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  Chapel

Our Series for Chapel this week is:

Day 2

A Fruit of the Spirit:  LOVE

Day Verse

"But the fruit of the Spirit is LOVE, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there
is no law."
--Galatians 5:22, 23

Teachers, click on the small diagram below for visuals ideas.

In Christ's last prayer on earth for us believers He prayed to His Father, "All Mine are Thine, and Thine are Mine...and I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it; that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them" (John 17:10, 26).

When you take Christ as your Savior, you really belong.  You are in!  In what?  In God's own family.  You are His child (John 1:12).   Then it is your Savior's great desire that God love you every bit as much as God loves Him, His only Son.  Think of that!  Also, Christ commanded all Christians to "love one another" (John 13:34; 15:9' 12, 17).  Not to love others is to rebel against our Lord.  If we don't love the Lord and others we are "nothing" (I Corinthians 13:2, 3.  "Charity" in this Scripture should be translated "love").

How do we know whether we love as we should?  WE can test our feelings by the standards in God's Word.  True love is kind, believes, bears, hopes, and endures all things. (I Corinthians 13:4. 7).  Does this make you feel that you don't love as you should?  Good!  Then you are ready to confess your lack of love to the Lord and find out how you can become loving.

To begin with, God has made it possible for Christians to be loving by putting within our very hearts a Person, the Holy Spirit Himself!

HOLY SPIRIT

Comforter

 Do you wonder how that can be?  In answer to the prayer of God's Son, Jesus Christ, God the Father sent the Holy Spirit to earth to take up His dwelling in the heart of every Christian (John 14:16, 17, 26).  Jesus, in telling His disciples about this, called the Holy Spirit "another Comforter" because the Holy Spirit was to take Jesus' place on earth.  What a Comforter He has been to the disciples and to every believer.

But the Holy Spirit is much more than a Comforter.  He is:

Teacher

Guide

Ever-Present Helper

as well.  His task is to make Christ real and wonderful to the believer, to make him understand God's Word, to possess and control every part of his personality--his mind, will, and emotions--and to put sin out of his life and keep it out.  Yes, the Holy Spirit is the important Person of the Godhead who co-operates with the Christian to make him as much like Christ as possible.  The Bible calls the Spirit-controlled character fruit.  Now do you understand why these lessons are called "the fruit of the Spirit"?

The first fruit of the Spirit is LOVE.  God SO loved you that He gave His only Son to save you from your sin (John 3:16).  This is another way of saying that the life of Christ, the Vine, is in all Christians, the branches, and all Christians are in Him.

We wouldn't know about God's wonderful love if we didn't have the Bible. 

Love = The Word

But because "holy men of God" wrote down what the Holy Spirit led them to record (II Peter 1:21), and other faithful men carefully translated their writings, and still others gave their lives to preserve the scriptures, we have this  precious Book.  Do we value it and love it as we should?  The psalmist exclaimed, "I will delight myself in Thy commandments which I have loved" (Psalm 119:47).  Yes, if you and I believe in Christ as our Savior, we each can say,  "God's Word is my delight and love", the Holy Spirit constantly makes us more loving and makes us love God's Word more.  And the wonderful thing about that is that as we live to love, we love to live.  Life takes on much more meaning and zest when we love the Lord and His Word and other people. 

 Yes, love is the badge of the Christian.  Jesus commanded all His followers to love one another as He has loved us, and said that people can tell that we belong to Him by observing our love and consideration for others 9John 13:34, 35).  Can you see that the Christian life is a cycle of being and doing?  We keep God's commandments by loving one another, and we love one another by keeping His commandments.

When others look at you, do they see your love for the Lord and others as a well-rounded virtue, fully developed  grape?  Or does your love appear to them like an undeveloped grape?  The chances are that if your love for the Lord and others is no more developed than a shriveled grape, the rest of your Christian character is just about as skimpy, because love is the basis of all other good traits.

The only way to know God's love is to show it.  We can turn this statement around and it will be equally true--the more we SHOW God's love, the more we KNOW it.  WE show forth our love by the places to which our feet take us, and by what our hands do.  Our hands especially tell a great deal about our character.

Are you wondering how you can possibly love others and also become as full of joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and self-control as the Lord intends?  Are you puzzled over how YOU an bear all this fruit of the Spirit?  You won't be after you find out in the next part of our study that you by yourself don't have to cultivate all these noble character traits, but that the Lord Jesus Himself gives each one to you as you trust and obey Him.

To continue this inspiring series on "The Fruit of the Spirit"