Ij

Fruit of the Spirit #1 Love in the Garden

by Clancy Nixon (much from Renny Scott)

January 7, 2007

Church of the Holy Spirit

Broadlands, Virginia

www.HolySpiritAnglican.org

Paul Zahl writes in this month's magazine of Trinity School for Ministry, Seed

and Harvest, that we evangelicals claim that our highest values are love and forgiveness.

After all, at the center of evangelical theology is the belief that we are saved by grace

alone through faith alone, and that that grace is God's unmerited favor toward us, his

outrageous love and forgiveness that we do not deserve. And yet, Zahl says, if you look

at how the public perceives us, most people do not see us as we would like to be seen

they do not see us as exemplars of love and forgiveness. If you want an example, check

out the hatchet job that the New York Times did on our movement in their article on

Christmas Day. Part of the problem is agenda driven journalism and, and part of the

problem is of our own making many of us are not living up to our professed highest

values, and we can reflexively respond legalistically rather than lovingly.

At Church of the Holy Spirit, our mission statement begins by saying "We love

Jesus. We love our neighbors." That is a restatement of the Great Commandment, and

love is at the center of it. We say that love defines who we are in our core identity. I

believe that in 2007, we need to learn better some practical ways how we can really love

one another. This is a year to build relationships in our community, to go deper in

discipleship with one another, to love one another in such a way that CHS becomes a

compelling community of love and forgiveness. I want to bridge the gap between the

promises of God about loving relationships in the body of Christ, and the provision of

God in the relationships that we actually experience. I'd like for our community to get to

the place that our reflexive response to negative circumstances in our life is love and

forgiveness. How about you? Would you like that to be your reflexive response? Jesus

said that the world would know we are Christians by our love. When we are in

conversation at the Costco or Safeway, and you mention that you attend Church of the

Holy Spirit, I'd like to hear people say about us: "Oh! How they love one another at that

church!" Amen?

God wants to build something of His life into your life, so that you reflect more

consistently His life in your day to day living. The character of Christ is what God wants

to grow in your life and mine. Sounds good, but you may ask, "How does that happen?"

The Bible says, "We love because he first loved us." It all starts with God's love for us.

That must be foundational. That is what Christmas and Epiphany are all about God sent

Jesus to us because he loves us. And because He loves us; because He has given us a

new life, because we are born again, we can love others.

Renny Scott taught 30 years ago that we become like Christ through the "Garden

Principle." I have used much of his material for this message. This is what he means by

the Garden Principle: God always gives us his best. Let's say that together: God always

gives us his best. That principle is founded on 3 verses in Romans 8:28, 29 and 32. Turn

with me to Romans 8, found on page 1119 of your blue pew Bibles. Verse 32 says, "God

did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all how will he not also, along with

him, graciously give us all things?" That is to say, if God the Father didn't even withhold

the life of his only son because of his love for you, is there anything that he would

withhold from you to accomplish his best purposes in your life? To ask the question is to

answer it. In verse 28 and 29a, Paul says, "We know that in all things God works for the

good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those

he foreknew he also predestined to become conformed to the likeness of his son...."

What can that mean? Since we often experience life as coming at us as out of a

double barred shotgun, it certainly does not appear to you and me on the face of it that

everything that happens to us is good! Since it does not appear that way, is the Garden

Principle about God always giving us his best some kind of Pollyanna theology that lacks

realism? Is it a type of positive thinking, redefinition of terms, like declaring victory even

when you lose? No, it isn't. Let's look at what God means by always working for our

good here, as opposed to what we think is good for us. We think it's good for us to have

no conflict, no trials, no sickness, no problems in life. In the Bible, Romans 8 verse 28

and 29, what is good for us is defined not by how we feel about it, but rather, by that

which conforms us into the likeness of Christ. God is at work in the circumstances, good

and bad, that come to us in this life in such a way as to make us look like Jesus. You say,

"Why is that so good?" Here is why. When we begin to look like Jesus at the core of our

being, when we reflexively respond like Jesus did, we become free to become all that

God intends for us to be.

What does the kind of love that Jesus lived look like? It looks like Galatians 5:22

and 23, found on page 1155. Paul says "For the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace,

patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." If ever there is a

portrait of the character of Christ in scripture, here it is. If you were to trace back in your

life the source of every one of your problems, every one of your difficulties, every one of

your heartaches, you would find that each one stems from a lack of one of those qualities

of the life of Christ. Either we lack them, or someone else lacked them and sinned

against us. A lack of love. A lack of joy. A lack of peace. A lack of patience. A lack of

kindness. A lack of goodness. A lack of faithfulness. A lack of gentleness. A lack of

self control. When we act in ways that fall short of the way Jesus lived, and that is every

day, troubles come to our life and experience. The garden principle is that God always

gives us his best. That is, he always arranges the circumstances of our life to create

something of a characteristic of Jesus, a fruit of the Spirit, in our life.

Turn with me to Isaiah 61:11, page 740 " For as the earth springs forth its

shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause

righteousness and praise to come forth before all the nations." When God begins to deal

with a man, he puts him in a garden. When he begins to fashion us, he places us in a

garden. It started with the Garden of Eden. Each one of the fruit of the spirit is grown in

a garden, and that garden is an emotional circumstance in your life. Renny says that God

arranges the emotional circumstances of your life so that it becomes a garden in which he

cultivates the fruit of his Holy Spirit. Now there can be no fruit without a seed. In the

Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13, Jesus says the seed is the word of God. Look at

verse 11 in Isaiah 61. "As the garden causes a seed to spring up...." As the word of God

becomes operative in an emotional circumstance in your life, God can take that seed and

grow it into the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 13 ends this way. "These three abide: faith, hope and love. The

greatest of these is love." What do we mean when we talk about love? We need to be

careful to define our terms. A Marxist philosopher named Herbert Marcuse was popular

when I was in college. You don't hear much about Marcuse anymore, but you do hear

very similar ideas from other postmodern thinkers like Derrida and Foucault. Marcuse

articulated a revolutionary strategy called the "trans-valuation of values." What that

means is that he gave words different meanings than they traditionally held. He knew that

if he could gut language of its traditional content, then he could cause a communication

breakdown in the nation, in the home, in the colleges, which could sow seeds of

discontent from which one could foment revolution. In this, he and his disciples have

been quite successful. We live in a time when words no longer have the meanings that

they have traditionally had so that when we read something is the scripture, like that

Paul's statement in Romans 13:10 that "love is the fulfillment of the law," some of you

might think of something different than what scripture intends to convey. When we

come to a Scripture text about love, we unconsciously bring our own experiences and our

own understandings that we get from the culture about what love is in seminary we

called that isogesis, and that is a no-no. What we want to do is to exegete the text, not

isogete it and exegesis is where we let the text speak for itself, and we let the meaning it

has influence us rather than the other way round. So we need to define what the Bible

says love is. We could be asking God to grow something in our lives that He has no

intention of growing - that may not be a fruit of the spirit at all, but may be a "weed

variety" of love. It may be a kind of love that is the fruit of human nature rather than the

fruit of the Holy Spirit.

So we need to clarify what God is talking about in the word of God, we need to

look closely at the Biblical language. There are four classical Greek words that we

translate for the one English word, love: Eros, Sturge, Fileo, and Agape. C.S. Lewis

writes about this in his book The Four Loves. The first word of the four words is Eros.

Eros does not mean lust. When a lustful man says that he wants a woman, he does not

realize that is precisely what he does not want. He does not want her, he wants it. He

wants the sensory pleasure for which the woman is the necessary apparatus. You can tell

how much he cares by how he treats her 5 minutes after he gets what he wants. The

classic biblical illustration here is of Amnon and Tamar in Second Samuel chapter 13.

Amnon is a son of King David, and he had a burning desire to have sexual relations with

his half-sister Tamar. When she won't consent, he rapes her, and then he immediately

discards her. It says that the hate with which he hated her after he had his way with her

was greater than the love with which he loved her before. Much like a man, after he

smokes a cigarette, throws away the pack when he is done. That is not Eros, and that is

not love. Many people think that is what love is today and it has become rampant in our

culture. Eros is not only a man's love for a woman, or a woman's for a man, but it is his

love for a particular woman, his wife, or a particular man, her husband. Eros is found at

the heart of a marriage.

The second kind of love, the Greek word is called Sturge. It is about family

affection: the love that a parent has for a child or a child for a parent or a sister has for a

sister. It is limited by family boundaries. It is a special, family kind of love. There are

two types of love, "need-love" and "gift-love." The kind of love that a baby has for a

mother is need-love. The baby needs his mother's milk. That is also how our love is for

God, because we are unfulfilled and incomplete, until we find our fulfillment in Jesus

Christ. The kind of love that a mother has for a child is gift-love. A mother needs to love.

If she does not give birth when pregnant, she can die. If she doesn't give suck, she'll

suffer. The kind of love God has for us is gift-love. God's love for us is a free gift, just

like his salvation.

The third Greek word defining love is called Fileo, from which we get our word

philanthropy, is friendship love, or brotherly love. Jesus does say in the gospel of John

that now he calls us friends. But that is the least frequent analogy God uses. More often,

God's love for us is likened to Eros, the love of the bridegroom for the bride. The church

is the bride of Christ. It is instinctive for the bride to love the bridegroom, and for the

bridegroom to love the bride. At least on the wedding day! Our God uses the words

Eros and Sturge to describe his love for us to let us know how natural it is for him to love

us. God loves us unconditionally. As the love of a mother for her baby is instinctive and

natural, as a father's love for his child is natural, so God's love for us is instinctive and

natural. That is who I am, God says.

The forth Greek word for love, the one that best describes the kind of love God

has for us, is Agape. Agape is to will the highest good for someone, without regard to the

cost to you personally. It is unconditional love. It is without regard to the limits of family

or romance. That is the kind of love that God has for you. And it is the kind of love that

we are called to have for one another. "A new commandment I give to you," said Jesus:

"to love one another as I have loved you." That's Agape love, selfless, self-giving love.

That is obviously not a natural kind of love. It is not instinctive or natural to any one of

us. It's not a fruit of human nature. It is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.

You can't control your feelings. They are all over the place. One morning you

feel great; the next morning your feel miserable. If love were feelings, God could not

have commanded you to love one another. That would have been impossible to fulfill.

But love is a verb, not a feeling. Love is something you do. Turn with me to First John,

chapter 3, verse 16. "By this we know love- (Agape) -that he laid down his life for us,

and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."

Did you ever stop to think that fruit is visible; fruit is tangible? When I come

home and I'm discouraged, it's one thing for me to know that God loves me. It's another

thing to experience Ginger coming to me, giving me a hug, comforting me, - now that's

God's love with skin on. You see the fruit of the spirit must be visible; it must be

tangible and touchable. Love is a verb. It's something you do. It relates to your will.

Look at verse 18 of First John 3: "Little children. Let us not love in word or speech, but

in deed and truth." God is more interested in our deeds than in our words. Love means

not just intending the highest good for someone, but actually acting so as to put their

highest good above other considerations.

We cannot bear fruit apart from Jesus Christ. It does not come naturally to any

one of us. In John 3, Jesus says, "what is born of the flesh is flesh, but what is born of the

spirit is spirit." You and I can reproduce human life, but only God can reproduce godly

life. Our whole identity in Christ comes from God's love for us. God's love does not

demand a change in us. His love for us so overwhelms us that it produces a change in us.

God's love changed me. We'll look more at how God produces that change next week.

Prayer.