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Aug 27, 2023

The Fruit of the Spirit is Love

The Fruit of the Spirit is Love

Passage: 1 John 4:7-21

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: That’s the Spirit: Learning to keep in step with Him who indwells

We take for granted how crucial love is to goodness, how unnecessary or far from inevitable it was that humanity should by and large embrace it as a virtue. That may be in part why Paul names love as the first in that list of interdependent qualities of our being known as the fruit of the Spirit. God commands love, but only first by compelling that love–all so that He might in us complete love.

Readings & Scriptures

PRE SERVICE TEXT: I John 4:7
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH/SCRIPTURE READING/CORPORATE PRAYER: Matthew 5:43-48; 1 Corinthians 13:4, 7
LEADER: You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

CENTRAL TEXT: 1 John 4:7-21
1 John 4:7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

13 By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 17 By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

CONFESSION OF SIN: 1 John 1:5-9
LEADER: This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

ALL: If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

ABSOLUTION OF PARDON: 1 John 1:7, 3:1
LEADER: if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. . . .See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.

BENEDICTION: 1 Peter 1:8, 9
LEADER: Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

POST SERVICE: I John 4:11
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God;
if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

RELATED SCRIPTURES:

  • Matthew 5:43-48 
  • Matthew 25:46
  • John 1:18; 5:37; 6:46
  • John 13:34, 14:15, 15:17
  • Romans 8:15
  • 2 Corinthians 5:14, 15
  • 1 Peter 1:8-9
  • 1 John 2:28
  • 1 John 3:24; 4:13, 15, 16

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. It’s a question we’ve asked in other ways in response to other sermons. It’s still worth revisiting: who most comes to mind when you think of someone who has loved you? Why them? What difference has it made on you?
  2. What’s hard about love? Venture as many thoughts as you can together.
  3. Why might the command to love be so central not just to this passage but to the ministry of Jesus as a whole?
  4. What all does it take to love an enemy? What could it look like? (Weave a story if you have to)
  5. Find all the places in the passage–implicit or explicit–where we find this love commanded as a love compelled first by His love. Why does that matter?
  6. What are the marks of a love “perfected”--in the sermon, “completed”? Why those? Reflect for a moment and see if you can discern in your own life the maturation of love. Can you name a time when you thought you were acting in love but in time realized it was something other than love? 

Illustrations

InView Media Album 08.27.2023

QUOTES:

  • We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts, it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us. C.S. Lewis
  • Heresy 2: Your spiritual development is primarily intellectual. - Mandy Smith
  • I used to naively to assume murderers are all monsters, sadistic sociopaths straight of Silence of the Lambs or Primal Fear. Today I realize that the difference between me and most murderers. . . comes down to one thing. Not character. Luck. I’ve been lucky enough to lose most of my fights. Yet hidden away in Jesus’s warning is a profound revelation. τῶ ἀδελφῶ αὐτοῦ. It’s there in the Greek. ‘Everyone who becomes angry with his brother’. … What is forgotten in fits of rage? Anger forgets that its object is no mere object, no mere thing, no mere item. I forget that the intended target of my wrath is in fact my brother. In anger you lose sight of the face. You become blind to the stranger’s reality, to what remains true about him, to his persistent identity whatever he has done. You forget that he is still related to you in the most intimate way. That this guy on the tube, or this person who has hurt you, or this person who bears ill-will towards you, remains a someone, not a something. Remains a person. Remains a creature of the God who loves in freedom. Flesh and blood like I am. But spirit too… destined, like I am, to be united to Christ. […] My prayer, therefore, is not just that I become increasingly sensitive to my own internal state or what it is in in my own present or past that predisposes me to anger. My prayer is that I learn to apprehend more vividly the identity and destiny of the person with whom I am here and now entangled, enmeshed, at odds. That I can perceive him as my brother, however momentarily estranged from me he is, one who belongs to the same family. Who, as he smirks and scowls and menaces me – also bears the weight of glory. Dealing with anger requires what Simone Weil, and after her Iris Murdoch, call ‘attention’. As Murdoch puts it in The Sovereignty of Good (1970): ‘It is in the capacity to love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists’. Anger management is about being liberated from fantasy – the fantasy that my adversary is a mere mortal. Christ’s call to peace – to see the object of my anger as my brother – is ultimately a call for a reality check. James Mumford
  • If thou must love me, let it be for naught,
    Except for love’s sake only. Do not say,
    “I love her for her smile—her looks—her way
    Of speaking gently—for a trick of thought
    That falls in well with me, and [assuredly] brought
    A sense of pleasant ease on such a day.”
    For these things, in themselves, Beloved, may
    Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought,
    May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
    Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry—
    A creature might forget to weep, who bore
    Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
    But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
    Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.
    - E.B. Browning, Sonnet 14
  • Love is so much the gift of God that it is called God. - Augustine
  • To be loved but not known is superficial. To be known but not loved is our nightmare. Only Jesus knows us to the bottom and loves us to the sky. . . . If you were a hundred times worse than you are, your sins would be no match for his mercy. - Tim Keller
  • Most of the love shown by the church today is no different from the love of sinners. We are tribal, petty, vindictive, and prone to retaliate. We look more like politicians attacking opponents than suffering servants. Too often the love of the church has looked like the love of the world. But Jesus tells us that to be sons of the Most High, we must have love that is labor and fortitude. Love that is patient, not immediate. Hidden, not applauded. Permanent, not temporary. And this is because of how we have been loved. Our father is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. He is merciful to those who do not deserve it. It’s this kind of love of labor and fortitude that we are called to today. This kind of love is overlooked, taken for granted, and easily trampled underfoot in a culture of rage. But it’s the same kind of love that can turn an enemy into a friend, bring a prodigal home, and redeem the world. It’s the love of Jesus manifest through our lives. To love well is to suffer. To suffer without recognition and often without response. It’s the way of the cross, but the way of life. - Jon Tyson.

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