“The fruit of the spirit is love…”

June 1, 2011 12:05

The Fruit of the Spirit is Love…

The most important Fruit of the Spirit is probably the hardest to talk about. Love is found throughout the Bible. One could say that love is the greatest theme of the Bible. When asked what the greatest command was, Jesus said “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. This is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37-39) In saying this, Jesus was paraphrasing Deuteronomy 6:4-5, part of the old law. This, in a sense, validates his command, as if he needed any validation, considering he’s God.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that God so clearly desires love, for whatever reason there may be, it is often the hardest thing to do. In seeking a precise biblical definition for love, I stumbled across the third chapter of the book of First John. In verse eleven, he starts out his section on love by remarking that “the message we have heard from the beginning” is “that we should love one another.” But what does this mean? How do we do this? In verse sixteen of this chapter, he explains what love is. He says, “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.”

This isn’t to say that the only way to love someone is to be a martyr. We don’t necessarily need to sacrifice our lives; Christ already did. However, we are to live our lives as living sacrifices. We are to die to ourselves—to our way of living—and live like Christ. In doing this, we do lay down our lives, as John says, for the sake of others and for Christ. One cannot truly love his brother without first loving Christ, and this is why John says we ought to lay down our lives, just like Christ did, in order to love. This is also why God said loving one’s neighbors is the second greatest command, after loving the Lord. You can’t do this out of order. The only way to truly love someone else is to love Christ first.

Still, somehow the postmodern world of which we are a part seems to believe all we need to do in order to have “good lives” is to love others. We’re so obsessed with “coexisting” as a means of loving other people that we don’t even know what it means to love. In all honesty, I don’t understand how it’s possible to love without God in mind, because God is love. 1 John 4:7-12 says,

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world, so that we might live in Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God: if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.”

This passage explains how inseparable love is from God. Sure, verse eight bluntly states that “God is love.” Still, the rest of the passage explains just how it is impossible to separate love from God. I especially like the last verse, verse twelve, which claims that God will live in us if we love others. This is truly a beautiful verse. Because God lives in those who love others, if we want to see God, all we have to do is look at someone who loves His people, and we are all His people. It is very important, though, to not take this verse out of context. This verse does not say that it is okay to just love others without loving God. This verse does not imply that it is acceptable or even possible to love others without loving God. We already know that love doesn’t work that way, because we have to love God before we can love others. If God is love, how can we “God” others without first “Godding” God?

Still, what is even more incredible is how inseparable those who are in Christ are from His love. Romans 8:35-39 says,

“What shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For Your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am sure that neither life nor death, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord!”

This is amongst the most powerful scriptures in the entire Bible. This passage explains how God’s love is so powerful that nothing—“neither life nor death”, “tribulation, nor distress”, etc.—can interfere with God’s love; rather because it is He that loves us, we more than defeat these things that try to separate us from God’s love. Angels—good and bad—cannot separate us from His love. Rulers of the earth cannot separate us from His love. They can say we can’t worship Him, but that doesn’t change the fact that God loves us.

Now then, knowing that God and love cannot be separated, nor can we be separated from love, this is why God lives inside of us when we love others. You see, when we love other people, we have God in us because God is love. When we have love, we have God. 1 John 4:12 doesn’t imply that loving others without loving God is sufficient. Rather it explains to us that we can’t claim to love God without loving His people. We are the body of Christ, and how can we love Christ if we don’t love His body?

With all this said, I want to make sure we know what “love” means. I believe the word “love” in today’s first-world society has an entirely different definition than it was ever supposed to. Nowadays, love in this context is more closely synonymous to either words like “accept” or “tolerate”, rather than how it was ever used in the Bible. The New Testament was written in an ancient Greek dialect which had four different words which are all translated into English as “love”. The Greek words for love are:

• Agápe—unconditional love
• Eros—passionate love, sensual love
• Philia—brotherly love, friendship
• Storge—affection

It seems as if our culture only recognizes two definitions of love: we certainly recognize Eros; we see it everywhere. Cultural media contains almost nothing but Eros. But the only other definition of love that our culture seems to ever have a part of was made up by our culture. I’m trying to figure out how toleration, such as of a race or sexual orientation, can be considered love. Does our society which is “accepting of all peoples regardless of race or sexual orientation” not even have the audacity to love, but only accept, anymore? It’s almost as if there’s a correlation between our society which is increasingly unreligious and our increasing replacement of “love” with “acceptance”.

Friends, let us not confuse love with toleration. God doesn’t merely tolerate or accept us; he outright loves us in every sense of the word. We need not fall under the impression that God loves us as if his definition of love is identical to our society’s. We need to understand that God actually loves us.

He loves us unconditionally. No matter how far we think we’ve run away from God, he still loves us. How can we run away from God who is everywhere?

He loves us passionately. We are the bride of Christ. (Hosea 2:19)

He loves us as friends. “No longer do I call you ‘servant’…but I call you ‘friend’, for all that I [Jesus] have heard from the father I have made known to you.” –John 15:15

He loves us affectionately, as a parent would love a child. And we are children of God.

Friends, God loves us. And there is nothing that we can do to change that! We can’t change his mind about us; He loves us no matter what we may have done. He loves us as a father would love his son who strayed away from truth for a little while, but eventually finds his way back (Luke 15:11-32). He cherishes us as a poor woman cherishes her last coin (Luke 15:8-10). God loves us. This is why we love our neighbors, because God lives in them, too. He lives in those who love. And he still loves those who might not know Him, and even they are still God’s children. If we love God, we love his creation, of which God is still a part. And when we understand as best as we can that God loves us, and we recognize it, we become aware of the amount of love God has for us, and we have no choice but to share it with our neighbors. “Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” And this is love, the love that God has for us.

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