"If we live by the Spirit," wrote Paul, "let us also be guided by the Spirit" (Galatians 5:25). Here is my attempt to be guided by the Holy Spirit. You will have to decide if I live by it.
C. Thomas Hilton
Interim Senior Pastor
Wayne Presbyterian Church
Wayne, Pennsylvania
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Romans 12:9
Love
It comes as no surprise that love is the first fruit of the Spirit mentioned by the Apostle Paul in his listing of the nine spiritual crops to be harvested by the Holy Spirit in the life of a Christian. As a way to sum up, I John 4:8 tells us that "God is love." In reality, this is the only spiritual fruit, for all the others are derivatives. All the others are but added colors in the rainbow of love. Each of the other eight spell out more clearly the variety of this one manifestation of the presence of the Spirit in the life of the believer.
When the God of love dwells in your life, you will have joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control (GNB). Paul details to the church in Galatians 5 the many works of the flesh, and when he finishes he hasn't really finished, for he concludes, "and things like that." In other words, there were many more "works of the flesh" that he could have mentioned, but did not. But when it came to detailing the presence of the Spirit in the life of the believer, it is one fruit—singular. The fruit involves one harvest of the Holy Spirit, giving a unified and cohesive character to what the Spirit produces in the Christian life.
Paul wanted the Galatians to understand this point clearly, for he wrote elsewhere in this letter, "Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit." There it is in black and white. "So," he wrote, "let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up" (6:7-9). What we will reap at harvest time is a crop of love, the specifics of which are spelled out in the expressions of love in the rest of Galatians 5:22. Again, Paul wrote to another church, "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (Romans 5:5). We begin with love, for God is love and if, in fact, we desire to be godlike, then we shall embrace love. If, in fact, we are to follow the Christ about whom Paul preaches, we must be loving ourselves, as Jesus was loving. Paul calls this attitude, in his introduction to I Corinthians 13 (the love chapter), "a more excellent way."
But for all his talk about love (and the necessity for it), for all his efforts to persuade the early Christians to be Christlike, for all his attempts to model love for the early Church, Paul was not too successful. Our text has Paul admonishing the early Christians to have "genuine love." What other kind is there, we might ask? Why would he speak of genuine love, if he did not find much of the opposite in the Church? Our text would indicate that Paul was struggling with a quality of love in the Church that left something to be desired. When you look at the evidence from other passages of Scripture, this would appear to be true.
First Peter, written from Rome to those having oversight of the churches in Asia Minor, speaks about "the genuineness of your faith," and "the genuine mutual love" that is needed. Again, there must be a fair amount of ingenuine faith present, in order to keep contrasting it to the genuine kind that these apostles desired.
I think we can safely say that Paul was having trouble growing genuine faith in the hearts of the believers. His letter to the church at Philippi (2:20) speaks about Timothy and how Paul will soon be sending him to them. Then he adds this revelation, "I have no one like him who will be genuinely concerned for your welfare. All of them are seeking their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ." All of them are? All but Timothy? If that's true, then there aren't many Spirit-filled Christians around. All of them? Really?
Writing to the church in Corinth, he twice mentioned the need for genuineness, speaking one time of the possibility of their taking an offering and adding, "I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others" (II Corinthians 8:8). If he knew that they had genuine faith, he would not have to compare it to others. He would know. But he has to continually test the sincerity of the church members. Will they measure up or not? Are they genuine Christians or not? Have they caught the genuine love, or the ingenuine love? "Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine" (I Corinthians 11:19). Paul was having such difficulty that J. B. Phillips titles the twelfth chapter of Romans, "Let Us Have Real Christian Behavior," as if this were a scarce commodity.
I shouldn't imply that Jesus didn't face many of the same difficulties, for in his Sermon on the Mount, he said, "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye" (Matthew 7:5). He also preached, "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." (Matthew 7:15-20).
"Ingenuine Love Is Selfish."
What is genuine love and what is not? Our danger is that we become discouraged over the obvious evidence of so much lack of real love. I read where an instructor said to a new parachute trainee, "When you jump, the rip cord will pull automatically, but if it doesn't, pull the auxiliary chute on your back. If that doesn't work, pull the emergency cord. If that doesn't work—well, there will be an ambulance waiting for you on the ground." So the trainee jumped and nothing happened. He pulled the auxiliary cord and still nothing happened. He pulled the emergency cord. Nothing happened. He said, "Of all the luck! I suppose the ambulance won't be there either!" His pessimism was warranted—ours is not. But we ought to at least be realistic. Love was not overflowing in the biblical world, or even in the early Church. For many the ambulance wasn't even there to help bind up their wounds when their lives crashed.
Ingenuine love is easy to discern, for it is limited. It is guarded. It is a love that is conditional. I will love you, if you will love me in return. If you will do this for me, I will do that for you. It often involved bargaining. The one characteristic that is most obvious in ingenuine love in the Church is that it is selfish. Any expression of affection that is only self-serving is "erotic"; eros love, an expression of love for oneself. No matter what you called it, no matter how you dressed it up, no matter what others think it is, if it is motivated by a desire to serve one's own needs, it is ingenuine love.
Genuine love, agape, is expressed in the willingness of a person to lay down one's life for another. There is no greater love: "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13). This is the love that Christ models for us.
I read about an expression of genuine sacrificial love in Hollywood, Florida. A four-year-old child wanted to see the week-old puppies in her friend's backyard next door. Diana, 15, knew her dogs didn't like strangers, but she thought it would be all right if she accompanied Bernice into the yard, just to take a look. The dogs, one a Chow Chow and German Shepherd mix, the other a German Shepherd, attacked Bernice when she tried to pick up one of the three puppies.
As Diana ran for a pole to fend off the dogs, her mother, Sonia, rushed into the yard and jumped on top of Bernice to protect her
