It's time now for the chapel hour, coming to you from the campus of Bob Jones University. Our speaker is Dr. Sid Cates, principal of Bob Jones Academy. The title of his message is, Faith, a Fruit of the Spirit. The text is from Galatians chapter 5, verses 22 and 23. Alright, if you would please turn to Galatians chapter 5, Galatians chapter 5. By the way, has anybody heard of Dicey Langston? Anybody heard of Dicey Langston? L-A-N-G-S-T-O-N. Became quite interested in this and I'm going to present it in a government meeting tomorrow night about putting up a monument for her. But in 1975, in National Geographic, they mentioned several ladies. It was in October 1975, they mentioned several ladies that were heroes or heroines of the Revolutionary War. They mentioned Martha Washington and what she had done. Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, and what she had done. Molly Pitcher, Phyllis Wheatley, a black lady, and what she had done. a lady by the name of Hart over in Georgia, and what she had done, Betsy Ross, and then they mentioned Dicey Langston. Interestingly enough, all those ladies, with the exception of Dicey Langston, have some kind of monument, park, Lake Hartwell, Hart County, for instance, named for these ladies except for Dicey Langston. Dicey Langston saved the town of Traveler's Rest by walking all night long to tell that the Bloody Scouts, a group that was to rape and pillage and burn towns, was staying in her father's house five miles from Traveler's Rest. She overheard their conversation, walked all night, went through a swollen stream, the Ennery River, and warned them, and the town was saved. And there's a book about it called The Patriot War Petticoats. Anyway, nobody. I went Saturday, I went through Traveler's Rest, went to Attic Sale, went to other places, went to Ford Place. Who is Dicey Langston? Nobody knew who Dicey Langston was. It's interesting that if you forget your past, sometimes you have problems with your future. You might want to look her up on the internet. She's a quite interesting lady who grew up in the area. She married a Springfield in downtown cemetery. She's named after her family, the Springfield Cemetery. But I'm putting together a PowerPoint presentation to bring tomorrow night to a county council meeting about we need to put up a monument to this lady. Her grave, I took pictures of her grave, went out to her grave site. On Saturday, it's the middle of a horse pasture. Trees are growing up through it. The monuments are knocked down and everything, but I think we need to do something about that. Anyway, that doesn't have anything to do with what I want to speak to you about today, but I just wonder if anybody knew who Dicey Langston was. Laodicea Langston is actually her name. They called her Dicey. Chapter 5 of the book of Galatians. Let me share with you some thoughts. that I shared with the Academy over a period, two years ago, I took the fruits of the Spirit, or the fruit of the Spirit, there are nine of them, and we took and we looked at each one of them for an entire month. For instance, Galatians chapter 5 verse 22, but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentlest, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. Against such there is no law." And I took each one of those, and we took one a month. I preached on it in chapel, and then some of the teachers would use it in their classes, and we'd talk about love. What is love? Joy, peace, and so forth. And as one of those fruit of the Spirit that really impressed me, I want to speak to you this morning, and it's about the fruit of the Spirit of faith. Well, let's take a look at the verse totally to begin with as far as some thoughts about the fruit of the Spirit. First of all, some important things to understand about the fruit of the Spirit. If you think about the most godly person you know, the most godly person you know, they evidence the fruit of the Spirit. They do. Even though on the inside, the Bible is very clear and tells that we have a wicked heart on the inside. We have a deceitful heart. I liken it to a peach. If you look at a peach, you will see that the peach on the inside of it has a pit. Nobody likes the pit. It's sharp. It's not the kind of thing that you're going to eat. And yet it's on the inside of every peach. But when you talk about the characteristics of the peach, you talk about the lusciousness of it, the sweetness of it, the softness of it, maybe the smell of it, the furry nature of it. You do not say anything about the pit that's on the inside. And yet on the inside of every peach there is a pit. On the inside of every one of us there's a pit. And yet what you see, the peach itself, the pit is surrounded by fibers, and from this fiber comes the fruit of the peach. And so we talk about the peach, we talk about the lusciousness of the peach. It's the same thing with the most godly person you know. On the inside, they have a heart that's wicked. And yet, we see the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, longsuffering emanating not from them, not from their heart, but from the Holy Spirit which is on the inside. The Holy Spirit produces the fruit of the peach, the fruit of the Spirit in this particular case. So, when you see that it's not the true person, it is the Holy Spirit that's working through them. And one of the things that we note about that is that, just like the peach, if the peach has taken away from its sustenance, you pull it off the tree, it no longer feeds itself, or it's attacked by bacteria, it begins to rot and fall away. And what you see lastly is the true pit. And it's the same thing with us. If we pull ourselves away from the sustenance of the Word of God and do not feed the Holy Spirit, the fire of the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit cannot produce that fruit, love, joy, peace, longsuffering, and so forth. And so we quench the fire of the Holy Spirit and that fruit has gone away. And that's why when you see folk who have lost the fruit of the Spirit, haven't lost their salvation, but the Spirit is no longer producing the fruit, the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, and longsuffering. A couple of things, as I went through with the academy students who went through each one of those, but today, as I said, I want to speak to you particularly about the fruit of faith. And by the way, he talks about the fruit of the Spirit. It is not the fruits of the Spirit. It is all one, no more than if we talk about the skin of the peach or the fur of the peach. or the liquid that's in the peach. It's all the fruit of the peach. You do not have a peach if you take away the skin. You do not have a peach if you take away the meat inside the peach. All of it together makes for the fruit of the peach. It's the same thing. All of it together makes for the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes you see it. I talked to someone not too long ago. She was waiting at our table. One of the things I always say to someone who's waiting at the table, I say, if you died right now, you know you go to heaven. Yes, sir, I have. And how do you know? Always ask, follow up with, how do you know? I was talking to a girl who was fitting me with glasses the other day. She said, I know because I was saved before I was ever born. My parents' dedication as a Catholic dedicated me. But this girl at the restaurant down here at Denny's, she said this, she says, I received the gift of the Holy Spirit. And I said, what do you mean you received the gift of the Holy Spirit? I said, I have two. When I was born again, I received the Holy Spirit. She said, well, I'm talking about I've spoken in tons. And that is an evidence to her of the Holy Spirit being on the inside. But in reality, the evidence of the Holy Spirit being on the inside is the fact that we have love, joy, peace, and long-suffering. One of the evidences there. To know that we have the Holy Spirit is those people, and the Holy Spirit is alive and well, and obviously we can't lose Him, but hasn't been quenched. It produces love, joy, peace, and long-suffering. So it's one of the evidences. A couple of thoughts I wanted to mention to you this morning, if I could, in the area as far as faith is concerned, one of the fruit of the Spirit. First of all, the Bible is very clear in that it is impossible to please God without faith. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. It's found in the 11th chapter of Hebrews there. And we have to ask ourselves, in essence, this, what he's saying here, it is impossible to please, entirely please God unless we have faith. Now, if faith comes by the Holy Spirit, and we'll see a little bit later, it comes also by hearing and by the Word of God, then it's impossible to please Him unless we have faith. We hear of those who walk by faith. We hear of the disciples that ask the Lord to give them more faith. So it is impossible to totally please God unless we have faith. Okay, if that's true, then what exactly is faith? And this was hard for me because I thought I knew what faith was all about. What is faith? And if you think about it, the other fruit of the Spirit, love. What is love? Can anybody truly define what love is? What is joy? The other day, Anna Beth Warren, she had gotten engaged and she was so tickled that she wanted to show me her ring and everything, so she walked around just like this all day. And she was talking about, I said, is your daddy thrilled with this thing? The reason I say that is because this guy comes down from Pennsylvania, only knows my daughter for three years, that's all, just three years, and then she up and goes away with him, marries him. I bought all her hoes for all these years. You've been at Bob Jones since the seventh grade and wore hoes. I fixed her teeth. I did all the things. He does nothing and takes her away from me. So I asked her, I said, is your daddy okay with this? She says, yeah. I said, well, do you love him? So, yes, of course I love him. And I paused for a moment. I said, you know, when I got married, I'm not sure that I really loved my wife, even though we dated for 11 years. I'm not sure that I really loved my wife." And she was kind of shocked when I said that. I said, in comparison today, I mean, the fact that she is my right arm, that I am part of her right arm, the fact that now I know, I feel like I know what love is today, but I'm not sure at the time I really knew. Oh, I could probably come up with some kind of definition, but now I truly know what love is because I've experienced it. Do we really know what joy is? Do we really know what the peace of God is all about until we've experienced it? It was so interesting in chapter 11, he tried to define what faith is all about. In Hebrews 11, he tried to find it by saying this, he said, "...faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Well, that is totally unclear. I mean, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. And if you look at it carefully, what it says is that faith is the substance of things that we hope for or long for. It is the elements, the foundation, the building blocks. What is it I hope for? Faith gives it to me. One thing I hope for is eternal life. I know that I have eternal life because of faith. And yet it's hard for me to define it. But I know that it's the element, it's the producer, it's the substance of what I long for, and that is eternal life. Faith gives me eternal life. Faith also gives me other things I hope for. I would like to be a nice guy, full of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, and so forth. I would like those things. I hope for those things. Faith gives me those things as well. So faith is the foundation, the elements, the producer, the substance of things that I hope for. And then it goes on to say, but it's the evidence about things that are not seen or are things that are not understood, things that are mysteries to us. It's evidenced by that. That's a hard one for me to understand as well. Except if you think, you go a little bit further in that verse there, he tries to explain. He said that, through faith we understand the world's refrained by the Word of God so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. Now, being a chemist, I think there are a lot of things that we know about materials on this earth that we do not know how they're constructed when we go down to the atomic level. Did you ever stop to think about this? This is a question I ask my majors in chemistry. I asked my chemistry teacher at the University of North Carolina. We were talking about the nucleus. The nucleus is never seen, but yet makes up everything. The nucleus, the inside of the atom. You know, the nucleus is made up of neutral charges and positive charges. And on the outside, we have the negative charges, the electrons, sort of like the planets going around the sun, the sun being the nucleus. Now, we know that like charges repel one another, thus we have an atomic explosion. When the positive charges within the nucleus just disintegrate, repel against one another, we have what's called atomic explosion. Well, why is it that the nucleus, does not explode. I mean, when you've got all these positive charges very tightly packed together, why do they not repel one another, push away from one another? You've seen the magnets, you know, you put the north and north together, it pushes away. You have to put the south and the north together in order for them to come together. Well, these positive charges tightly packed in uranium, there's 235 of them tightly packed. Why do they not repel? Why do they not blow apart? And I remember my professor saying, there's a quasi-paste in there that holds them together. So, you want to ask the question, what is in the quasi-paste? What makes up the quasi-paste? Well, in reality, God holds all these. By Him, all things consist. We believe that by faith, because we don't really know. So, faith not only takes and is a substance of things we hope for, eternal life, to be full of love, joy, peace, and love for it, but He actually holds everything together. And yet, it's still not clear what faith is. In chapter 11 of Hebrew, he gives us fifteen illustrations trying to show us through an illustration exactly what faith is. He talks about Enoch and Abel and Noah and Abraham and Isaac and so forth. Joseph, he goes right through that, giving example after example after example so that we can understand what faith is. Just as I did not understand what love is, he is trying to help us to understand what faith is. But if we never understand exactly all the elements of faith, we know what it produces. It gives us eternal life. There are other things that it produces, and of course, the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, and longsuffering. But where does it come from? And how do we get it? I'm not sure exactly all it is, but I know this. The Bible's very clear in Romans chapter 10, verse 17, "'So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.' So then I know that faith comes from the fact that I hear and read the word of God." Now, it goes back to what I was saying about the peach a while ago. You take the peach off the tree and it no longer draws sustenance. And after a while, it begins to die. It is attacked from the outside by bacteria. And suddenly it falls away and the pit is left. And we don't see the fruit of the peach, we see all the pit. And it's the same thing with our lives. The fruit of the Spirit. We're fed. As long as we have our roots into the Word of God, Then the Holy Spirit is fed. The fire and the gasoline is poured upon the Holy Spirit and he's burning, producing the fruit of the Spirit in our lives. But the moment that we pull out of the root, no longer, no longer fuel is there. And when the fuel goes, then the Holy Spirit becomes quenched over a period of time. And then, of course, the bacteria that attacks the peach, we have sin from the outside that begins to attach. And before long, the fruit of the Spirit has gone away. And faith is one of those areas. We begin to doubt certain things, doubt our salvation and so forth. There are many things the Holy Spirit does in our life, but one of the things He definitely does is produce the fruit of the Spirit of which one of those happens to be faith. I don't know how to define faith. I know what it produces. I know where it comes from. It comes from the Holy Spirit. And I know how to feed the Holy Spirit. It's through the Word of God. I know that. And I know that as long as I'm in the Word of God, as long as I keep the sin confessed, that I can maintain the fruit of the Spirit in my life. I'll never lose my salvation, but I can lose the fruit of the Spirit in my life when the Holy Spirit becomes quenched. But again, I am totally unsure what faith is all about. Except I want to share an illustration with you that probably better than anything else evidences what faith is all about. Several years ago, it was actually about 30-some years ago, I was principal of a school in Charlotte, Northside, and I was asked to preach at an education conference at a church in Lancaster, South Carolina, about 50 miles south of Charlotte. And I went down there to preach, and I preached that morning, and they had a dinner or luncheon afterwards. And I sat across the table from a lady that was probably in about her 60s, maybe late 60s, perhaps 70s. And she told me a story that was perhaps one of the most interesting stories I've ever heard. As a matter of fact, so interesting that every time I go down into this area, I stop by the place where this event took place. She told me how that one night, it's actually on May the 17th, 1923, they were having a play at a school. Now, this school was located in a town or a postal code. It was called Charlotte Township or Charlotte Thompson Township. It's right outside of Camden, about five miles outside of Camden, right along I-20. As a matter of fact, it's exit 101 along I-20. It's about a half a mile off Exit 101 there on I-20 going out of Columbia, just south of Camden. She said she was a small girl, and that night they had had graduation that morning, May the 17th, 1923. And that night, as was the tradition, they were going to have a play. The seniors were going to perform a play called Topsy-Turvy. Mostly seniors were involved in the play. And because there was no radio, there was no electricity, this was a big deal in the community for everybody to go to this particular play that night. It also was special because this was the last night they were going to use this school, which was called the Cleveland School, named after when it was built in Grover, Cleveland. And so they all went into this building. Now, the building was a two-story building, 20 feet wide and 40 feet long. As you went in the mezzanine area or the lobby area, which was just a little one-story attachment that they had to the school building itself, and they have a model replica there just off the interstate to see. As you walked in to the right was the girls' cloakroom, and to the left was the boys' cloakroom. As you walked through the lobby itself, there were two classrooms, one for the lower grades, One for the upper grades. They were all both heated by wooden stoves. No lights. Water was by a pump by a well on the outside. In order to get to the auditorium, which is upstairs, which is 20 by 40, you had to go into the boys' cloakroom. You had to push a door open. You went up steps. They were 30 inches wide. You turned left and you went up to the auditorium at the top. 300 people crowded into that auditorium. Remember, 20 by 40, 300 people crowded into that auditorium. One of these was that lady, the little girl. At the front, there was a stage. She went down among the others and sat on the floor while the adults sat in the chairs in the back there. The stage was at the front. It was about eight feet deep. On both sides was a little room. One of the rooms was a music room with a piano. The other room was a dressing room. It had a Muslim sheet that was hanging in the front there as a curtain and they had oil lamps that were hanging from the ceiling for light. A man whose name is listed as one of those on a monument there, a man sit down near the door, and a thought went through his mind. He went to his, he let his daughter go up to the front. A thought went through his mind. Not too long ago, his barn had burned, his dairy barn had burned. And it was burned because of an oil lamp. And a thought came to his mind, this could, this place could catch on fire. And so he went to his daughter. Remember, the huge crowd there. Went to his daughter and said, I don't think anything like this is going to happen. This is what the lady told me. She said, my dad told me that if there's a fire, you stay right here until I come and get you, if there happens to be a fire. Well, the play started at eight o'clock. It was a lot of fun. Then about nine o'clock, you can go read the Greenville paper. You can read from the state, Columbia State, and go online and read about it. One of the lanterns fell. And when it fell, it fell into the stage right in front of her, right in the stage area there. And no problem, some of the men got up and they took off their coats and they began to fan the fire itself. And it wasn't long before one very exuberant guy, he began to fan it and threw the coal oil up on the Muslim curtain and it went up like that. Soon the room was filled with black smoke and there was panic in the room. Everybody tried to go down the steps. When they got down the steps, remember the door opened one way instead of out. They were trapped. Finally, the force of the crowd pushed the door open and people began to go out the steps there, but eventually the steps collapsed. Most of the people that died died in the steps area. That left everybody up to be thrown out the window, to jump out a 15-foot window. Someone outside took a flagpole and put it against the window so people could crawl down. They were throwing babies out and so forth. And the lady said, my daddy told me that this happened, that I was to stay there. And she said, it was hard, but I stayed there. And everybody was saying, come on, let's go. But I stayed there. I couldn't see anything. It was choking. I could not say I could not do anything. I began to cry, begin to pray. I knew my daddy had forgotten about me. I didn't know what to do. And then she said this. I heard my daddy's voice asking for me and calling for me. And he grabbed me, went to the room where the piano was, threw me out the window, and immediately the second floor crashed under, and he died. As a matter of fact, 77 died. There's a monument. Because of that fire, now doors open to the outside. Now auditoriums are on the first floor. Now there are fire escapes. Many things happened because of the Cleveland School fire. Look it up on the Internet there. But as I thought, as I list there, I've thought about that many times. When everybody else is saying leave, when everybody else, when everything about you is saying, now it's time to get up to go, now it's time to run for my life. She sat there and she waited for her dad who promised that he would be there even when everything around her said, it's time for you to leave. If you get a chance, every time I visit, probably 12 times, every time I go to the coast, I always stop by Route 101. I don't know what faith is. I don't know exactly how to define faith, but I know it produced Holy Spirit, produces because of faith I have eternal life through Jesus Christ, and I know it produces the fruit of the Spirit. And I know for a fact, I can't define it perhaps, but I know it comes and it's fed, the Holy Spirit is fed by the Word of God, and through the Word of God it produces the fruit of the Spirit. Father, we do thank you for the Holy Spirit. We thank you for the work that he does in our life. We thank you for the many other works that he does, the writing of the scriptures, the assurance, the guarantee of our salvation, the seal for us, and many other works that he performed. But we thank you for the very important work of drawing us to the Lord Jesus Christ, and then for the work of producing the fruit of the Spirit in our life. Even though we can define faith, Father, we understand it comes from the Holy Spirit, and we understand that we have to feed the Holy Spirit through Thy Word in order to produce this fruit. You've been listening to The Chapel Hour, coming to you from the campus of Bob Jones University. Our speaker was Dr. Sid Cates, principal of Bob Jones Academy. For a cassette or compact disc copy of today's message, send a check for $6 to Campus Store, Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina 29614. Be sure to mention the name of the speaker and today's date. The Chapel Hour has been sponsored by Bob Jones University.