The Primacy of Love

It's good to be with you once again. Thank you for the invitation to bring God's Word to you as a congregation. Please turn with me to Galatians chapter 5. Our text is taken from this passage beginning with verse 13 through to verse 26. Galatians 5 verse 13. For you brethren have been called to liberty Only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you hate, if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another. I say then, walk in the spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh. And these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like, of which I tell you beforehand just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. May the words of my mouth, the meditation of our hearts, be acceptable, In your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen. This weekend, millions of people are caught up with love for family, sweethearts, and friends, and are expressing it in gifts of roses, chocolates, and cards, just to name a few. So it's a good time for us to examine what Galatians 5 verses 22 to 23 has to say about the love God wants us to show to one another. Paul says the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. No prohibition, that is. It's a great word from God. And this morning, instead of seeing the fruit of the Spirit as a list of nine distinct Christian virtues, I want us to view it as five great affirmations of love. To begin with, love is the preeminent grace in Christ. There is no grace or virtue in Christ that is greater than love. The fruit of the Spirit is love first. Paul gives love pride of first place in this list of Spirit-given qualities of character. Now, there are many in the church today who are completely preoccupied with the spectacular and miraculous gifts of the Spirit, as recorded in 1 Corinthians 12. But in 1 Corinthians 13, after mentioning several of these spectacular gifts of the Spirit, Paul concludes by saying, But the greatest of these is love. And we desperately need to recapture that perspective. Some Christians, again, regard knowledge of the Bible as the most important thing. And correct doctrine, as you know, is most important. But in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says, Though I have all knowledge, but have not love, I am nothing. Elsewhere, he warns us that knowledge is prone to puff up, whereas love builds up. In other words, love is greater than knowledge. Again, there are those today who say that faith is the most important thing in the Christian life, because without faith we cannot do mighty exploits to God. Like those men and women, the heroes of faith, in Hebrews chapter 11. And once more, we must agree that faith is very, very important. But Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, if I have faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I am nothing. So love is greater than faith. And then there are others who think that the most important thing in a Christian's life is the gift of speaking in tongues. Without it, they say, your Christian life is always going to be substandard. But in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul clearly says, if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. So love is greater than speaking in tongues. Then there are yet others who say that the most important thing is Christian service. We all desperately need to be involved in helping the needy wherever we can. And again, this too is important. Service, I believe, is one of the marks of a true Christian. Our Lord Himself said, I am among you as a serving man. And again, He said, I came not to be served, but to serve and give my life for ransom for many. But Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, if I give away all I have to feed the poor but have not love, I gain nothing. So although knowledge is essential, faith indispensable, spiritual experience crucial, and service commendable in a Christian's life, Paul says love is greater than them all. Love is the greatest thing in the world because God is love. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are eternally united by one another in self-giving love. Moreover, God has demonstrated His love to us, to you and to me, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He bore the agony of God-forsakenness upon the cross so that we might be spared that agony. It is only natural then that the God who is love calls us to love. We cannot be His children. if we are not the children of love. Beloved, let us love one another, says John, for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. Well, that's the first lesson we take away with us from this text. is the preeminent grace in the Christian life. Now, secondly, Paul tells us that love brings with it joy and peace. Human beings instinctively pursue joy and peace in life. Thomas Jefferson thought that the pursuit of happiness was important enough to be included in the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is there anybody here this morning pursuing happiness as your inalienable right? Well, let me tell you not to waste your time. It's very foolish, because those who pursue happiness will never find it. Joy and peace are extremely elusive qualities. Happiness is a will-o'-the-wisp. It's a phantom. The moment you try to grasp it, it disappears into thin air. You see, joy and peace are really byproducts of love. God gives us joy and peace, not when we pursue them, but when we pursue Him and our fellow human beings in love. Over this Valentine's weekend, we are concerned and thinking about love of husband and wife especially. And I want to say that if you think that you will obtain happiness by becoming married, think again. Marriage is not going to make you happy by itself. If you want to be happy, become married because you love that person and you want to give yourself in the service of that person's highest interests. And it's very important for us to believe this in a society where everybody is living for themselves and pursuing his or her own dreams of happiness and success. It's technically known, you know, as the human potential movement. And his father, Carl Rogers, the influential past president of the American Psychological Association, was very foremost in presenting this notion which has captured the whole of our nation. His philosophy has to do with what he calls the unlimited potential of every human being and the need to dream big things for yourself. There is nothing, he said, you cannot be if you set your mind on it. Now, it's a view that has even infiltrated the Christian church through the advocates of the so-called prosperity gospel and their slogan, name it and claim it. It's nothing less than unconditional self-love and the pursuit of selfish ends. And as Christians, we ought to know better. Oh, it's true that Jesus said that you must love your neighbor as yourself, but he wasn't endorsing self-love when he said that. Jesus wasn't saying you must love God, you must love your neighbor, and you must love yourself. You can't love others and try to love yourself as well. That is a great misunderstanding of the teaching of Jesus. What Jesus was simply saying was that because of our fallen, sinful, selfish nature, we find it very natural and very easy to look after number one. But what we should be doing if we want to keep God's commandments is to channel that love instead into serving the interests of God and of our fellow men and women. You see, the love with which we are supposed to love God and our neighbour in the New Testament is called agape love. It's a love that sacrifices self in order to serve God and others. So, true love cannot be self-serving. How can I sacrifice myself and still serve myself? So, it's sheer nonsense to preach that doctrine. Oh, but when we give ourselves in love to God and other people, in that moment of self-giving, we find true joy, peace, and fulfilment in life. So, friends, the way of Jesus is the exact opposite of today's preoccupation with self. Our Lord said, whoever loses his life for my sake, shall find it. So, it's when you forget yourself that you fulfil yourself. And it's when you and I die to our self-centredness that we begin to live. Well, that's the second thing about love. It's when we give ourselves in self-forgetful love to God and to our neighbour that joy and peace come into our lives. Thirdly, love, says Paul, issues in patience, kindness and goodness. For love is not just a romantic feeling, nor is it even a vague kind of sentimentality. True love issues in concrete attitudes and actions such as patience, kindness, and goodness. Patience is a negative quality. The Greek word is often translated long-suffering as it is in the King James Version. I prefer patience because long-suffering often conveys the notion of suffering long or of enduring for long suffering or pain. But the notion behind this word here is patience. It means the ability to bear with aggravating and demanding people. Love suffers long. Kindness and goodness are the positive counterparts of love. Kindness is a disposition that wants the good of others. Whereas, goodness is doing good to them because we love them. So, we don't just bear with people negatively, but we think good thoughts about them. We desire their highest welfare. And so, we do good to them because we love them. Love, I say, always issues in patience, kindness and goodness. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says, Love is patient and kind. And in the passage we read, Galatians 5 verse 13, he says, Through love be servants of one another. So, love issues in service, in doing good to others. And it's no good simply making protestations of our love on Valentine's Day and claiming that we love our neighbour or our wife or our children. Rather, we have got to get involved with real people in real situations, seeking all the time to be patient and kind. and good in practical ways. I say again, love is not just a feeling. It issues in patience, kindness and goodness. And then, fourthly, we come to the last three characteristics of the Spirit's fruit. And that is, love is assisted by faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. And all three, you know, are really different forms of self-mastery. Faithfulness, for instance, is curbing our fickleness and our tendency to always take the easy way out instead of fulfilling our responsibilities. It's being dependable, keeping our promises and fulfilling our responsibilities, whatever the demands. Gentleness is taming our strength and harnessing our energies in our treatment of other people and in our attitude to other people when we know they are wrong and when we know they are weak. Self-control is disciplining our instincts and our passions, our temper and our tongue and our thoughts, which naturally tend to get out of hand and become hurtful to others. Now, why do I say that love is assisted by faithfulness, gentleness and self-control? For this reason, Love is essentially self-giving, and the fruit of the Spirit which begins with self-giving ends with self-control, and for a good reason. Because to me it's very significant. Self-giving and self-control bracket together all of these virtues. They belong necessarily to each other. The one cannot do without the other, because I cannot give myself until I have first learned to control myself. Self has to be mastered before it can be offered in service to God and to others. It's therefore important to notice that the fruit of the Spirit includes both. Wherever the Holy Spirit is, self is being controlled and managed. And we all need the Spirit's help in controlling self so that we may give ourselves freely in loving God and loving our neighbour. So far we have seen that love is the preeminent Christian grace. that love brings with it joy and peace, that love issues impatience, kindness, and goodness, and that love is assisted by faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Which brings me to the fifth and last thing, and it's my main point. Love is the fruit of the Holy Spirit. That is to say, love is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit who has taken up residence in the innermost recesses of our being and of our personality when we become Christians. Now, of course, some love is natural, not supernatural. It's very natural for a man to love a woman and vice versa. It's very natural for parents to love their children. But the love which is the fruit of the Spirit is not just natural, it is supernatural, because it has a quality and an intensity that is far, far greater than natural love, in that it loves in a self-sacrificial way. Such love cannot be produced by ourselves. And that is why Paul in this passage contrasts what he calls the works or the desires of the flesh with the fruit of the Holy Spirit. And by flesh, Paul doesn't mean the soft pink tissue that covers our bony skeleton. What Paul means by the word flesh in this passage is the sinful, selfish nature we inherit at birth, because we are all born with a self-centered bias. Indeed, it is often said, if you spell flesh backwards, leaving out the letter H, you have S-E-L-F, self. That is what the flesh is. It's our inherited self-centeredness. It's our fallen human nature. It's what theologians call original sin. By the Spirit, Paul means the Holy Spirit Himself, who at our conversion comes to dwell in our bodies, and He makes our spirit His royal throne. and dwelling within us. He is able to subdue the flesh with all its desires, and He is able to produce in us and in our character the fruit of Christlikeness. So, Paul says here in the passage I read to you, there are these two irreconcilable forces at work in us. They are engaged, as it were, in a fierce tug of war. for our allegiance. On the one hand, there is the flesh, verse 19, with such strong desires as hatred, immolarity, contentions, jealousy, anger, selfishness, and so on, dragging us down, and all the while making us ashamed of ourselves. But on the other hand, there is the Spirit working to counteract this downward drag, and ennobling our lives with love, and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and goodness, and faithfulness, and gentleness, and self-control. And friends, Which power prevails, the flesh or the spirit, depends on the attitude we adopt to both. According to verse 24, those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. That, says Paul, is the proper attitude to adopt towards our fallen human nature. We are to hate it. We are to crucify it. We are to reject our self-centeredness at every turn. Friends, be ruthless in your dealings with it. Don't pity it. Don't massage it. Don't imagine that you can ever come to a peaceful compromise with it. The call of Jesus is, deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me. The right attitude to the Holy Spirit, verse 16, is to walk in the Spirit, or to walk by the Spirit. And the word walk is a metaphor for living. We are to live in the power of the Holy Spirit, and as Paul also says here, we are to be led by the Holy Spirit. We are to allow Him to lead us and guide us. We have to yield to the Holy Spirit's control every moment of every day. Have you got that? We have to crucify our fallen selfish human nature and surrender ourselves, body and soul, to the control of the Holy Spirit. And then, friends, gradually we will find that our new nature will gain ascendancy over the old. True, the old nature is never going to be finally killed in this life. Sorry, I should say, never be finally killed until the end of our life on earth. But it does become weaker and weaker as we crucify it. For crucifixion, after all, was not a quick death. It was a slow death. It was a lingering death. And as the Spirit gains ascendancy over the flesh, the fruit of Christ's likeness will appear more and more. There is no instant holiness promised in the New Testament. The growth of the fruit of the Spirit is as gradual as the growth of any natural fruit. Look at chapter 6 and verse 8 of Galatians, where Paul develops this agricultural metaphor a bit further. And he speaks not only of the fruit of the Spirit, but also of reaping And he says, he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption or death, but he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. Every harvest, you know, depends on what you sow. The question, therefore, is this, what are we sowing every day in our lives? If we sow to our fallen nature, then, says Paul, you're going to reap corruption. The fruit you're going to harvest will never last. It will begin to decay as you live and eventually die or perish when you die. But if we sow to the Spirit, we will reap the fruit of the Spirit. We will reap those Christ-like virtues that Paul mentions in verse 22, that are the very essence of eternal life, and which will remain ours forever, for eternity and eternity. Ah, but someone says, what are the seeds that we need to sow to the Spirit? Well, the answer isn't all that difficult, is it? If to sow to the flesh is to give in to the desires of the flesh, then to sow to the Spirit is to give in to the holy desires of the Spirit. That is, to give ourselves to daily prayer and daily Bible reading and meditation. It means regular attendance at the worship service every Sunday and regular observance of the Lord's Supper once a month. It means reading good Christian books and having good Christian friends. It means being involved in Christian service and many, many other things besides. For when we are cultivating these things in a disciplined way, friends, we are sowing, sowing, sowing to the Spirit. And from this good seed, the Holy Spirit will gradually bring His fruit to ripeness. Now, let me emphasize that adverb, gradually. The farmer doesn't sow his seed in the spring. and expect to reap a harvest a week or two later. No, he has to wait until the end of summer. Well, it's the same for a Christian, isn't it? The fruit of the Spirit will only be ripe for harvesting at the end of the summer of our lives. I love the story of Charles Simeon, who was vicar of Trinity Church, Cambridge, England, in the early part of the 19th century. He was a great man of God who left an indelible mark upon the Anglican Church by his faithful preaching of God's Word. But you know, like many men that God has used greatly, He was by nature and disposition a very awkward character. He was proud, quick-tempered, and impetuous. Well, when he first paid a visit to the godly preacher, Henry Venn, in the village of Yelling, Venn's eldest daughter, Nellie, wrote this. It's impossible to conceive anything more ridiculous than the look and manner of Mr. Simeon. His grimaces were beyond anything you can imagine. So, as soon as he was gone, we all got together in the study and set up an amazing laugh. The Father heard it and came in and asked what it was all about and then rebuked them and summoned them into the garden. And although it was early summer, he asked his daughters to pick one of the green peaches. When they all showed surprise, he said to them, yes, my dears, the peach is green now and we must wait. But with time and a little more sun and rain, the peach will be ripe and sweet. So it is with Mr. Simeon. You know, there is only one person whose life on this earth displayed the fruit of the Spirit to absolute perfection, and that person is our Saviour, the man Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, the fruit of the Spirit is a portrait of Jesus. He lived and loved on this earth as no one else has lived and loved. And because He loved, It brought him joy and peace. And he could say to his disciples, my joy and my peace I give to you. He was also patient and kind and full of good works. He was faithful. He always kept his promises. He could honestly say, I am gentle and lowly of heart. And he had perfect self-control. So, if this is a portrait of Christ, then the fruit of the Spirit is really Christlikeness, isn't it? And Paul says in Romans 8 that God has predestined you and me to be conformed to the image of His Son. Well, as I conclude, I wonder if I'm speaking to someone here who cannot see the forest for the trees. in your Christian life. You're so caught up with the daily struggle you're going through that you've lost sight of the end that God has in store for you. Well, I want to assure you this morning that God's purpose conceived in eternity past and being worked out right now in your life is to make you and me and all of us like Christ by the time this world ends. You may be puzzled by the doctrine of predestination and election. I am too, but lay hold of this. God has predestined us to be conformed to the image of his Son. You may be puzzled by how the Holy Spirit works inside of you, but take comfort from this, that Paul says, We are being changed, not will be, but we are being changed into Christ's likeness from one degree of glory to another by the Spirit. And again, you may be puzzled about what's going to happen to you when you finally go to heaven. Remember this. John says, it's not clear yet what we shall be. But we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. Friends, the most important thing to know in the Christian life is that God's eternal purpose is for us to be like Christ. So I hope that our personal goal in life is and always will be to become like Jesus Christ. Let's commit this verse to memory and repeat it to ourselves as we can every morning. And as we do so, let's pray that we will become so filled with the Holy Spirit, so controlled by the Holy Spirit, that His fruit will begin to ripen gradually in our lives. The fruit of love, which brings joy and peace, which issues in patience, kindness, and goodness, and is assisted by faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Let us pray. Our loving Heavenly Father, We worship you today as the God who is pure, unbounded love. And we acknowledge that you want us, as your children, to be perfect in love like you. And so as we come to the end of this service, we ask that you will forgive our lovelessness and selfishness in our marriages, in our parenting, in our relationships at work and in the neighborhood. Help us so to submit to the Holy Spirit's control, Father, that he may make us more like your Son, who is the express image of your person. To the glory of your name, and for the furtherance of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we ask these mercies. Amen.