Sermon Notes, June 16, 2013
The Fruit of the Spirit: The Fruit, Galatians 5:16-26 (pg. 826)
We’re looking at the Fruit of the Spirit. We looked last week at the importance of “abiding”
or “remaining” in the vine—in Jesus—for the fruit of the Spirit to flourish in your life. As
we plunge into the study of the Fruit of the Spirit let’s understand what the fruit of the Spirit
is.
The fruit of the Spirit is really just a breakdown of holiness. If you could take holiness
and put it through a prism so that the prism somehow could breakdown holiness into its
constituent parts you’d have the fruit of the Spirit. They are the same thing.
 You can see it for example in Romans 6. In Romans 6 Paul talks about the works of
the flesh and how we must not produce works of the flesh but instead we should be
holy, we should put on holiness.
 In Galatians 5 the works of the flesh are contrasted with the fruit of the Spirit.
 In Romans 6 and in 1 Peter and a number of other places the works of the flesh are
contrasted with holiness. So holiness and the fruit of the Spirit are the same thing.
Now, the secret of holiness and the secret of the fruit of the Spirit, (let’s not forget), is not to
work harder, or another way to put that, to live under Law, but under grace. In other words,
 If you’re trying to do good—
 If you’re trying to live up to standards—
 If you’re simply working harder at morality out of a belief that being moral will earn
you heaven, will earn you acceptance with God, will earn you anything with God—
 If you are being moral out of that motivation it will produce works of the flesh.
If, on the other hand, you understand the gospel of grace, and that is through Jesus Christ
we’re accepted fully now because God has laid our sins on Jesus and then God also transfers,
when we believe in Jesus, His righteousness to our account so that we’re fully accepted now,
then when we seek to live a godly life with that motivation it produces the fruit of the Spirit.
Let me say this in a sentence. If you’re trying to be good, under Law, which means
you’re trying to be good enough so that you hope that God will answer your prayers, put
power in your life, or more importantly you can earn His favor, the problem is that more
often than not the spiritual life gets distorted to mean just a self-improvement project. And
what will happen is that this will produce works of the flesh. It will produce pride.
If, on the other hand, you say that I see that “I’m accepted wholly because of what Jesus
has done for me and now I want to live a life of grateful joy and grateful obedience to God”
and your singular desire is to simply abide in Jesus in all your activities you will produce the
fruit of the Spirit. It will be unavoidable! It’s the same with the fruit of the Spirit as with
holiness.
Jonathan Edwards wrote a book back around 1740 entitled Religious Affections. In that
book he says, “It’s one thing to love God for his mercy. It’s another thing to love God for his
power. (And of course a real Christian will love God for his mercy and his power.) But only a
real Christian can love God for his holiness.”
Now, why did he say that? He said it because of this. It’s possible to come to Christianity
the way you come to a self-help book or that you come to a seminar that’s supposed to help
you get your life together. It’s possible to simply want to use God to get His power or His
forgiveness, you see, not to love God for Himself, but just to say, “I love God for His power
and His forgiveness because I need that power to deal with my problems and to reach my
goals and I need that forgiveness to feel good about myself.”
But Edwards says if you love God for His holiness, for His purity, for His perfection, for
His goodness, for His greatness then you actually love God for Himself. That’s only possible
if you believe the gospel.
It’s like this. Let me share this. It’s pretty revealing.
Let’s say your wife comes to you and says, “Why do you love me?” And you say, “Well,
I love you because you’re serviceable—you meet all my needs…”And what will she say? She
won’t say much. Not all day. Not all week, probably.
God says, “I love you simply because I love you. You are worthy of my love.”
That’s why God is always saying in the Bible—Deuteronomy 7—He comes to Israel (this is
amazing), He says, “O Israel, I did not love you because you were the greatest of nations. I
did not love you because you were the largest of nations. I did not love you because you had
the most going for you, I love you because I love you and I loved your ancestors before you.”
Now, when you experience God’s love like that, when you accept Christ as Savior and
you know that you’re completely accepted now, in spite of how badly you’ve blown it at
times, in spite of how inadequate you feel, in spite of your sin you’re totally accepted, you’re
in! You’re in Him. You belong to Him.
That’s the reason we can say that the mark of a real Christian is that you love God for His
holiness, namely, you love Him for Himself. When you begin to love Him for Himself—
another way of putting that is you abide in His love, in Him, you will grow in the fruit of the
Spirit. There’s no stopping it!
The fruit of the Spirit is the communicable attributes of God. The incommunicable
attributes of God are His omnipresence, His omnipotence, things we’ll never have. The
communicable attributes of God are things like His love, His wisdom, His compassion and so
on. These things, through our intimate contact with Him, will grow in us. How do we become
like Him? We become like Him the closer we get to Him, the more we gaze at Him, the
more our delight and joy come from being in relationship with Him.
It’s one thing to know intellectually that He’s wise. It’s one thing to know intellectually
that He’s gracious. It’s another thing to actually gaze at Him, to let His love wash over you,
to sit in His presence and just let it sink in. If there is a secret to holiness, that’s it. And
therefore, really there is no secret.
Your typical book on the victorious Christian life, they ordinarily start like this: “You
have problems? You have troubles? Do you have things you have to overcome? Just follow
these 3 or 5 steps and everything will be fine. You’ll be a better you.” But the Bible, instead
of starting with you, it starts with God.
When Isaiah got ahold of who God was he was different. He saw God “high and lifted
up.” He saw God, he fell to his face, and he was changed.
How did Job become holy? Job says, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have
seen you. Therefore I … repent in dust and ashes.”
How did Peter become holy? He and his fishermen follow Jesus’ instructions to let down
their nets for a catch. And with his eyes he witnesses the miraculous catch of fish. Peter sees
this and he falls at Jesus’ feet and says, “Depart from me, Lord, I am a sinful man!” He saw
who Jesus was. And he was changed!
And all the methods are not really important. Ultimately it doesn’t come down to methods.
It’s taking the truth of who God is and keeping your eye on Him. The fruit of the Spirit are
God’s qualities burned into our soul because we keep looking at Him!
One more thing about studying the fruit of the Spirit.
In Gal. 5 where we find the list of the fruit of the Spirit (and I alluded to this last week),
notice that the word “fruit” is singular. It is important to keep this in mind. It doesn’t say the
“fruits” of the Spirit. In the Greek “fruit” is singular. So that means that love, joy, peace,
patience and so on are not separate things. Instead you should think of the fruit of the Spirit
like a diamond and every one of these things are truly facets or aspects. You can actually
look into the diamond through any face and see all the rest of the diamond.
Now, what this means is that if you have one of these attributes or one of these fruit all
the rest of them would be there. It’s extremely clear in the case of love, though it’s true for
all the rest. When we look at Paul’s famous passage on love next week, 1 Corinthians 13, and
we’ll see that all the other fruit are there. Love is patient. Love is kind. What are those?
Those are fruit of the Spirit.
Maybe you’ll think, “Well, love is the only thing and all these other things are
derivative.” No. You see, if you really love the way the Bible says you’re to love then you’ll
have joy, you’ll have peace, you’ll have kindness, you’ll have self-control. They’re all in
there. If you have joy, you’ll have love and peace and all the rest. If you have peace, you’ll
have love and joy and all the rest. That’s because they’re all parts of a whole and you can’t
really, really, really have one without developing the rest.
Something that Jonathan Edwards points out in Religious Affections is that people can
work at developing certain of these traits individually—these can be counterfeited by the
natural constitution of the human heart and at times by Satan.
What makes you know the difference between a real Christian and anybody else is that
only the Holy Spirit can produce all of them together. There is a symmetry about holiness.
The natural human heart can produce some of those kinds of attributes. You see, your natural
temperament, your natural constitution can produce some of these.
But real spiritual fruit is all of a piece. It’s all of them together. And the way that you can
tell that something is going on that’s supernatural, that cannot be accounted for in any other
way in your life, is that they’re all growing together. And that’s the reason why fruit is
singular.