Fruit of the Spirit: Love — with Steve Ferris

Welcome to the Grace Church Weekly Podcast. We're an international church right

in the heart of Stockholm, Sweden.

Each week, we share a message that's rooted in the faithful teaching of God's

Word and open to the vibrant work of the Holy Spirit among His people.

Here's this week's message.

You lord we thank you for uh your truths we thank you

for sharing with us these wonderful things about the

fruits of the spirit and we just pray now you'll be with steve help him to open

your word for us and just really speak to us what you would have us we pray

lord in your name amen amen thank you james yeah we're going through the fruit

to the spirit how many here would like a little bit more of that.

I'm a person who appreciates uniqueness, novelty, obscure things.

So when I looked at the teaching rota and I was down for love,

I was like, at first, honestly, my first response was, love?

It's like so obvious. It's like the most obvious one.

Because I'm like, here we are. I'm ready.

Actually, I needed this. So for those of you we're thinking love.

That's so basic. We learn about that.

Well, we've already started today. In case you haven't noticed,

God's already been putting in some foretaste of what's coming throughout our time of worship.

And so I believe God has something to share in a.

He's commanded us over and over to be like him, to love like him.

He's identified love as a single characteristic that the world will identify us as his own by.

So it's really important that we get it.

So it is obvious. It is obvious what love is.

So love in the world, throughout the world, I think it's a common idea.

Every society, every culture celebrates it in a different kind of a way.

It's expressed in many ways. Some

of us come from families that are really expressive in how we're loved.

Other of us come from families where if they love you, they have a certain way

of showing, which means it's really hard to see, but they do love you.

It's just not really expressed.

So how do we express it? It's different. It has lots of meaning.

We say, we throw around, in English, we throw around the word love a lot.

And we're limited with our love vocabulary.

In Greek, they have a lot of different types of nuance, like I didn't say,

so you knew exactly what they meant. But we will say, I love tacos,

and then we will say, I love my spouse, and the same word.

And so you can see how the vagueness of the term, it's just,

we can sort of take for granted just how undefined it actually is.

And when it's not defined, well, the world steps in to give us lots of definitions.

But universally, we all agree that love is something we need.

It's something we should be giving to the people around us. And it's something

that we should be protecting.

But what is it? What is it really? Is it feelings of attraction?

Because someone can see someone they don't even know and say,

I'm in love with that person.

I don't even know who they are. I just saw them and I'm in love.

Is that love? Some people would say, yes.

Is it physical attraction? Is it physical expression?

It's an act that we do. That's love. Or is it something that we or other people earn from us?

Love is earned. Love is something you kind of level up to that in someone else's life.

Society thinks so, and they tell us that over and over through the music we

listen to, through the TV shows and the movies we watch, all the stories that

we consume and all the experiences we go through through our different cultures.

The world is telling us what love is.

But in 1 John 4.16, we're told this.

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love.

Whoever lives in love lives in God.

And God in them. So here we're told, we're going to start off with this base level. Love is God.

Yesterday, if you were out in the city, there was a Stockholm Pride parade.

There's lots of t-shirts saying, love is love.

Well, here we go. Love is actually not love. It's not for us to define.

It's actually God has defined it.

He isn't. It says, God is love.

And I think oftentimes we're tempted to define how we want. But God has already said, that's me.

That's my thing. How many of you were the oldest sibling?

Any oldest siblings in here? How many of you remember getting a little bit irritated

when your younger sibling caught with you and was like doing stuff that it was your thing?

And they started to get recognized. Maybe they were taking your clothes.

Maybe they were using your stuff. That's my thing.

Anyone identify you with that? That's never happened. It happened.

If you have experience you have

your thing and someone else he kind of does it you ever

think how do you think God feels how do you think God feels when they say hey

I'm love this is me it originates here and then all people across the whole

world say actually love is this this is love that's what it is and God's thinking

that's not at all what I've said that's not at all I'm going in you're wrong stop saying that,

so let's so today we're going to have a chance to kind of get it squared away for ourselves.

So if our infinite all-power for God is identifying himself as love,

that love has to, and love is actually listed as a fruit of the Holy Spirit of God,

the generative spirit of God living in us, outworking the nature of God in our

lives, then it has to be so much more than what the world's told us.

Because you can't say love is so fickle And so just anyone can define it however they want.

And love is so changing and unreliable and different between times, cultures.

And then say that God is love.

God is so much more. And his love is so much more. So let's just go and listen to this first.

He tells us what it is.

Before I begin to that, it's one of my personal challenges that I've had,

and maybe you'll identify with this as well, is that I've noticed that there's

been a lack in my own love.

I think deep in my heart, I know the expectation that God has for the love in

my life towards the people in my life.

And if I'm honest, I know that the love that's actually outworking in my life

is less than I know what he's required.

Less than what he's actually shown in the example of Christ.

And so, how do I address that lack?

So, if you recognize the challenge, how do you address that lack?

You recognize you are not loving enough. Your love is not strong enough.

I think it's important to note that the the love that we're talking about it

doesn't originate with us it actually it begins with god and because he is the

origin of it and he defines it,

it's it's not feelings it's not culture it's it's not romance not those things

because god's defined it for us and it's and it's much bigger and phil like

you you shared in worship you shared my passages that I'm teaching and we sing

about it. I think God is up to something.

God wants to make sure that nobody misses 1 Corinthians 13 verses 4 through

1 Corinthians 13:4–7

7, which is our key passage. You want to turn the ring now?

1 Corinthians chapter 13 verses 4 through 7.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7

I was laughing. I was like, God, you're really just like, every chance you get,

you're making sure we get this.

Repetition is how I learn, right? All right.

And it says, love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast.

It is not proud. It does not dishonor others.

It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered.

It keeps no reputable wrongs. Love does not delay evil.

But rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts,

always hopes, always preserves.

Now, if you look at this as a list of rules, which I think as if you are following

Christ, this is your list of rules.

This is, if we're going to accurately represent Christ to the world in our time,

these are things that we need to be, they need to be in our life.

But like I said, it doesn't originate from us.

So you don't just decide that, I'm just going to go ahead and just do all that.

We have to rely on the Lord because He is the source.

But it's also a portrait of God. If love of God are the same thing,

and He's telling us here what love is, He's actually telling us this is what He is.

And if you look through Scripture, this is accurate.

He is all these things from the beginning of the record in Scripture all the

way until current time, because see, I'm outworking this.

And this is also what Gina showed us in his lifetime. We saw Jesus do these

things through his life and through the whole process up to his death.

And so we're going to go through each of these things. You can put up that slide if you like Toby.

There's actually 14 things listed here. Now kind of go through them briefly.

I would like you just to just keep, I don't know, the best way you can.

Just evaluate yourself.

Ask the Holy Spirit to shine on things in your heart.

Because it's important that we love well. It's important that our love is getting perfected.

The way you love now is not the way you should be loving in 10 years.

You should be growing and excelling in that.

And your love today should be the same type of love that it was a decade ago.

Our love should be constantly evolving and growing because there's a lot to

grow into if it is what God is.

So first thing is just patience. Love is patient.

The Greek word here that's used, I'm not going to try to pronounce it,

but it's just kind of, it refers to like a long fuse.

Having, not losing your temper so quickly.

Not retaliating when things people are doing wrong to you. It doesn't demand payback.

You've done this to me and I've went after you.

There is patience in this. And part of this patience is actually the ability

to kind of hold back with adversity when you are justified to actually repay more.

So when you're being provoked by somebody or you're being treated unjustly,

and there is a lot of things you could do to actually bring harm back to that

person, and you're choosing to withhold it, this is patience.

So the thing is, love is kind.

Kindness, I don't know how you think about it, but it's really this disposition

we have towards other people.

We're prone to be generous towards them. We're willing to give them a little

bit more than what we think they deserve.

God has done that with us. God has shown us so much kindness.

And kindness is expressed in gentleness, it's in compassion.

And to those people around us, we even find these are unlovable, unlovely.

Annoying people in our life that come in and out, the people who really grow

the grace of God and us just to just rub us the wrong way.

This is where we see the love of God exercising itself as kindness.

It's easy to be kind to people who are kind to you. That's just kind of repaying,

it for or paying the favor.

But Jesus has told us many, many times that we pray for our enemies.

We don't repay evil for evil.

We actually bless those who persecute us.

And that's always something that can be done with the power of God.

It says love doesn't end me.

It's really easy to get jealous when you think that you've achieved more,

you're better at something and you're not getting recognized for it,

and someone else is getting the recognition being.

Your flesh will rise up and you'll feel it or you or there's something deep

in your heart that you desire but you're seeing it pouring out in someone else's life,

your flesh begins to rise up and you feel this jealousness in this movie the

love of God helps to wash that out.

Helps us to not fall into resentment,

and also I think that when we are submitted to the Holy Spirit when we can step

into the ability to actually rejoice for those people which is we're going to do later on,

love's not proud it's not going to be arrogant it's not going to be lifting

itself up making sure that everyone is looking at it so it's a person who's humble,

We can see that Jesus, you know, even as the Son of God,

he didn't think that being acquainted with God was something that he was able to do.

He wasn't able to demand all the rights.

He wasn't able to walk through streets, you know, as a 14-year-old,

hey, do you have any idea who my dad is? You'll treat me differently right now.

Even Jesus, who absolutely could have done that, didn't do it.

So we each remember to make sure that we live our lives as humbly as he did.

Love will just not dishonor others. It's not rude. I think this is sometimes,

the religious spirit or those attitudes that we have, they can make us quite rude, actually.

We can be quite condescending and quite sharp towards other people who we disagree

with, people who we have, want to take issue with.

And there's this issue of honor.

And if you think about the fact that in Christ that we've been seated with Christ,

in heaven, in high places.

We didn't earn that. It wasn't from us. But you think about how God took us

to such a low place and put us in a place of honor that we didn't deserve.

So I think oftentimes we can think that this person deserves that honor.

This person deserves this honor.

And the Spirit of God would actually enable us to honor the people who other

people would say are dishonorable.

We could take the person who nobody wants to spend time with and spend time with it.

We could take the person who nobody wants to invite over and invite them over

and make space for them to honor them in our lives.

Love is not self-seeking. Our society is sort of constantly telling us that

we should be thinking about ourselves.

We're thinking about our best selves. We're thinking about optimizing every part of our life.

But what about the people around us? We don't really, at the expense of my family,

at the expense of my community, is that okay if I don't excel as much as I can

in this light and instead I invest into just these few people? Is that okay?

The world will actually say that's kind of a waste. That's actually,

you should put yourself first so you can help people more.

But once we give ourselves permission to do that I think it's really hard to

turn back so we need to be making sure that we're not seeking ourselves in our own interest.

Love is not easily angered. It's not hot-headed.

It's not ready to jump into an argument. It's not ready to throw down when someone's made it angry.

It's not ready to, you know, posture like it's, you know, you know how it goes.

Some of those things that really are juvenile, they can follow us into adulthood.

You know, that you easily, you see that yourself, you can see yourself anger manifesting in you.

The moment somebody says something, it does something.

Love is not easily angered. Think about how easily you're offended.

Love would actually challenge that. Don't say, we need to have less of this.

And I think that's one thing as we begin to submit our lives to the Lord,

submitting our offenses to the Lord, instead of us going to everybody about

everything we're offended about and asking for people to make it right and apologize.

Instead of saying, God, I'm offended. I'm handing this to you.

I trust you can handle this. Lord, help my heart.

Give me the love right now that I'm not feeling. Help me to act in that way.

And trust that he will manifest his power there.

Love keeps no record of wrongs.

The ability to forgive over and over and over.

Some people, I think it's easy for the world to look at this.

This is letting someone just take advantage of you. There's a lot of reasons

why you shouldn't do that.

But Jesus has given us clear instructions over and over to forgive 70 times 70.

I mean, like, if that's one person in your life, how long does it take to forgive that many times?

And it's one of those things that we have to be remembering.

Think about, are there people in your life who you can remember a list of offenses

that happened years ago?

You've got them all named and numbered.

And when you're with them and they say and they're doing something, the file comes out.

You're like, one more for you.

And then all of a sudden, you recognize that anger starts to build up,

whatever it is, because you've kept a record of wrongs.

And you've just added another one on top of it. And you can feel the emotional

weight of having to carry that because you're thinking that you are the one

that has to bring justice to the situation.

And actually, that's not our place. God is a much better, just judge than we are.

And He's much more compassionate than we are. And actually, the people in our

lives, they don't really need all of our judgment.

They need a lot more of our compassion. They need truth, of course.

They need to be truth, but it's delivered in love.

And ultimately, the judgment and kind of setting the score, we did that to God.

And then love doesn't delay in evil, and our joy is in truth.

Love doesn't find joy in the downfall of another person.

It doesn't find joy in injustice, somebody's cheating, and we find that really clever or great.

We can mourn over those things. We should be broken about those things.

We should be celebrating what's right in the world.

Things that align with truth.

And we need to be aligning with truth. even when

it hurts and there's a cost sometimes to aligning

with the truth of God and making sure that you're standing on the things that

God has called you to stand for your time because God is not pleased by other

people's failure He's not pleased by compromises and actually when we can bring

the truth and love we are a corrective kind of force of God,

where we're at to bring us to submit it there is a right way and a wrong way

to submit, you know, the standard of the Lord to people who don't know it.

And a lot of times that's just how we live our lives.

Love protects. It's going to shield other people's reputations when they mess up.

We're not looking to tear them down in the moment because there's some form of weakness.

There's people around us that we see that they're vulnerable. We're there to protect.

We're not there to kind of start gossiping and start making a situation worse

for them. We come in to repair.

We're there to help. You know, someone's made a mistake.

We don't need to stand there and point at it and let them know,

like, look at what you've done. But we can actually step in.

Can i help can i help with this i see you see there's a mess here please there's

nothing i can do we can protect that capacity and love trusts chooses to believe

other people it's not always suspicious i think it's really easy to get cynical

and suspicious of just everything,

and sometimes that is that's wise with certain situations and certain people

like you know it's good to have your guard on me.

I mean, there's some wisdom there. But if it's your default response to a lot

of different circumstances, you're not trusting enough.

And the love of God will help you do that.

Love always hopes. It looks for God's redemptive ending.

So whatever's happening, if it looks hopeless, we'll have an eye that's looking

towards God, how does your love come and redeem what's happened here?

And then we're looking, when we have that kind of hopeful outlook we can preserve. We can persevere.

Love perseveres or refuses to quit.

So this kind of love is not something that we actually fall into.

This is something that we're actually filled up with through the Holy Spirit.

The love of God is different.

It allows us to love in circumstances where human love cannot go.

And so I want to spend more attention to how weak our love actually is we see

all the time in our world love that is failing,

love that is changing love that is betraying love that is not lasting,

and if we're honest our love runs out too it doesn't take many circumstances

within your day for all your love to be to sadden out of you and then you find

that your response is unloving you find that,

you're angry you're cynical it's just all coming out because your love has just been,

assaulted your love has just been it's at it's end that's a human experience

but for the spirit within me that's just a higher love.

So if God is a source of all love, and love comes from God, that is important

for us to remember that in our life, that God's love was first. God's love is first.

Before you encounter the thing you're going to encounter that's going to require

that God's love of you, you can already have decided that God's will is going

to, sorry, that God's love is going to govern your behavior.

So God's love exists for you before you get into the situation that requires

it. And I think this is something to think about.

We're not responding to everything that comes at us just out of our own.

The decision has been made that we're going to love.

Instead of loving and being reactive and having it be conditional,

just what most people do, God shows us there's a love that is initiating.

It's a love that is a spot of origin. I'm not reacting to you in love.

Before we got here, I decided to be loving. I decided that what we need for

the situation, the origin of it is God's love.

I've entered into this situation filled with it, filled with faith for it.

Filled with the expectation that when it comes time to actually put God's love

on, to express it, that it's already there. It's something that I've decided beforehand.

And if you think about what God has done for us, to see.

Ephesians 1.4 says, Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us

in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.

So even before you were born, before you did anything, God had already chosen

that His love was going to be for you.

And so what the love of God does when it's a fruit of the Spirit in our life,

what that does is that love pre-exists before the other things come in.

And so we can respond and we can behave in a way that's inhuman.

It is divine. because it's the divine love of God that we've determined to walk

in and to respond to things in life and that brings us into a place where we

can access more of that power.

In James 1.5, he talks about, hey, you lack wisdom because if you lack wisdom,

you should just ask for it.

And I think we can apply the same

principle to love. If you recognize you lack love, you can ask for it.

It's a good gift that he wants to give to you.

And it's a natural thing that he wants to outwork in your life.

So I guess how do we imply this truth is you're not trying harder to love.

You're determining to love through the power of God. And you're praying beforehand.

And you're trying to spend as much time as you can with the Lord so you can

receive as much of his love for you as you can. because you will not give others

what you haven't received yourself.

And so you need to make sure that you are getting time to kind of fill up your will.

Allow the Lord to fill that up. You need to be investing into spiritual disciplines

that allow you to be reminded of God's love for you,

staying in His Word, staying rooted in the gospel of Jesus, so you can never

forget the love that He's expressed for you.

So when times that are challenging come You can respond appropriately to it.

So what happens when you're tired and there's someone who needs you?

It's a common thing. People need us at the worst time.

So here's a scenario. You just get home from work. You're exhausted.

A friend calls you. There's a crisis.

Or there's a child that wants your attention. Or your spouse is,

you know, letting you know all the things you need to do when your mind is not ready for it.

So there's a human instinct where you're going to say, I have nothing left to give. Leave me alone.

Another time, please.

And then there's also the spirit-led response. When God's working through us,

where we can say, Lord, I'm determined to love.

Fill me with your love right now so I can do this thing. so I can manifest your

love to this person in this situation right now.

So instead of forcing kindness, you can ask God for supernatural strength to

serve, to listen, to comfort the person because he is the source of that.

Or what about when you feel offended or rejected?

What if it's a what if it's it's a it's a co-worker who

disrespects you or a friend who ignores you

after you keep reaching out time after time

after time or someone's read a rumor about you it's like really hurtful and

people are coming back to you from other places like is this true what do you

do then well the human instinct is well you know that person has actually caused

an offense and they don't deserve my love.

They have some things to fix before they can have...

Anything kind from me. A spirit-led choice we can make with the power of God

is to say, Jesus, you loved me before I even responded to you.

And I'm choosing to love first in the situation.

There may be a time to bring correction, injustice, or I said injustice, not injustice.

There may be a time to bring that. But first, God, I'm going to bring love.

And through that, God can actually use you to speak truth and love because you're

determined to walk in love first.

And so in doing that, you're not excusing the wrong. You're not excusing the sin that was done to you.

You're just refusing to retaliate, which I think the enemy is counting on.

The enemy knows that he can use someone to come against you and to hurt you.

If he knows humanity well, and he does, he knows that, well,

that'll cause something to come up out of you, and that you retaliate,

and then I give both of you.

So instead, we can choose to bless those who curse us.

And that's all from the power of God.

The Bible teacher and writer, Abby Wedgworth, she summed it up so well.

She said, one thing you should know about love, that it's not actually a feeling at all.

More often than not, love is a choice we make or an action we take despite our feelings.

It's something we simply cannot conjure up within ourselves because love comes from God.

And the good news, though, the love may feel completely unnatural.

You can hardly fall into it. God's word tells us that it leads to joy Jesus

issues a command to his followers To love one another So your joy may be full.

Somehow, sacrificially prioritizing others Leads to fullness of joy,

So, the love that you need To fulfill your purpose on this earth As an image

bearer of God and the love that you need to please Him it doesn't come from within you,

He's made a demand of it He's actually supplied it through His Holy Spirit and

God comes and He gives it to you through His Holy Spirit,

And so Jesus, we can see through the scripture, he is the face of that love.

If you begin to read and study the ways of Jesus, you see this love acted out over and over again.

And the Holy Spirit that comes in and takes residence in us, it grows that love in us.

And even when this love can feel painful, it can feel like a painful sacrifice

to act in this way, to act in God's love when our flesh is telling us to act another way.

When we really believe we are owed something different.

We really believe the best force of action for me, the thing that's going to

profit me most, is another action.

It's usually self-centered. It's usually something that our flesh wants us to do.

Refusing to do that is painful.

There will be many, many times, But there's no joy, actually,

in choosing to not do that at first.

But through the obedience of submitting to the Lord, there's joy that comes

after that because He blesses obedience.

We can feel that in our heart. We can see it in our life. And joy can grow. Real joy.

And that's the deception that we can fall into. We're always seeking after our

own interests because the world has told us this is what we should do.

But the moment we began to focus our life and our intention on God first and

others second and myself last.

Life is so full of rewarding joy.

It doesn't make sense. The Bible calls it joy unspeakable.

When you think about the Lord, there's a level of joy. The world can't quite define it.

They can't quite understand it because it doesn't logically make sense.

That you would put yourself last and that you are the most fulfilled.

But we can see in the person of

Jesus that this is exactly the pattern of living that we are called to do.

So, there's more of this love available to you and I that we've ever thought about.

If God is so vast, so is His love. And how much of that love do you really believe

you've actually encountered?

How much of that love do you really believe you've actually allowed Him to work through you?

I think if we're all honest, it's just been a little.

No matter how long we walk through the Lord, no matter how faithful or unfaithful

we've been, There's so much more of his love to learn and to exercise.

What an amazing story that'll be for the people in our life to see us outworking

his love, greater than your levels.

So we're going to take communion in this moment. And so we've been talking about what love is.

With we can remember now at the cross,

Jesus he didn't just describe what love was for us in his life he actually demonstrated it there for us,

when we were turning to the cross see the truest expression of God's love right

there and today we're going to remember his love through communion,

we hope that this sermon has encouraged you if you'd like to learn more about

us visit us online at gracechurch.se thanks for listening.