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Ripe Life

Sermons on the Fruit of the Spirit

Abingdon Press

Guided by the Spirit

How do I know when I am making spiritual progress in my life? Is there any objective criterion that can be applied? Am I a better person for being a Christian, or does it make any difference? Am I growing in grace? Am I improving? Just where do I measure on the spiritual scale?

These and similar questions are the ones I hear from the people in the congregation and from my own heart. Does the Bible offer any criteria for evaluating my life in the Spirit? Or is the answer the one my parents gave me when I inquired how I would know when I was really in love. "You'll know," they agreed, "You'll know."

For over fifty years I have been in love with God through Jesus Christ and I still entertain these kinds of questions. Preaching this series of sermons in a local congregation helped me to realize that there are in fact certain observable fruit of the Spirit. The challenge then became, how to ripen the fruit.

This series of sermons is based on the struggle with the nine fruit of the Spirit that the Apostle Paul shared with the church in Galatians 5:22. It is a struggle that every church and every Christian goes through. It is a struggle that Paul went through himself.

Paul, writing to the church in Rome said, "You are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you" (Romans 8:9). The Church of Jesus Christ was in the Spirit, and hence these nine fruit should be found in abundance. This is the harvest that comes from living the abundant life.

The nine fruit of the Spirit are called by different names in different translations. While my basic translation for quotation is the New Revised Standard Version, I have based this listing on the Good News Bible (GNB) translation of Galatians 5:22:

"If we live by the Spirit," wrote Paul, "let us also be guided by the Spirit" (Galatians 5:25). Here is my attempt to be guided by the Holy Spirit. You will have to decide if I live by it.

C. Thomas Hilton
Interim Senior Pastor
Wayne Presbyterian Church
Wayne, Pennsylvania

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Romans 12:9

Love

It comes as no surprise that love is the first fruit of the Spirit mentioned by the Apostle Paul in his listing of the nine spiritual crops to be harvested by the Holy Spirit in the life of a Christian. As a way to sum up, I John 4:8 tells us that "God is love." In reality, this is the only spiritual fruit, for all the others are derivatives. All the others are but added colors in the rainbow of love. Each of the other eight spell out more clearly the variety of this one manifestation of the presence of the Spirit in the life of the believer.

When the God of love dwells in your life, you will have joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control (GNB). Paul details to the church in Galatians 5 the many works of the flesh, and when he finishes he hasn't really finished, for he concludes, "and things like that." In other words, there were many more "works of the flesh" that he could have mentioned, but did not. But when it came to detailing the presence of the Spirit in the life of the believer, it is one fruit—singular. The fruit involves one harvest of the Holy Spirit, giving a unified and cohesive character to what the Spirit produces in the Christian life.

Paul wanted the Galatians to understand this point clearly, for he wrote elsewhere in this letter, "Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit." There it is in black and white. "So," he wrote, "let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up" (6:7-9). What we will reap at harvest time is a crop of love, the specifics of which are spelled out in the expressions of love in the rest of Galatians 5:22. Again, Paul wrote to another church, "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (Romans 5:5). We begin with love, for God is love and if, in fact, we desire to be godlike, then we shall embrace love. If, in fact, we are to follow the Christ about whom Paul preaches, we must be loving ourselves, as Jesus was loving. Paul calls this attitude, in his introduction to I Corinthians 13 (the love chapter), "a more excellent way."

But for all his talk about love (and the necessity for it), for all his efforts to persuade the early Christians to be Christlike, for all his attempts to model love for the early Church, Paul was not too successful. Our text has Paul admonishing the early Christians to have "genuine love." What other kind is there, we might ask? Why would he speak of genuine love, if he did not find much of the opposite in the Church? Our text would indicate that Paul was struggling with a quality of love in the Church that left something to be desired. When you look at the evidence from other passages of Scripture, this would appear to be true.

First Peter, written from Rome to those having oversight of the churches in Asia Minor, speaks about "the genuineness of your faith," and "the genuine mutual love" that is needed. Again, there must be a fair amount of ingenuine faith present, in order to keep contrasting it to the genuine kind that these apostles desired.

I think we can safely say that Paul was having trouble growing genuine faith in the hearts of the believers. His letter to the church at Philippi (2:20) speaks about Timothy and how Paul will soon be sending him to them. Then he adds this revelation, "I have no one like him who will be genuinely concerned for your welfare. All of them are seeking their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ." All of them are? All but Timothy? If that's true, then there aren't many Spirit-filled Christians around. All of them? Really?

Writing to the church in Corinth, he twice mentioned the need for genuineness, speaking one time of the possibility of their taking an offering and adding, "I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others" (II Corinthians 8:8). If he knew that they had genuine faith, he would not have to compare it to others. He would know. But he has to continually test the sincerity of the church members. Will they measure up or not? Are they genuine Christians or not? Have they caught the genuine love, or the ingenuine love? "Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine" (I Corinthians 11:19). Paul was having such difficulty that J. B. Phillips titles the twelfth chapter of Romans, "Let Us Have Real Christian Behavior," as if this were a scarce commodity.

I shouldn't imply that Jesus didn't face many of the same difficulties, for in his Sermon on the Mount, he said, "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye" (Matthew 7:5). He also preached, "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." (Matthew 7:15-20).

What is genuine love and what is not? Our danger is that we become discouraged over the obvious evidence of so much lack of real love. I read where an instructor said to a new parachute trainee, "When you jump, the rip cord will pull automatically, but if it doesn't, pull the auxiliary chute on your back. If that doesn't work, pull the emergency cord. If that doesn't work—well, there will be an ambulance waiting for you on the ground." So the trainee jumped and nothing happened. He pulled the auxiliary cord and still nothing happened. He pulled the emergency cord. Nothing happened. He said, "Of all the luck! I suppose the ambulance won't be there either!" His pessimism was warranted—ours is not. But we ought to at least be realistic. Love was not overflowing in the biblical world, or even in the early Church. For many the ambulance wasn't even there to help bind up their wounds when their lives crashed.

Ingenuine love is easy to discern, for it is limited. It is guarded. It is a love that is conditional. I will love you, if you will love me in return. If you will do this for me, I will do that for you. It often involved bargaining. The one characteristic that is most obvious in ingenuine love in the Church is that it is selfish. Any expression of affection that is only self-serving is "erotic"; eros love, an expression of love for oneself. No matter what you called it, no matter how you dressed it up, no matter what others think it is, if it is motivated by a desire to serve one's own needs, it is ingenuine love.

Genuine love, agape, is expressed in the willingness of a person to lay down one's life for another. There is no greater love: "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13). This is the love that Christ models for us.

I read about an expression of genuine sacrificial love in Hollywood, Florida. A four-year-old child wanted to see the week-old puppies in her friend's backyard next door. Diana, 15, knew her dogs didn't like strangers, but she thought it would be all right if she accompanied Bernice into the yard, just to take a look. The dogs, one a Chow Chow and German Shepherd mix, the other a German Shepherd, attacked Bernice when she tried to pick up one of the three puppies.

As Diana ran for a pole to fend off the dogs, her mother, Sonia, rushed into the yard and jumped on top of Bernice to protect her from the two mad animals. She then scooped up the four-year-old child and ran into a nearby shed in the yard. When the dogs calmed down, she walked out of the yard, and seeing the extent of the wounds to her neighbors' child, she then called the police (Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, May 6, 1991).

Large German Shepherd dogs, growling, angry, ferocious, jealous, attacking a little four year old, and the woman next door throws herself on top of her to protect her. Not even the child's mother. An expression of "no greater love," for here was a willingness to lay down one's life for another. Here is genuine love expressed. Is there doubt in anyone's mind that this expression of love was selfless, not self-serving in any way? She was willing to sacrifice herself for the benefit of another—Christian love. We stand in awe of it.

A less-dramatic expression was seen in Oswald Goldry, who, in 1940, was an American missionary in China. He was arrested and expelled from that country by the Chinese authorities. Upon leaving China, he journeyed to India to arrange for his return home. Passing through a coastal area of India, he encountered a network of Jewish refugees—most of them living in attics, barns, and tents, and some still looking for shelter. The refugees had fled from Nazi persecution in Germany, and they desperately needed help.

The conditions were such that the missionary was powerless to do much. Nevertheless, he felt that he couldn't just leave without doing something. So he cashed the check he had received for passage home and gave it to one of the refugee families! In due course, his passage was again provided by the Missionary Society, and he returned home. On his return, he was interviewed by a reporter from a religion magazine. During the interview, the reporter's questions led to the details of the missionary's expulsion from China and the trip home, including his contacts with the Jewish refugees in India. "Why did you, a Christian missionary, give your passage money to them?" the reporter asked. "After all, it was all you had, and they don't even believe in Jesus!" "You are right," said the missionary, "but I do" (Good News, April, 1991). The relevant matter in genuine love is our motivation. Did we want to better the good of another? Did we act in a way that Jesus would have acted?

Isn't it interesting that Paul had never been to Rome when he wrote them and encouraged them to have genuine love? He had never even received a letter from them asking him any spiritual questions. He had never had an opportunity to solve any of their problems. But, because there were people in that church, he knew people and he knew that people were struggling with the development of genuine love. He assumed correctly that this struggle was a universal human problem for all who desire to be Christians. He was right on target, for now, as well as then, we all wrestle with this challenge.

Our modern culture is so committed to self-service that someone wrote the following humorous prayer: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my Cuisinart to keep. I pray my stocks are on the rise, and that my analyst is wise, that all the wine I sip is white, and that my hot tub's watertight; that racquetball won't get too tough, that all my sushi's fresh enough. I pray my cordless phone still works, that my career won't lose its perks, my microwave won't radiate, my condo won't depreciate. I pray my health club doesn't close, and that my money market grows. If I go broke before I wake, I pray my Volvo they won't take."

Love is the rainbow upon which the eight colors are spread. "Let love be genuine...." Helen Fazio's expression of love for her imprisoned brother, Joseph Cicippio, was classic. Joseph Cicippio was taken hostage in Lebanon by pro-Iranian Shiites and was eventually held for 5½ years. But Helen also had her problems. For 12 years, her ovarian cancer had been in remission, but now she had been informed that it had recurred and she had only two weeks to two months to live.

Fazio, however, defied her prognosis, and with the power that only love can provide, she became the family cheerleader while her family stood vigil during Joseph's captivity. She said she would not die without embracing her younger brother, Joseph, one more time.

On December 5, 1991, Fazio's promise was fulfilled when her brother waded through a throng of TV cameras and reporters to hug his sister inside their brother Thomas's Norristown, Pennsylvania, home. "Oh, Joe! Joe! I love you so!" she said as they embraced for the first time in years. She died five months later (Trenton Times, April 24, 1992).

Helen Fazio's death-defying act of love for her brother is a model of what is in store for us when we perform such an act of genuine love for all our brothers and sisters in need around the world.

I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. John 15:11

Joy

Is our lack of joy due to the fact that we are Christians, or to the fact that we are not Christian enough?" Paul Tillich raised this question in The New Being (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950, p. 42). I wonder what the answer is? We sing, "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee ..." and we call God the "Giver of immortal gladness...." We sing, "All thy works with joy surround Thee ..." and all these works "call us to rejoice in Thee." We sing that God is the "Well spring of the joy of living," and we ask him to "lift us to the joy divine." We sing how "joyful music leads us sunward in the triumph song of life."

Are you really as joyful as that hymn seems to indicate? Are those really your feelings or just the feelings of Henry van Dyke, the author of the words? Maybe he felt that way, but you do not. "Is our lack of joy due to the fact that we are Christians, or to the fact that we are not Christian enough?"

You have heard the story about the worshiper who was shouting and hollering in the last pew of a church at various times during the service. After one gleeful alleluia, the usher rushed up to him and asked, "Is there anything wrong?" "Not at all," he responded, "I've got religion."

"Well," said the usher, "you didn't get it here." Would you be ushered out of church if you were too joyful? Would your cohorts at work usher you out if you were full of joy? Would your classmates at school usher you out if you were joyful on campus? If you were always full of joy, would your spouse wonder what happened to you? If you embraced this fruit of the Spirit, would your personality be so dramatically altered that your everyday acquaintances would think that you have had a serious personality change?

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Excerpted from Ripe Life by C. Thomas Hilton. Copyright © 1993 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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