Slowing Down: Embracing Love and the Spirit's Pace

Devotional

Sermon Summary

Bible Study Guide

Sermon Clips


But what if you saw those unsettling unplanned moments as a gift, a gift to finally stop and observe the world around you, a gift to slow down your breathing and your heart rate for a minute, a gift to reawaken your soul to God's three-dimensional world instead of plunging back into the two-dimensional matrix of your smartphone. [00:00:46]

Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. I read it one more time: hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life, says Dallas Willard. [00:05:18]

The problem isn't when you have a lot to do. It's when you have too much to do, and the only way to keep the quota up is to hurry. In our topic this afternoon in this chapel series is love, love for others in particular, and so the connection here with the pace of our lives and with the Christian calling to love other people is close. [00:06:04]

For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. But I say walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. [00:09:42]

Love serves others. The reason to specify that here and to say that the love that we're talking about and the love of the Galatians 5 is talking about is the love that serves others is because there's three main ways of the Apostle Paul uses the language of love in his letters. [00:12:13]

Christian love is not simply love for love's sake. Christian love for others is an extension of the love of God. Or do you put use Paul summary term: faith. Love for others issues from faith in Christ. So Paul says in Galatians 5:6, what counts is faith working through love. [00:17:14]

Our love for others produced in and through us by the Spirit is fruit, and it's not root. Other realities must happen first outside of us and in us for the fruit of the Spirit to be born in love in and through us. Our love, our meeting the needs of others, our good works are not the root of the Christian life but the fruit of the Spirit's work in and through us. [00:19:42]

God calls us to move at the pace of his Spirit. What struck me here in meditating on love as a fruit of the Spirit is that Christians are called in this passage to adjust our lives to the Spirit, not presume that he will adjust to our lives. [00:23:09]

Walking is a powerful image in the Christian life. Not that there's no place for running. Paul himself says he runs. He hopes his running will not be in vain. He says in Galatians chapter 2, in Philippians chapter 2, he laments that the Galatians were running well before they were deceived by the false teachers. [00:24:29]

Do I have enough margin in my schedule and life for other people's needs and requests? As a Christian, it is not simply enough to ask if my current pace of life is sustainable for my own soul. That is an important question, the first question. She's not the only one because Christians are called to care for noses other than our own. [00:36:09]

Think of Jesus' life as we closed. Jesus was not idle, and Jesus was not frenzied. He walked and walked and walked and also wasn't sedentary. From all we can tell in the Gospels, Jesus's days were full. I think it would be fair to say that Jesus was busy, but Jesus was not frenzied. [00:37:56]

Love is the fruit of the Spirit. Love is not the fruit of our flesh. It's not the fruit of our strengths. Love is produced by the Spirit through us, not apart from us. Our fruit of love happens by the power of the Holy Spirit. [00:40:02]

Ask a question about this sermon