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Fruit of the Spirit: 1. Love

More loving and loveable. Love is the first named Fruit of the Spirit.

Now and then, we have feelings of dislike or hate which are not of God.  God hates sin and so should we; however, we go a step further than God and dislike and hate things he sees beyond. One fundamental part of our role is to keep growing past these feelings and become Godlier, or more God-like, in the matter of love.

Love covers a multitude of issues if we can only advance beyond the boundary of our emotions, to the place where God waits for us with expectation. Feelings often inhibit our spiritual growth and restrict the Holy Spirit, impeding us from judging like God and loving like him.

We are mere servants who are ‘called’ to be heirs with Christ, yet sometimes we act as heirs now, and unrighteous ones at that. We can fall into the trap of judging so harshly and permanently, much harsher than God himself and much less mercifully; particularly of the brethren and our enemies.

We can find ourselves putting people in pigeon holes according to how they have treated us or how we think they have treated God, when God himself does not do this despite his own children of Israel putting his son, Jesus, to death.

For instance, did God judge the sons of Jacob when they tried to rid themselves of Joseph? Did he slay or banish them for their actions?  No, he had a bigger plan. What would have been your judgement?

God looks at people’s end result and keeps that vision in mind when judging them. We should be doing the same.

If we can look beyond our predispositions when weighing other people’s actions and words, and extend forgiveness as individuals who are ourselves forgiven, we would not only become more loving of others, but the flow-on effect is we become more loveable.  When we are more loveable, we become more attractive to more people, and the nectar (our words) which flows from us becomes a healing balm to a wounded soul instead of discarding comment.

One caution. Simply because we are more loving of people does not mean we are more loving of God. Many volunteers are helpers of people but have no interest in God. We are therefore to follow Jesus’s command to love God and live a life that He loves, and also love people.

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