Here's an illustration from a group called "Children's Christian Corner" on what the fruit of the Spirit look like.. Does this best demonstrate what God's fruit in your life will look like?

Your tree of life will produce an apple of love and a peach of joy… A pear of patience grapes of faithfulness! This is, perhaps, how we get the image into the minds of a small child but I hope we can go way beyond this in our understanding this summer….

I explained to you last week, (and then we really explored it on Wednesday evening),

the problem of even teaching the Fruit of the Spirit as a subject, in itself, is that you have to carve 1 ½ verses out of a Biblical passage and ignore the rest of the passage.

Gal 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. (NIV)

If I start right in teaching about the Fruit of the Spirit in those 1 ½ verses… what have I ignored already in that one short sentance?? The word… but…..

The word" but" suggests that something went ahead that was the opposite of the Fruit…and you all know what that was.

Gal 5:16 So I say, live by the (Fruit of the) Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature….. 19 The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20 idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21 and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

I tried to draw this line very sharply, last week, in a negative sort of way…. Now let me phrase it to you from a positive, "wonderful-piece-of-truth" side before we move into the first Fruit of Love. Watch this distinction…

Message Paraphrase:

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own selfish way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

Last week I purposely tried to stress the hard-to-hear negative:

What shows up on the outside of us in the way of attitudes or actions is a fairly accurate thermometer of what is going on, spiritually, inside of us.

God is enormously interested that we move from an outer display of impurity, jealousy, rage, envy, selfish ambition to an outer display of joy, peace, gentleness, and self-control.

Obviously, for any of those changes to habitually show up on the outside…there has to be a real change happening on the inside.

Illustration: I heard something this last week that made my big old heart happy. If you have been a Christian for a long time… my hammering out this line in the sand between sinfulness and godliness probably seems like overkill. Truth is, I wasn't trying to convince you that the line exists…I was trying to get through to those in their teens, and twenties who have been drilled by the world around them that there is no line, between absolute right and wrong and anyone who tries to create such a line is being intolerant and perhaps even immoral. (Immorality is often now defined as you trying to put your beliefs onto someone else.)

Heather Chess (21)- "I always thought we, as Christians, were supposed to follow the Bible's guidelines, but that we had no right to point out the wrong-doings of others. The world led me to believe that having no tolerance for evil was a sin against my own faith. I never knew how to have debates about my own faith for fear of being politically incorrect…. Until last Sunday, when Pastor Sam bluntly said, "The Bible not tolerant of sin!"

We, as Christian are not commanded to get warm and fuzzy with sin…in fact the opposite is true. We are supposed to be increasingly uncomfortable with sin, particularly in ourselves, and become more and more comfortable with the Spirit's fruit defining how we act and think.

But…..It's not, quite, as simple as your "green leafy tree of life popping out an apple of love".

I asked the question Wednesday evening: "Where does this fruit of the Spirit come from and we finally got to the very root of the theology behind this whole subject. Of course everybody said the fruit comes from "God"… that may be a little too simple.

You don't get the "fruit of love" by pulling up to the drive-through line and putting your withdrawal request into the little vacuum tube to Heaven. The Great Teller of heaven take your withdrawal request.. takes a quart of love off the heavenly shelf, puts it back into the vacuum tube and whoosh… you drive off into life with a grin on your face…. whistling "All I need is love"…

There is no love in the universe apart from God. Do trees have love in them? Are the electrons in an atom attracted to each other by love? Do cats love their owners? People have the capacity to love… but where does that love come from? It's the image of God created into us that gives us any capacity at all for love, or gentleness, or kindness. There is nothing inside a fallen, sinful, world…or in fallen, sinful, humanity that makes us want to automatically love someone else unless that love comes from the only source of love in the entire universe. I know I've repeated this kind of truth many times over the years but it is so essential to our understanding of God. God doesn't have love…God is love. God doesn't give away love… he gives himself.

1 John 4:16 …. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. (NLT)

On to the good news… as if that weren't already..

When you become a Christian…repent of your sin, embrace Jesus as "God who paid the price for your sins" and invite him to take over the steering wheel of your future…

The Bible says God doesn't, from up in heaven, stamp you with a "saved" stamp, and then begin to squirt small portions of the Fruit of the Spirit into your life.

God himself enters your life. All the metaphors of Scripture…. You open the door to Christ and he comes into your life, lives in you, His Spirit begins to reshape you from the inside out, His fruit begin to show through your life and others begin to be nourished by it.

At the risk of repeating myself…. Jesus doesn't come into to live, in you and through you, and bring with him nine suitcases full of fruit. He cracks open the cases and takes out the first little cannister of the fruit of love and pours it over your heart and your mind and "presto" the next morning you wake up with a crooked little grin on your face…

No… when he comes into your life he brings….. Himself!

He is all of those things. He is the Fruit of the Spirit! His presence automatically ensures you that the Fruit of the Spirit have arrived in your life.

If you are a Christian here today the good news is that you don't have to beg God to bring the fruit of love and patience and gentleness and self control into your life… it's already there. When Jesus came in he brought all of the fruit because he brought himself and he is the fruit.

So if I have Jesus in my life, and He is the Fruit of the Spirit… then why don't I always act patient and loving…why don't I show more self control?

It's right here in Galatians 5… As we say no to the sins of the flesh they wither and die and the fruit of Jesus is allowed to flourish and grow.

The fruit of the Spirit becomes an outward expression of the Spirit of Christ dwelling within us. The more the character of Christ is allowed to take root and grow in us the more the fruit of the growth begins to spill outside into our attitudes and actions.

After a while when people look at you and say: You know he is so much more loving to his fellow man that used to be…. they are not really complimenting you…. What they are actually saying is: I see Jesus, inside him, reflecting out his mouth and face expressions, and hands and feet.

She's becoming more and more, on the outside, a reflection of her Savior who is dwelling on the inside.

When my latest grandson, Elijah, was born, it was a little shocking. He has a little baby body with an exact miniature version of his dad's face…. That how we should all look to the world around us. Not quite grown up… but looking so much like our Father that nobody could possibly mistake us for someone else's kid. If we don't look anything like our Heavenly Father it becomes very confusing to the rest of the world.

As long as the family resemblance is clearly established the growing up process should automatically follow. It is a process…. It will take some time….

I found this is Romans 15, this week, and was intrigued:

Romans 15: 13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. 14 I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another. (NIV)

- Paul is suggesting that joy and peace will fill up with time as they submit (trust) in God.

- He says they are full of goodness…how can they be full of one fruit and not others?...

- If they are complete in knowledge, why did he just spend 14 chapters teaching them more?

What he is saying to them is what I think he would say to all of us. Everything you need is in you. The seeds to grow a huge harvest are all intact inside you… you just need to walk it out in your daily lives.

In every Christian in this room lies the seed and the inner fertilizer to grow a record- settting crop of love for your fellow man. How far along is the fruit of love in your life.

Remember…if "works of the flesh", like hatred, discord, jealousy, rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions are still dominant in your life… then love, divine love, certainly will not be dominant. Let's define it… then apply it…

This is a subject I've discussed, a lot, over the years so let me put all the Scripture into a paragraph nutshell.

God loves you with a divine love. It's not so much an emotion as an action. He loved you so much he gave everything to redeem you from your sin and allow you to spend eternity with him. God wants you to love him back! Again, He not so much, looking for an emotional response from you as he is an action: "If you love me…keep my commandments". It's a two way giving relationship between God and us…and us and God.

That two-way love relationship is supposed to reflect in our attitude toward other people. Our relationship with everyone around us is supposed to be characterized by love.

It doesn't take a theologian to figure out that if God's love, to us, is defined as a self-sacrificial giving and our love to him is also a self-sacrificial giving… then our love to others should be defined as ___________________

So the question we all need to be asking is:

In what ways does the fruit of love show up in my relationship with the people around me? Is my life characterized by a self-less giving of myself to meet the needs of others. Am I looking more an more like my model, Jesus Christ, who gave up his life to pay for my sin?

Let me show you what God's expectations are in our relationship with others: