Date: Feb 12, 2013
THE MOST DELICIOUS FRUIT YOU'LL EVER FIND - PART 2
When a 9.0-magnitude earthquake hit Indonesia in late December, 2004, some 220,000 died and 500,000 were left homeless. For weeks after that, house painter Bill Crosby wanted to help. But he asked himself, Who cares about paint if you don’t have a house?
Hello everyone, I’m Connie Jeffrey and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to today’s broadcast of the Voice of Prophecy. We’re in the second week of a three-week series exploring four major assurances that are ours through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Pastor Lonnie dealt with two of them last week, and introduced the third yesterday, which is this: The Holy Spirit grows beautiful, desirable, spiritual fruit in our lives. So as you can well imagine, we’re offering you a book about one of the Spirit’s works, the gifts He gives to all of us when we enter the Kingdom of His grace. The book is by H. M. S. Richards Jr. and titled What’s Your Gift? For your free, post-paid copy of this fine 62-page book, just write to Voice of Prophecy, Box 53055, Los Angeles 90053. That’s Box 53055, Los Angeles, 90053, or call us toll free at 1-800-872-0055. Now here’s our radio pastor, Lonnie Melashenko to conclude the message he began yesterday on the fruit of the Spirit.
Thank you Connie. And friend, let me return to the story I began a moment ago. After the tsunami disaster just after Christmas 2004, the world tried to help. In America, Bill Crosby went to work every day painting houses, but he couldn’t get out of his mind the people far away whose lives had been devastated. “Then something just snapped,” he told a reporter. “One minute I knew I was going over there. I just knew it.” He wanted to go to Phi Phi [pee-pee] Island to search for friends he’d made at a resort. But the Thai government refused permission. So he volunteered at a temple that had been converted into a morgue. He helped stack 2,000 bodies and assisted relatives searching for loved ones. Then Bill collapsed from heat exhaustion. He’s a big guy, arms displaying bulging muscles covered in tattoos. But when he told a reporter about helping a family find a man whose arms had been torn off by the tsunami, his voice quavered and his hands shook. “The morgue was the most intense experience of my life,” he murmured.
Rumors reached his ears that relief was not getting to the surrounding islands. It made him angry. So he decided to go home, sell his house, and return with food. Back in the States, he couldn’t believe the tsunami story had vanished from the media! He purchased supplies and arrived back in Thailand in March and personally delivered a 10-week supply of food to 4,000 people who had received nothing from any relief agency. When all 30 tons of supplies had been distributed, he got on a plane and came home. When a reporter caught up with him, Bill was sitting on the floor, because he’d sold all his furniture. All he had left were a few of his “toys”—a Harley motorcycle and a black Hummer both for sale from sheer necessity. “I’m embarrassed to even have this stuff after what I’ve seen,” he mused. Bill is thinking of becoming a missionary in Thailand because he just can’t get these needy people out of his mind.
You can’t help but think of the words Jesus spoke about the last day of human history. He will say to people like Bill: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink” (Matthew 25:35, 36).
And that kind of thoughtfulness reminds me of these words about the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22, 23: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.” And we observed yesterday, there’s one fruit, the fruit of love, and this love is manifested in many different ways. And we looked at the first two love aspects of the Spirit’s fruit: joy and peace. Today we’ll explore the other six aspects of the “love fruit” named in the New Testament.
The third aspect of this fruit is patience. This means to be tolerant when provoked. No Christian can reach the Golden Gates without experiencing provocation and pain. But when we listen to the Spirit within, He makes us sensitive to the plea of the serenity prayer: God help me accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
You know, there's one thing that no one can take away from us, not even a court of law dispatching someone to jail for life. No one can take from us the right to choose our attitudes. Nelson Mandela is a fine example. He maintained a strong, positive, hopeful, helpful attitude to life throughout his 27-year incarceration on Robben Island, off the coast of South Africa, and became one of the most revered leaders of our time. The Holy Spirit helps us to be patient so God can turn an assault from Satan into an advance for God's kingdom.
John Bunyan suffered 13 years in a medieval prison and turned his experience into his classic, Pilgrim's Progress. That experience taught him patience and how to hurl the giant Despair over the walls of Doubting Castle.
The fourth aspect of the Spirit's fruit of love is gentleness. The beatitudes call this same quality, “mercy.” And I’m sure we would agree that the ultimate biblical example of mercy is the Good Samaritan. By the time he got to the beaten, bloodied traveler, two religious leaders had come and gone without lifting a finger to help.
Finally, the Samaritan comes by. He does everything one could wish for and more. He shows compassion, he cleans up the man’s wounds, he carries the stranger to the nearest resting place and assumes full responsibility for the bill. Oh, how the world needs this love fruit!
The fifth aspect of love Paul names is goodness. In some ways it’s one of the more difficult to define of the eight aspects of the fruit of the Spirit. It’s both so obvious and illusive! Of course the Christian shows the quality of goodness, but it’s a very particular kind of goodness. It’s almost incandescent. It shines from within. It shows its beautiful face at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected places. And its demonstrations of love for God and love for others become a spontaneous way of life.
When Catherine Booth, the co-founder of the Salvation Army, first learned of the deadly disease that would take her life (slowly, over two years of agony for which she would not take any drug to dull the pain) she knelt beside her husband and said, “Do you know what my first thought was? That I should not be there to nurse you at your last hour.” In that simple statement, Catherine showed in all its glory that the Spirit had grown the fruit of goodness in her powerful, sacrificial life.
The sixth aspect of love is faithfulness, doing what God asks us to do, and doing it to the best of our ability in God’s strength. Yes, this fruit is about faith, but the question is not whether we have faith, or don’t have faith, the question is how much faith we’ve developed, and how much we can be trusted. I think the perfect illustration is found in the Gospels in the cry of the father of an epileptic son. When he came face to face with Jesus, his love for his boy, his desperation to see the lad healed, elicited these poignant words: “Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24, KJV).
And we see another illustration of the meaning of faithfulness in the comments of the apostle Paul while in prison. He describes himself as a prisoner of Jesus Christ. Now we know he was a prisoner of Nero! But here’s the difference: Paul knew Nero could not hold him against the will of God! That was the extent of Paul’s faith, and the demonstration of his abiding faithfulness.
The seventh aspect of the love fruit is meekness. And this is a really difficult word to understand. Meekness is like gentleness, but that’s not quite adequate either. Maybe the English word that comes closest to the Greek word is "submission." Of course, non-believers see meekness as weakness, but in reality it is incredible strength. It's also mistaken for an inferiority complex or a lack of ambition, but that’s only because this aspect of love is beyond the understanding of the secular mind. In reality it’s the other side of the coin of a healthy self-esteem. It's the awareness that without Jesus we never reach the full potential that He desires for us. And when we're tuned to the Spirit’s voice in our innermost souls, we exhibit both humility and a healthy self concept.
For me the late Mother Teressa, submitting herself to a life of abject deprivation, and holding in her arms diseased and dying derelicts from the littered streets of Calcutta, is a modern portrait of genuine meekness. In her we see a strong, indomitable spirit, perfectly wed to a deep humility and daily service for others because of her submission to Jesus.
Which brings us to the eighth and final dimension of love, which Paul names temperance, which means balance, or self control. A Christian who listens to the Spirit's voice in her heart makes intelligent choices with the goal of maintaining a balanced life. This often means a prayerful calculation to deny something which might hinder personal growth and witness—something which is almost impossible for a narcissistic society to comprehend. We’ve bred a generation that knows what it wants, and gets what it wants no matter what the cost. Deprivation is almost unknown except for the poor. Which reminds me that John Wesley endorsed his mother's judgment that, "Moderation is still an indispensable Christian duty."
Christians have to live with a Spirit-conditioned sense of moderation, of self-imposed limits, of discipline, especially when it comes to such aspects of life as diet and daily exercise, and how we choose to spend the resources God gives. As Scripture says, “’My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17, 18). Discipline and balance extend to every aspect of the Christian’s life—even how we choose to spend the money God gives us the ability to earn.
So there you have the eight dimensions of love that the Holy Spirit grows in your life: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. I know I’d like my Spirit garden to flourish with these fruits. How about you? They’re not fruits we can grow by ourselves, but by allowing God’s Holy Spirit to be our gardener, we can see a rich crop. Invite Him to take over your garden today!
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