The Fruit of the Spirit: Love

Galatians 5:22–23 ESV

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

What Is Love?

The English language only has the word “Love.” The Greek has agape, storge, philia, and eros.

Do you love your parents?

Do you have a pet? Do you love your pets?

You have friends you like. Do you have friends you love?

Have you ever had a favorite pair of shoes or a certain outfit that you loved?

How about a boyfriend or girlfriend? Is there someone you are in love with?

Now, let me ask: do you love your pets like you do your parents? Do you love that favorite outfit like you do your boyfriend/girlfriend?

This brings us to our first point—there are different kinds of love. And some of what we call love is not actually love.

Attraction vs. Love

What is attraction?

Is it the same as love?

What’s the difference?

Attraction is all about how that other person makes me feel.

What are some things we can be attracted to?

Most people confuse this with love. They think love is all about the feeling.

But love is more than feeling. You can feel love, and that’s good. But when we make love all about the emotion, it leads to problems.

What kinds of problems am I talking about?

First of all, there’s that whole thing about confusing love and attraction. We can find someone attractive, but attraction can fade. It can be because you start seeing unattractive things in the other person. Or it can be because someone else comes along that you find more attractive.

That’s why people can be a cute couple one day and broken up the next. They based their relationship on emotions.

Just like we confuse attraction with love, we also confuse sex with love. God created sex. He made it to be the ultimate connection between a man and a woman. Sex is an intensely physical experience, but it also causes an emotional experience. You feel connected to the person you are with. The thing about sex is that it cannot be undone. When you have sex, you are connected to that person forever. We are more than just physical bodies. We have souls, and sex is as much a spiritual experience as it is a physical experience. That’s why God does not want us to have sex outside of marriage. It is meant to be something beautiful and sacred. It joins two people together, and it’s meant to be forever and exclusive.

Making love about emotions also leads to problems when we feel we have to do certain things in order to earn someone else’s love. Then, one of two things happens. We either destroy ourselves trying to keep that other person from leaving us, or we decide that love isn’t real, or that love isn’t worth the effort. When that happens, we die a little inside.

Love is real. But love that has to be earned is not love at all. Love is given freely.

The fact is, love is an active choice before it is an emotion.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7 ESV

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

So, if you hear somebody say, “If you love me, you’ll...”, is that love?

Love at first site—is that really love?

How about if there is someone you have been hateful to, but then something really bad happens in your life, and they are really kind and helpful and sympathetic?

That’s how Jesus has been with us.