Fruit of the Spirit: Love

I'm hoping to gain a greater understanding and awareness of the fruit of the Spirit.  I thought I would start with the first one from this list, love.  I suppose volumes could be written on what love is and what it isn't, but I thought I would cover it today by taking a quick spin through (yes, again!) 1 Corinthians 12 & 13.  But first, here is Paul writing about the works of the flesh and then the fruit of the Spirit:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. (Galatians 5:16-26)

In the accountability group I am a part of one of the questions I chose a while back to have asked of me is as follows (I came across it somewhere online and "borrowed" it):

Friendship: Part 2 - Discernment in Choosing Friends

I have not always had the ability to be discerning when it comes to choosing those friends that I seek closeness with.  Often, the qualities I looked for in a friend had nothing to do with Godly pursuits or a mutual betterment of each other.  This is nothing shocking as their was no reason for me to have sought out such qualities before coming to faith.  However, now that I am seeking to walk in obedience to God, it is critical that I surround myself with others who have the same goal.  This is not to say that I shouldn't go out among unbelievers and seek to impact them for Christ; just that my innermost core group of friends with whom I commit to give and receive love, truth, comfort, encouragement and hope, must be seeking the same goal as I - continued sanctification in Christ.

What this means to me is not that these friends I seek be without sin (as if that is possible) or that they will fill every expectation that I am looking for in a friend, but rather that they share a commitment to follow Christ and look at friendship with me as a means to build each other up in our faith and hope in Him.  Essentially, that through good stretches and bad, we are committed to applying Biblical principles to the relationship including: selfless love, honesty, forgiveness, mercy, kindness, exhortation, rebuke, encouragement, compassion, comfort, truth, and patience.  It is not an expectation of continuous perfect behavior, but just that the friendship is generally oriented toward growth and transformation in Christ - with a realization that neither of us has yet attained perfection in Him, and because of this reality, some poor choices may be made from time to time despite the presence of love - but the relationship shouldn't be dominated by bad choices.  As love grows within the friendship, so should each of our love for Christ be growing as well.

Friendship: Part 1

Greater love has no one than this, that
one lay down his life for his friends.

Looking back on the friendships of my past, they were often marked by great happiness and conversely, great sadness and pain; sometimes in rapid succession.  The happiness was in spending time with a friend who's mere presence can brighten my mood and give me a sense of being loved and accepted.  Sadness and pain upon the realization that the label "close friend" or "good friend" seems to have a totally different meaning to me than it does for so many others.

"Love does not give up on people when they are struggling. It does not give in to despair in the face of extreme difficulty. It does not declare that someone’s heart can never change or that a broken community can never be healed. Love hopes all things. Understand that whenever we give up hope, this is really a failure to love, because love hopes."

I suppose it would help if I clarified my ideas of what types of friendships I have experienced.  First, "friend" is not a label that I throw around loosely.   I try to be realistic in identifying the type of relationships I have with people.  For the most part, I don't consider co-workers to be friends.  With few exceptions, I always look at them as acquaintances.  I would also apply the acquaintance label to most people I socialized with at certain places such as bars.  These were people with whom my contact was limited to certain times or places.  If I removed myself from those places, whether it be the bar, work, or even church, I would not necessarily maintain contact with them or continue on in any type of relationship.  They are all relationships that are conditional on some factor other than a mutual, voluntary choice to have someone be a part of your life.

Encouragement For Struggling Friends

In many ways, my first year of following Christ seemed (to me) to be marked by a lack of encouragement from other Christians around me.  Not that encouragement was non-existent; more-so just muted, conditional, or somewhat reserved.  I think several factors played into this, one of which was the unfamiliarity of many at my church with homosexuality and how it looks to transition from the "gay lifestyle" to that of committed follower of Jesus.  At times I felt that it was up to me to prove to my brothers and sisters in Christ that I was serious about my new life.  While never outright told this, I sensed they felt I had to first "fix" certain aspects of my character, attractions, and sexuality in order to prove myself worthy of their encouragement and praise.  This deficit of encouragement that I perceived often contributed to a lack of hope on my part and caused me to question whether any of this transformation was even possible.  Rather than being pursued by my bothers and sisters at the church, I felt that I was always in a struggle to stay connected to the Body.  I often wanted to leave the church and find one where I would be embraced on terms equal to the embrace of sinners who struggled in more "comfortable" ways.  It was often a struggle to stay a part of this community of believers.  It was as if I had to constantly remind them "Hey, there is hope for me too! I am not beyond God's power to save and heal!".  Being a new believer, I was perplexed by this as I thought that these statements were ones they should have been loudly proclaiming to me, not the other way around!

Love

All of my life I remember periods of falling in and out of "love" with other guys.  I thought highly of myself for these feelings of love I had for others; that I was somehow superior in my caring for others due to this "love".  What I wasn't so conscious of at the time, though, was just how self-seeking my love was. Sure, I was a nice guy in many respects.  A certain aspect of my love was geared toward helping the person I was loving.  However, I have more recently come to see that the ugly side of this love was a desire to get something from the other person.  I had that powerful "feeling" of loving someone, but unfortunately this "love" was not what is spoken of in the Bible in the following text:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.