It’s easy to rattle off the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control), especially when they are sung to a catchy tune, without having any thought to depths that each one holds and how they should look in our daily lives. I have been personally guilty of doing this and yet Jesus clearly tells us in John 15:8, “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”
As I look at this list of evidences, I am immediately challenged by the first one listed- love. For years, I have had a preconditioned idea about love. Society has done a great disservice by sending out false messages about the true essence of love, one being “follow your heart.” Yet, God warns us that our hearts can be deceitful and following mere emotion can easily lead us astray.
Elizabeth George says in her book “A Woman’s Walk with God”, “It’s obvious that since love is the sacrifice of self, it involves effort not merely emotion. It demands action, not just feeling. It’s something we do, not something we only feel or say.”
But in our flesh, how tempted are we to write those off that God is calling us to love when it takes more effort than we want to give or when we no longer “feel” love for them anymore, when we feel they are undeserving of our love? How tempted are we to wash our hands clean of those people and just walk away? As I wrestle with these questions, I then in turn ask myself, “Is this how God has treated me? At my most difficult moments, has God ever withheld His love from me?” And the answer is, NO.
It’s absolutely humbling to me that God’s perfect, unchanging love has been given to me completely out of grace- and so undeserved. As I look to the cross, I am reminded that my unloveliness, my sin, is why He died. We easily forget how unlovable we are, and yet God does not withhold His love from us.
In light of God’s sacrificial love towards us, may we not fail to extend it to another! Instead, may we seek to completely surrender ourselves to Him so that we can be a means in which He extends His love to those in our lives, even those who may not be so lovely, all the while remembering God loved us in our darkest moments.
“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” 1 Peter 1:22, 23
Highlighting the hope that we have in Christ! 