Meditations on The Fruit of the Spirit - Love

Recently, I invited friends to a women’s Bible study on the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5.

I decided we would spend one class on each quality, so I set up a nine-class outline, created a generic study sheet, and sat back, thinking this would be a simple class.  Only when I got out my notebook and Bible and began to work on the first “fruit” - love,  I realized it was anything but simple! Where to start? No, seriously, where to start?  In describing the fruit of the Spirit, Paul began with love, perhaps because all the other qualities are grounded in love.  But how was I to even begin narrowing our focus on a concept that is woven into every theme and is the very theme of the Bible?  I was overwhelmed at the task and quickly humbled from my overly confident approach to our study.

We could start with the first time the word appears in the text, in Genesis 22, where God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac, “whom you love,” and offer him as a burnt offering. What a foreshadowing of our salvation!  Or, when Jesus answered the question, “What is the greatest commandment?” with “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30-31). Or we could start with 1 Corinthians 13, a glimpse at what love looks like.  Or maybe we should jump to Revelation where Jesus warns the church at Ephesus that they had lost their first love (Rev 2:4).

I was stumped, wondering how to cover love thoroughly and fairly without trying to teach the entire Bible!  And, of course, the answer was to quit trying.  Stop attempting to neatly condense and organize the Bible’s teaching about love. Love is in every page of the Spirit’s revelation. You can teach about love without teaching the entire Bible.  But you can’t teach anything from the Bible that isn’t affected by God’s love. The Bible is the story of God’s love.

We see love in the creation story. God created a world suited exactly to our needs and so complex that we don’t fully understand it after all these thousands of years.  And yet He also made it a place of majestic beauty for us to enjoy. And after God created the universe, He planted a garden for Adam and Eve to live in.  We can let our imagination picture a time when God walked with man “in the cool of the day.”  And we can marvel that God didn’t destroy Adam and Eve and just start over when they rejected Him, but rather let them know that one day He would make a way for mankind to be restored.

And in the final chapters of the Bible, John is given a revelation from Heaven, with a message for Christians on earth who are undergoing great persecution. God is about to send destruction to the wicked kingdoms of earth. The Christians might wonder if they will be swept away in the confusion! In the midst of the chaos, God shows John four angels “holding back the four winds of the earth” and a loud voice telling them, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads” (Rev. 7:3). God sees His children on the earth, and He wants them to know that.  Even as the great victory in Heaven takes place, it’s described as the marriage of the Lamb and His bride.  The final story is a love story.

My initial thoughts about what this class session would look like had become completely irrelevant. I now recognize that every exposure to the Word is an opportunity for the Spirit to teach us to love. So, I have asked each student to come prepared with a verse that helps them understand Biblical love and a Bible story that illustrates it. There will be no “wrong answers.”  We will talk about the challenges of keeping our focus on love in our daily walk, and we will look for scripture to strengthen us in our weakness.

Still, as I continued to plan and study, I did find patterns and enjoyed organizing thoughts about love in the scriptures. I began to realize how long and how deep a study of love could go.  I saw the natural progression and never-ending cycle of God’s love for man, our love for God, and our love for our fellow man.

I found the phrases “God’s steadfast love”  and “God’s covenant love” repeated dozens of times. God’s immutable, steadfast nature makes His love superior to any other. What happens to love when it is a promise? What could give more hope than God’s promise to love me?

I now look for love in Bible stories where the word “love” is not found.  I understand that there are no “random” stories. Seeking God’s love weaves individual stories into the one story of the Bible. It gives each one more importance, more implications, and application to my life.

I found love given as a command,  bound tightly to obedience. Jesus says loving one another is a new commandment and that love is how others will know we belong to Him (John 13).

So my friends and I will come together to talk about love as a fruit that the Spirit produces in our lives. We will not cover all that the Bible says about love; in fact, we will barely scratch the surface.  But we will read scripture and relate Bible stories. We will pray for guidance and wisdom to allow the Spirit to guide our steps. Out of love, we’ll offer support to each other in the weeks ahead.

The class is beginning in September - apple-picking season here in the Northeast. I love to leave the city where I live and drive to the country to the apple orchards to see healthy trees  laden with colorful fruit. Is there an abundance of the fruit of the Spirit visible in me?  Is there love in all I do and say? Looking at the fruit of my life, would someone know I belong to Christ?  “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control…”