00:00
00:00
00:01
Transcript
1/0
Father, I pray as we look at
your word this morning that you would give us the ability to
love it. To want what we find here to
be part of our lives because in it we would find that we would
become closer to you, that you would get glory from our lives,
Lord, that's what we desire. And we know that the things that
we talk about this morning are the things that go a long way
toward that as you work them out in our lives. And so, God,
we just are asking that, first of all, you help us to understand,
but then, Lord, you give us grace to be changed. And it's in Jesus'
name that we pray. Amen. If you would look at Galatians
5 verse 22, we'll begin this familiar passage of the fruit
of the Spirit we spent last week talking about all of the things
that Paul listed that said these are the opposite of the fruit
of the Spirit. If you do these things, you're
not walking in the Spirit. If these are the practice of
your life, then you're not going to heaven, because you don't
know anything about God. That was the somberness of what
we dealt with last week. And we talked about the fact
that we all struggle with things, and that we all sin and have difficulty with
that, and we end up constantly in the need for repentance and
faith. But if we are, if these things characterize our lives,
then there's a good chance that we don't know Christ. And it
doesn't matter, the profession that we made doesn't have anything
to do with anything. Because the issue is, if this
is how you live, then at least over time, in a habitual way,
then you can't claim that you know him. And I should clarify that by
saying that that's difficult for me as well. I mean, there
are many of us in this room, I think, that made a profession
of faith when we were children, and our lives didn't look like
it for a long period of time. And in my own case, I have to
confess that I don't really know when I was really converted you
know, was it nine years old down the road here at Faith Baptist
or Was it later on when the Lord finally showed me that his word
actually meant something But during those years when I did
not act like a Christian and I did not care about the things
of Christ I have no right nor do any of anyone that I was around
have a right to look at my life and say, well, he's just backslidden,
but he's a believer. You can't do that. You got to
look at it for what it looks like. God ultimately knows men's
hearts. But the issue still is that we have to go with what
the scripture tells us. And the scripture tells us that
people who live like that can't be considered believers over
long periods of time. And so there needed to be some
clarification because there were some questions and so that's
your clarification. It may still not make you happy in terms of
what it is that I just said and I'm sorry about that. I have
to be true to what I think the scripture is saying. We have
to understand that Jesus didn't die on that cross just so that
we could live any life that we want to live and at the end of
it go to heaven. And if anyone has sold anyone that, then they
lied to him. I mean, that's kind of the way
that is. But now we're going to deal with the positive aspect. So let's read verse 22 and on. But the fruit of the Spirit is
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,
and self-control. Against such things there is
no law. And those who belong to Christ have crucified the
flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let
us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited,
provoking one another, envying one another. Let's stop there because I think
we may not get very far this time. A couple of opening things that
we should do. So the first is this. Based on
the passage we just read, and you may have to go over it, what
is the context in which the fruit of the Spirit should be displayed
in the believer's life? What is Paul talking about? It is a lifestyle, but particularly
when a person is in a certain place, not that we're saying
that the fruit of the Spirit shouldn't be demonstrated at
all times, but there are a couple of things that tell us particularly
what he's talking about here. Yeah, but where? Around what
people? That's what I'm getting at. All people is correct, but look
at the text. Look at the last verse. that we read. Provoking one another, envying
one another. Good. Now who's the letter to? A church. Good. A church. OK. Paul is dealing with a specific
issue within this church at Galatia. OK. This is it. These little
local bodies are having these false teachers come in. And what
he's trying to do is to explain to them the difference in between
law and grace in their lives. The fruit of the spirit. Another
way of saying that is grace. Now what John said is absolutely
correct. Obviously when we walk in the
spirit we want these characteristics to come out of our lives at all
times. But specifically we want them to come out in our dealings
with our brothers and sisters in the local church. And Paul
I say that specifically only because that's what Paul is dealing
with. Apparently, and this always happens, when you have false
teaching, or when you have more of a legalistic mindset, people
immediately begin to compare each other to themselves. Well, I'm doing it better than
you are. And in this case it would be, I am a little more
zealous for following these Jewish rules than you are, and therefore
I'm better than you. Right? That's what he's saying.
We're not caring about love, and we're not caring about gentleness,
and we're not caring about patience. We're not caring about any of
those things. We don't focus on the other person, but it's
what I can get out of the situation. And of course, in the local church,
that can never be our standpoint. That can never be where we start.
If we start there, we just wreak havoc. And that's what's going
on here. Some people take this passage to say, well, and not
altogether. This is not altogether wrong.
I don't mean to communicate that. But we take it and we say, well,
these are things that I need to be. I need to be more loving
and I need to be more gentle and I need to have more joy.
Absolutely. We certainly do. But all of these
characteristics. How are you going to know if
you have them? You have to be around people. You have to. If you're not around people,
it's a little hard. I can be really patient if I'm on the
cave up here on the side of this mountain with nobody around.
You can be a real patient man up there. And I've heard people
talk about, you know, well, I just love all of the people in China
because I just want them to come to Christ and I love them and
I love the culture and everything else. Well, I'm not saying that
we discount that completely, but it's real easy to love people
you don't know. When you know somebody and you
have functioned with them, as in some of our cases, for years
within a local body, it changes things. It changes things. Because at that point, we will
find all of the things that irritate one another. And yet we still
have to stay together because there isn't a plan B. This is
how we do it. And a good example of this and
again we read that last verse so we're not to be conceited
but I bring it up only only to demonstrate a point. The church,
the local church, whether you're going or not, has decided that
it is important that members that we had here, Trey and Kylie
Griffin, need encouragement this afternoon. And this is something
that the local church does. And so in that context, this
is what we do. And what we're going to do is
actually If it were not for the spirit, I would say what we're
going to do is kind of nuts, really. Because we're going to
do a service this morning, we're going to drive three hours, we're
going to go see these folks, we're going to turn around and drive
three hours back. Why would you do that? Now, if you're not doing
that, this is not a speech in order to make you feel that you
need to do it. Practically, God has different things for us to
do along the way, and it doesn't mean that everybody all has to
do the same thing at one time. But as a church, we have decided
that those who can, and those who feel like they need to, need
to come do this, right? That's what being part of a local
body is, and that's how you demonstrate these fruits of the Spirit. They
come out this way, right? You can be patient in your closet
if you want to, and you can be loving in your closet if you
want to, But it's a little different thing when word gets out that
these people, this group of people that Christ has lived his life
through, actually love the people that have been members of them
for years enough that they're willing to do things that, even
in a worldly sense, don't make sense. Right? That's the fruit of the Spirit.
And hopefully that will be demonstrated as we do it. But we need to say
another couple of things before we actually get in to the fruits. One of them is this. We have to be careful with this
list of fruits because what people tend to want to do with these
things is to define them the way that they want to define
them. What do I mean? Well, the first one is love,
and we know that the world defines love often in a very different
way than the Bible defines love, right? I mean, joy, patience,
goodness even. Goodness is in here, okay? Now,
if you define love, because this is the only type of relationships
that you've had, you define love, well, I am going to care about
somebody because of what they can do for me. Right? So, it's like this symbiotic
relationship. And in most worldly relationships,
love is like this, where what happens is, yes, I will do nice
things for you and I will affirm you, but that is only because
you do the same thing for me. And if you don't do the same
thing for me, then I'm going to quit doing it for you. And
those things happen in marriages. They happen with parents and
children. They happen with friends. They happen with, you know, all
sorts of different people. My point is this. If you define
love that way and then you say, well, I have to demonstrate this
fruit of the spirit, which is love, but you have the wrong
definition. You don't understand biblically what love is. then
you're going to get off the track really quick. Goodness. What is good? We have the scripture
to define for us what good is because in our day and time there
are a lot of people and we can't say that this hasn't seeped into
us as well that call bad things according to the scripture good.
and good things, according to the Scripture, bad. Right? So
what does goodness mean as a fruit of the Spirit? Well, we always
have to go back to the Scripture itself to define those. Now,
we'll get to some of that in a minute. I had thought of going
really, really in depth with some of that. I don't think I
will. I think I'm just going to give you definitions when we actually
go through these that may help you. But if you have questions
about those, we can talk about those later. The third thing
before I start the fruit of the Spirit is this. This is the fruit of the Spirit. What is being talked about here
is absolutely and totally supernatural. Absolutely and totally supernatural,
and it is apart from what you're able to do yourself. What do
I mean by that? Some people might look down through
this list, and I don't know of anyone who can say that I do
all of these things, but there might be some who would look
down through this list and say, well, I am a naturally kind person.
Right. I'm a natural. I'm not. But somebody
might be. So I'm a naturally kind person. I tend to care about things.
I tend to see an animal in the middle of the road and stop my
car and go and get it. And I tend to do all of these
kinds of things. Those are gifts that God gives us perhaps in
a natural way. But that's not a spiritual gift.
OK. That's not a spiritual gift.
That's something that has already built into you because of God's
common grace in your life and the way that he's built and the
environments that he's allowed you to be in and those things.
And they're good things. We don't discount them but we
need to make a distinction in between those things and the
supernatural work of God's spirit in the believer's life because
those are different. Those are different. So. Let me turn over to my notes
here. We're just going to go through
the fruit. And the first one we're going to talk about is
love. The agape love. It means that we serve a person
for their good and not for what that person gives us or brings
us. We see intrinsic value in a person
because of what God has done in their lives or because he
has created them. And we want to serve them, even
recognizing that they won't give us anything back. And in fact,
what we may get back are things that are not good. And we know
and I'll just say this up front because it was another point
I intended to make before I started this and is this. We know that
all of these things all of these attributes were demonstrated
for us perfectly in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so if we want
to know how they are how this works itself out that's what
you look at. You look at his life you study
Jesus's life. So we're going to serve a person.
Now we can also help ourselves by giving what the opposite of
love is because that will maybe help us define it a little bit
better. We're going to try to do this at least with most of
these. So if love is serving a person regardless of what we
get for it, the opposite of love is fear. That's biblical. The opposite of love is fear.
And of course, that requires defining, too. But in this case,
we'll just define it by saying self-protection. The opposite
of love is self-protection and, frankly, abuse in one form or
another. If we're loving people in a sacrificial
way, in the way that this fruit of the spirit works itself out,
then we will love them like Christ loved us, which means that we
will sacrifice our time and we will sacrifice our sleep and
we will sacrifice our energy and our money. in all of these
situations that God brings into our lives and yes we need to
temper some of those with wisdom and that's where again the body
of Christ comes in we we have to not do these things by ourselves
we have to filter it through the local church so that everybody's
gifts can come to bear on the situation that's the that's the
thing but here if we're protecting ourselves If we're afraid that
our little life and the way that we have set it up is going to
be altered in some way that doesn't make us happy, then that's not
love. So, I don't know if that helps.
It helped me. The first one's love. Now we
have, we won't go there, but we have 1st Corinthians 13 that
gives us that whole long chapter about what love is. Love is patient. Love is kind. It doesn't seek
its own. And if you condense all that down, which is what
I tried to do, that's what you're getting in this definition. Love is not, one more thing here
that I have here, love is not selfish affection. It's not an attraction to someone
that you treat well because of how they make you feel about
yourself. Okay? That's not that. This love is supernatural. It
comes from outside of human relationships, in a sense. If we're dealing
with two believers who both have the Spirit, then yes, we can
both sense that coming through as we work together in the body,
but This is not a mutual, well, I'm
being affirmed here and somebody's trying to follow me around like
my little duckling and because I live this life and they want
to do what I do and that makes me feel really special. That's
not love. That's not love. So, we've only done one, how
we doing? And, huh? Yeah. And it's like that to some
degree. And when we get to the end of
this, and I hope we do today, we're going to deal with how
we sort that out. But this is the reality of the
Christian life. When we are walking in the Spirit,
which is what we are commanded to do, the kind of love that
I've just defined for you is going to come through our lives.
It's going to come through our lives as we're around people.
So yes, when we're with our families and when we're at our jobs, all
those things, but particularly as we work together with the
body of Christ. OK, so our next one is joy. Now, we know that this is misunderstood
by the world. All of us want to feel happy.
None of us want to be sad. Right? When you're sad, it's
just not good. You're depressed. And in fact,
if you're sad long enough, they'll give you a pill so you won't
be sad anymore. Which in some cases may be something that's
okay, but just understand that those two things don't have anything
to do with what we're talking about here. This kind of joy. The first thing that you need
to understand, we're going to define it, but the first thing that
you need to understand is that the joy that comes through the Spirit,
The fruit, this fruit, has no dependence upon circumstance. None. In other words, it doesn't matter
what's happening in your life, a fruit of the Spirit can always
be joy. It can be. Why? Well, we'll define joy. Joy is a delight in God for the
sheer beauty and worth of who he is. That kind of hits you upside
the head if you hadn't been thinking about it because you've been
and I have been infected by what the world thinks is joy. But that's joy. I get to be in
a relationship with God. That's joy. unless you misunderstand, God
gives us things. He gives us experiences. He even
gives us appetites which are good if not used wrongly. He gives eyes, some of us better
than others, and noses and mouths that we can taste and eat with.
The ability to have relationships and the ability to have emotions
all of those things are of God. He created us that way but all
of those have to be Put through this filter of How do I see the
Lord Jesus high and lifted up in this thing I That's the issue. Joy is about
recognizing God's intrinsic worth and beauty. And He is beautiful. Well, again, we will look at
joy. We need to talk about it a little
bit because it's one that we have trouble. So the first thing
is, it's opposite. What is the opposite of joy?
Hopelessness. No hope. Despair. That's the opposite. So, for
the believer, when I am in despair, or when I'm hopeless, when I
look at a situation either in my own life, in my own family,
in this body, in a discipleship relationship, and wherever I'm
at, and I say, this is hopeless, there's no way this is going
to work out well, then I am not exhibiting the fruit of joy. Because joy doesn't look so much
at my circumstance. I may not understand my circumstance.
See the problem with us is that we always think that we have
to understand everything before we can either be happy or sad
about it. But the reality is that most things in life you're
not going to understand and most things in life you have little
or no control over. God is sovereign and so we've
got to get comfortable with the idea that if God takes my life
and what I think it is turns it upside down and says you are
now working in an inner city somewhere in Baltimore because
that's what I want you to do and you're going to plant a church
there. And I can get all up in arms
and say, God, that's not my natural gift. That's not what I'm about.
I don't want you using your natural gifts. I want you to walk in
the fruit of the spirit. Now, I should say differently
that God gives us natural gifts and that he does use them. But
those are not the primary thing. Those are the secondary thing.
He uses them. But the supernaturalness of God's
work in someone's life, that indicates that they're walking
in the spirit. If I'm the adventuresome type who probably, if I'd never
come to know Christ, wanted to go across the world somewhere
and join the Peace Corps, then it's probably not a gift of the
Spirit that I'm willing to leave everything and go. Now God may
use that, but I found, and this is just Alex talking, this is
not the scripture, I found that oftentimes that person is the
one that has to stay in the same place for 35 years. God just does it that way. And
the person who is a homebody who does nothing other than want
to stay in the same place for 35, 40, 50 years until they're
dead, God says, no, you go. I mean, that whole thing is like
that. At least it seems to me to be.
So joy. Well, it's got a counterfeit
too. It's counterfeit is an elation elation that's best on that's
that's based on experiencing the blessings of God and not
God himself. In other words joy doesn't have
anything that this causes this causes the counterfeit is like
mood swings right. That's what it is. It's like
mood swings. It may depend on an external circumstance. It
may depend on some sort of brain chemistry. It may depend on whether
I had enough coffee this morning, which, by the way, I did not.
I still need to work on that. And if I had had enough coffee,
then I would be more joyful, right? I mean, you see how goofy
that is? It's not goofy to me. That's actual reality, let me
tell you. Some people who've been around me can tell you.
But the thing about that is, that doesn't have anything to
do with the supernatural work of God in someone's life. Joy doesn't
depend on circumstance. All right. Peace. We want to deal with peace. Now, of course, the world defines
peace this way. We'll come back to this. Peace
is the absence of conflict. If we're at peace, that means
we're not at war. And we always want to be at peace, but what
we mean when we say, I want peace in my life, what we mean by that
is that Want to be okay, you're okay. I'm okay. I want you to
think I'm okay. I don't want any problems I don't
want conflicts. I don't want issues This is how
peace is defined and you see now just as a side note why this
is so important to define It's because if I come to someone
and I'm giving them the gospel and I'm saying come to Jesus
because You're gonna get peace But at least as I spend time
with them and as I deal with them over a period of months,
we have to define these things. Because you know what they're
going to do? They're going to say, you're a liar. I got less peace now
than I've ever had in my life. Because I used to didn't care
about all this stuff. And now I care a bunch. Peace. There's no peace in this. You
see how it looks? We need to be careful that we
over time are dealing with folks and training folks and constantly
renewing even our own minds because we are fooled by these things
all of the time. We need to renew our own minds
in the scriptures to define these things so that we understand
what's actually being offered and what's actually being promised. Okay, peace. This is a confidence
and a rest in the wisdom and control of God. This is a confidence
and a rest in the wisdom and control of God, and not your
own wisdom or control. That's hard. Right. The other
definition is easier. But to say that I have peace
because God is sovereign and he is wise and I actually rejoice
in the fact that I'm not control. I'm not in control and I'm not
wise in comparison to him. We have to get comfortable with
that. And when you can live like that, that's super. You see how
supernatural that is? That's not just let me tell you
six ways you could have peace in your life, right? It doesn't
work that way. This is supernatural that I'm
going to trust a God that I can't see who has redeemed me and who
is in control of everything and who has all wisdom. And that's
going to bring about this fruit of the spirit, which is peace. Well, what's the opposite? Anxiety and worry. Anxiety and worry is caused because
of circumstances that I can't control that I want to. Right? I mean, that's where those come
from. So there's a fake version of
peace. And we have to be careful about this, because I've fallen
into this too. The fake piece is indifference and apathy, not caring. You see, we think sometimes,
and the world tells us this sometimes, that if the way to have peace
is just not to care, to be indifferent, to have a certain apathy about
everything. Another way to put it, I'm not going to get close
to people, I'm not going to get involved in things, I'm not going to do
those things, because if I do, I'll just invariably get hurt.
So I'm just going to stay away from that, and I'm going to be
indifferent. I don't care. But that's not
peace that is again a self-protection mechanism that the flesh brings
out and It can protect our emotions pretty well Sometimes and we
can think that we're having a lot of peace, but we're not living
on real peace. We're living on a counterfeit Patience Now, patience is an ability to face
trouble without blowing up or becoming angry. I mean, patience
is the ability to face trouble without blowing up or becoming
angry. And the thing about patience
is that what we need to understand we
need God to use his word and his spirit to work in our lives
because we all have different things that kind of trigger us
in terms of what makes us mad what makes us frustrated what
angers us it's not all the same thing and so we need to be We
need to ask God to search our hearts and be clear because I
can watch someone who is Dealing with a certain situation and
say boy. That's a lot of patience that they're demonstrating there
and they may be They may not but maybe what I'm seeing is
is just if I was in that situation I couldn't do it, you know, and
maybe that's not their trigger point, but maybe it is and God's
done a work I mean, you don't know but the issue is It's easy
to be patient as long as you're not facing something that has
the possibility of making you impatient. Maybe that's like a duh moment,
but patience happens across the board. You don't get, you don't,
you just don't blow up. One thing about patience that
happens is that you don't have this thing that just comes out
that says it's not fair. shouldn't have to deal with this
it's not fair. So if that's the case then the
opposite of patience is resentment and ultimately if we're talking
about the fruit of the spirit we're going to be talking about
resentment toward God. And while we would never say
God I resent the fact that this this and this is occurring in
my life biblically and again this is why we have to get our
definitions right biblically when we are Impatient, angry,
frustrated about something, and resentful. We may aim it at circumstances,
we may aim it at people, but when we believe that God is the
sovereign of the whole universe, ultimately when we do that, we
are resenting him. Because he's the one who set
those things into place. Some counterfeits of patience,
and I know a whole lot about this, is cynicism, is a real
counterfeit here. Cynicism and lack of caring again. In other words, it's not patience to say, and
I think sometimes we've been trained in a worldly way to do
this, to say, that's just not a big enough deal to care about.
It's a good strategy, it worked. The problem is that it's just
sort of a mental manipulation of things. Because who are you
to say it's not a big enough deal to care about? Usually when
you say, I'm not going to worry about that because it's not a
big enough deal to care about, you're saying it because you
can't do anything about it anyway. That's that whole thing. Patience, by necessity, demonstrates
to us that trouble is going to come into our lives. Adversity
is going to come into our lives. Problems. Things that don't go
the way that we, within our flesh, want them to go. That's going
to happen. And that's another gospel issue
because you have to tell people. When you're training them, when
you're working with them, this doesn't mean that bad things
aren't going to happen to you. In fact, it's likely more of
them are going to happen to you, in a sense. Patience. Kindness. Kindness is a lot like love,
the best that I could tell. But the difference between the
love and kindness is that kindness is really practical. OK? Serving people in a practical
way, and I think kindness in this sense is serving someone
in a practical way that makes me vulnerable, that puts me out. Right? So this is going to be
time, this is going to be money, this is going to be loss of sleep,
this is going to be, I wanted to do something else with this
time, I wanted to do something else with this money, but I'm
going to use whatever it is to serve someone else in a practical
way, and that's going to make me vulnerable because, let's
just face it guys, I need to tell you that, and many of you
have already experienced this over and over again, You think
and it's a worldly thing it's not a biblical thing you think
that if you demonstrate kindness to somebody that what's going
to happen is is that they're going to give you kindness in
return. Let me tell you nine times out of 10 in this world
that is not true. OK it's just not you don't expect
that that's not why you do it right. If you don't understand
that, then you're always going to be disappointed. And so what's
going to happen is I'm going to reach out there. I'm going to be self-sacrificing. I'm going to do something for
somebody. And then it just made me feel like garbage. And so
what's the likelihood that I'm going to do that again next time? It's a supernatural free of the
spirit that allows the believer to keep doing these things over
and over and over again for God's glory, not for the response that
they get. It's a deep inner security that
is necessary for kindness. A security in Christ. you have
to get that he has done everything for your justification for your
salvation and for your sanctification and that he will see you through
on to glory and it doesn't matter what he calls you to do the response
doesn't matter except that we want him to receive glory in
the response we want people to come to Christ but other than
that it's not why we do it. The opposite of kindness, the
opposite of kindness, at least one of them, is envy. When I envy someone. It leaves
me unable to rejoice when someone else is successful. I'm not a
kind person. In other words, I can be kind
to someone as long as I kind of stay up here and they kind
of stay down here, and we kind of have this kind of relationship.
But if I'm here, or if this is where I think I am, and they
start doing this, and I start thinking, hey, wait a minute.
They're not more special than me. Yeah, well, that's enviousness. And a counterfeit of kindness. This
is taking longer than I thought. I don't care. I think it's valuable.
So we'll just do as much as we can. You should know, by the
way, I got a lot of help. I wrote most of this out myself
because he was wordy and didn't use words like we use here in
our little local thing. The idea of defining these things
of going back to the Greek and searching them out in scripture
That was Tim Keller's idea and it's a good idea and that's where
I got this from so I'm using some of his stuff, but mostly
I had to change a lot of it because I think it would help us but
I wasn't necessarily smart enough to come up with this approach
on my own. So you should know that Okay, so counterfeit of kindness
Manipulativeness Manipulation. Manipulative people
always want to tell us how kind they are. And if we're manipulative,
we always want to talk ourselves into being, into how kind we
are being in a situation. But being manipulative, all that
is, is we're giving out, we're doing good deeds, quote unquote
good deeds, doing good for others, so that I can congratulate myself
and they can congratulate me too. Pretty much. Yeah. The other
reason for maybe doing these manipulative good deeds is so
that I can be good enough for God which of course is absolutely
totally against what the Book of Galatians is about. But nonetheless
that is a lot of the reason that people do good things. Alright. Goodness. Goodness is the fruit of the
Spirit. And we need to define goodness. I'm going to give you a one word
definition of goodness that I think will help you. Because we define
goodness in all ways. Are you a good little boy? You're
such a good little girl. What do we mean by that? Now
watch this, parents. This is what we mean by that.
We mean you don't bug me and you do what I tell you to do.
That's what we mean by that. Right. I do it with my dogs all
the time. You're a good dog because you're
not tearing stuff up and you're not bothering me wanting to go
outside and you're just laying there and let me pet your head.
That's a good dog. But if you require my attention if you cause
me inconvenience you are not good any longer. You see that
that's the issue. Your definition for the word
good goodness in the scripture is going to be integrity. This is Tim Keller-ish-esque-ish,
however you want to say it. Goodness is being the same person
no matter where you are. And the same person, of course,
we know that's informed by who Christ has made us to be. so
that I'm not a like a Hollywood actor. Someone who was hired
to pay the part of one of the Holy Bible characters. Jesus. So I may be on my sixth marriage
and it's going to be in divorce and I may be doing drugs and
alcoholism and running around on my wife and cheating and lying
and all those things. But when I come to work because
I have been I'm an actor and I have been called to play the
part of a holy guy in the Bible, and now I'm very holy and I quote
scripture all of the time, and I don't use any bad language,
and I don't have any bad thoughts. But as soon as my acting session
is over, I go back to what I was before. I go back to what I was before.
Goodness is being the same person in every situation. The opposite
of goodness is hypocrisy. The opposite of goodness is hypocrisy. Now again, I want you to, I'm
glad some of you will remember this and some of you are taking
notes, but some of these are bare thinking about, right? Because
we have been drinking the Kool-Aid of this world around us so long
that we don't have these definitions. We view good as something totally
different than having integrity. In fact, good, in terms of its
emotional charge, probably has a higher, better emotional charge
for you, perhaps, than the word integrity has. Well, integrity's
good, but we have trouble with that. But good, boy, that's a
wide range. And good means that I get stuff
for me. Integrity, oh, that's tough. Not only does it mean I have
to tell the truth, it means I can't be a hypocrite. It means I have
to be the same person wherever I am. That's goodness. Now again it's
supernatural. Please don't take this as I need
to work harder on this. You may need to work harder on
this but how you need to work harder on this is on your knees
with the scripture in front of you asking God to work it out
in your life. And then as you come to these
situations, He will give you wisdom and He will let you see
situations and your thoughts and your motivations for what
they are. And then you can deal with them as they come up. Hypocrisy
is a real problem. Faithfulness. Faithfulness. I had a hard time figuring out
which kind of one word thing I was going to give you for faithfulness. I think I decided on one predominantly,
but I will give you the others. Reliability. Reliability. I'm utterly reliable. When you
are free of the Spirit, and of course we know this is informed
by Christ. We know this is informed by the
scriptures but reliability is the issue because the thing is
faithfulness means that the one thing I've not been nearly as
faithful as I would like to be but one thing that I have seen
God do in my life is that there are certain brothers not through
my own strength. There are certain brothers through
the year and I'll give you an example. And please understand
this is all the Lord God I'm not trying to toot my own horn,
but I thought of this not because I saw it in myself But because
someone else saw it in me and really that's how this should
be But I have a relationship with Tracy and we don't talk
all the time But when we talk he talks to me because he says
the thing that I appreciate about you is That you try to do what
you said you were going to do and you don't change your mind
all of the time about things So that when I ask you for an
answer on something, I'm going to get something that's informed
by How you've walked with Christ and it doesn't mean that we're
stubbornly not going to change wrong things But what it does
mean is is that we're just not carried around by every wind
like it talks about in James Another another word that I could
have used for faithfulness is loyalty and loyalty. So we'll just put them
together. Loyalty and courage and reliability. That's faithfulness. It's opposite. The opposite is to be a fake,
an opportunist of some sort. Someone who is willing to have
a relationship as long as it is beneficial to them. Someone
who, in any given situation, is always looking for what the
best team is so that they'll get the best outcome at the end
of it. That's the opposite of faithfulness. Faithfulness means I know what
the truth is, regardless of the circumstance, and whatever it
costs me, the truth still stays the truth. That's faithfulness. I think we'll stop there. We'll
do the others next time. So what you can look forward
next time is we'll define the rest of the fruits. I'm not going
to be here this next week. Ron's going to teach for me.
So it will be a little bit down the road. We'll define the rest
of these. And then particularly I would like for you to study
that verse that says that we have crucified the flesh there
right after the fruits of the spirit. Those who are in Christ
have crucified the flesh. Dig into that and try to come
up with what you think that means. is we're going to tie it back
to all of these things. Let's pray. Father, we're grateful
this morning for your word and particularly these fruits that
you say that people like us can exhibit by walking in or by your
spirit. And Lord, we have to confess
that it must be by your spirit that these things could ever
be done in people like us. But we thank you that it's possible.
And where we don't desire these things to be growing in our lives,
Father, I pray that you would give us the ability to desire
it more. It's in Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.
Galatians 5:22 -- Love
Series Galatians
| Sermon ID | 81161130179 |
| Duration | 49:23 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday School |
| Bible Text | Galatians 5:22 |
| Language | English |
Documents
Add a Comment
Comments
No Comments