Love: Rooted in God, Reaching Out to Others

Finally, frustrated, you decide that you're gonna fix it, so you grab a ladder and you get some some branch cutters and a staple gun, and you get two bushels of perfectly ripe, red, delicious apples. And you go to your tree and you cut off all the rotten fruit, and you staple on the new apples to the branches. And then you step back, and you proudly declare, now, now my tree is fixed. Well, of course, you haven't actually fixed anything. [00:34:10] (26 seconds)  #DontStapleFruit

All through the letter of Galatians, Paul is making sure that the readers understand the wonder of what it means to be in Christ. This is essential. We must understand this, that fruit is a consequence of the wonder of God's grace to us in Jesus. Fruit's not something you manufacture, it's the organic result of God's grace in your life. [00:33:29] (22 seconds)  #GraceProducesFruit

and the New Testament is replete with descriptions and commands to love. This word occurs over 300 times. And a study of these verses show that love is primarily it's primarily not a feeling, but rather an action. Love is an action. As I was looking at definitions of love, one that continue to come up again and again is originally cited with Thomas Aquinas that to love is to will the good of another. Love is to will the good of another. [00:37:39] (28 seconds)  #LoveIsAction

And when the bible uses this language of fruit, it's it's giving us this image of a garden that we're to walk walking into a beautiful garden and being overwhelmed by the fragrance, the beauty, just consumed by the spectrum of colors and smells and loveliness. Right? The opposite of a day like today. We can imagine a spring day and a full bloom of a garden. Paul says, this is the purpose of God in relationship to his people, to bear this beautiful fragrant fruit. [00:32:26] (33 seconds)  #FragrantFruit

And so this brings us to the verse that we're gonna study together the next couple weeks, this Galatians five twenty two, which is a picture, a portrait of practical godliness. So if we were to ask the question, what does it mean to be holy? This is what it looks like. Or ask the question, what does it mean to be godly? This is the portrait. Or what does it mean to be Christ like? This is what it's showing us. So the first thing we need to see about this fruit is that this is the consequences of us being brought into a relationship with Jesus. [00:32:59] (30 seconds)  #FruitOfGodlyLiving

It's only the work of the grace of Jesus Christ in the root of the tree that produces real fruit. So let's take a moment. We need to pause and drive this home. This is very important It's clearly possible for a person who's interested in religion or concerned about these things to create something of an outward change in their habits without ever experiencing an inward change of the heart. If this is you, [00:34:59] (23 seconds)  #HeartNotHabits

If the roots are diseased, stapling on new fruit isn't going to help. The new apples are gonna rot just like the old ones. And Tristan, this is what happens often in the Christian life. We try to change things through our behavior tweaks. We we stop doing something or we start doing something else without our heart ever being transformed. It's it's cosmetic changes that ultimately don't last. [00:34:36] (22 seconds)  #FixTheRoots

That the the church should live together in such a way that in everything we do, we make the gospel attractive. And it's vitally important that this runs through the whole framework, family life, employers and employees, the structure of state and politics, and so on, so that in every way, in everything we do, we make the gospel attractive. And so this raises a question for us. Question personally, does my character make people want to believe the gospel? [00:31:11] (28 seconds)  #MakeGospelAttractive