Galatians 5:22-23 “22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things
there is no law.”
Let me ask you a question about natural fruit before we jump into
talking about spiritual fruit. Have you ever seen a fruit tree
struggling to grow fruit? Does an apple tree have to strain and
work at producing apples? No, of course not. Why is that?
It’s because bearing fruit for a fruit tree is what comes naturally.
There is no effort put forth by a fruit tree to grow fruit. All the tree
needs, is to be planted in the right environment. The right
environment has three essential elements. Soil, water and sun.
Soil acts as the foundation for the roots, water provides the
nutrients, and sunlight is the energy source for growth.
Now, here’s the next question. Have you ever seen a Christian
struggling to produce spiritual fruit? Yes, of course you have.
Maybe you saw them when you looked in the mirror. Why is
that? It’s because you were not planted in the right environment.
Producing spiritual fruit for a Christian should come as naturally
as an apple tree producing apples. But in order to do that a
Christian needs the same three essential elements. A solid
foundation, vital nutrients and a powerful energy source.The right environment for growing spiritual fruit is being planted
in the good soil of a body of believers. You can’t uproot yourself
constantly and expect for your spiritual roots to grow deep
enough to stabilize your life. The Word of God is the living water
that provides all the vital nutrients you need for a healthy life. If
you are not in the word of God, you will starve from lack of
spiritual nourishment. And the Holy Spirit is the energy source or
the power in the life of a Christian. If you are not in God’s word,
then it will be very hard for you to allow the power of the Holy
Spirit to work through you.
If you are lacking in any one of these essential elements,
your spiritual life will not produce the fruit that God is looking
for from you. Keep that in mind as we move forward this
morning.
The last two fruits off the Spirit and the ending phrase of the
passage are what we will cover today. The fruits are gentleness
and self-control. And the ending phrase is: “against such things
there is no law.”
Gentleness and self-control, are tied together, just like the
other pairs of fruit we have studied over the last couple of weeks.
It’s hard to imagine that you could be considered gentle if you
have no self-control. These two fruits flow in and out of each
other.
Andy talked a couple of weeks ago about how the king James
version uses different words than the ESV when it lists the fruit of
the Spirit. As a generals rule I use the ESV (English Standard
Version) when I study and teach. What you see on the screen
every Sunday is 99% from the ESV. But today I want to use the
King James Version, because the words it uses for these two
fruit of there Spirit are more clearly defined for our use today.The words gentleness and self-control probably immediately
bring to mind a modern definition. But if I replace them with the
King James Version, it uses the words meekness and
temperance. You you may not have an immediate idea of what
these fruits are all about, but meekness and temperance have
a much deeper meaning than our modern understanding of the
words gentleness and self-control.
Let’s start with Gentleness, in the King James version it is called
meekness. First let me say this. Meekness is not weakness.
The idea of being gentle and meek is all about humility. This is
an internal condition of the heart. It’s an attitude that establishes
the position from which you act. How you act, is all about having
self-control.
Unfortunately, meekness is most often misunderstood to mean
weakness. But it’s not…it’s the exact opposite. Meekness is
the ability of a person who has the power or authority to force
their own agenda over another person or situation…but they
don’t. Instead of doing that, they determine to work through the
situation with humility and patience. It’s having strength, but
through humility, keeping it under control.
Matthew 11:28-29 “28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you,
and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you
will find rest for your souls.”
In this passage is Jesus telling us to learn from Him, about what
He is like. He is gentle or meek, and lowly of heart or humble.
Jesus had all the strength that has ever existed. And yet, He
kept it under complete self-control, with His humility.
I don’t think anyone who was around Jesus, while He walked
the earth, would ever accuse Him of being weak.He cast demons out of people and stood up to the Pharisees,
with great authority. And at the same time, He humbled Himself
to be obedient to The Father’s plan. And that plan required Him
to be beaten and crucified, when He had committed no crime.
Jesus is the ultimate example of meekness and humility. For
us this would be the ultimate test of our spiritual meekness. To
be accused of a crime that you didn’t commit, and then be willing
to suffer the punishment for that crime without lashing out
against those who set you up. If you knew that a situation like
that would further God’s kingdom and it was part of His plan for
you…could you do it?
Galatians 6:1
“Brothers, if anyone is caught in any
transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a
spirit of gentleness (meekness). Keep watch on yourself, lest
you too be tempted.”
This passage is all about being a spiritual leader. You have to
have spiritual authority to correct someone, but you must use it
in meekness. Let me say it again. Meekness is not weakness.
It’s allowing humility to rule your strength, so that you don’t fall
into the same temptation.
Meekness requires you to be extremely mentally tough. It is
the internal position from which your actions flow. If your mental
state is ruled by meekness, then your actions can be self-
controlled.
Which brings us to our last fruit of the Spirit, self-control. Do
you give in to the desires of you flesh or do you control yourself
by the power of the Holy Spirit?
Romans 13:14 “ 14 But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make
no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”This is what we think about as self-control, but there’s more to it
than just controlling our fleshly desires concerning anger, lust or
greed. Don’t get me wrong…those are part of it. But there is
more.
Self-control in the King James Version is called temperance.
Now I really like this word, because it is much more descriptive
for what is being communicated. Temperance, comes from the
word temper. Having yourself under control when it comes to
your temper, is all about how you act. Self-control or
temperance, is an external condition.
The word temper has a different meaning than you probably think
off when you hear it. Normally when we hear the word temper,
we think of anger. But temper does not mean anger. It actually
means the opposite. Anger is what happens when you lose your
temper. Temper means: to dilute, qualify, or soften by the
addition or influence of something else.
When you temper something, you are adding something to it, in
order to change it’s properties and make it more moderate or
flexible. To temper, allows something to be changed moderately
instead of instantly. The thing that creates a temper is heat. But
here’s the thing about tempering. The thing you’re tempering
does not want to be tempered…because it has to go through the
difficult process of heat treatment.
Tempering takes time. It is not a quick process. There are no
shortcuts, if you want to have something tempered properly. If
you temper something too fast or at too high of a heat and you
will ruin the thing you were trying to make.
When it comes to cooking, if you are making a custard, you will
read in a recipe that you need to temper the eggs before adding
them into the hot milk. This is just the process of adding a littleof the hot liquid into the eggs, which will slowly bring them up
closer to the temperature of the mixture you need to put them in.
If you don’t temper the eggs and just dump them into the hot
milk, they will instantly cook. You will not have made custard.
You will have ended up making scrambled eggs in hot milk.
Does that sound delicious? No. The custard mixture will be
ruined if you don’t temper the eggs. And then you have to start
the entire process all over again from scratch.
Tempering is not just for cooking. It is also required for metal
work. A hard metal, is a brittle metal and it’s more likely to
break when put under pressure. It needs to have a certain
amount of flexibility depending on the application. So, the metal
must be tempered with a heat treatment to achieve the correct
hardness while still having some flexibility.
For example, a sword that is made from a hard untempered
metal is no good in a sword fight. Because it will be brittle and
break when striking another sword. So the blade-smith must
temper the blade so it is soft enough to allow it to flex in
battle and absorb blows without breaking.
This is a process of heating the blade up and holding it at the
temperature for the right amount of time. The tempering process
allows the blade smith to make a sword with an edge that is hard
and sharp, but still have a body that will be more flexible. If you
heat the blade too high or for too long you will ruin the sword,
and you will have to start the entire process all over again.
There is one more thing that needs to be tempered in order to
improve it...you. As a believer, you need to be tempered too. As
with everything else, the tempering process will require some
heat. In order to produce the right temperament in you, God
will have to allow some heat to come into your life.And here is where things get difficult. No one enjoys the
spiritual tempering, because of the heat treatment process.
So we must rely on the fruit of meekness for help.
If you don’t walk through this season of heat treatment with
meekness, which again is strength under the control of humility,
there is a very high chance you get over heated, and do you
know what that’s called? It’s called losing your temper.
It’s just like what happened to the eggs that scrambled when
they got hot too fast and the sword that broke under too much
pressure. If you lose your temper, then the tempering process
was not effective in your life…and the entire process will have
to be started all over again. You have turned God’s season of
tempering, into a continuous cycle of heat treatment.
Galatians 5:24-25 “24 And those who belong to Christ
Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the
Spirit.”
When our flesh is tempered by being nailed to a cross daily,
that level of humility allows us to live and walk by the Spirit, with
self control. To walk in step with the Spirit, means to walk behind
in sync with the steps of the Leader. Is this how you walk?
And now we come to the very last phrase in the passage that
lists the spiritual fruit. Let’s look at it one last time.
Galatians 5:22-23 “22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things
there is no law.”Against such things there is no law. What is Paul saying here?
In order to completely understand this, we have to understand
the context of who Paul was writing it to and why he wrote it.
Pau’s letter to the church in Galatia was all about their new
freedom in Christ. Galatians was one of the first books of the
New Testament, written bout 49 years after Jesus ascended.
The Galatian church was made up of both Jews and Gentiles.
This was creating some confusion because of the background of
the Jews in the church. Remember, Jews were accustomed to
a strict adherence to the Mosaic law. But now, they were no
longer slaves to the law. At least that’s how it was supposed to
be viewed.
The problem was that the law was everything, as far as they were
concerned. It’s all they had ever known, and Paul was trying to
help them understand that Jesus had set them free and also to
warn them not to turn back to their old ways.
The old ways that they wanted to turn back to was the law of
circumcision. The Jews were saying that the Gentiles who had
joined the church needed to have faith in Jesus…and also be
circumcised. As you can imagine, that created quite the uproar
in the church.
Paul is basically saying that when the fruit of the Spirit is actively
growing in a believer’s life, it is no longer necessary to have a
strict obedience to the Jewish laws found in the Torah…because
the fruit of the Holy Spirit is perfectly aligned with all of God’s
laws.
Romans 8:1-4 “There is therefore now no condemnation for
those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of
life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin anddeath. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the
flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of
sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order
that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in
us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the
Spirit.”
What Paul said to the believers in Rome is still true for us today.
When the fruit of the Spirit is actively growing in our life, there is
no place for strict legalism. If you are operating with the fruit
of the Spirit…love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness and self-control…that’s all you need.
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