What's Love Got to do with It? Fruit of the Spirit
Last week was an interesting week for my daughter, Kate, and her youth group cronies.
For the past six months or so, they have been looking forward to their mission trip in Pittsburgh organized through a global mission organization.
For years, they attended camps and conferences where they slept in comfy beds, ate pretty decent foods, heard accomplished speakers, attended concerts, and were generally entertained.
They were good.
Don’t get me wrong.
They have their place.
This year, though, they wanted to focus on serving the least of these, on loving the unlovable, on being a little uncomfortable, and on forcing their feet to meet the pavement when it came to serving and loving.
After just a couple of days there, they realized their experience wasn’t panning out to be anything they had planned. Instead of serving the least of these, they were shuttled to grandiose churches surrounded by million-dollar houses and met by church staff who didn’t know they were coming and ultimately had them clean their church.
Repeatedly, they were thrust into situations where adults and church folks essentially used them as slave labor to do the things nobody else wanted to do for organizations that were paying people to complete these tasks.
It was a disaster.
Finally, the leaders of her youth group took matters into their own hands. They took the teens to Wal-Mart, split them up into groups, and gave them a grocery list to shop for–telling them to buy the stuff they would eat, not the cheap crap!
Then, they packed sack lunches, coolers of cold water, and snacks and went to a homeless camp in downtown Pittsburgh where they spent the day sitting with the least of these, feeding them, loving on them, and making sure every single person had a seat at their table.
There are so many lessons to be learned here.
We could talk about not delegating the crappy church tasks to the teens or treating them as second-class citizens.
We could talk about the dangers of lack of communication or planning.
We could talk about advocating for what is right.
Or, we could talk about what it really looks like to love.
Agape Love
Last week, I started this series on the fruit of the spirit by discussing the context of this widely known and often quoted set of scriptures. If you didn’t check that post out, you might want to go back and read it before you go on. You can do that here:
https://kristenneighbarger.com/2023/07/05/whats-with-the-fruit-of-the-spirit-intro-context/
One of the major points Paul was making in this portion of his letter was that there is a difference between living in the flesh and living by the Spirit, and those two things are not compatible–you can’t do them both at the same time!
Then, in Galatians 5:13-14 (AMP), Paul tells the church:
For you, my brothers, were called to freedom; only do not let your freedom become an opportunity for the sinful nature (worldliness, selfishness), but through love serve and seek the best for one another. For the whole Law [concerning human relationships] is fulfilled in one precept, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself [that is, you shall have an unselfish concern for others and do things for their benefit].”
Galatians 5:13-14 AMP
It’s important to recognize the love Paul is referring to here is agape love. You’ve probably heard agape love described in different ways over the years. I think the easiest way to try to wrap our heads around agape love is to recognize this isn’t an emotion. I love the way the Amplified bible expands on this and explains that it is more of a guiding principle or an attitude, that, agape love is the unselfish concern for others as well as a willingness and desire to seek the best for others.
When we think about agape love in this context, essentially what Paul is telling his readers is that if they are living by the Spirit, then they will be guided by an innate unselfish concern for others. They will be willing and even desire to seek the best for those around them.
The Fruit of the Spirit is Love:
Back in the day when I was a practicing Pharisee (even though I didn’t realize it), one of the things I used to hear Sunday-morning Theologians argue over was whether or not there were fruits of the spirit (plural) or one fruit of the spirit (singular) that encompassed all of these qualities.
Oh, and one of my other favorite arguments about this topic was whether or not you had to cultivate one of these qualities before you could move on to the next quality.
For example, you had to master love before you could ever have joy, and you had to master both love and joy before you could have peace…you get the idea.
This is real, folks.
These were actual sermons and arguments.
Honestly, I think Paul was probably banging his head against a wall in heaven and wishing he could pen some letters to the church over this chaos.
So, here’s the thing–you can read different commentaries and translations of the bible that will tell you different things about how to interpret this section of scripture, just like you can with so many other scriptures and books of the bible. At the end of the day, though, I think we have to take a step back and look at Paul’s big picture or we miss his entire point.
The point Paul was making was that a life lived in the Spirit will bear spiritual fruit; whereas, a life lived for self or the flesh will bear a selfish fruit.
Period.
As he has already mentioned multiple times in Galatians 5, the Spirit and the Flesh are not compatible. Therefore, the fruit of these two lives are going to look vastly different.
The fruit of someone who the Spirit guides is going to be love in action (agape love).
Different translations present Galatians 5:22 in different ways. Here are some of the most popular, and some of my favorites:
But the fruit produced by the Holy Spirit within you is divine love in all its varied expressions... (TPT)
But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others… (MSG)
But the fruit of the Spirit [the result of His presence within us] is love [unselfish concern for others]...(AMP)
But the fruit of the Spirit is love… (NIV)
But the fruit of the Spirit is love… (ESV)
While different translators present this semantically differently, the meaning is the same–a life lived in the spirit is one distinctly marked by love.
The Dangers of Not Loving One Another:
I’m going to go back a few verses in Galatians 5 for a minute. As Paul is talking to the Galatians about loving their neighbors as themselves (agape love, remember) in verse 14, he follows it up with a “but” statement in verse 15:
But if you bite and devour one another [in bickering and strife], watch out that you [along with your entire fellowship] are not consumed by one another (AMP)
But if you continue to criticize and come against each other over minor issues, you’re acting like wild beasts trying to destroy one another! (TPT)
If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then? (MSG)
Paul explains that a life lived by the spirit is guided by love for others in action, but he warns that the dangers of not loving one another is bickering, strife, the devouring of one another, ravaging, and annihilating one another.
I spent years in a church that was driven by everything Paul warns against.
We didn’t love one another.
We didn’t have an unselfish concern for others.
We didn’t have affection for others.
No, instead of love, there was:
Criticism
Legalism
Strife
Destruction of others
For years, I was part of that. Even though it was never stated directly, the church might as well have rewritten this verse to say “Love your neighbor as yourself–as long as they think like you, look like you, and believe the exact same thing as you.”
Scary.
Love is….
I talk about this often, but I am so thankful we have a definition of what love is–both from these verses in Galatians and from Paul’s description in his letter to the Corinthians. In I Corinthians 13, Paul is again referring to agape love when he says:
If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
Love never dies.
I Corinthians 3:3-8 (MSG)
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Everything.
Love has everything to do with it.
This is a weird time.
There’s so much hate in the world, in our churches, and in our communities.
For some of us, we might read about a life of love and be encouraged because we see this fruit in our own lives and in the lives of those leading the churches we are part of.
For some of us, though, we might read this and feel the Holy Spirit giving us a nudge or even a yell because the fruit we are bearing and the fruit that our churches are bearing look nothing like these definitions. In fact, they might even look a little too much like that “but” statement Paul uses to warn the Galatians about.
They might look more like
Bickering
Strife
Annihilation
Devouring
Friends, we are all in different situations, but I pray today that we all start to move toward lives governed by love–true agape love.
Reflections:
What is the biggest hurdle you have when it comes to love?
What type of community does your church resemble? One that loves or one that bickers, judges, and annihilates others?
What is one practical step you can take to start loving better?
