
disturbing with panic, fear, or anxiety you can have some measure of peace in
spite of these negatives. This is an imitation of what the Holy Spirit does in
our lives when we let him produce the fruit of peace in us. He does not change
the environment and rid it of stress and conflict. The Christian has to live in
the same fallen world with everyone else.
Ronald Hutchraft in his book on peace, Peaceful Living in a
Stressfull World, tells of the testing of his peace as he wrote that book. He
wrote,
"No sooner had I made a
commitment to insist on peace than stress
brought out the heavy
artillery.
My wife has had three
dangerous illnesses in the last nine months
The staff for whom I am
responsible went through a major upheaval.
Our daughter started high
school.
Our son started junior high
school with a badly broken arm.
We faced a decisive deadline
in the legal tangle due to an accident.
Paychecks for our staff were
delayed.
The kitchen floor and the
back stairs fell apart.
"All these surprises
came in right on top of my already relentless
schedule full of speaking,
counseling, managing, radio, nonstop
meetings, and daddying. The
peace has stood the test. To be sure,
my old high‑pressure, high‑pitched responses still surface,
but I
retreat quickly to the new
peace I have chased and found. This
tranquility is anything but
theoretical or passive. It is the product
of a daily insistence that
we choose the peace alternative."
His testimony is typical of many. The Christian does not
escape the external turmoil of life in a fallen world. But he can escape the
internal reaction that robs him of peace. The world's imitations do work for
awhile, and they are a temptation. That is why we are told, "Be not drunk
with wine but be filled with the Spirit." Wine can help you relax and not
feel as full of anxiety, but you have to deal with the after effects which can
be worse than the problem you sought to escape. Peace purchased in this way is
not worth the cost for in the end peace will be lost. The peace of God does not
come with the risks of negative after effects.
What the Bible makes clear is that we can cooperate with the
Holy Spirit is the growing of this fruit. David says in Psalm 34:14 "seek
peace and pursue it." You do not sit on your couch and hope it will fall
into your lap. Peace is a matter of activity. You go in search of it. It is
like game. You have to go hunt to find it and possess it for your own. When
David wrote this he was being pursued by Saul, and was the no.1 most wanted man
in the nation. He was a fugitive running for his life under great stress. Yet
he says seek peace and pursue it. The Apostle Peter writing to Christians going
through tough times remembers these words of David. He quotes them for
Christians under stress in IPet.3:10‑11, "Whoever would love life
and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful
speech. He must turn from evil and do good, he must seek peace and pursue
it."
Seeking peace and actively pursuing it is one of the major
obligations of the Christian life. It is a sin to let the world be in control
of your emotional system. The Christian is to make the pursuit of inner peace
one of the major goals of life. Without this fruit of peace the Christian
cannot be truly Christlike and obey the laws of love. In IPet.3:8‑9 we
read, "Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be
sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil
with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing...." This passage comes
just before his urging them to seek peace and pursue it. Without inner peace
the Christian cannot do these things so essential to the true Christian life.
The Christian will respond just like the natural man without the fruit of the
Spirit. His peace will keep them in control so they do not react to evil and insult with the same. Internal peace is
the key to external peace. Where men are filled with war within there will be
war without. Only the fruit of peace can produce peace in a world of war.
Blessed are the peacemakers said Jesus, for they will be
called the sons of God. Why? Because they are obviously of a different blood
line than mere men who are ever war‑like. Only God's kids can achieve
peace in a war zone like this fallen world. If you want people to know you are
a child of God, one of the most conspicuous ways of doing so is to be a
peacemaker.
It is not natural not to want to live in peace with all
men. It is unnatural to want to forgive
offenses and not seek revenge. You seem
like some sort of a freak if you don't hate your enemies, but pray for them
instead. A peacemaker is not a
conformist to what is natural and normal.
They are as conspicuous as a pro basketball player at a midget festival. They stand out as unique, for they are like
the man found beaten by the Good Samaritan, going to the priest and Levite who
left him to die, and contributing to their ministry. That is the kind of thing the peacemaker can do, because he has
the fruit of the Spirit‑peace.
Peace is the ability to respond to evil with good. This is the peace of God which passes
understanding.
Let's face reality, there is not a lot of this going around,
and the reason is very few Christians are surrendered to the Holy Spirit. Most all Christians are quenching the Spirit
to some degree. That is why we need to
back up the fruit of the Spirit with natural techniques. It is a matter of damage control. When we fell to be Spirit filled we need to
have a net of safety to fall into.
Christian leaders who fall and bring disgrace to the Christian faith do
so because they depend to much on their Spiritual life alone. They do not develop natural methods for
backup. Then when they quench the
Spirit and have to depend on their own resources they fall.
The whole idea of pursuing peace is to get Christians to
realize they have to play an active role in their own success. They have to learn to balance themselves
like a child on a bike, so when dad let's go they can continue to move forward
and not fall. God sometimes lets go
because we grieve the Holy Spirit, and if we have not learned to go on our own
we will fall. This means it is possible
to be too spiritual. That is, we can so
depend on spirituality that we do not develop any natural gifts, and then when
we fell spiritually we are in deep trouble.
Paul is the one who tells us of the fruit of the Spirit, but
he is also the one who urges us to labor like mad and put forth all the natural
effort possible. In Rom.14:19 he
writes, "Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and
to mutual edification." Won't the
Holy Spirit just do this for us? No
more so than He will grow fruit in your garden if you never plow it, cultivate
it, or water it. Fruit is a joint
adventure of God and man. If man does
not cooperate the fruit is not grown at all, or is very inferior. In Eph.4:3 Paul writes, "Make every
effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace." Does Paul mean that if Christians do not
make every effort the unity of the body can fall apart, and peace be lost? That is what precisely what Paul is saying,
for he has seen it often, and it has been recorded all through history. Christians who do not put forth efforts to be
peacemakers do not contribute to the peace of the world, or the body of Christ.
Paul writes in Col.3:15, "Let the peace of Christ rule in
your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace." Every Christian has a calling from God. It is a call to be channels of His
peace. We need this fruit of the Spirit
to fulfill our calling. But peace is
not very high on the list of priorities most Christians aim for. The Church has conformed to the culture
which is T. V. driven, and one of perpetual stimulus and response. Dr. Maxwell Maltz in his book Psycho‑Cybernetics, says we are so conditioned to respond that
we feel we have no choice to not respond.
He recommends that people de‑condition themselves by letting their
telephone ring and not answering it.
This is hard, but when you can learn to do it, you have regained some
control of your life. You realize you
have a choice, and do not have to respond to all the stimuli that life hurls at
you. You can just sit still and not
respond. In order to have peace, the
Christian needs to learn how to not respond to all the stimuli that comes at
him for our culture.
Escapism is usually thought of as a bad thing, because it is a
running away from reality. But we need
to see there is much reality that we need to escape from. The stress and tension all around us is
real, but we have no obligation to be in a state of constant reaction to
it. If we can escape and be at peace in
the midst of it, let us praise God for this kind of escapism. Sleep is escapism God has built into our
life, and it saves our life everyday.
Building a house to retreat from the weather is escapism. Taking a vacation is escapism. Carrying an umbrella is escapism. Life is full of perfectly valid
escapism. And so is the escapism of the
Christian who learns to retreat into the presence of God and bathed in His
peace. Music, reading, relaxation
tapes, there are all kinds of resources for the Christian to use to obey the
Biblical command to seek peace and pursue it.
The Christian who uses these means is going to be prepared soil for the
fruit of the Spirit‑peace.
Pursuing peace has to be seen in the same sense as pursuing a
deer. I had to learn the hard way that
the best way to get a deer is to be still.
You have to go into the woods to pursue it, but then you have to learn
to be still. I once waited for an hour
in the woods and did not see a deer, so I got up to look around. Just then five deer were startled and ran.
They were just about to come into the opening, but I never got a shot,
because I scared them. Had I stayed
still they would have come right to me.
Passive pursuit is a hard lesson to learn.
We live in a culture where speed is king. I find myself in a hurry even if there is no
reason. People get uptight today if they miss a revolution in a
revolving door. We are an uptight
generation of compulsive activists.
There are ten times more things to do in a day than anyone can do, and so we feel we are always behind and
failing to do all that we could. All we
do is respond, respond, respond to stimuli.
We want peace but it just does not fit into our agenda. Peace calls for doing nothing sometimes, and
we can't handle that. Pascal the great
Christian philosopher and scientist said, "Most of man's troubles come
from his inability to be still."
God gave the Sabbath law to force His people to relax and be
still one day a week. Modern man has
made it one of the most active days of the week. Man wants peace in a pill he can swallow, so he does not have to
stop his perpetual motion. "Be
still and know I am God", goes against the gain of our culture. The result is, Christians often have no more
peace than do non‑Christians.
Yet, the promise of God in Isaiah 26:3 is, "Thou wilt keep him in
perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee." If we could have a mind focused on God, and not on all the
stimuli about us, we could have perfect peace.
We should pray often as May Rowland does in her poem‑
Come! Peace of God, and
dwell again on earth,
Come, with the calm that
hailed Thy Prince's birth,
Come, with the healing of
Thy gentle touch,
Come, Peace of God, that
this world needs so much.
Break every weapon forged in
fires of hate,
Turn back the foes that
would assail Thy gate;
Where fields of strife lie
desolate and bare
Take Thy sweet flowers of peace
and plant them there.
The Holy Spirit will not give us peace if we do not retreat
and escape from the constant bombardment of stimuli. Just as money in the bank draws interest and grows into more
money, so peace in a peaceful environment draws interest, and becomes a deeper
peace. People with the greatest
evidence of peace are people who know how to escape. Former President Harry Truman is often used as an illustration. He had no end of stress with a war on his
hands, and one crisis after another.
When he was asked how he could stand it, he responded, "When I
can't take it anymore, I go into a fox hole in my mind." That is where a soldier escapes from the
bullets of the enemy. He would retreat
into his mind and do what Paul tells us to do in Phil.4:8, "...Whatever is
true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is
lovely, whatever is admirable‑if anything is excellent or praiseworthy‑think
about such things." He would live
in the memory of all the peaceful scenes and beautiful experiences of his life,
and be renewed in spirit. He could get
away from it all without going anywhere, because he could slip into a state of peace.
This is what devotional time and prayer time is to be for the
Christian. It is an escape from the
perpetual stimuli of the flesh to the peaceful stimuli of the spirit. It is not an escape from reality, but an
escape to a higher reality so that one can better cope with the lower
reality. Peace is aware of conflict,
just as love is aware of hate, and joy is aware of sorrow, but each fruit
counteracts the impact of its opposite.
Peace, like all of the fruits, has its source in Jesus
Christ. Paul says in Eph.2:14,
"For He Himself is our Peace."
There is no way the Holy Spirit can grow any of the fruits in us if
Jesus is not our Savior and Lord.
Michel Quoist defines peace like this‑
"We mean the calm, the
interior serenity, and the profound peace
which permeate and emanate
from a man who, notwithstanding
a torn heart and body, and
despite the suffering of mankind and
the world, believes with all
his strength in the victory of the
Savior. And he believes this without for an instant
forgetting
or denying the existence of
suffering and sin, and without
giving up the fight against
them."
What we are seeing in our study of the first three fruits of
the Spirit is that they all depend on an optimistic conviction about Jesus and
His ultimate victory over all evil. If you
waver in this conviction, all of the fruits wither and lose their power. On the other hand, each of them flourishes
to the degree that one is absolutely committed to the Lordship of Christ. When His Lordship is real in your life, you
have a hiding place where you can escape from the storms of the world.
In the heart of the cyclone,
tearing the sky,
And flinging the clouds and
the towers by,
Is a place of central calm.
So here in the rush of
earthly things,
There is a place where the
spirit sings,
In the hollow of God's
palm.
Author unknown
You do not need to become a monk or a mystic escaping to a
desert or monastery, for you can escape right where you are by withdrawing to
the inner life where Jesus is king. He
is our peace, and as we look to Him, He will grant us His peace. Our problem is, we usually worry and fret
and do all we can to control life's circumstances, and only after we fail and
are full of anxiety do we come to Christ for escape. We need to learn to escape to His presence first, and get peace
before we fight the battles of life. We
need peace in the midst of the storm, and not just peace after the storm. Both are good, but before is better. Corrie Ten Boom said, "Look around and
be distressed. Look inside and be
depressed. Look at Jesus and be at
rest." If we put Jesus first we do
not have to work our way through the lower levels, but can start at the top and
experience peace from the beginning.
When Jesus appeared to His depressed disciples after His
resurrection, we read in John 20:19‑20, "Jesus came and stood among
them and said, 'Peace be with you!'
After He said this, He showed them His hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw
the Lord." Why did He say peace
and then show them His scars? Because
those scars represented the worst life could throw at Jesus‑crucifixion
and violent death. Now He had conquered
the worst and has a right to say peace be with you. Evil has done all it can, and it has lost. In Him there is victory over every evil foe.
The worse can never rob them of His best, and so there is a solid foundation
for peace in the midst of the battle with evil.
The cross and what Jesus did there for us is a symbol of
ultimate peace. Jesus, by His shed
blood, fixes all that sin had broken, and gives us a foundation for absolute
optimism. Paul states it clearly in
Col.1:19‑20, "For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in
Him, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on
earth or things in heaven, by making peace through His blood, shed on the
cross."
The goal of God is peace.
He is the God of peace, and He sent the Prince of Peace to achieve that
goal on the cross. Jesus did achieve
it, and now in Him we are to be a people of peace. Eighty eight times peace is used in the New Testament. It is used in every book of the New
Testament. It is a major challenge of
the Christian life to seek peace and pursue it. It is only by doing so that we can be prepared soil for the Holy
Spirit to produce in us the fruit of peace.
A young boy, who had reached the age where having a watch made
life worth living, was bugging his parents to get him one. He was told he would
have to wait until he was older. But he continued to beg for one until his
whole family was sick of it. His father finally laid down the law and told him
he would get one later, but for now he was not to even mention the subject
again. The next Sunday, as was the
custom, each child in the family read a Bible verse at the dinner table. When
it came to Edward's turn, this was the verse he chose to read‑"What
I say unto you, I say unto all: Watch!" For every rule there is someway to
get around it, and here was a lad who found a way to even use the Bible to
disobey his parents.
Most of us can identify with him, for we have had an obsession
with getting something, and we could not rest until we got it. This puts our
patience to the test, and we realize it is no easy virtue to achieve‑this
ability to wait for what we want with a calm and undisturbed spirit in the face
of obstacles and delays. In our age of instant gratification, nobody enjoys
waiting for satisfaction, but God demands that His children learn to discipline
their desires, and to persevere and not give up because they do not reach their
goals as soon as they hoped. Shakespeare said, "How poor are they who have
not patience. What wound did ever heal but by degrees?" Waiting and
persevering are a part of God's plan for His people, and those who can't endure
this part of it miss out on God's best.
The Bible is constantly urging Christians to look at life long
range. Job is the greatest example of
patience because he was able to endure and persevere. He did not give up even though all the evidence seemed to support that he should. He had the fruit of patience, and held on to see a happy ending
to a very difficult story. All's well
that ends well is the message, and all is guaranteed to end well for those who
wait on the Lord, and never give up, but let patience be their guide.
Dr. Wilhelm DeNejs heads the Services for the Blind in Santa
Anna, California. He helps blind people
learn that by patient perseverance they can do what they never dreamed
possible. He even helped an
electrician who became blind continue his vocation of wiring new houses. He had to learn how to tell the difference
between black and white wires by touch.
It was a slow process but he finally gained enough confidence so he
could do the job as fast as a sighted person.
Dr. DeNejs had good
reason to believe in the possibility of achieving the seemingly impossible by
patient plodding. He lived in Indonesia
when Sukarno came to power, and was determined to kill all of the royal blood
line, and he was in that line. He and
his wife had to flee in a canoe at night to Singapore. They had to get to the Netherlands where
their five children were in school. He
spoke at a local Rotary Club, and told of his plan to drive his Tempo to
Holland, and then get to the U. S. where he could aid those who lost their
rights. He was not blind but he had
lost much of his vision. An executive
in the audience from Shell Oil Company was moved, and gave him the use of his
credit card for his journey.
Fifty miles out of Singapore the road ended, and they had to
drive over open fields. They got stuck
and needed to get farmers to pull them out.
They came to rivers with no bridges, and he would have to take the
engine out, put it on the roof of the car, and he and his wife would push the
car across the river. Sometimes
friendly natives would build a raft for them to float the car across. They often had to clean the road of debris
and underbrush, but the made it to Pakistan, and then across India. It got so cold in the Khyber Pass going into
Afghanistan they had to drain the water out of the radiator at night, and wait
until the water thawed again the next morning to put it back in.
They got through Iran and Iraq, but at the Syrian border they
were denied entrance. What a blow! But as they sat there praying for an answer,
a stranger came to the window of the car and said, "just wait here,
tomorrow or the next day, or soon, a sandstorm will come. No one will be able to see you and you can
drive across the border. No one will
risk coming after you, for these sandstorms can kill a camel.
So they waited, and waited, and waited, and finally it
came. The sand began to blow and the
guards retreated into their guard house.
DeNejs could not see, but he had the car pointed in the right direction,
and so he started the car and drove straight ahead. He drove quite a way across the border, and then stopped to wait
out the storm. When they could see
again, the road was covered by sand.
They just followed signs, like dead camels caught in the storm, and kept
going across the desert. They had to
drink water out of the car radiator to survive. In Yugoslavia they tipped over into a ditch, and it took seven
days to repair the car. The doors were
tied on with wire, and the motor was coughing and missing as they crossed the
Austrian Alps, but they made it into the beautiful green hills and valleys of
Germany.
They made it to the factory where their Tempo had been made,
and their story so impressed the manager, he repaired their car without
charge. From then it was smooth riding
to the Netherlands, and to the waiting arms of their happy children. Six months and 20,000 miles of hardships
were behind them. When asked what kept
them going DeNejs said, "We believed deeply that if we had the patience
and faith, nothing was impossible. We
had faith in our Lord." It is the
fruit of patience that keeps people from giving up when it seems hopeless.
Joseph had to endure the pit and the prison before he got to
the palace. Without patience he would have given up and stopped pursuing his
dream. This can happen to God's people when they go through tough times and
that is why we read in Heb. 6:11‑12, "We want each of you to show
this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. We do not
want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience
inherit what has been promised." Only those with the fruit of patience
will be able to hang in there until the story has a happy ending.
Charles Jefferson in his book, The Character of Jesus; points out
that Jesus had to the superlative degree both aspects of patience. Patience is
one word, but it is like many stars that look like one star, but which are
really two. Double stars are very common, and so are words that have double
meanings. Patience is an example. It means, says Jefferson, both‑a calm
waiting for something hoped for, and the unruffled endurance of pain and
trouble. The two are different. In the first case patience is waiting for what
is hoped for with nothing to endure but the time it takes for the goal to be
achieved. In the second case their is the need for endurance and perseverance
for their are many obstacles to be overcome.
Love is the key fruit out of which all the others grow. But
love does not always get a positive response. If love only lasts until people
who are loved become unlovely, then love is a very flimsy foundation. Love
needs patience to last. When only one of ten lepers came back to thank Jesus
for the healing, He had every reason to be tempted to give up on healing the
sick. Many of us may have said I have had it with these ungrateful wretches.
They deserve to be the outcasts of society. I am not going to be giving out
miracles so freely from now on. But Jesus did not give this response, but just
patiently went about doing good even if people were not responding with
gratitude. He continued to love because His love was linked with patience,
which makes love last and not give up. Anybody can be loving for awhile, but no
virtue is of great value, even love, if it does not last, but is only
temporary. Virtues only become Christ like when they last, and become
persistent in the face of obstacles. This is only possible when they are linked
with patience.
The fruit of patience is what makes every virtue a Christian
virtue. Christian virtues are those that last, and do not disappear when there
are obstacles and opposition. You cannot eliminate any one of the fruits, for
they hang together like grapes on the vine and the removal of any one of them
spoils the whole cluster. None of the fruits can be truly Christian without
this fruit of patience, for if they do not last they are virtues that any pagan
can have for a time. It is impossible for us to have these fruits all the time,
and that is why we need the Holy Spirit, for they are not produced by human
resources but by the resource that only God can provide. They are fruits of the
Spirit.
Jesus could only
respond as He did to life's trials because He was filled with the Spirit. Chuck Swindoll in his book, Laugh Again,
writes,
"How could any man be
as patient as He was? How could He
keep His cool under constant
fire? How could He demonstrate
so much grace, so much
compassion, and at the same time so
much determination? And when faced with the Pharisees'
continued badgering and
baiting, how could he restrain Himself
from punching their lights
out? As a man, He had all the emotions
we have as human
beings. What was it that gave Him the
edge
we so often lack? It was His attitude. To return to Webster's
words, He acted and felt as
He did because of His "disposition,"
His "mental
set." You only get this mental set
by having the long range perspective of the mind of God.
The essence of Christian theology is this‑if God is
love, then in the final analysis all that is right and good will win, and,
therefore, we must not fight evil with evil, but overcome evil with good. This means the Christian does not have to
win every battle to confident he will win the war. If evil is strong and they have to suffer at the hands of evil
people, they do not sink to their level, but respond with love‑the kind
of love that Paul says in his great love chapter of I Cor.13, has as it's first
characteristic that it is patient. That
is, it looks at the long run, and recognizes that the only wise response to
evil is love, for it will always have the last word.
Three of the greatest personalities of the New Testament‑Jesus,
Stephen, and Paul illustrate the patience of love in the most trying of
circumstances. Jesus on the cross said,
"Father forgive them for they know not what they do." Stephen is being stoned by an angry mob and
he prays, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." Paul's patience was tried by believers who
failed him. He writes in II Tim.4:16,
"At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted
me. May it not be held against
them." How could they all be so
forgiving? Because they had the fruit
of patience. They had the ability to
endure and put with the weakness and folly of
human nature, because they knew, in the long run, all such weakness will
not prevent the victory of God's love.
You can put up with a lot when you are assured the negative
stuff will not win in the end. Patience
is what makes you able to live in this fallen world, and still have love, joy,
and peace, and all the other fruits of the Spirit.
Able to suffer without
complaining,
To be misunderstood without
explaining;
Able to give without
receiving,
To be ignored without any
grieving;
Able to ask without
commanding,
To love despite
misunderstanding;
Able to turn to the Lord for
guarding,
Able to wait for his own
rewarding.
Author unknown
Dr. A. B. Simpson may sound
too Pollyanna in his little poem, but this is what Christian patience is all
about.
Wait, and every wrong will
righten;
Wait, and every cloud will
brighten,
If you will only wait.
This does not mean the
Christian never takes action to fight evil.
It means he never uses evil means, but waits for the power of God to
overcome evil. It is an optimism that
says, I will always chose the way of love, for in the end love will always
win.
Paul makes it clear in Rom.12 there are many commands
impossible to obey without the fruit of patience.
In verse12, "Be joyful in hope patient in
affliction."
In verse 14, "Bless
those who persecute you; bless and do not curse."
In verse 17, "Do not
repay anyone evil for evil."
In verse 19, "Do not
take revenge."
In verse 20, "If your
enemy is hungry, feed him, if he is thirsty, give him something to drink."
In verse 21, "Do not be
overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
Paul takes the Sermon on the Mount very seriously, and he
expects the average Christian to live it.
But how is it possible to not be overcome by evil? Evil men crucified Jesus and stoned Stephen
to death. The point of Paul is not that
you will never be defeated by evil people.
The point is you must never let their philosophy and methods become
yours. If you fight evil with the same
spirit of hate and injustice, you have been overcome by evil. You are now in their camp using the weapons
of hell rather than those of heaven.
The weapons of good often seem weak and inadequate compared to
the violence of evil, but the Christian with patience will wait, and not give
in to violence, for he is convinced the way of love will win in the end. It may seem impossible, and to the flesh it
is, but to the Spirit who produces the fruit of patience it is the key to
victory.
O God of the impossible!
Since all things are to Thee
But soil in which
Omnipotence
Can work almightily,
Each trial may to us become
The means that will display
How o'er what seems
impossible
Our God hath perfect sway!
The very storms that beat
upon
Our little barque so frail,
But manifest thy power to
quell
All forces that assail.
The things that are to us
too hard,
The foes that are too strong,
Are just the very ones that
may
Awake a triumph song.
O God of the impossible,
When we no hope can see,
Grant us the faith that
still believes
ALL possible to Thee!
Author unknown
In the simplest language I can come up with, I define
patience as the deep conviction that it
can never be wrong to be Christ like, and it can never be right to be un‑Christlike. If I chose to be Christ like and I suffer
for it, I will still be the winner, for I please God. It is a no lose choice to be like Jesus, and never cease making
that choice when all the natural emotions are screaming, get back, get even,
and get violent.
George Horne says, "Patience strengthens the spirit,
sweetens the temper, stifles anger, extinguishes envy, subdues pride, bridles
the tongue, restrains the hand, and tramples on temptation." In other words, it is the key to being like
Jesus. Christians almost always fall
and fail because of a lack of patience.
Adam and Eve could not wait to learn why it was in their best interest
not to eat of the forbidden fruit.
Their impatience was the beginning of sin. Sarah could not wait for God to keep His promise, and so she gave
Hagar to her husband to produce a child.
The result of this impatience has been a history of violence between the
Arabs and Jews. Moses could have obeyed
God and spoken to the rock to get water, but he impatiently struck it, and lost
his chance to go into the promised land.
David was filled with sexual lust, which by its very nature is impatient
for satisfaction, and made the biggest mistake of his life for himself and his
family.
The record goes on and on, for Satan knows he can win a lot of
battles if he can get God people to be impatient. When you want something very strongly right now, you can count on
it, Satan has a foot in the door of your life, and you are open to suggestion
to make foolish choices. There is a
right time for everything under the sun, but if Satan can get you to jump the
gun he knows he has the battle won.
Once the power of patience is turned off, every other virtue becomes
weakened.
In the movie Jurassic Park, the elaborate control system to keep
the dangerous creatures safely confined was turned off. The result was the Tyrannosaurus Rex was
able to break loose and turn the paradise into a devils island. The point of the movie was, without absolute
assurance of control man cannot live in the same environment with dangerous
creatures of violence, and, therefore, the whole idea had to be abandoned.
God did not abandon the project of saving the world, however,
and making it into a part of the eternal paradise. Instead, He provided a Savior to atone for the sin of man. Then He gave the Holy Spirit to provide a
control system whereby the beast in man could be restrained. That is what the fruits of the Spirit are
all about. By their power every evil
tendency in man's nature can be restrained.
The last one of the nine is self‑control, and that final link in
this chain of Christlikeness is reached
by means of the fourth fruit we are looking at, which is patience.
You do not build a control system overnight. Rome was not built in a day, nor were the Roman Christians. It took a lot of teaching, training,
commitment, and trial and error, just as it does for any of us to become Christ
like. It the Christian gives up and
ceases to grow because they lack the patience to persevere, they will stay as
babes in Christ, and be underdeveloped Christians the rest of their lives. The world is filled with Christians who
stopped praying because their prayers were not answered. The world is filled with Christians who
stopped giving because they did not get rich, as some preacher told them they
would. The world is filled with
Christians who do not go to church because they were bored, or did not
understand, or were not treated the way they felt they should have been. What is the basic problem of all these
discouraged Christians in the world?
Impatience! It takes time to
develop any skill or relationship. The
Christian life is a process, and those who demand that it be a finished product
handed to them like a Bible are setting themselves up for failure.
We can learn a lesson from the American soldiers who were
taken prisoners in the Viet‑Nam war, and kept in the infamous Hanoi
Hilton. Most of them were flyers who
had to endure this setting for 3 to 5 years, and some as long as 9 years. Those endless months of monotony and
loneliness could have driven them crazy, but someone started the idea that they
were in the university of North Viet‑Nam, and they were there to improve
their future. Some began to learn a
foreign language. Others played on
imaginary instruments using their memory of strings and key boards. One group put together a Bible from a
composite of all the verses they could remember, and then memorized that Bible
together. One officer played golf in
his imagination, and returned to the
U.S. and became a tournament‑level competitor. The point is, they made a choice to either
grieve about their mess and give up in despair, or have hope there would a
bright future, and patiently began to plan for it by pursuing some goal that
would prepare them for that future.
They could not control their circumstances or their
environment, but they had the choice of being impatient and thus
depressed, or of being patient and
building something positive for the future.
This is the spirit Christians need to keep growing when they find it
easier just to give up and stay at the level where they are. One of the most beautiful things in the world
is an old Christian who still loves to learn.
That is patience on display. Robert Schuller, a fairly old Christian himself, speaks these
words of wisdom that represents that which is experienced by many pastors‑
Don't try to rush God.
Mountains don't move
overnight.
Give God time to work
miracles,
I have seen God dissolve
resentments,
resolve frustrations,
fill lonely hearts with new
love,
and wash away hurts like a
new wave
washes away scars on sand
scratched by children's
sticks.
God can get you out of a
rut,
onto a new road,
and over the mountain that
seemed impassable,
if you will be patient.
I have seen God turn
juvenile delinquents into great men,
criminals into good
citizens,
alcoholics into church
elders.
His point is, the present is never the end of the story. No matter
how discouraging it seems now, God will have the final word, and we can wait
for that victorious word if we let the Holy Spirit produce in us the fruit of
patience.
Allen Emery, one of Billy Graham's associates tells of his
experience as a boy back in 1937. He
was travelling on a train with his father.
One of the porters had a limp and was obviously in pain. When they inquired about it, they learned he
had an infected ingrown toenail. After
breakfast Allen came back to his car and noticed the porter coming out of his
parents room. He was crying, so Allen
followed him to the men's lounge and sat down beside him. "Are you crying because your toe
hurts?", he asked. "No,"
he said, " it is because of your daddy.
Your daddy could see my toe was in pain and suggested that I let him
lance it and clean it out." The
porter explained what his father did, and he began to cry again. "Did it hurt that much?" Allen asked. "It didn't hurt at all and it feels fine now," he responded. "Then why are you crying?" Allen asked. Let me
finish the story in Allen's own words.
The porter made this reply‑
Well, while he was dressing
my toe, your daddy asked me if I
loved the Lord Jesus. I told him my mother did but that I did not
believe as she did. Then he told me that Jesus loved me and had
died for me. As I saw your daddy carefully bandaging my
foot,
I saw a love that was Jesus'
love and I knew I could believe it.
We got down on our knees and
we prayed and, now, I know
I am important to Jesus and
that He loves me.
With that he started crying
again, happy and unashamed.
When his sobs subsided, he
earnestly burst out, "you know,
boy, kindness can make you
cry." I understood. I also
understood that a living
illustration like this can never be
forgotten and the privilege
of seeing such events is a
responsibility of life.
One father, by bearing the fruit of kindness, led a man into
the kingdom of God, and gave his son a lesson in love that changed his life
forever as well.
Kindness is no wimp among the virtues. The reason we tend to think so is because it
is a virtue that even pagans can manifest in a strong way. Paul, who makes a great deal of the
importance of kindness in the Christian life, recognizes just how kind pagans
can be. In Acts 28 when the storm
wrecked the ship, and all were forced to swim for their lives to the island of
Malta, we read in verse 2, "The islanders showed us unusual kindness. They built a fire and welcomed us all
because it was raining and cold."
In verse 7 we read, "there was an estate nearby that belonged to
Publius, the chief official of the island.
He welcomed us to his home and for three days entertained us
hospitably." In verse 10 the story
ends with these words, "they honored us in many ways and when we were
ready to sail, they furnished us with the supplies we needed."
These pagan people treated Paul and Dr. Luke as kindly as they
were ever treated by their Christian friends, and far more kindly than what
they received from some Christians.
This kind of competition has, instead of challenging the Christian to a
higher level of kindness, led them to minimize its importance. It is embarrassing when a non‑Christian
is more kind than a Christian, and so to save face the Christian says it is no
big deal to be kind. Kindness is just a
natural gift of some personalities, they say, and so, even though it is nice,
it is of no credit to anyone, anymore than it is to have blue eyes. Kindness is
just the luck of the draw, and a matter of genetics, and should not be given
much value as a Christian virtue. If my pagan neighbor is kinder than me, it is
due to his or her heritage, and does not make them better than me. With this
kind of rationalizing, Christians have been able to send kindness back to the
minor leagues. The only problem is that the New Testament stresses that
kindness is a major league player. It
has a contract with God to play on the highest level, and we can't fire it or
push it out of the big leagues.
Paul settled this once and for all when he said in his great
love song of I Cor.13, in verse 4, "love is kind." God‑like love is kind. There is no escape from this fact, kindness
is a primary virtue and part of the image of God in man. The fact that this image can still be
reflected in non‑Christians is no excuse to minimize it, but rather a
reason to recognize that God's people should display it in its purest
form. The non‑Christian may beat
you on the level of natural kindness of personality, but there is no kindness
superior to that of the fruit of the Spirit kindness. This is not merely man produced, but it is God produced fruit.
Like all the other fruits this one too grows out of love. Jesus went about doing good and showing
kindness to everyone in need because He loved people. It is hard to be kind if you do not love. It is easy if you do love, for love is kind
by its very nature. This is where the
Christian can compete and win, for the Christian filled with the Spirit can
love his enemies and those who do not deserve love. This is not natural, but is the fruit of the Spirit.
If a Christian is not unusually kind he or she will not make
much of an impression on the world, where
people experience kindness from others whom they know are worldly. We need to make a commitment to magnify
rather than minimize this fruit of kindness.
Henry Frederic Amiel said, "Life is short and we have never too
much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey
with us. Oh, be swift to love, make
haste to be kind!"
The opportunities to be kind are very numerous we can show
kindness almost every day, and often several times a day. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, whose brother
Gallio set Paul free in Acts18, said, "Wherever there is a human being,
there is a chance for kindness."
Paul was shown great kindness by his brother, and Paul was fully aware
just how kind pagans could be. That is
why he stresses that Christians be kind, for if they are not, they are less
than the pagans they are trying to reach.
In Col.3:12 he urges Christians, "Therefore, as God's chosen
people, holy and dearly beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness,
humility, gentleness and patience."
When a Christian gets up in the morning to dress for the day they are to
put on kindness along with all else they wear.
Ask yourself before you head off to work or to school or to wherever,
did I put on my kindness? To walk out
of your home unprepared to be kind to people who cross your path is to be
unprepared to be a Christian. We should
be as embarrassed to leave our kindness at home as we would be to leave our
shoes or shirt.
You have seen the signs on the doors of many stores that say,
no shirt, no shoes, no service. If Paul
ran a restaurant his sign would say, no love, no kindness, no service. He would be embarrassed to see Christians
running around with no kindness on. He
sees kindness as one of the undergarments, for in Col.3:14 he sees love as the
outer garment that covers all. He
writes, "And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all
together in perfect unity." Paul
is saying if you take off into your day not clothed with love and kindness you
are practically naked, and will probably be a spiritual embarrassment before
the day is over. Paul is not worried
about you leaving home without your credit card, but he is saying of kindness,
don't leave home without it.
How does a Christian dress?
With the fruits of the Spirit.
We are to cover the flesh with these fruits, so that, just as the defects of the body are covered
by clothing, so the defects of our fleshly nature are covered by these
beautiful garments of the Spirit. You are
what you wear in the spiritual life. If
you wear these fruits you are Christ like.
The Greek word for kindness even sounds like Christ. The noun is Chrestotes, and the adjective is
Chrestos. We are to wear Chrestotes to
be Christ like. If we wear this garment
we will be conspicuous for our courtesy in
a world where rudeness is often the norm. Courteous language and behavior should characterize the Christian
in the daily walk. Jesus said,
"Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for my yoke is
chrestos..." Jesus is saying my
yoke is kind. He does not make a yoke
that is rough so that is cuts into the neck of the oxen as it plows. He makes His yokes smooth so they do not
irritate. They are easy to wear and
make the job easy. This is being kind
and considerate, and that is the way Christians are to treat other people. We are to make life easier and more pleasant
for all who cross our path.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is in such radical language that
we seldom see the relevance of it for our daily living. We seldom to never see anyone laying in the
road beaten, and so the message is lost on us.
The point of the parable is not to be on the lookout for victims of
robbers, but to recognize that anyone who is in need is your neighbor, and you
are to love your neighbor as yourself.
In other words, anyone God puts in your path is to be treated with
kindness. Everyone has burdens, and
they need encouragement. Do not add to
their load by being inconsiderate and thoughtless. They get plenty of that in a day. The Christian is to be different, and to, by being kind, make an
impression on them that somebody does care.
Many people who have troubles have brought them on
themselves. There anti‑Christian
life style has made their lives a mess.
It is hard to be kind to people like this. That is why we need the fruit of the Spirit kindness that goes
beyond the natural kindness of the human spirit. This natural kindness is precious, but it will not enable you to
be Christ like when you confront those who do not deserve kindness. Listen to Jesus commanding the impossible in
Luke 6:35, "But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them
without expecting to get anything back.
Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High,
because He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked."
When someone cuts you off, or grabs your parking place which
you are waiting for, that is your opportunity to be a Christian. Anybody can
say thanks and be kind when people are being nice. But the Christian is to be kind when others are being jerks and
treating you badly. This does not mean
you do not fight injustice and discrimination, but you do it with kindness
toward your foes, even when they will reject that kindness, and respond with
more negative behavior. This is a step
up from the previous fruit of patience.
Patience is passive and puts up with a lot, but kindness is more active
and goes out of its way to return good for evil. Many Christians will endure those who wrong them, but they will
not go the next step and be kind to them.
Peter Ainslie III, in his book, Cultivating The Fruit Of The Spirit, tells this historical
example of the power of kindness.
When Robert Southey, once
poet laureate of England, was a
small boy, there was a Negro
boy in the same neighborhood by
the name of Jim. The white boys took great pleasure in
calling him
"nigger" and other
degrading epithets, which always grieved Jim.
One winter morning when the
white boys had planned to go skating,
Southey found one of his
skates broken. Remembering that Jim
had a new pair of skates, he
hurried over to Jim's house and asked
him to loan him his skates,
to which Jim readily agreed, saying,
"Oh, yes, Robert, you
can have them and welcome." After
several
hours he returned them and
found Jim seated by the fire in the
kitchen reading his
Bible. Southey thanked him kindly, and
as
Jim took the skates from his
hands, with tears in his eyes he said,
"Robert, don't call me
'nigger' anymore." Southey burst
into tears.
Years afterward in telling
the story he said that after that he never
dropped into the practice of
calling people uncomplimentary nick‑
names. Kindness in the heart of the Negro boy had conquered
one who became foremost in
English literature.
An angry unkind response to prejudice could have led Southey
to become a bigot for the rest of his life, and to have influenced many others
to follow. Kindness is no wimp in the
arsenal of Christian weapons to fight evil.
It is one of the big guns. Beth
Robertson, in poetry says,
When I think
of the charming people I know,
It's surprising how often I
find
The chief of the qualities
that make them so
Is just that they are kind.
Being kind is a matter of being aware of other people's
feelings and needs. We get so self‑centered
that we are unaware of others needs,
and so we fail to be kind. We
are often unkind to those closest to us.
We need to see that kindness is not just for our enemies, but for our
loved ones as well. Paul stresses this
in Eph.4:32, "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each
other, just as in Christ God forgave you." The implication is, Christian
people will rub each other the wrong way at times, and they will be rude and
offensive. This is when it is a great
temptation to respond in like manner.
We need the fruit of the Spirit to overcome such temptation, and
instead, be kind. When Christians act
natural they are quenching the Spirit.
A Christian mother was shocked, when after a day of
irritability, she heard her child pray at bedtime, "Dear God, make mommy
be kind to us like she is to people we visit." Parents often forget the importance of kindness in raising their
children. John Drescher in his book,
Spirit Fruit, which is the best book available on the fruits of the Spirit,
quotes many authorities. One is Dr.
William Bede McGrath, Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association who said,
"Ninety percent of all mental illness that comes before me could have been
prevented, or could yet be cured, by simple kindness." Then he quotes Amy
R. Raabe‑
Scattered seeds of kindness
Everywhere you go;
Scatter bit of courtesy‑
Watch them grow and grow.
Gather buds of friendship;
Keep them till full‑blown.
You will find more happiness
Than you have ever known.
Your own happiness, as well
as that of others, is wrapped up in this fruit of kindness. Fruit is not only good for physical health,
it is also essential for spiritual health.
Charlie Shedd, in his marriage enrichment material, has been
telling couples for decades that one of the keys to a happy marriage is the
kindness of complimenting your mate every day.
John Drescher saw this strategy work even in the work place. He tells of the secretary who went to work
for an executive who was notorious for his critical spirit. He kept a secretary for about two months at
best. She needed this job bad, and
though it was torture to endure him, she decided to move up the next step from patience to
kindness. She decided she would pay the
old goat a compliment every day. It was
not easy, but every day she found some little thing to compliment him
about. They were simple things like,
"That is nice material in your suit sir." It took time, but his hard heart softened, and this secretary by
kindness made him a lovable enough man to marry. He became her husband, not just
her boss, by the power of kindness.
Frederick William Faber, author of many hymns like, Faith Of
Our Fathers and There's A Wideness In God's Mercy, made this powerful statement‑
Kind words are the music of
this world. They have a power
which seems to be beyond natural causes, as if they were
some angel's song which had
lost its way and come to earth.
It seems as if they could
almost do what in reality God alone
can do‑soften the hard
and angry hearts of men. No one was
ever directed by a sarcasm‑crushed,
perhaps, if the sarcasm
was clever enough, but drawn
nearer to God, never.....
Kindness has converted more
sinners than zeal, eloquence, or learning.
Not every one can be
eloquent or learned, but everyone can be kind, and by kindness change
lives. You will experience a lot of
failure in life, but none will revolve around kindness. C. R. Gibben wrote‑
I have wept in the night for
the shortness
of sight
That to somebody's need made
me blind;
But I never have yet felt a
twinge of
regret
For being a little too kind.
Someone defined a Christian as one who makes it easy for
others to believe in God. The most
likely way to do this is by displaying the fruit of kindness.
Is anybody happier
Because you passed his way?
Does anyone remember
That you spoke to him today?
This day is almost over,
And its toiling time is through;
Is there anyone to utter
now,
A friendly word for you?
Can you say tonight in
passing,
With the day the slipped so fast,
That you helped a single
person
Of the many that you passed?
Is a single heart rejoicing,
Of what you did or said?
Does one whose hopes were
fading
Now with courage look ahead?
Did you waste the day or
lose it?
Was it well or poorly spent?
Did you leave a trail of
kindness,
Or a scar of
discontent?
Author unknown
Mr. and Mrs. Grayson are missionaries in Nigeria, Africa. One day he lost control of his car and went
into the ditch. It was up to the hub
caps in mud. He knew he would have walk
eight miles to the nearest town to get help, and Mrs. Grayson would have to
wait in the car. She said it would be
okay, but she was fearful. Darkness was
coming, and she was soon hearing all kinds of strange noises. Then she heard voices. She flicked on the headlights and saw two
men coming toward the car. They asked
her who she was. She told them and they
left. But shortly she heard voices
again. The two men had come back with two women caring blankets and bundles
of wood. They spread the blankets out,
and started a fire. They invited her to
join them. They were so friendly she
got out and sat with them. They talked
of all kinds of things, and then she asked them why they came to keep her
company.
One of the men smiled and said, "we have been waiting
three years to do something for you.
Three years ago your husband drove through our village, and when he saw
that my little daughter was ill he took her to the mission hospital. She was there a long time, but they saved
her life. We have waited three years to
thank him. We would be happy to sit
with that good man's wife, and keep her company all night if
necessary." They were showing
kindness because they had been deeply touched by an act of kindness.
People who do not grasp the theology of Christianity can
easily grasp its love when they see it displayed in acts of kindness. Instead of thinking of kindness as a minor
virtue, we need to exalt it to the level where the Bible puts it‑a vital
ingredient to being Christ like. William
Penn, the Christian founder of Pennsylvania, has been quoted often for these
words of wisdom, "I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can
show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not
defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again." Let this be
your daily prayer as you dress each morning, Lord, help me put on this
day, and for your glory display the fruit of kindness.
A young boy had been sent to his room for bad behavior. After awhile he emerged and told his mother
he had thought it over and prayed about it.
"That's wonderful", said the mother. "If you ask God He will help you be good." The boy responded, "But I didn't ask
God to help me be good, I asked Him to help you put up with me." This little guy discovered the path of least
resistance. He realized life would be
easier if others would just change in relation to him. Let's face it, life would be easier for all of us if people would just tolerate
our weaknesses, and put up with our shortcomings. In other words, if everybody else had the fruit of the Spirit we
would not have to bother being good.
Somebody would have to remain as a pain to give others an opportunity to
exercise their fruits.
But since this fantasy is never going to be a reality, the
Christian needs to face the fact that goodness is not an option, but an
absolute necessity. It is impossible to
be Christ like without goodness, the sixth fruit of the Spirit. The subject of goodness is so vast in the
Bible it would take hours just to read all of the texts. I counted in my concordance 77 different
words and word combinations dealing with the theme of goodness. It is overwhelming to try and convey the
significance of this material in one message, but let's begin by seeing that
goodness begins in the very nature of God.
His goodness is linked to His love, as are all of the fruits.
The only reason there is a relationship between God and man
is because God is good. In Psalm 25:7‑8 we read, "Remember not the
sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to your love remember me,
for you are good, O Lord. Good and
upright is the Lord; therefore, He instructs sinners in His ways." We see the goodness of God is what makes Him
care about sinners and their forgiveness, and their guidance into the
truth. Why do we have a Savior? Because God is good. Why do we have a Bible? Because God is good. Why do we have the church for fellowship and
encouragement? Because God is
good. All the gifts and blessings we
have, we have because God is good. If
He was only Holy He would have destroyed the world long ago and started
over. But God is good, and goodness is
love reaching out to give a helping hand to those who cannot make it on their
own. The Good Samaritan was good
because he helped a man survive who would not have without his help.
Psalm 34:8 says, "Taste and see that the Lord is
good." Over and over the Bible
says the Lord is good, and He expects His people to reflect that goodness in
the world. Hannah Whitall Smith, famous for her book The Christian's Secret
Of A Happy Life, tells of her discovery of the goodness of God in her other
book, The God Of All Comfort. She writes,
"I shall never forget
the hour when I first discovered that
God was really good. I had, of course, always known that
the Bible said He was good,
but I had thought it only
meant He was religiously
good; and it had never dawned
on me that it meant He was
actually and practically good,
with the same kind of
goodness He has commanded us to
have. The expression, "The goodness of
God," had
seemed to me nothing more
than a sort of heavenly state‑
ment, which I could not be
expected to understand. And
then one day I came in my
reading of the Bible across
the words, "O taste and
see that the Lord is good, " and
suddenly they meant
something. The Lord is good, I
repeated to myself. What does it mean to be good? What
but this, the living up to the
best and highest that one
knows. To be good is exactly the opposite of being
bad. To
be bad is to know the right
and not to do it, but to be
good is to do the best we
know. And I saw that, since
God is omniscient, He must
know what is the best and
highest good of all, and
that therefore His goodness must
necessarily be beyond
question. I can never express what
this meant to me. I had such a view of the real actual
goodness of God that I saw
nothing could possibly go
wrong under His care, and it
seemed to me that no one
could ever be anxious
again. And over and over, when
appearances have been
against Him, and when I have been
tempted to question whether
He had not been unkind, or
neglectful, or indifferent,
I have been brought up short by
the words, "The Lord is good"; and I have
seen that it
was simply unthinkable that
a God who was good could
have done the bad things I
had imagined."
Bad things happen to good people all the time in this fallen
world, but not because God wills it. He,
in fact, forbids it, and no one is guiltless who does a bad thing against his
neighbor. Jesus went about doing good,
and never did a bad thing to anyone. He
did have severe words of judgement for the Pharisees, who had perverted the
truth of God. They were such religious
people, but they were not good. No
amount of religion, learning, ritual, or legalistic law keeping is worth a hill
of beans if it does not make you good.
Jesus blasted all religion that
failed the test of goodness. If
people are not made good by their faith, their faith is no good. God is good, and what is not good is not of
God. That is Biblical theology in a
nutshell, and this is to be our guide for evaluating all movements and ideas‑are
they good?
Before Paul's conversion he was a very religious man. He was learned in the Old Testament
law. He was scrupulous in his obedience
to the legalistic system of the Pharisees.
He was zealous in his promotion of the Jewish faith. Paul had all you could ask for in a
religious person, it would seem. He had
it all except for one thing, he was not good.
He was cruel and hard hearted, and he hurt and killed people who would
not conform to his convictions. When he
surrendered to Christ as Lord of his life, he had all the virtues he had
before, but now he was also a good man.
He never again hurt another person for not conforming to his
convictions. He did not persecute the
Jews as he did Christians. He did good
to them as he sought to persuade them that Jesus was their Messiah. He devoted a good part of his ministry to
doing good to the Jews in Jerusalem.
Paul was converted from being a radically religious man to being a good
man in Christ.
The Greek word for goodness is AGATHOSUNE, and Paul is the
only one who uses this word in the New Testament. His vocabulary was converted along with his heart, and he had a
special love for the fruit of goodness.
Paul was converted to Christ and to goodness all at the same time, but
not all Christians have this conversion.
All are saved by faith in Christ, but they are not good. Many still have prejudices that make them
mean spirited toward certain people.
The letters of Paul, that comprise almost half of the New Testament, are
basically his efforts to get Christians to be good‑to be good to
one another; to be good to the lost; to be good citizens, and to, like
Jesus, go about doing good.
The greatest weakness in Christian history is Christians who
are not good. There love for the Bible
and for Jesus are not questioned, but they fail to manifest the fruit of the
Spirit in relationship to others, and therefore, they are not good Christians,
because they are not good. You can be
saved by grace yet still live in the flesh, and therefore, not be a good person. A lot of New Testament Christians were not
good people. They were prejudiced
against either Jews or Gentiles. They
were envious and jealous. They
developed a party spirit that divided the church. They were power hungry and fought against Paul to get fame and
control. Just about every sin you can
imagine was a part of the life of New Testament Christians. They were saved but not yet good. Goodness must be a goal for all believer's
if they intend to be true disciples of Jesus.
God's goodness saves us.
Our goodness does not. Our
goodness is a fruit which the Holy Spirit grows in us, when we surrender to
Him. If a Christian is not good, it
does ot mean he or she is not saved. It
means they are choosing to live in the flesh, and not surrendering to the
Spirit. Carnal Christians are saved,
but not yet good, because they quench the Spirit and live in the flesh. A Spirit led Christian will go about doing
good, as Jesus did. Goodness is love in
action. It is that which makes
Christianity practical, so all can see its value. It makes people good so they are beneficial to society. These are the people who seek to counteract
the evils of society. They are the
foundation for what use to be called the Social Gospel‑the efforts to
fight off the social evils that damage and destroy the happiness of people.
Being good does not save anyone, only Christ can do that as
they trust Him as their Savior. This
led many Christians to oppose the Social Gospel for decades, and some still do,
forgetting that the good that Jesus did, also, did not save anyone. He healed the sick, fed the hungry, and did
many good things for people that did not save them. But it did lead some to get saved because they could tell He
really cared about their needs. Love like
this convinced them He was one they could trust. But many took His good deeds and rejected Him. So being good, or doing good, does not
guarantee people will be changed in any long range way. If you refuse to do good because of this,
you are living in the flesh and not the Spirit, for the Spirit is Christ like,
and does good because good is the thing to do, whether it leads people to
respond properly or not. Goodness does
not say, "I'll be good only if I can see the payoff." That is not true goodness, but hypocrisy.
I read of a small town pharmacist who always closed up his
drugstore on Sunday, because he believed in keeping Sunday as a Christian
Sabbath. Bus as we all know, sickness does not take weekends off, and so people
get sick and need medicine on Sunday. He did not hesitate to to open up and
fill prescriptions on Sunday. Once a father needed a prescription filled on
Sunday for his sick daughter, and after he got it he said to the Pharmacist,
"Thank you, now you can go home and
get back to keeping the Sabbath." "Oh no!" said the
Pharmacist, as he handed the man his medicine. "This is keeping the
Sabbath!" That it the spirit of Jesus, who healed on the Sabbath. This
made the legalists mad at Him, but Jesus taught by his actions that what
matters to God is that we be channels of His goodness in this world.
The reason behind the Sabbath was the goodness of God. He was
giving man a break from the toils of life for his health and happiness. It was
a day meant for the good of man, and if you could add to their health and
happiness by some act of goodness, it was pleasing to Him. God was concerned
about goodness, not legalistic conformity. The Pharisees were very religious
and they obeyed a lot of rules, but they were not pleasing to God because
they lacked goodness.
Barnabas received one of the greatest compliments that can be
given to a Christian in Acts 11:24, where it says, "He was a good man, and
full of the Holy Spirit and faith."
Barnabas was the man who befriended Paul when all others were afraid of
him. He sought him out and gave him a chance to preach in Antioch. He helped
Paul get into the ministry of building the church. One good man showing that
goodness to a former enemy helped change the course of history for the glory of
God. Shakespeare said, "How far that little candle throws his beam! So
shines a good deed in a naughty world."
In the day of judgement the words all of us are going to want
to hear are, "Well done, good and faithful servant.!" We will not long to hear famous servant,
popular servant, rich servant, but good and faithful servant. What matters to
God is that we are good and faithful. No matter what else you are, if you are
not good and faithful, you are living in the flesh and not producing the fruits
of the Spirit.
In Matt. 25, Jesus tells the parable of the Sheep and the
Goats, which defines what he had in mind by goodness. Those rewarded are those
who fed the hungry and gave the thirsty to drink. They showed hospitality to strangers
and clothed the needy. They cared for the sick and visited the lonely in
prison. In other words, like Jesus, they went about doing good. A good person
is simply one who recognizes the world is full of hurting people, and goes
about seeking to relieve that hurt where they can. Christians are to be
involved in all effort to relieve the suffering of this world. That is the
essence of goodness.
How our lives would please
the Savior
If we only understood,
What He seeks in our
behavior
Is a love for doing good.
On a tombstone in Shrewsbury, England, these words are
engraved‑
For the Lord Jesus Christ's
sake
Do all the good you can
To all the people you can
In all the ways you can
As long as ever you can.
That is to display the fruit
of goodness. Like all the other fruits of the Spirit, this one too, is based on
the conviction that good will win the war with evil, and in the end all
goodness will survive forever, and all that is bad will perish forever.
Goodness is to be a part of our very being. It is not like a
bulb we hang on the Christmas tree, but it is to be like one of its branches‑a
very part of the tree itself. People can do good deeds and not be good people.
A Mafia boss can write out a check to help someone out of a jam, but they may
have gotten that money by acts that hurt other people. That good act does not
make him a good person. Goodness, in order to be truly Christ like, has to grow
out of agape love, which is a love that cares about all people and not just
those that please you. It is other‑centered and not self‑centered.
It is doing good for the other not just because it makes you feel good to be
doing good. The Pharisees wanted to be seen of men and get credit for their
good acts. Jesus never did a good act for self glory. Dr. Martineau gives us
the gist of the different levels of good. He writes‑"To get good is
animal; to do good is human; to be good is divine." It is this third level
that is the fruit of the Spirit. It incorporates doing good and getting good,
but it has its origin in being good, which can only come from God.
This is what Jesus was conveying to the Rich Young Ruler. All
three of the Synoptic Gospels record these words of Jesus, which he said to him
when he called Jesus good teacher. Jesus responded, "Why do you call me
good? No one is good except God alone." Was Jesus denying that He was good? No!, He was saying that if
you see good in me recognize from whence it comes. It is no mere human virtue.
Goodness is a part of God's nature, and if you see it in me, acknowledge that
it is of God. The goodness of Jesus was due to His being filled with the Holy
Spirit, and allowing his human nature to be controlled by His divine nature. He
could have chosen to yield to the temptation of Satan, but he chose, instead,
to be loyal to God. The point is nobody is good, not even Jesus, without the
Spirit of God. God is the source of all true goodness, and His Spirit alone can produce it in us.
You and I cannot live the Christian life in the flesh. The Son
of God Himself could not do it. Jesus could only be good by being filled with
the Spirit. He was the perfect man, not by the power of His flesh, but by the
power of the Spirit. We need to see this and recognize that we too need to be
filled with the Spirit if we expect to produce the fruit of the Spirit, and
especially the fruit of goodness.
VII.
THE FRUIT OF FAITHFULNESS
Andrew Carnegie was the richest man in the world at the
beginning of the 20th century. His life
illustrated both the positive and negative sides of the fruit of
faithfulness. You would think that
faithfulness would always be positive, but the fact is, every virtue can be a
vice if it is linked to the wrong value system. Even love can be a vice, for as Paul says, the love of money is
the root of all evil. Carnegie had a
love for money that made him faithful to his goal of becoming rich. He ruthlessly underpaid his steel workers,
and made them work 12 hours a day 7 days a week. His labor practices led to one of the bloodiest strikes in labor
history. In the town of Homestead, Pa.
14 people were killed and 163 were seriously injured in that strike.
Carnegie made 40 million dollars in profit in the year 1900,
because he was faithful to his commitment to become rich. But once he became the richest man in the
world, he changed his whole perspective and decided it would be a disgrace to
die rich. He decided to give his
fortune back to society. He found he
could not give it away fast enough, for it was growing so rapidly, so he formed
the Carnegie Corporation Foundation.
90% of his fortune was given away, and 3,000 libraries were
endowed. 350 million dollars were given
away, and when he died in 1919 he had
just 30 million left, and 20 million of that went to the Carnegie Foundation
for educational purposes. The other 10
million went to family and relatives.
Here was a man faithful in making a fortune, and faithful in
giving it away. His faithfulness was a
burden to some and a blessing to others.
Thus, we see the duel nature of this virtue which can also be a
vice. The Pharisees were faithful to
the law, and refused to forsake their legalism, even in the face of the
miracles of Jesus. People can be
faithful to cults, cruel leaders, and every form of evil you can imagine. I read of how even animal faithfulness can
be a problem. Jonathan Daniels was a
newspaper man who covered the races.
The one that stands out in his mind is a race between 5 camels. It was at a Carolina carnival. It was an unusual race and people all over
the state were betting on the outcome.
But bookies noticed that Arabs were putting all their money on the camel
named Ben Ali. They watched the race
with eagle eyes for any sign of dirty work.
The race seemed to be fairly run, and all jockies pressed
their mounts with equal fervor and determination. Yet Ben Ali was the easy winner.
Daniels interviewed some Arabs and asked why they put all their money on
Ben Ali, and one of them explained with a grin. "Ben Ali is what is known
in our country as a bell camel.
From the day of their birth all other camels are taught to follow the
bell camel." These Arabs were not
gambling at all. It was a sure thing,
for they knew the other camels would be faithful to their training, and never
pass up the bell camel.
What you don't know can hurt you. That is why it is important to recognize the paradox that virtues
can be vices if they are focused on the wrong values. Faithfulness is not a fruit
of the Spirit if it is not directed toward the revealed will of God. There are people who are faithful to their
commitment to get drunk every weekend, or faithful to their commitment to play
poker every Saturday night. You and I
can be faithful to buy our gas at the same station every week, or where only
brand of shoes for life, or a thousand and one other things. This is not necessarily either good or bad,
but it is not the fruit of the Spirit.
The fruit of the Spirit, which is faithfulness, is an absolute
loyalty to Jesus Christ regardless of the cost. Jesus put it plainly to the Christians in Smyrna in Rev.2:10,
"Do not be afraid of what you
about to suffer. I tell you, the
devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer
persecution for 10 days. Be faithful,
even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life." Faithfulness means a lot to Jesus, and He
will greatly reward it. This is the
fruit that took Him all the way to the cross.
He could have been the world's greatest teacher, healer, and miracle
worker, and still have failed to be our Savior had He not been faithful even to
the point of death.
When John saw into the future, this was one of his visions in
Rev.19:11, "I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white
horse, whose rider was called Faithful and True." This is a name Jesus will wear forever. He never forsook the plan of God even though
the cost was beyond calculation. You
can count on Jesus when He says I will never leave you or forsake you, for He
is absolutely faithful. And this is
what He expects from His disciples.
Christians are to be people you can count on because they are faithful
to their commitments.
I John 1:9 says, "If we confess our sins He is faithful
and just to forgive our sins...."
What does this mean? It means you
can count on Christ to be consistent.
He will not be moody, one day forgiving you, and the next day saying
tough luck. The book of Hebrews calls
Jesus a faithful high priest. He would
not let you down by inconsistencies. He
is dependable. And He is greatly
pleased when His disciples are also dependable. In the great and final war against evil, we read this description
of those on the winning side in
Rev.17:14, "They will make war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will
overcome them because He is Lord of lords and King of kings‑and with him
will be his called, chosen and faithful followers."
The highest compliment the New Testament can give to a
Christian is that they are faithful. It
will be the greatest reward to hear Jesus say in the day of judgement,
"well done thou good and faithful servant." Paul could give no higher recommendation than to say one was faithful. He writes in I Cor.4:17, "I am sending
to you Timothy, my son whom I love, who is faithful in the Lord." In Eph.6:21 he writes, "Tychicus, the
dear brother and faithful servant in the Lord will tell you
everything...." Paul could not
have accomplished what he did without the help of faithful servants. Many forsook Paul and did not have the fruit
of faithfulness, but the few who were faithful help him change all of history. One of the things that Paul was most
grateful for was that Jesus considered him to be faithful. He writes in I Tim.1:12, "I thank
Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me
faithful appointing me to His service."
This brings us back to the paradox of faithfulness and to
another aspect of it‑the good side of bad faithfulness. Paul had bad faithfulness before he was
converted. He was a faithful fanatical
Pharisee who would persecute fellow Jews who became Christians. He was not about to forsake his faithful
commitment to salvation by works of the law.
His faithfulness to Judaism made him a very cruel and dangerous man,
thus, illustrating again, just how bad a thing faithfulness can be. It is a force behind all hatred, bigotry,
and prejudice. But here is the good
side of bad faithfulness. If a person
is faithful to their values, even if they are wrong and perverted values, they
have the potential, as Paul did, of
becoming faithful to right and true values.
The point is, if Paul had been a
rotten Pharisee, who was breaking his own laws and being unfaithful to his
commitments as a legalist, he would not have been a good candidate for an
Apostle of Christ. It was his
faithfulness to his wrong convictions that made him a good candidate for one
who would be faithful to right convictions.
We need to see with the eyes of Christ as we look at the
lost. We tend to say a certain person
is so committed to his materialism that he would never be interested in the
things of the Spirit. She is so loyal
to her social organization she would never be interested in church things. We forget the good side of bad faithfulness, which is, it can
become good faithfulness if it is converted and directed toward the service of
Christ. The best servants of the Lord
are often those who were the best servants of the devil. People who are faithful to folly can become
people who are faithful to wisdom. That
is why we need to see the faithfulness of sinners to their value system as
potential values for the kingdom of God.
Jesus saw this potential in Paul, and that is why a man so faithful to
the law became the Apostle so faithful to love.
Unfortunately not all faithfulness gets a lot of attention or
reward in this life. Some of the people
Paul commends as faithful are obscure persons.
The world is full of Christians who are faithful, and by their
attendance, giving, and service keep the church alive and well. They are often taken for granted because they
are faithful. You don't have to worry
or wonder about them. They just faithfully
do their thing as members of the body, and like the glands of the physical body
they are crucial for health, but they are seldom given a lot of thought. But the very nature of faithfulness is that
it does the job needed regardless of the recognition. If you only serve the Lord to be seen of men, Jesus says you are
like the Pharisees. You may get your
reward, which is recognition from men, but you will receive none from God.
The true test of faithfulness is, will you do what you are
gifted to do for the body of Christ even if you are seldom to never thanked for
it. It is not much of a virtue to keep
doing what you are rewarded for doing.
Even animals learn a lot of tricks because they are rewarded for their
acts. This natural faithfulness is not
bad at all. It gives us a lot of
pleasure, and it is a part of good education.
Rewarding is a good thing, but faithfulness is that virtue that says
reward or not, recognition or not, I am going to do what pleases my Lord. I will be faithful.
This is a virtue that
rises above the natural response of faithfulness to what gives you pleasure and
reward. It is when you suffer calamity
and great loss that this kind of faithfulness shows. Habakkuk reveals his faithfulness in Hab.3:17‑18,
"Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no
sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I
will be joyful in God my Savior."
That is not natural‑that is fruit of the Spirit faithfulness. A Christian who is only faithful when it
pays off in some sort of reward is operating it the flesh. a non‑Christian or even an animal can
live on this level. But cut off the
reward and seals will stop bouncing balls on their nose, whales will stop
leaping over nets, lions will stop leaping through hoops, and the natural
faithfulness of men will lead them to forsake the cause, whatever it is. Even the cause of Christ will be abandoned
by Christians who operate in the flesh.
Only those with the fruit of the Spirit faithfulness will continue to
serve the Lord when the benefits cease, and there are only burdens to be
carried.
The whole idea of taking up the cross and following Jesus is based
on faithfulness. Cross‑bearing is
not for the unfaithful. They will
abandoned Christ at the point at which the burden is greater than the
benefit. "Demas has forsaken me
having loved this present world, "said Paul of one of his unfaithful
Christian servants. When the burdens of
serving with Paul became greater than the benefits, he took off and went his
own way. He was faithful only when it
paid to be. This kind of natural
faithfulness is not enough in any relationship of life. All relationships are tested, and the test
is that they sometimes cost more than they pay. There is more pain than pleasure, and more burden than benefit.
The reason why Christians are into more divorces than ever
before is because they are operating on the level of natural faithfulness.
"As long as it pays off and their is more pleasure than pain, I will stick
with the relationship. But when it costs emotional burdens to stick with it, I
will be gone." It is natural to
have these feelings, but the Christian is to operate on a higher level than the
natural and overcome these feelings. When they do not do so by the fruit of the
Spirit, they do the same things the non‑Christian does. No relationship
will escape the testing, and if Christians are not examples of faithfulness in
all relationships, they will not be a very attractive witness to the power of
the Gospel to change life. Faithfulness has no valid existence until it has to
stick to a commitment when their is no pleasure in doing so. When their is only
pleasure it is just self‑satisfaction to be faithful. But when their is a
burden to bear, and you are still faithful, that is fruit of the Spirit
faithfulness. This is what we see in Jesus as He went to the cross for us, and
what we see in all relationships that survive the valleys of life. Our salvation and our security depend upon
the faithfulness of Christ. Nothing
could be secure if He was not faithful.
And nothing in the Christians life can be secure if they are not
faithful. All security is based on
faithfulness.
Dr. Charles E. Fuller had one of the most fruitful radio
ministries in history. It was called,
The Old‑Fashioned Revival Hour, and it covered 90% of the inhabited
world. Without faithfulness it never would
have gotten to this level. He and his
wife lost their first child. Then her
health failed and they were separated.
Then a serious financial crunch involved them in a hard five year battle
to recover. 12 years after their first
child died they had another child that almost died. Added to all this trial, they were deserted by some of their
closest friends in the church. How do
you get through all that, and touch the world for God? The only way is by the fruit of
faithfulness. He could have let any one
of his trials stop him, but he didn't.
He was faithful when there was only pain, and God rewarded him beyond
what he could have ever dreamed.
Jesus will be ever faithful to us, but the question always
is, will we be faithful to Him. Peter Ainslie
writes,
"I shall never forget
the time I saw Poynter's great picture
"Faithful Unto
Death." in the Walker Art Gallery
in Liverpool.
There stood the Roman guard
on duty while the palace was
falling into ruins during
the destruction of Herculaneum. The
dead were lying in the
background; others were falling to the
pavement amid the red‑hot
eruptions of Vesuvius; everyone
who could was fleeing for
his life. The Roman guard might
have made his escape, but
there he stood like a marble statue,
preferring to remain at his
post faithful unto death. The picture
clung to me like an
individual‑‑not simply the man standing at
his post of duty but the
expression of faithfulness that showed
in his countenance. I have thought of it a hundred times since,
and have felt its influence
as I have felt that of a living person."
Even natural faithfulness can reach great heights, and be a
powerful example, but to be faithful to our Lord in day to day living we need
more than natural faithfulness. That
too is a valuable asset, but to be all
that God wants us to be we need the fruit of the Spirit faithfulness.
Bill Hybels, the popular pastor of the Willow Creek Community Church,
one of the fastest growing churches in America, admits that he is not a tender
hearted person. By nature he is often
cold, hardhearted, and indifferent to
the hurting world around him. In his
book Who Are You When No One's Looking, he tells of how he and his wife went to
see the movie Sophie's Choice. It was a
heavy drama where Sophie had to decide which of her two children she would hand
over to the Nazi officer, for sure incineration. He was thinking he would like another box of popcorn, but he
noticed his wife was sobbing. She cried
through the rest of the movie. As they
walked to the car he knew it was no time to crack jokes. It was a day and a half later when she said
to him, "I want to tell you why I
was so upset at the movie. I was picturing
having Todd in one arm and Shawn in the other, and having 30 seconds to choose
which one was going to live and which one was going to die. How in the world could I ever make that
choice?" Pastor Hybels did not
understand that, for he did not get into the skin of the actor and feel the
emotion. His wife did, and she
identified with the emotional turmoil.
His wife is tenderhearted and she can empathize with others,
and feel what they feel when they hurt.
He, on the other hand, is hardhearted and does not let the pain and
tears of others bother him. All people
tend to fall into one or the other of these categories. He sees it in his own children. His 6 year old son will burst into tears
when he sees a house plant die. His 9
year old daughter thinks he is silly, and she could whack one to pieces with no
sense of remorse. His good friend had
to put his dog to sleep, and it was
torture. After they took the dog to the
vet, he sat in the car for a long time to regain composure, before he returned
to work. His brother said, "Why
didn't you bring him to me. I could
have knocked it over the head and taken care of it‑no problem." Here were two brothers raised in the same
family and environment, yet one is
tenderhearted and the other hardhearted.
The whole point of Pastor Hybels sharing this is, that he, as
a hardhearted Christian, knows he must be all the more surrendered to the Holy
Spirit to produce the fruit of gentleness, for it just does not grow in him by
nature. Tenderhearted people by nature
are more gentle, but Christians like himself need to constantly rely on the
Spirit to have a kind and gentle spirit toward hurting people. This is his honest confession‑
"If we harder‑hearted
Christians are honest, we have to admit
that our
tough approach can do
damage. We kid people that we shouldn't
kid, and when they get hurt
we say, 'Can't you take a joke?' We
don't
listen to other people very
well. Usually while they are talking to
us we are either making unrelated plans or mentally responding to what they are
saying. We wonder why many people are so weak and timid. We use people and dispose of them
unceremoniously when they have served our purposes. Although we may not realize
it, others tell us we act superior. We
love to be right, to compete and especially to win. If the truth were known, we secretly view tenderhearted people as
emotional weaklings or psycho‑logical misfits. We don't understand them."
He knows a lot of Christians who are like that, but he
recognizes that this is not Christ like, and such Christians, like himself,
must not relate to other people according to their fleshly nature, but
according to the nature of the Spirit.
He is not like the comedian who says, "I am very health
conscious. I'm lazy and out of shape,
but I'm very conscious of it." He
is not just conscious of his lack of a gentle spirit, he works hard at letting
the Spirit produce this fruit in him.
This fruit of gentleness has a host of English words that
translators have used to convey its meaning.
Some of them are, moderation, humility, forbearance, courtesy,
considerateness, meekness, kindness, and sweet reasonableness. We see the spirit of gentleness in the way
Jesus dealt with the despised sinners of His day. Zaccheaus was hated as a tax collector, but Jesus treated him
with consideration, and gave him a chance to express himself.
The Pharisees were ready to stone the woman taken in
adultery, but Jesus was gentle and did not blast her even with verbal stones,
but forgave her and commanded her to go and sin no more. The gentle person is one who takes all the
of the facts into consideration. The
hardhearted are quick to make absolute judgements regardless of the
circumstances. They are legalists, and
are seldom open to grace. A non‑gentle
Jesus would have had the woman stoned, and only later reflected on the strange
circumstances that the man was not also brought to be judged. Jesus was gentle for he could see this woman
was being used by the Pharisees. They
cared not for her fate, but only for how she could be used to trap him.
A gentle spirit takes in a whole picture. It does not operate on half truths. It does not jump to conclusions that hurt
people. If you hear something bad about another person and you are instantly
ready to condemn them, you do not have a gentle spirit. A gentle spirit is patient, and will want to
get all the facts. And even when the facts
do support a negative conclusion, they will way all the circumstances, and give
the person every possible consideration.
If God did not have a gentle spirit, there would be no plan of
salvation.
Paul was constantly referring to the fruit of gentleness in
dealing with the tensions in the early church.
There was enormous conflict and arguments of all kinds, even over his authority. Some in Corinth were asking, who does Paul
think he is telling us what to do? Paul
writes in II Cor.10:1, "By the meekness and gentleness of Christ, I appeal
to you." In I Cor.4:21 he wrote,
"Shall I come to you with a whip or in love and with a gentle
spirit?" Love and gentleness go
together. Lack of love and roughness go
together. If you are quick to throw
stones you reveal, not so much how bad your victim is, but how spiritually
rough and unpolished you are.
Paul in Gal.6:1 uses this fruit again in telling Christians
how to deal with fallen Christians. He
writes, "Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual
should restore him gently." People
who are truly spiritual are gentle people, whose goal is restoration and not
judgement. The Christian operating in
the flesh says, "They blew it, let
them pay the penalty. Let's boot them
out of the fellowship so they do not contaminate the rest of us." The spirit led Christian says, "There
but for the grace of God go I. Let's
help this fallen brother get back on the road, and continue the journey with
us."
Pride makes us rough, for it says, "I am superior, and
those inferior to me deserve to be stomped on." Humility, however, is gentle, for it says, "I need the
gentle love of God to survive, and others need it from me. I will do unto others what I would have them
to do unto me." Paul writes in
Eph.4:2, "Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing one another
in love."
You will notice how everyone of the fruits of the Spirit is
linked to the other fruits. None of
them operate in isolation. They are a
cluster of fruit, like grapes, and they function together. These fruits working together in harmony are
the most powerful force in the world.
Gentleness does not sound like a great power, but united with the other
fruits it is powerful beyond what we would ever dream. Alexander Maclaren, the famous English preacher,
goes to great lengths to praise the power of gentleness. He writes,
"Gentleness is the
strongest force in the world, and the soldiers
of Christ are to be priests,
and to fight the battle of the kingdom,
robed, not in jingling
shining armor or with sharp swords, nor
with fierce and eager
bitterness of controversy, but in the meekness
which overcomes. You make take all the steam hammers that
were
ever forged and battle at an
iceberg, and except for the compara‑
tively little heat that is
developed by the blows and melts some
small portion, it will be
ice still, though pulverized instead of
whole. But let it move gently down to the
southward, there the
sunbeams smite the coldness
to death, and it is dissipated in the
warm ocean. Meekness is conquering."
We have to be honest and admit, gentleness is not a popular
virtue in our culture. The power of
brute force is what produces the heroes in our
culture. I have to admit, I get
the same kick out of seeing Clint Eastwood shove problems instantly with a gun
or a fist, as do a host of Americans.
But the fact is, it is a world of fantasy, just like the cartoons, and
does not fit the real world. In the real
world most of our heroes from Hollywood would be locked up for life after a
week of their violent lifestyle. It may
be good entertainment, but it is worthless as a guide to good living.
Paul wrote to Titus about how Christians should live in there
culture. He used the fruit of
gentleness as one of the key ingredients of the good Christian citizen. In Titus 3:1‑2 we read, "Remind
the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready
to do whatever is good, to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and
to show true humility toward all men."
Considerate is the English word used here for the fruit of
gentleness. The ideal citizen that Paul
describes here does not live rough, talk rough, and act rough toward others,
but is peace‑loving, and gentle in relation to all men.
My personal observation is, Christians are not a whole lot
different from the world when it comes to citizenship. They are just as critical of authorities as
anyone else, and just as likely to slander them as anyone else. It could very well be that Christians do not
have the impact on our culture they should have, considering their great
numbers, because they operate on the level of cultural values rather than
Biblical values. They use the same
weapons of the flesh the world uses, and thus they have only the power of the
flesh, and not the power of the Spirit.
The power of gentleness is so seldom tried that we can't know
what it might accomplish. Shakespeare
recognized its power in As You Like It.
He has the Duke say, "What would you have? Your gentleness shall force more than your
force move us to gentleness." And
them Orlando says, "Let gentleness my strong enforcement be."
Many Christians argue that there are so many stupid people in
power that you have to be rough, and deal with them with violent language. We have to fight with weapons they
understand. But Paul gives instructions
to Timothy on how to deal with stupid, aggravating people who stir up all kinds
of quarrels. He writes in II Tim.2:23‑25,
"Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you
know they produce quarrels. And the
Lord's servant must not quarrel; instead he must be kind to everyone, able to
teach, not resentful. Those who
oppose him he must gently instruct, in
the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the
truth." Again, we see the fruit of
gentleness is a key ingredient in dealing with problem situations.
The goal of the Christian in all relationships, even with the most
painful of jerks, is to get them to accept the truth in Christ. The most effective way to do this is by the
power of gentleness. G. W. Langford
wrote,
Speak gently! Tis a little thing
Dropped in the heart's deep well;
The good, the joy that it
may bring
Eternity shall tell.
John Drescher, in his marvelous book Spirit Fruit, tells this
story of the gentleness of the great evangelist D.L. Moody. Crowds came to hear
him everywhere he went and on one occasion a young boy , dirty and ragged, came
to the door of the large church where he was to preach. The usher at the door told him he should be
home in bed, and he turned him away.
The lad went to the side of the church where he was crying when Moody
arrived in his carriage. He heard the
boys sobs and went over and asked him what his problem was. He explained he was not allowed in to hear
Moody preach. Moody smiled and said,
"Do you really want to get in? I
know how you can get past that big
fellow at the door. Are you
willing?" The lads response was a
definite, "Yes, sir!"
Moody told him to hold on to his coat tails, and not let loose until he said so. Moody just walked into the church and up to the pulpit, and the little guy was right behind. He said, "Now my boy you sit here." Then he put him in his chair, where he listened to Moody preach. The pastor who told this true story said, "The reason I know it is true is because it happened in my church, and I was that little boy." Moody"s gentle handling of a crisis in this boys life led him to become a full time servant of God in that very church where the kindness was shown.