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The Fruit of the Spirit
Clay Spencer
8/9/09

Key Scriptures: John 15:1-11, Galatians 5:22-23 (ESV)

I. Abide in Me- John 15:1-11

Verses 1-5 “I am the true vine and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in Me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me”

1. Abide in Me is the first instruction. Abide= stay in Me, remain in Me, continue relating to Me.

If we continue relating to Him, continue to live in Him, we will bear much fruit.
These verbs denote time. Fruit takes time.
We are to focus on the relationship, not the fruit. The fruit will happen.
Verses 6-10 “ If anyone does not abide in me He is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me a, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.”

1. Here we have more instruction: continuing in Him means continually being conscious of His love.
2. Jesus likes you- loves you. He wants you to live in that knowledge.

Verse 10 “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept the Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”

1. This is a turn. Jesus has come to us, just as we are, forgiven and accepted us. So He has just told us ‘if you do everything I say, I will love you, and if you don’t I won’t??’
2. No, I think what he says here is: “Here is a simple test for you. If you stop wanting to obey me, to follow my instructions, that is when you have lost touch with my love. That is when you are more in love with something or someone else than you are in love with me.”

Verse 11 “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”
Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. The love of our savior is the sap that flows from the vine, and we thrive if we live off that sap. Observe the way a branch is attached to the vine- like a giant sucker. Attach yourself to the Lord, stay in that condition and you will bear fruit.
His love gives us life (energy- joy) and his commands give us structure.

II. Keep My Commandments- Matthew 28:19-20
A. Verses 19-20 “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

His commands give structure to our life.
Some might think, “See, Christianity is just a bunch of rules. Rules I can never keep. Rules no one else ever keeps either. What a bunch of hypocrites!”
No, Christianity is not a bunch of rules. Christianity is life.
The Bible teaches us that the Law of God contained in the Torah was perfect in every way, but powerless to change us. The instinctive rebellion of our natural heart was too much for it. The very best it could do was produce the Pharisees of the New Testament era; the people who despised Jesus and sought to kill Him. Jesus didn’t like them very much either.

B. What Jesus ushered in was a New Covenant, promised by the Old Testament prophets.

A New Covenant in which God would transform our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.
A New Covenant in which He would write the law on our hearts rather than on tablets of stone.
The etching of the law onto our hearts is what we call the Fruit of the Spirit. If you abide in His love, you will find the fruits dripping off of your life
Galatians 5:22-23 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.”

III. The Age of the Spirit
    A. Christianity is about much more than a man who lived a long time ago and taught us how to live. It is about more even than God becoming man and dying for our sins, so that we might stand before Him blameless.
    B. Christianity is about the inauguration of the Age of the Spirit.
    C. In Matthew 28 we are instructed to baptize disciples in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We are to immerse new believers in a relationship with God as their Father, Christ as their brother and Savior, and the Holy Spirit as…

The One who calls them and leads them to faith in Christ
The One who opens their hearts and grants them repentance
The One who raises them from the dead and brings them to life along with Christ
The One who, with them, puts to death the deeds of their former life
The One who births hope in them
The One who teaches and brings to remembrance the things spoken by Christ
The One who gives them gifts of Healings, and Faith, and Wisdom, and Knowledge
The One who produces spiritual fruit in their lives

D. On the Day of Pentecost when the 120 members of the earliest church were baptized by Christ in the Holy Spirit, a revolutionary way of life began.

From that day onward, men and women no longer had to exist alone in creation.
Adam and Eve lost the ability to walk with God. In Christ that relationship is restored by His Holy Spirit. His resurrection tells us that we have His life in us.
That’s why John the Baptist said the One coming after him was greater, because He would baptize in the Holy Spirit.
Who is the Holy Spirit?

He is the invisible person of the Trinity who, by grace, becomes joined with us once we join with Christ.
His presence turns the natural events of our life into spiritual events

IV. Grace and Truth
A. John 1:17- “ For the law was given through Moses but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
B. Grace and truth are the two elements that we need to grow into the image of God.

How does that work out in our personal lives? In two ways:

We remain sure of Jesus’ love for us (grace) by the empowering of the Spirit.
We obey His commands (truth) by the empowering of the Spirit.

For growth we need grace:

Grace is God’s total acceptance, His kind disposition toward us. A Christian has total acceptance in Christ.
Grace is also God’s provision. The Apostles tell us we have all we need in Christ for life and godliness.

Along with grace we need truth.

We have truth in Christ’s words.
We obey His commands by the work of the Holy Spirit.

With these two elements, God’s Spirit causes His life to flourish in us. But they must be together. Grace without truth or truth without grace is totally destructive.

C. As a Charismatic congregation we delight in seeing the power of God at work.

His greatest work of power was raising Jesus from the dead.
Consider what happened the night before the crucifixion. Jesus, in absolute agony, asked, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”
Was He free to go? Absolutely. He could have walked out of the Garden. He could have called down legions of angels to defend Him when He stood in front of the Roman authority.
But His life was formed,(structured) by the will of our Father. “Not my will, Father, but Yours,” He said.

Because of that, He experienced death, and women and men witnessed the resurrection from the dead…He was the firstborn from the dead… the first of the promised resurrection… the proof of the pudding… the declaration that Jesus is the Son of God with power.

V. Take Up You Cross

A. Do you realize what his command is to His followers? “Take up your cross and follow Me.”

Do you realize that it isn’t the same as take up your vacation and follow Me. Or
Take up your spare time and follow Me.
He is saying, “Take up the Father’s will and follow Me.”

B. The truth is that the Father’s will can be very hard at times.

It can be fun when the palm branches are waving and everyone is shouting out your name.
It can be fun when you get to feed 5,000 or 10,000 with only bread and prayer.
But it is hard when your brothers think you are crazy, or all your friends run away.

C. Or take it on a more minor level.

It is painful to love your enemy.
Or to love your neighbor whom you despise.
It is painful to love a spouse you hate, because something in you has to go.
It is painful to share your material possessions with a member of the church who has none.
It is painful to befriend a difficult person rather than just pray for him.
It can be painful to listen to the burden of another heart.
It can be excruciating for some of us just to speak the truth.

D. You can’t do it if you are not sure of His love.

That’s why He said, ‘if you want to bear fruit, don’t move away from the sure fact that I love you.’
That’s why the apostle Paul wrote about pressing on through all his difficulties in order to do the Lord’s will to the uttermost…because he wanted to experience the power of the resurrection.

E. We don’t become reborn until we are at the end of ourselves… but oh, we hate to go that far.

We often think the power and blessing of God is made manifest in our comfort, but scripture indicates that there is a greater manifestation of His presence in our suffering for Him. When we break bread and share the juice together, we acknowledge that it is suffering that binds us together.
“The Necessary Enemy” essay by Katherine Anne Porter ( 1940’s)

   “This very contemporary young woman finds herself facing the oldest and ugliest dilemma of marriage. She is dismayed, horrified, full of guilt and forebodings, because she is finding out little by little that she is capable of hating her husband, whom she loves faithfully. She can hate him at times as fiercely and mysteriously, indeed in terribly much the same way, as she often hated her parents, her brothers and sisters, whom she loved when she was a child…
    She thought she had outgrown all this, but here it was again, an element in her own nature that she could not control, or feared she could not. She would have to hide from her husband, if she could, the same spot in her feelings she had hidden from her parents, and for the same no doubt disreputable, selfish reason: she wants to keep his love.
    Above all, she wants him to be absolutely confident that she loves him, for that is the real truth, no matter how unreasonable it sounds, and no matter how her own feelings betray them both at times. She depends recklessly on his love.”

This is a simple example. But it illustrates a common problem. Even when we want to love, we can’t fully love. It pains us. They pain us.
If she is like most of us, she will hide this little spot of hatred in her heart. It will fester and grow and one day she will scream out, “I hate you!” Or at a low point in her depression she will realize that she has never loved him, but hated him from the beginning, and could never face the truth
We love, and we hate. We tell the truth and we lie. We are disciplined and undisciplined, moral and immoral, godly and ungodly, happy and sad, wise and foolish, brave and cowardly, successes and failures.

VI. The Ideal and the Real
A. The Bible tells us that we are made to carry God’s image and so we are extremely precious. But it also tells us that we are broken and very weak. We need God’s grace.

We were created to live in a sinless world. We were never intended to handle the co-existence of good and evil. We were not made to handle the effects of the Fall or to defend ourselves from one another.
We want the ideal world but are stuck with the real. We want the ideal spouse but are married to a real spouse. We want to be our ideal self but we are our real self.
On top of that, we want grace, and need grace but we are not born with an understanding of grace. The Holy Spirit has to teach us about grace in order for us to handle it in ourselves and to handle it in others.

We learn grace by living in a relationship with God Himself, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit.
We learn grace by trusting His love and His commands.
We learn grace by submitting ourselves to His Spirit to conform us into His image.

It is not for our sakes alone that we are meant to be changed day by day into His likeness. It is so that as a people we would collectively exhibit love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are characteristics of Christ and these are what mark us out to be His people.
Without this living relationship, without the Spirit of the Living God at work within us, the church can no more be missional than the Rotary Club, or the Chamber of Commerce.
Remember, Grace and Truth is what we have received in Jesus Christ. but it is the Spirit of the Living God who persuades us that our sin can be brought to Light without condemnation. It is the Spirit of the Living God who ministers healing to us through members of the body of Christ, when we confess our sins and pray for one another
Many of us don’t want to share our shortcomings until we have overcome them. We do not want to reveal our real self, because we want to appear to be perfect. But the apostles command us to confess our sins to one another.
We use excuses such as trying to be a ‘good witness’, but a good witness is someone who demonstrates how forgiving, how full of grace God is.

a. Do we really comprehend how forgiving God is until we receive forgiveness both from Him and from His people?
b. We do not experience acceptance until hurt and guilty places in our hearts are exposed.

So our contemporary young woman, if she were following the Lord’s instruction in John 15, would:

a. First- Keep herself conscious of the Lord’s love for her- even after realizing this dark spot of hate, which she thought she had grown out of, was still a part of her.
b. Secondly- She would keep His commands
*She would stay married though it caused her sin to be exposed.
*She would confess her sin humbly to other members of Christ’s body and ask them to pray for her.
c. Thirdly- She would wait, sure of His love and provision. With grace, truth and time she will bear much fruit.

VII. The Fruit of the Spirit
A. The life that Christ wants to grow in you is the slow dawning of the life and characteristics of Jesus Christ, who lives in you, and wants to grow more evident in you.
B. The Spirit leads us, but we must follow.

Take little steps of obedience. The genuineness of obedience is proven when it gets truly hard.
When it makes no sense, but you pursue God nonetheless.

C. It is this Spirit who, over time, produces in us the fruit of the Spirit.

Sometimes we make the Spirit to be abstract and neutral. But this is God. He is fully God. What does Jesus tell us about God? God is love.
Picture for me someone you love. Bring to mind your love. This is what God is: that dearness, that openness, that warmth, and safety, and joy. That is the Holy Spirit who, if you abide in Him, will transform your heart and make it holy.
Galatians 5:22-23 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”

These are the things that shall mark us out as the people of God. It is not the observance of rules. It is character wrought in us by God’s Spirit.
These are what make us truly missional. Would you bear fruit then?

Abide in his love.
Keep His commands.
We will be marked as His people.

Discussion Questions:

Why is abiding (continuing) in Christ’s love necessary to bearing spiritual fruit in our lives? What does bearing spiritual fruit mean to you?

In what ways can grace without truth or truth without grace be destructive?

Do you tend to believe that “if I do everything that God says, He will love me, and if I don’t, He won’t”? What is wrong with this concept? (See John 15:10 and point C under I. Abide in Me)

What is the main difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant? (see point D under The Age of the Spirit.

Discuss point G under Take up Your Cross. (comfort-suffering) Which view do you most often take? Why?

Why don’t we want to reveal our real selves to others?