Transcription
Such an appropriate lead song to go into our past message tonight: the fruit of the Spirit. We have been looking, in these six Sunday nights, at life in the Spirit, beginning with considering who the Spirit is and looking at the work of the Spirit: the baptism in the Spirit, the Spirit and speaking in other tongues, the Spirit and the gifts, and now bringing the series full circle: the Spirit and the fruit.
Of course, the fruit of the Spirit is given to us as a list in Galatians chapter 5, verses 22 and 23. But there is a chapter before that, in Galatians 4:19, a verse that I think explains what the fruit of the Spirit is about and what Paul is doing. Giving us that list in Galatians five is preceded by this great statement in Galatians 4:19: "My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth." I've never been in that kind of pain, but a lot of you in this congregation have. Paul's saying, with these Galatians who, in their Christian lifestyle, have fallen so short of the character of Christ, he is in travail over them as though he were in child labor until Christ is formed in you.
You see, it's one thing to receive Christ in our life and acknowledge him as our Savior and Lord, but then there is this process of his, in actuality, becoming the Lord and being formed in us. So that the personality of Jesus moves into our personality, and we express, through our own individual uniqueness, the common characteristics of personality that we really belong to Jesus in. And I found that the more I become like Jesus, the more uniquely I become myself. And that, I guess, is one of the splendors of Christ being formed in us: that we don't all look like we're cut out of a cookie cutter in terms of our personality. We're all still going to be different, but there is going to be a thread that unites us together because Christ is formed in us. And when Christ is formed in us, it means his personality is going to be duplicated in us.
And so when we look at the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22 and 23, we read, "the fruit of the Spirit is…" but we could also say that Jesus is… and we can also say then that, because of him, we are… Jesus is loving, and I am loving; Jesus is joyful, and I am joyful; Jesus is peaceful, and I am peaceful; and right on down through the list. So there is a common link that links the fruit of the Spirit to the personality of Jesus and to our own personality, I think as well. As you look at the New Testament carefully, you will see that the relationship of fruit bearing often is in direct proportion to our difficulties. Difficulties are not easy to bear.
The Galatian letter was written to a group of people that came out of what we now know is south central, or really south central slightly to the east, Turkey. And it was a very difficult area to launch the gospel in. Every city described in Acts 13 and 14, there were tumultuous times for the Apostle Paul; times when he was kicked out of town after town, and in one place pelted with rocks until he almost died. And that's not the kind of an environment that is a tranquil environment. And if you think of the fruit of the Spirit as only being possible if you've got a lot of time on your hand, a lot of relaxation opportunity, an ability to spend hours sitting under a shade tree reading a good book, and you can get up from those times and you can be loving and joyful and peaceful because there are no kids running around the house pulling at your skirts, and no spouses disagreeing with you, and no stress on the job… and well, I suppose if we all had this ideal environment, we could develop the food of this… but the great thing about the fruit of the Spirit is that it operates in difficulties, and it's really seen so clearly then. Paul, writing to the Galatians, knows that they have seen the fruit of the Spirit in his life when he has been under extreme pressure and adversity. And God's the Spirit in us works in all kinds of temperatures, whether the temperature be emotionally or spiritually cold or hot. The Spirit of God is seeking to bear fruit.
Then—we take a moment to look at the relationship of the fruit to doctrine and to gifts. And it is possible that a person can be orthodox in their belief, can say the Apostles' Creed, or know all sixteen fundamental truths of the Assemblies of God, or the Westminster Catechism, or the Nicene Creed, or the Caledonian Creed, or any of the Creeds of Christendom, and say from their heart, "I believe this," but that still doesn't mean that Christ has been fully formed. Because it's possible for us to be theologically orthodox and heretical in our lifestyle. And what the Lord wants to do is bring our lifestyle into correspondence with our belief, so that we behave as we believe. Behavior and belief cannot be separated in the Christian's life. And the fruit of the Spirit can't be confused with the gifts either, for the gifts are plural. And last week we went through a list of 24 gifts in the New Testament, and we did a show of hands at the end of the service, and it was really amazing to see the response. But there was not a single person in the group that I spotted that raised their hand as desiring all of the gifts. And most everybody checked out on martyrdom anyway, and most people checked out on celibacy. But even the other gifts, I was pleased by the way to see how many raised their hand on the gift of helps—a lot of helping people in this body. And the gift of helps has to be numerically far more in supply than the gift of leadership or the gift of teaching. But the gifts are plural, meaning that they apply to our life in correspondence with our natural inclinations on many occasions and with the need in the body. But none of us have all the gifts. Only Christ operates with all the gifts, and maybe some of the Apostles did as well, but that's not the case with the fruit of the Spirit. We do not hunt and pick through the fruit of the Spirit and say, "Well, I'll take this one, but I'd rather leave that one behind." For, in fact, we often err when we talk even about the fruit of the Spirit and mistakenly refer to it as the fruits of the Spirit. But the language of the scripture, both in the original and in the English, is very clear: it is the fruit of the Spirit, not fruits. Therefore, all of these characteristics listed in Galatians 5:22 and 23 are meant to be part and parcel of our life. And we don't say, "Well, I'd sure would like to be loving, and especially it would be nice to be loved, but I'd rather not be patient, or I'd rather not be self-controlled." Patience and self-control are part of the package.
And then something else: an introduction we need to say is that the key to developing fruit is to abide in Christ. The fruit is not simply a result of our own self-effort, although certainly effort is involved. God is at work in us: "both to will and to work his good pleasure," but "work out your own salvation." So there's God's work in our work, but the fruit comes as a result of abiding in Christ. John 15:5 says, "If any man abide in me, and I in him, he will bring forth much fruit." I like the little story that Stuart Briscoe tells—he's an author and a theologian—he had a neighbor who had a dead fruit tree outside of his house—second-story house it was—and his boy would sometimes, after curfew, step out of his upper bedroom window and get out on the tree and scamper down and disappear for a while. And the father found out he was doing this, so he thought he would sure of this, and the next morning after he'd found it out he was outside in his yard, and he said to his boy as his wife was standing there, "You know, I believe I'm gonna cut this tree down; it doesn't bear any fruit, and I just don't think it's gonna stay there anymore." And so that night the boy got some of his friends together, and they worked all night and tied apples to the tree. And in the morning the father came out and looked, and he said, "Why, it's a miracle to think that that tree has apples on it when it's a pear tree!" And you can't tie the fruit of the Spirit on to a life in which there is not the vitality—if you will, the sap—that is in Christ. The lifestream, the life fluid that is in him, is that which generates the fruit. And that's why, in relationship to developing the fruit, our personal prayer life and our time with God are so important, because it is out of that association that the vitality of life comes to us.
Well, let's take some moments. And I could spend probably a just too much time developing each of these units of thought, but just kind of highlight each one this evening. The first fruit of the Spirit is love. And there are some who, in looking at Scripture, have said that this really is the—is the fruit out of which all the others come; that there's really not nine fruit of the Spirit, there's really only one, and that's love. And if you have love, you'll have everything else. And I think there's a great deal of merit to that. I remember when I first began to try to define what love was; I didn't have any fancy theological handles and didn't know any Greek words to describe it with, but I was about 14 or 15, and I wrote in my little journal that I was keeping what my definition of love was: "Love is an itching in the heart that can't be scratched." Because I was in love—I don't remember who with—but it seemed serious at the time. And love is so often, when we are in that time of life when we're romantically involved and looking, that we think of love romantically. And all of the fruit of the Spirit, by the—by the way, have their parallel in non-Christian experience. There are non-Christians that are very loving people. What makes Christian love different is a Christian love does not flow out of emotion and feeling; it flows out of commitment. And Christian love is known by its extent, by the degree to which it will go. Human love is so often based upon attraction: we love those who are lovely; we love those that somehow are pretty to us. And everybody's idea of beauty is different; your idea of beauty may be totally different from mine. Every once in a while my wife says something to me that would make me indicate she thinks I'm still handsome, and there are a lot of people who wouldn't agree with that. So beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it's easy to love people that look good, and it's easy to—to love if the love is returned, because romantic love depends upon something called reciprocity: we need that coming back to us. But Paul says in Romans chapter 5 that God loved us while we were yet sinners, when we were unattractive, and when there was no reciprocity coming back to him, he yet loved; he loved to the lengthen, to the limit, and he went to the cross for us, show us the extent of his love. And so Christian love then finds that it's possible to not only love those within family, but to go beyond that and love those who are in extreme need; to love the—the person who might be within our culture, the leper, or the spare tire, the difficult person. Christian love reaches out to them, and this is the fruit that the Lord is seeking to develop in our life: a love that is generated out of our commitment, that is enduring, and can be always counted upon as sort of rock-ribbed to our nature. My more adult definition now of love is to simply describe love as the consistent effort and desire to seek the highest and best welfare in another. And the New Testament never takes it for granted that we know how to love. Does it ever struck you if you look, for example, in Romans chapter 12, verses 9 through 21, we have a whole list of prescriptions that are given to help us to love one another: from entertaining strangers and showing hospitality and honoring one another and returning good for evil. The New Testament is very clear in outlining for us prescriptions on how we ought to love. And so Christ reaches into us, and through our prayer and through our attitudes and through our actions, he's at work shaping us and helping us to become loving people. And maybe as you hear this message tonight, you're not at the place in your—in the development of the fruit of love in your life where you would like to be, but since the fruit is developmental, take where you are and grow from that. Just like we—we don't become great athletes overnight; you may not become a great lover overnight. But I think one of the most important things about love is to quit looking for someone to love you. We all could say, "Well, I'd be sure better off if someone else loved me more; if my somebody in my family loved me more, I'd be a better person," and that may well be true, but we don't have any power, any control over what someone else is doing. But Christ has given us not a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of self-control, and the changes that we can make are in our life. So the Lord says, "Don't spend your time looking for love, but rather spend your time seeking to give it; to find ways of expressing love—worse—and through actions and through heart attitudes." Fruit of the Spirit is love; it's hard to beat that; it's hard to be loved when it's really practiced.
And then the second fruit of the Spirit is joy. Joy—there's two kinds of joy. There is a joy that non-Christians have, and I thought of moments where non-Christians are joyous just like Christians. There are celebrated moments in our life: weddings and births and engagements, and those kinds of events are great bringers of joy. And then there are achievements: breaking the sales record in the office, or graduating magna summa—a lot of your—whatever that is, you tell me—I never did it—I made the honor roll. And achievements—we feel good when we've worked hard and gained an achievement; it brings us joy. And then there's joy in relationships, and oh, the joy that comes when we feel like things are right between us and another person. And then there's joy when we have great—what we call great good luck. I've never yet seen a sad lottery winner—when they won—a few months later there have been some sad ones, and what has happened in our life with unexpected riches and unattended by the discipline that knows how to invest and handle and spend money. But good luck moments bring joy. And then life itself often brings joy, even for the unbeliever. *Fiddler on the Roof* is a classic example of that. As I watched Tevye in *Fiddler on the Roof*, I see a person who, in his contemplative moments in life, is delirious with human joy. *Sound of Music* reflects something of this too. So there is—there is joy in people outside Christ, but again, it is different from the fruit of the Spirit, which is distinctly Christian joy. Now I'm not saying that non-Christians are by very nature happy; there are some non-Christians that seem to be very happy, but we know from our own experience and coming to Christ and from the Bible itself that there is a—there is even in the happiest non-Christian a void, an emptiness, and a key that only Christ can fill. So we come to Christian joy, and the joy that is uniquely Christian begins with our salvation. So Jesus, in talking about salvation in Luke 15, tells us the story of the lost coin and the lost sheep and the lost son, and when all three of that which is lost is found, there is great joy and celebration. Why? Because these figures of speech speak of salvation: "Your father rejoices over you." And when we are saved, that's a time for joy. When we see someone else saved and come to the Lord, we rejoice. And then Christian joy also is—comes into focus when we watch the progress of the gospel. And I think that's often a dimension of joy that perhaps as individual Christians we don't focus enough upon; that we too easily bring the sense of joy into the non-Christian dimension and are looking for a sense of a titillating feeling, are—are going around all the time whistling a tune. And if we're not particularly happy in that moment emotionally, we feel like we're—we're not really exercising joy. But one of the real dimensions of Christian joy in the New Testament is that people take great joy—the Christians take great joy in the gospel coming to others. So you find in John 4:36 that Jesus talks about the one who goes out sowing and reaping will rejoice together. And in Acts 15:3, the early church, when they consider the conversion of the Gentiles, rejoices over what God has done. I like the phrase that is used of the Apostle Paul at the end of Acts chapter 14, when coming back after his first missionary journey, he talks to his sending church, the church in Antioch, and he reports to them all the things which the Lord has done through them—doesn't report the things he has done, but reports the things the Lord has done—and how God had filled the disciples with joy. And somehow that, to me, is—it's always want to have that reaction when I hear the progress of the gospel, like when we heard a report this morning from Egypt; it brings me joy. I'm praying for that; I'm investing in that; it brings me joy to see the children that are being reached in this community and in your families for Christ, and the teenagers and the adults. Progress of the gospel. And then there is joy associated with a filling of the Spirit. Acts 2:13—the joy is so deep that they are mistakenly assumed to be inebriated. But the Spirit does bring joy. And thank God that there are those great celebrated moments in worship where our heart truly sings, when we are literally outside of ourselves. We had this morning such that sense of joy in each of the services; in the eleven o'clock service, I guess I had been through three services by that time, and I was just—I was ready for the fourth service this morning; I really was; I was ready to go. I turned around, I said, "Oh, I'm so sorry to say this service," and I'm ready to go again; it was just so great. But we just kind of—I just felt spontaneous; it's like we got to close the service by applauding and giving thanks to the Lord. It's sort of—I know it, Newport Mason, we tend to be more quiet, sedate, which is good because that's respectable and all that, but every once in a while it's okay to just, you know, take off your coat or wave a flag or something and yay, joy, because of what the Lord is doing and the filling of the Spirit. And then there's even Christian joy that is present in the midst of struggle and stress and suffering. Romans 5:3-4: "For we rejoice in our suffering…" What kind of nut is that, who rejoices in suffering? The Christian joy finds us even in our down times, and we rejoice because we know that in that suffering God is working out a process in our life, a process that is initiated with suffering but goes on to the development of endurance—another fruit of the Spirit—and character, which is what we are when all the masts are removed; what we really are stands out. And by the way, just a word to those of you who are being tested but seemingly beyond your ability to bear it: there is a wonderful thing that happens when you come to the completion of a test, because it's sort of like a walking across a pond that you don't know where the bottom of it is, and you don't know how to swim either. I had this experience, by the way, when I was a kid; it was in a swimming pool in Bristow, Oklahoma. I had disobeyed my parents, sneaked out of the house and gone to a swimming pool, and I couldn't swim, but I decided to walk across the medium part of the pool, and just as I got to the medium part on tiptoes, I lost the floor and started to drown—at least I thought I was drowning; I went under three times—I suppose that's fairly close—and I was yelling every time I came up, "Help!" And the lifeguards thought I was joking. And fortunately some young lady that was sitting on the edge of the pool saw me and assumed that I was in trouble and came out and gotten me. But it's wonderful when you're going through trial to find out that your feet can touch the bottom. And when you get to the bottom and find you're still there, your character is intact and your relationship with God is there; it gives you a feeling of power and exhilaration like I don't think anything else in life can afford. And there's joy in that—joy in knowing that your feet can touch bottom, and you can find that no matter what happens, you know you've gone through the severus test and you've passed it. And so the next time a test comes, you say, "Ah, come on!" For we rejoice in our suffering, for suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, which is what we are, and that produces hope, and hope never disappoints us. So we rejoice in that. And then we rejoice also in our future hope. Jesus says to us in Matthew 5:12, "Rejoice, for great is your reward in heaven." We have not yet even begun to consider what the glories of heaven are. And many times we're even ready to speak about heaven in the afterlife because of the criticism that is directed against us Christians that we are pie-in-the-sky people. I know there have been many times in my own personal ministry that I have not really spoken upon the glory of eternal life with God because I didn't want to create the impression of the—of the person sitting here who didn't know Christ who was a thinking person, where all these Christians, you know, they always say it'll be better in the next life, so they pass off responsibilities now. And I'm very conscious, by the way, one of them—one of the—one of the persons that I always have in mind when I'm preaching is the agnostic—the agnostic person that might be sitting in the audience and wanting to hear the gospel but suspicious and skeptical. And I really pray that the Lord will help me give a presentation of the gospel which will not only reach the heart but will reach the mind as well. And joy in our future hope—a great days that come—in the pollak over to that, he said to be absent even from the body and is—is—is better because we get to be present with the Lord. So joy—uniquely Christian joy—and I think the Scriptures give us all kinds of ways that we keep the joy level flowing; we keep the joy level as we love and as we sing and continually give thanks—giving thanks in all things, singing, and having an attitude of Thanksgiving are necessary corollaries to joy—and surrendering to the Lord and not fighting. And when things are going against you, no matter how hard you've tried to change them and they don't change, say, "Lord, I've done my best to break that door in; now, rather than being bitter or being resigned about it, I just simply surrender my life anew to you; have your way in my life, Lord; it's my life, yours anyway, spend it any way you want." And keep staying in fellowship with the Lord and with other believers, and that's—that brings this development of the fruit in our life.
And then the third fruit of the Spirit is peace. Peace arises out of God's grace. But when the—the spirit of love is there and the fruit of the spirit of joy is there, why, love and joy naturally produce a person who is at peace. And when the scripture talks of peace, it's not talking simply about cessation of conflict. There's a great deal of talk in our culture today about conflict management and conflict resolution; there are courses now—and I know there's a course—I'm not sure what the exact title is—but a course in the Southern California College graduate program for ministers on conflict resolution within a church setting. And that's a very important thing, because sometimes the Saints are in conflict with one another. And some people think that, well, peace is just no conflict, but unfortunately life is filled with…
Conflict. You're gonna have conflict this week. And if you haven't had conflict, maybe you're living in a room by yourself. But there will be conflict. And how do you have peace? You know, in the grave there is no conflict. But that's not that's not my idea of resting in peace, okay?
In the Scriptures, peace, that great word Shalom, means wholeness, well-being, fulfilling the purpose for life. Psychologists might call it the actualized person; that person in whose personality the intentions that they've had for life are actually coming to pass, and they're living out their dreams. They're not living in a fantasy world, but they're living with a sense of inner wholeness and balance. And we need that kind of gyro compass in our life, that in the center of us is at peace, comfortable with who we are and no longer trying just to be like somebody else, and and no longer trying necessarily to match up to somebody's expectation of us. How many of us are driven in life by what other people think of us? And some of us are still driven with what people expected of us that are not even any longer living, but we're still trying to get someone's approval because in our heart there is not this fixed center of rest.
When I perform married services, I always have the benediction at the end, and I use the high priestly blessing that Aaron gives, found in the Book of Numbers: The Lord bless you and keep you. And as we come to the last phrase, it's "and give you peace." And I always refuse to say that word "peace," because in the English it seems like to me such a weak word when you consider the strength of the Hebrew words. So I just always have that little moment, Jewish moment, in every wedding service, says "and give you Shalom," may you and your life fully realize those purposes that God is working out in your personality.
And the person of peace is is resolving hostility in their life, and they're especially resolving hostility toward those who are against them, because they're using what Jesus taught us to do. And the persons that take our peace from us, they are praying for the difficult persons in their life; they are blessing them, speaking well of them, and they are doing good to them, and they are forgiving, and they're resolving anger daily. Don't let the Sun go down upon your wrath. You can be at peace as you do these things. And the person at peace is also helping God is helping to resolve stress. There may be many responsibilities and pressures, but God is in control, and God can help us to live with the strength we need for today.
And a continual prayer of my life, and I have this feeling of getting backed into pressure and started in today's, when I was a student and I had to make out a list of things that I was just going to do that day and be content with that, and even if I didn't get completely through the list, stop there, because tomorrow's all of tomorrow's stresses and all the things that are coming to pass are like all the stones that I could put in the burlap bag on my back today. But if I put them all in, I won't be able to lift the weight. So I only put in the rocks that I've got to carry today. And a lot of you have very busy schedules. I know what that is. And sometimes I'll look at his schedule like looking at this weekend. Said I just got tired thinking about all the things I was going to be involved in over the next, as I was thinking Friday morning between Friday morning and Sunday night. And we were at Walter Martin's banquet last night--25th anniversary for Christian Research Institute. And normally I don't go out on Saturday night because I like to rest up for Sunday so I'm refreshed. And the program lasts a little long. It was extremely informative, told us a lot about CRI, and it was a blessing. But it didn't get out till a quarter to twelve. And had I known that on from God, I didn't know that Friday morning, I don't I think I would have worried myself to death about that, well I won't be strong for Sunday, and I and here I was, I went to bed last night, I had this sense, well, Lord, you're in control, you're in control of my calendar in time, and you you know that tonight I needed eight hours of sleep, but I'm only going to get five instead. So, Lord, I gave you those hours tonight, how they were a gift to you. And because I believe in what Walter is doing, they're a gift to you now, Lord. It's up to you, you're gonna have to give them back tomorrow, and I thank you for that. And I felt so good today. You know, it's wonderful in our life where we can just kind of back off and say, God, you're in control of my life. I don't have to just fight and scratch and claw and try to push myself in, but I can sit still and be in God, be the person he made me to be, just about a a 1 talent or a 2 talent person and be content with that, be at peace.
And the fourth fruit of the Spirit is patience. And I want it now. One of the fruit of the Spirit that obviously cannot be developed without adversity, for patience comes about by situations in our life that would make us impatient. There are two Greek words that are translated in the New Testament patience. The word that's used here in Galatians 5:22 is the word macrothumia. We're more familiar, I think, with the word micro, which means small, microscope, or microcosm. Macro simply is the opposite of micro; macro means large. Those of you who have cameras know the difference between a micro and a macro lens, macro meaning large or long. And thumia is from a Greek word thumos, which meant originally a violent movement of air or water, or a violent movement in the ground or among animals or men. And because it was a movement of air or water, it gradually came to be used to describe anger, which is sort of a movement of violent movement, to well up, to boil up, to blow up. And so patience is long anger; a person who takes a long time to boil up and well up and blow up, not a quick-fused person. And then hypomonē, another Greek word, which is used interchangeably in the New Testament on several occasions with macrothumia, hypomonē meaning under and menē meaning to abide or to remain. It describes a person who remains under. When we're praying for God to do something in our life, maybe we're carrying a load, he can either give us strength to carry the load or he can remove the load from our back. And strength to carry the load at Suppan, menē, to remain under. And the only way you get a chance to develop patience is to find those impatient circumstances of life. Patience is such an attribute of God, for it describes his willingness to be long-suffering in our behalf. And when you're loving and joyful and peaceful, somehow patience then easily slides into that growing development of the fruit of the Spirit.
And then there's kindness, a fifth fruit of the Spirit. And the Greek word is chrestotes, which is very akin, with only one letter difference, the vowel e instead of I separating it from the word Christos, which means Christ or Messiah in the Greek. And I think those words therefore in the Greek beautifully matched one another, that the Christian person is the chrestotes, is the kindness person. Chrestos, in fact, when this word chrestotes is used in the New Testament, of the 17 times it is used, eight of those seventeen times it describes the character of God, whose kindness leads us to repentance, Romans 2:4, who out of his incomparable riches in his kindness gave us salvation in Christ, Ephesians 2:7. And First Peter 2:3 says to us that we have tasted of the Lord, and the Lord is chrestotes, kind. In English, the word kind comes from the root kin, k-i-n, and it originally meant simply to treat others as kin, as relatives. And I think therefore that this attribute in our life is is one so descriptive of all of our human relationships, that we bring people in, treat them as family. An unkind person, and when sometimes we know what something is by looking at what the opposite is, a non-kind person is hostile and punitive and or maybe indifferent, doesn't really care, doesn't do anything. Or an unkind person reduces life to a set of rules and says, if you keep the rules, everything will be right, but I don't have to have mercy upon you if you don't keep the rules. I can never forget the change that happened in a very caring person's personality. Who am I? And I'm glad to see in in later years now they've swung back to balance, but they got into the teaching that if you were ill is because there was sin or lack of faith in your life. And anyone therefore that continued to be sick, they just had no patience for whatever. And they used to be a very kind and compassionate, caring person. Well, we're not even going to mess with them; they don't deserve to be prayed for because they obviously don't have faith. Oh, I prayed for him, just cut them off. And so when we when we overemphasize one trait of a gift and leave out the fruit, we get into imbalance. Kindness is not reducing life to a set of rules and has compassion even on those who have broken the rules. And a person may even be faithful to God's rules and not have God's heart; that was Jonah. He didn't have kindness; that was his basic problem. Kind of speaks of warps and our human relationships, Ephesians 4:32, be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other as in Christ God forgave you.
The sixth fruit of the Spirit is goodness. And for some people, maybe good means average. You asked a child when they get home from school, "How was your how are your grades?" They were good. You know that's not so good. Good means C or low B. But goodness in the Bible is a very worthy trade. It describes the person in which there is not there is not a deterioration or decay or a rottenness; a person who is who is what you see is what you get, who is clean and wholesome. And I think a few years ago when our country went through Watergate, we saw what the absence of goodness does in leadership; corrodes attitudes. We need to be good. And then the seventh fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness. Again, it's flowing out of the others. And and faith or faithfulness is the only one of the fruit that is also listed as a gift in the Greek. It's the same word that is used for the gift of faith as it is for the fruit. And but the Greeks had a way of using the same word for either faith or faithfulness. And so in the English translation, this word comes across as faithfulness. And faithful does likewise flows out of God's character. God is faithful to strengthen and protect us from the evil one, 2nd Thessalonians 3:3. God is faithful in that he will not let us be tested beyond what we can bear, 1st Corinthians 10:13. We need to say those things to ourselves when we're getting tested seemingly beyond our strength, 2nd Thessalonians 3:3 in 1st Corinthians 10:13. No, God is faithful, and he knows where am I limits are, and he knows when to intervene and to back the pressure off. He will not let me be tested beyond what I can bear. And God is faithful to me even when I am NOT to him, 2nd Timothy 2:11 through 13. And God has failed to forgive, First John 1:9. And he's faithful to present us without fault on that day. God has made a covenant that he is going to present us in that day acquitted at his presence. And when I stand before eternal God, Jesus is going to allow no one to come and say, well, let me tell you what George was really like. I hope of what I really like is fairly consistent with what you see me in public, but there are aspects to each one of our life that have had dim moments, moments when the personality of Christ hasn't flowed through us as completely as it ought. But Jesus is going to present us, be faithful to present us on that day faultless before him. A faithful person can be relied upon; their word is is good. Don't need a contract when they make a commitment on the phone or make an appointment or have an obligation; they can be counted upon. It's always a distress for me is serving on the presbytery of our district to have to deal with situations among credentialed ministers where they have not kept their word to people in the matter of bills or obligations. A faithful person tries to make those things right, and if they can't pay, at least answers a letter or make some sort of attempt to manifest good faith and character. A faithful person lives with fixed beliefs; there there are things that a person of faith knows are true and that nothing can deny. I know that Jesus is I know that God loves me. A faithful person can successfully deal with obstacles, and you need faith to deal with obstacles, because faithfulness has two dimensions. Sometimes faithfulness and faith call us to remove the obstacles, and other times faithfulness requires us to tunnel through them. We don't see them removed, but we either get around them or underneath them. A faithful person sticks with commitments regardless of feelings. A faithful person can be content with God's approval even if human approval isn't forthcoming. Great model of faithfulness in my own life, of course, was my mother, upon whose tombstone we have inscribed the phrase, "God's faithful servant," because Mother always used to say to us, in that day when we stand before God, he is not going to ask us if we have been successful, but if we have been faithful.
One of my very favorite stories of all time is the story in England in the early part of the last century when an elderly minister was winding down his pastoral career. And in his last years, he did not have a large congregation, very small hand handful of folk. And the deacons came to him and said to him at the conclusion of one of his years there, said, "You know, Pastor, there don't seem to be many results under your ministry, and we would like for you to consider now retiring and leaving the pastorate." And they pointed out that that year only one lad had come forward and given his life to Christ under the pastor's ministry. So the pastor agreed to retire because that year only one person had found Christ. And years went by, and the minister died not knowing what fruit his faithfulness had produced. And then later on, decades, a celebrated man came back to Great Britain who had been the father of the modern missionary movement and who had blazed the trail for the gospel as the first missionary to Africa, Sir Robert Moffat. And as he spoke to a group of young people, he talked about the smoke of a thousand villages in Africa that he had seen, that smoke of those thousand villages that had not yet even heard the name of Jesus. And one of the young men sitting hearing Dr. Robert Moffat that day was David Livingstone, who would answer the call to be a missionary and go, and ultimately his heart would be buried in Africa. And Moffat was the little lad that was won by the unnamed Minister, who's named nobody's even bothered to record. And Moffat won Livingstone. Faithfulness. God rewards faithfulness.
So interesting, after I talked about Lily and Thrasher in the services this morning, there are people in this congregation that knew and and ministered with Lillian Thrasher, the Phil and Hazel Crouch, for example, who served with her in the 50s. And also Sister could tell Maxine could tell and Phyllis Crouch as well. And Phyllis Crouch came up to me after the service; she's retired and elderly now. And she said, "You know, the most beautiful thing happened when Lillian Thrasher came back to the United States," said, "Actually, when I was a young girl, my sister had died, and that had been 45 years before that, and Lillian Thrasher had made the clothes and taken care of the arrangements for her body to be placed in the casket." And she said, "So all these years have gone by, and people all through my life have called me the Crouch's daughter or related to Phillip Crouch." And she said, "When Lillian came here and she saw me, and she hadn't seen me for a long long time, she came up to me and she said, 'Oh,' she said, 'your Rachel's sister.'" She said, "Nobody has called me that in 45 years." But she said, "Lily remembered." And she said, "She didn't have a dress so that's really presentable to wear, so I gave her five dollars and told her she should spend that on getting a dress, but she couldn't bear the thought of spending five dollars on herself, so she went out and got a bed that she could take back with her for one of her orphans in Egypt." I was those great models of faithfulness, fidelity to God are so precious to us, give us such a great example to live with. And I want to be faithful. I what young people that are here to have a greater emphasis upon being faithful to the Lord than being successful.
And then the eighth fruit of the Spirit is gentleness. Gentleness, and that's a very difficult word to translate; it's the Greek word praotes. And at various times it's translated meek. It's actually used in three different ways in the Greek language. Praotes is used by Aristotle to describe the mean, that is, the person who is not on an extreme, who is not on the one hand a miser and not on the other hand spends every nickel he gets, but it is balanced. And and so that would be one way of looking at this word. And then another way to look at it is of a wild horse that has been broken, and now its energies have been channeled. And that wild horse may said be said to be disciplined. And praotes therefore could be used of a disciplined horse. A praotes horse didn't mean that it was tame and passive and lacking spunk; it just meant that all that spunk and Spitfire had now been channeled for a purpose. And then out of praotes flowed the third definition, which is gentleness, because a balanced person and a disciplined person has a gentleness in their lifestyle. I think it's sort of like they have the Velvet Touch, but underneath that velvet there's iron steel. And Jesus was that kind of way. He said, "I am meek and gentle of heart," and he certainly was not a passive milquetoast kind of a person; strong personality, but gentle, gentle with children, gentle with women, gentle with his disciples. And this is a trait that is very helpful when people disagree with us. And it's helpful also with people who correct us, to be gentle in response. And it's helpful when people fail us, to be gentle. Paul says in Galatians 6:1 that when someone fails, falls into sin, we are to restore them in a spirit of gentleness; we're not to have a harsh kind of an attitude toward them.
And then the ninth fruit of the Spirit is self-control, which comes from the Greek word enkrateia. Enkrateia is a marvelous word out of which we derive terms like democracy, because that word cracy, or democrat, actually comes out of the Greek kratos, and it simply means power. And mo means people. So a democrat is a people power. I don't know what a Republican is, but democracy is is power to the people. And what are some of the other terms that go with Krissy? Theocracy, power to God. And here is enkrateia, meaning a person who is in strength, in control. First Corinthians 9:25 says, he speaking of the athlete who's training for an Olympic kind of event, "Everyone who agonizes in all things controls himself." And here he's speaking of a person who takes on disciplines. And Paul now is especially speaking about spiritual disciplines, which are a struggle at times to live with. Prayer is not easy; studying the scripture is not easy. It's a simple thing to stay on January the 1st, now let's all have a daily program this year of prayer and Bible reading. It's hard to do it; it's agonizing. And giving ourselves to the Lord's work in any significant way involves development of character and training, and that brings with the agony self-control. A person who's not out of control or investing their happiness in the hands of someone else and their well-being. Well, if that person will just change his attitude toward me, I'll be better off. But the enkrateia person has found strength in themselves through God.
I see the fruit of the Spirit therefore is somewhat obviously sequential in development, much like the locks on a canal. And there was on the St. Lawrence Seaway this last week, a segment of one of those locks gave in as totally shut down the canal. And that canal operates on the principle that these giant ocean liners move into a closed space called a lock, and that's because one body major body of water is lower than the other body of water they're moving to. And gradually by going this ship going uphill or downhill, it must move through a sequence of locks. And each of the locks that it moves through, it fills up with water and floats the ship higher, and it moves into the next lock, and it goes on. And I think the fruit of the spirit are like that, beginning with love, we move all the way through until we've gotten progressively through, and we've come at the last to that hardest of all to develop, maybe self-control. The fruit of the Spirit tell us that God is far more concerned with who we are than what we're doing. And the fruit of the Spirit tells us that if you're looking for God's will for your life, don't look first of all that where God wants you to go or what God wants you to do; look first of all at what God wants you to be. Probably 99% of knowing the will of God is being the person God wants you to be, because if you are being that person, you can go anywhere and do anything, and you'll be in God's will, and you can be guided.
Now I mentioned that the beginning of this message that fruit of the Spirit often grows in adversity, and that's the opposite of fruit in the natural sense, for when we have a real bad chill in the orange groves of Orange County and Riverside County, we all know that the fruit gets frozen. And if the chill is too bad, it may affect the tree altogether, and a tree cannot survive under tremendous adversity. But the great thing about the fruit of the Spirit is that nothing can kill the development of Christ's personality within our life, for Christ's personality grows in under all kinds of temperatures and atmospheres. And the fruit of the Lord's personality is being shown even in that special gift of martyrdom that we mentioned last week, when Stephen, who has that one-time gift, is going to have his life extinguished from him, he responds with a love of Christ and magnanimity, and says, "Lay this not to their charge." I always think of that what I minister to dying people. I was with a Marcus family this week as we gathered around Ken's bedside and had moments of Prayer. And I know as a as a person who prays for the sick that I want I have this tension when I pray for someone that's seriously ill, because on the one hand I want God to heal them, but on the other hand, if this is time to say goodbye, I don't want to deny the opportunity to speak meaningful words. And I think that's one of the dilemmas we Pentecostal people always have when we face death, because right up to the moment of death we're often still talking about surface things because we're afraid to just simply say, "Thanks to a person who is dying, and I love you dearly, and if this is if this is the time for us to part, thanks for all the years," and we'll often miss that because we don't want to talk about things like that for fear that somehow we'd crowd out faith. So it's a real conundrum often in ministry. And one of the chaplains that St. Joseph told the family beautiful things. She said, "Why don't one by one you just all come into the room and have your own moment alone with Ken; he can probably still hear you, talk to him, telling you loved him." And that was precious. And Stephen had a kind of an experience at his death where the fruit of the Spirit was growing in adversity; it was there because
It's good in all temperatures. Revelation 22, verses 1 through 2, with this I close, points us to that future age when we're taken to the eternal City of God. And there is in that city, down the Main Street of the city, a river called the river of the water of life. Ponce de Leon was looking for the Fountain of Life; here it is in Revelation chapter 22, the water of life. Jesus said to the woman at the well, "If you knew who you were talking to, you would have asked of me, and I would have given you living water." He who drinks of this water will never thirst again. Here now, in the eternal city, is water, the River of Life. And along on either side of that River there are trees, fruit-bearing trees, changing fruit for every one of the twelve months of the year. And I think they describe the fact, on a symbolic scale, that where there is the life of God, there will you will have the full and rich variety of the fruit of God. And that I would simply move that picture of Revelation into our life now and say that where Christ's life is living in us now, there you will see this wonderful sight of his life, the water of his life bringing fruit to our own.
And the great thing about fruit is that it's no good if it's just left on the tree. A fruit is meant to be eaten. And that's how we are in our relationships with one another. God wants to make us delicious; he wants to make you delicious to the person that you're living with, and, surprising to me, he wants me, wants to make me delicious. And if we will let Christ's personality be developed in our life, people that know us well will have such a satisfying experience partaking of our life. And those that we minister to, that are outside family, wherever that wherever Christians gather together, there will be that sweetness in Christ. That's why it's a contradiction to be a crusty or a crabby or a mean or a cantankerous Christian. There are contradictions in terms that can't be, because the fruit is meant to be tasted. Oh, the Scriptures tell us, "O taste and see that the Lord is good," and we might add to that that the Lord wants us to be his tasty fruit in the world.
The gifts of the Spirit come to us, the miraculous endowment of God's Spirit; they also, some of them may be developmental. The baptism in the spirit is a kind of a climactic crisis, sort of a moment, but the fruit of the Spirit grows as we continue to sink our roots down in Christ. And we want to do that tonight; we want to reaffirm our love for the Lord and our desire for his personality to live in us. And I'd like for us again to have a time of worship and a calling upon the Lord. Father, our desire in life is to have you, your personality in us, and so we simply pray this evening as we offer our lives to you and know that all you want for us will come to pass, that Christ will be formed in us. Lord, we just take a moment to think through and pray through these gifts of the Spirit and or this fruit of the Spirit. And as we do, we think, Lord, of those maybe that it is difficult for us to love, and we ask that we will have love. We pray for those within the service of seeding who are depressed and going through hurting times; you will give them your joy which the world cannot take away. That those who are going through times of great stress and anxiety and worry will have your peace; and those who are disappointed because there is not a quick solution to long-term problems will be given your patience. And those who are tempted to be harsh and vindictive and critical and cruel will have kindness; and that where evil dwells in us there will be in its place goodness; and that faithfulness will characterize our life. And for those, Lord, who are being tested to neglect faithfulness to you or faithfulness to their relationships in life and their commitments, or the enemy has come to rob and to steal and to destroy, and what looks good on the outward, if it would make us to be unfaithful, it can never be right. So give us, Lord, deep in our heart faithfulness, and give us the gentleness that is balanced and self-controlled and kind. And then, Lord, help us to be self-controlled. We're there, Lord, our friends here tonight that are not in control because of drugs or alcohol or cigarettes or habits of any kind. Lord Jesus, we pray that you will move your control into our life so that we may be a person who has this fruit richly abiding in us as well. And we thank you that as you encouraged us to pray, you tell us that when we pray you will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask, and we're to go on asking and go on seeking and go on knocking. So we bring, Lord, that passage of scripture right here to Galatians 5:22 and 23, and we look at what the personality of the Spirit is like, and we are asking for that, we are seeking for that, we are knocking for that, and we will not be content to have any other objective in life than to have as our central most objective to be like you and to ask for that with all of our heart and seek for that with all of our being and knock at that door with every ounce of energy we have so that we might be conformed into your image. We pray it, Lord, in your name, amen. [Music]