God's Victory

Date: 2021-11-21

Audience: Grass Valley

Title: God’s Victory

Topic: How to Grow Fruit (Joy/Peace) of the Spirit

Text: (if applicable): Various

Proposition: God’s Victory grows fruit

Purpose: Live in Victory

Introduction

Grace and peace!

22 Butthe fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.[1]

That’s Galatians 5:22-23, and it is a description of the fruit which should be abundant in the lives of those who follow Jesus. The visible outgrowing of the Spirit in our lives!

-Illustration

I’ve mentioned that I had relatives in Washington who owned apple orchards while I was growing up. Every autumn we would be invited to spend a few days visiting and harvesting some of the fruit for our family.

These were good-sized orchards and they were healthy trees. Strong limbs, well maintained. They were cared for, given the nutrition they needed, pruned to remove dead or bad limbs. They got plenty of water and plenty of sunlight and the fruit they produced was proof of that.

People who complain that Red Delicious apples have no flavor never ate an apple right off a good tree just after they hit the peak of ripeness.

These weren’t those little, lopsided, bruised up globes you find in a grocery store either! These were large, symmetrical apples with deep red skins that would fall off the tree with a little gentle tug.

The Goldens were amazing too – sweet, firm, crisp, and they almost seemed to melt as you bit into them. And their natural color was the yellow of happiness and sunshine.

Over the years I’ve lived a few places that had an old, poorly maintained fruit tree or two on the property when I arrived. The fruit from these gnarled old trees was usually small, hard, and bitter, be it an apple tree, orange tree, or lemon.

Trees that are not well-maintained and cultivated don’t bear the best fruit. And that takes work! Thought, planning, and sweat equity are all required to make sure the tree or bush or shrub or whatever fruit-bearing plant is going to be able to bring forth the best, sweetest, most memorable delights possible. Like those apples.

-Reference to Proposition

We want to do all we can to cultivate the growth of fruit in our lives, and the thing which helps more than any other is an awareness of the Victory of God in our lives.

-Reference to Purpose

Because it is when we live in expectation of God’s victory that we find the ability to grow and ripen the fruit of the Spirit.

-Transition Sentence

Today we are particularly interested in what it takes to grow the next two flavors we see on this list after love: Joy and peace. What are they and how do we multiply these traits in our lives?

Body

-Main Point #1: God’s Victory creates Joy If you want to experience Joy in your life, you need to recognize and celebrate the victory of God. Why? Because God’s Victory creates Joy!

-Discussion Joy = chara = exultation = celebrating triumph/elation

Biblically-speaking, Joy is always related to Victory – specifically, the victories of God. Joy is a celebration, not a feeling!

NOT happiness. A joyful life can make you happy but being happy doesn’t create joy. Happiness is an emotion and emotion is an undirected response – ebbs and flows like a tide; rises and falls like a roller coaster. Not reliable!

Emotions are often nothing more than response to stimulus. An addict may feel happy when they get a supply of their drug of choice, be that heroin, alcohol, or a chocolate bar. That same happiness may surge up even if they are in recovery and haven’t touched chocolate in years.

Like every other flavor of the Fruit of the Spirit – Joy comes from CHOICE, not chance. DECISION, not feeling. Happiness can’t be turned on and off at will. Joy, though, is something you opt into or out of.

-Illustration

Israel in Egypt – Exodus – Plagues – Red Sea – Border of Promised Land – Refused to accept victory – God could have abandoned – Cared for them 40 years in wilderness, got them ready – Brought them into Promised Land.

Victory on top of victory!

God cared, God saved, God delivered, God kept them close, God continued to care, God brought them home.

God decreed an annual festival – holiday to remember a lifetime spent in his care while they lived in tents, homeless. Deut 16:13-15:

13 Celebratethe Festival of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing floor and your winepress. 14 Be joyful at your festival—you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns. 15 For seven days celebrate the festival to the Lord your God at the place the Lord will choose. For the Lord your God will bless you in all your harvest and in all the work of your hands, and your joy will be complete. [2]

Be JOYFUL! It’s a command!

Sages and Rabbis took to heart. Would plan out ways to express joy. Not a FEELING – a CHOICE!

Jokes, acrobatics, feasts, decorations. A week devoted to celebrating the victories of God in the lives of his people!

Victory over circumstances – God provided for them in the wilderness – and victory over SIN – God provided for them in their rebellion. Saved them from Egypt, saved them from destruction, saved them from themselves. Salvation story!

-Supporting Scripture

People are people – act without thinking, without remembering… David, king of Israel, got involved with a woman not his wife. Big mess – effectively ruined the two families involved and dozens of others besides. God called David on it, letting him hear and feel the depth of pain he had caused in the world. David, in deep repentance, penned Psalm 51, where he said:

11 Do not cast me from your presence

or take your Holy Spirit from me.

12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation

and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.[3]

Don’t leave me aside! Don’t leave me alone! Help me remember to celebrate you salvation! Give me the ability to always remember! I don’t want to forget again!

Because God’s salvation is joy, something to hang onto, something to give us strength, something to remind us that the LORD cares. It’s victory in our lives and it’s always there and should always give us hope for the future, because where God has been, he will always be, and that’s right with us.

No matter how lost we feel we might have gotten.

Jesus in Luke 15:

4 “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? 5 And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders 6 and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ 7 I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.[4]

-Application

Joy is our choice to celebrate the victory of God. That means the victories he awards us in life, the victory of his care for us, the victory of his seeking and finding us when we have gone astray, and the victory he celebrated with us when we come back with him.

Salvation is victory and joy is a celebration of that victory! We need to remember to celebrate, because that remembering helps grow the fruit of the Spirit in our lives.

-Transition Sentence

Joy is the fruit which sustains us as we live as part of the Kingdom of God.

17 Forthe kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,[5] according to Paul in Romans 14.

Where righteousness is walking close to God and Joy is the celebration of God’s victories that make it possible for us to walk close to God, then PEACE is what is happening between us and God and also between us and the world around us.

-Main Point #2: God’s Victory increases Peace

Because God’s Victory increases Peace!

-Discussion

Just a few sentences later, as Paul reminds the Gentile believers that they are part of God’s Victory he says this:

13 Maythe God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. [6]

Hope: Not about a lottery! Means “EXPECTATION”, as in “God has ALWAYS kept his word and he will always do so.

“God of hope,” then, is “God you can TRUST.”

As you celebrate his past victories you can also look forward to future victories. That’s how JOY fills your life.

And in understanding those victories, you can come to understand what it means to live at peace with God. And once you have that, even a piece of it, you begin to realize that this peace is available for everyone.

And that changes things!

But to get there, we need to understand something VERY important about peace.

While it certainly includes an absence of hostilities, that isn’t what peace is about.

-Illustration

At the end of a war, both sides get together and say that they aren’t going to be trying to kill each other any more.

They may even decide on some ways that they will work together towards some goal.

This is called a peace treaty, but it is entirely about ending open hostilities.

There are two key words for Peace in the Bible. The Hebrew word is shalom and the Greek word is Eirene (eye-ray-nay). Both have the same meaning, which can be best expressed as a wholeness and harmony of welfare and prosperity. Both languages use the word as a synonym for victory.

True peace, then, isn’t an absence of hostility so much as it is the presence of friends, mutually beneficial relations.

Peace is love. Remember, agape, the word for love Jesus uses, means a willful effort to benefit the other.

Peace is a promise to love.

-Supporting Scripture

In Ezekiel, when God is speaking of the time when Messiah will come and the people will be cleansed and will live together in a single kingdom – the Kingdom of God – he says this:

26 I willmake a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant.[7]

A covenant is another word for a contract – it’s a planned relationship built on the obligations of one party towards the other.

A covenant of peace is an obligation to maintain agapetowards the other. From God to you. From you to God. And God’s command, as Jesus taught it to us, is that we are to love God with agape and we are to love God by loving others the same way.

In Psalm 34 the author puts it like this:

11 Come, my children, listen to me;

I will teach you the fear of the Lord.

12 Whoever of you loves life

and desires to see many good days,

13 keep your tongue from evil

and your lips from telling lies.

14 Turn from evil and do good;

seek peace and pursue it. [8]

-Application

So as we follow the Holy Spirit’s leading to grow fruit in our lives, fruit being the sweet things that draw people to us and through us to the God of our salvation, we need to seek peace and pursue peace. To seek and pursue friendly, God-honoring, agape relationships with one another. With those we are comfortable with and those we are not. With neighbors and with enemies, though they won’t be our enemies when we have engaged them in the peace of God, will they?

How can we do this? Only by trusting in God’s victory. Because if the LORD keeps his word, then we can endure and overcome all things, no matter how challenging.

We may even find that there are times at which we strive for perfect peace and we manage to obtain it, but only from our side, while the other continues to rage and try to drag us down into hatred.

But we don’t have to let them. By following the Spirit God gave us, we can overcome any challenge.

-Transition Sentence

We don’t do this by our own power, but by the promise, encouragement, leading, and power of the Holy Spirit. Not by our own victories, but by the hope we have in His victory.

-Main Point #3: God’s Victory grows fruit

Remembering and acknowledging God’s Victory grows the Fruit of the Spirit in your life.

-Discussion

-Illustration

-Supporting Scripture

James put this in an interesting way in his letter giving instructions to the followers of Jesus.

2 Considerit pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds[9]

I don’t know about you, but this has never been my favorite piece of advice.

Consider trials to be joy? Crazy!

But, maybe not so much, when we consider what he’s really saying.

Which is really that we should consider all things in the light of God’s victories.

-Application

Every challenge, looked at that way, becomes an opportunity. A chance to talk about the victories of God in the past and the ones that are coming in the future. Those should certainly give us hope for any circumstance in the present, shouldn’t they?

Every trial we face becomes a chance to show the fruit of the Spirit which has grown in our lives and gives us opportunity to produce and mature more of it.

Trials, struggles, and the way they lead us to lean into God in new ways are just a ripening of the sweetness of our lives.

-Transition Sentence

Striving to love, we rely on celebrating joy to encourage us to seek peace, and the more difficult or contentious the situation that we must enter to demand peace, the greater the glory of God in achieving it.

Conclusion

-Summary

As we strive to live the way Jesus taught, as we allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives to lead us and cultivate us so that we can become the people we were created to be, we need to be thoughtful and mindful as we plan out how to grow the best fruit.

Just like my relatives were careful to bring the best out of their apple orchards, we need to be careful to plan to bear the best fruit in our lives.

-Reference to Proposition

That means remembering God’s Victories, because God’s Victory bears fruit and encourages us to do the same.

-Statement of purpose, including application

And so we need to thoughtfully rely on the hope presented by those victories because when we live in God’s victory we are choosing to live out the joy that leads us to seek peace, and that’s the greatest act of love we can produce.

And that’s what following Jesus is all about, isn’t it?

Let’s pray.

[1] The New International Version. (2011). (Ga 5:22–23). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [2] The New International Version. (2011). (Dt 16:13–15). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [3] The New International Version. (2011). (Ps 51:11–12). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [4] The New International Version. (2011). (Lk 15:4–7). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [5] The New International Version. (2011). (Ro 14:17). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [6] The New International Version. (2011). (Ro 15:13). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [7] The New International Version. (2011). (Eze 37:26). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [8] The New International Version. (2011). (Ps 34:11–14). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. [9] The New International Version. (2011). (Jas 1:2). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.