“But the harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,

fidelity, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”

(Galatians 5:13-25 – Revised English Bible)

What do you get out of it — this Christian way of life? Your church membership, your participation in Bible study and worship — what does it get you?

To be perfectly frank with ourselves, isn’t this what we are asking ourselves about our religious connections all the time, no matter how long we have been Christians? What help can I really expect in my daily work, in my home, in my personal relationships with other people and with God? When I have problems and burdens and troubles, can I expect any more help than people who have no religious profession and practice, and if so, what kind of help and how will it come?

St. Paul, in his Galatian letter, writes that “the harvest of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control.” This is the Apostle’s way of saying that the natural harvest to be expected in the Christian life is a spiritual increment, a dispositional dividend, where all the capital gains and compounded interests are intangible, inner values.

Now to some who have joined the church this may be disappointing if they have expected more substantial results — things like immunity from dangerous illness, and escape from catastrophe, and financial success. But the Christian faith does not promise such results.

I suppose that some of us are repeatedly disappointed at how little we get out of our religion. How meager seems the harvest of our faith! Wheeler Robinson of Oxford told of how, in the course of a serious illness, he was lead to ask himself, “Why the truths of evangelical Christianity which he had often preached to others now failed to bring him personal strength? They remained true to him but they seemed to lack vitality.” He finally came to the conclusion that he enjoyed so little of the fruits of the Spirit because he gave so little attention to the New Testament teachings on the Holy Spirit. He did not enjoy the harvest of the Spirit because he was negligent of, and uncooperative with, what the New Testament taught about the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes this is due to our practicing the “flower arranging” school of Christian culture rather than living in expectation of the Pauline harvest of the fruits of the Spirit. We act as if virtues of character and desirable qualities of personality were like pretty posies to be selected at random, according to our taste, and cut and arranged in the parlor vase of our personalities, or placed in the showcase of our public image. But everybody knows how perishable cut flowers are. They have no root. In a day or two they wilt and the petals drop. The Japanese know how to dwarf potentially great trees and keep them to pygmy size by cutting the tap root and forcing the plant to live entirely from the surface roots.

St. Paul understood the secret of genuine Christian character cultivation and the horticulture of the fruits of the Spirit. He knew from experience that there can be no harvest of spiritual beauty and goodness and power in sustained supply unless the soul is rooted deeply in Jesus Christ.

One of Paul’s distinctive contributions to the New Testament understanding of the Holy Spirit is summed up in his declaration: “The Lord is the Spirit” (II Corinthians 3:17). “Paul’s experience was that to possess the Spirit was nothing less than to possess Jesus Christ.” (William Barclay — The Gift of the Spirit, p. 68)

The life that is rooted in Christ by faith — and for Paul “faith” meant not only trust in and reliance upon, but obedience to Christ — that life is sustained, supported, and supplied with the fullness of the life of Christ by the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

Rufus Jones pointed out that: “A greater reality than any we touch or see breaks through in love — almost universally … But love in its full glory, love in its height of unselfishness and with its passion of self-giving, is a rare manifestation. One person, ‘The Galilean’, has been a perfect revealing organ of it. In His life it broke through and revealed itself so impressively that those who see it and feel it are convinced that here at last the real nature of God has come through to us and stands revealed. And St. Paul, who was absolutely convinced of this, went still farther. He held, with a faith buttressed in experience, that this same Christ, who had made this demonstration of love, became after His resurrection an invisible presence, a life-giving Spirit, who could work and act as a resident power within receptive, responsive human spirits, and could transform them into a likeness to Himself and continue His revelation of love wherever He could find such organs of revelation.” (Rufus Jones — The Best of Rufus Jones, p. 25)

So St. Paul could exult: “No longer I live, but Christ liveth in me.” And the admirable virtues and the enviable spiritual resources of the genuine Christian person are the natural out-flowering of the indwelling Spirit.

St. Paul also says that the indwelling Spirit gives freedom to the Christian, liberating him from the old, dead-letter legalisms of the law. Contemporary, enthusiastic situation ethics cultists, and those of what is sometimes erroneously called “The New Morality School” are in a hurry to press St. Paul into their ranks. They are eminently right in seeing him as a pioneer of situational ethics who would leave the old law far behind and follow love alone in every situation, doing the fresh, creative thing. But they are, oh so wrong, and understand Paul so superficially, when they presume his permission to be less pure, and less chaste, and less faithful in their morality than the old morality would demand of them.

Listen to St. Paul to the Galatians: “You my friends were called to be free men; only do not turn your freedom into license for your lower nature; but be servants to one another in love … If you are guided by the Spirit you will not fulfill the desires of your lower nature: in fornication, impurity and indecency; quarrels, a contentious temper, envy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissention, party intrigues, and jealousies; drinking bouts, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who behave in such ways will never inherit the Kingdom of God.” (Galatians 4:13, 16, 19-21 — New English Bible)

New Testament Situation Ethics opens the door for the Christian to do in love more, not less, than both law and love demand.

Charles Lindbergh, whose historic nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic in his “Spirit of St. Louis” opened up vast vistas of possible development in air travel, was a young man driven by a burning sense of personal destiny, so “he cultivated his body as a trust; he not only refused to drink or smoke but also gave up coffee for fear it would spoil his reflexes.” (Time magazine, May 26, 1967)

St. Paul’s view of the Christian’s body as the Temple of God, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit — God’s instrument for Christ-like service and witness in His needy world — marked out an even more demanding destiny for the most pedestrian of Christians.

What is the Christian’s resolution of such problems as: “Shall I indulge in recreational drugs and liquors if I am careful not to over-indulge?” and, “Are pre-marital sex relations permissible if no one gets hurt?”

The New Testament scholar, C. H. Dodd, said that when a moral question rises for the Christian — spirit-filled and spirit-directed as he is — the question takes the form, not, “Is this unworthy of me?” but, “Does this hurt my relationship to Jesus Christ? Is it unworthy of Him? … In this way the Christian approaches all problems of ethics; He brings the mind of Christ to it. He then has his ethical standard within himself.” (C. H. Dodd — The Meaning of Paul for Today, p. 133)

And what is the specific fruit of the Spirit in every Christian life in so far as the harvest can be predicted? Paul mentions love first — not only here, but always, he gives love preeminence. In his Corinthian correspondence you will remember that he discusses the preoccupation of the early church with those spectacular manifestations of the Spirit’s presence, such as the gift of prophecy and the violent emotional seizures and speaking with tongues. Paul does not deny the validity of these human experiences of the Spirit’s presence, but he writes: “Behold, I will show you a better way” and proceeds to mention the quieter, nobler, spiritual and moral virtues, the chief of which is love.

“Love is the relationship which God intends and desires should exist between all His earthly children. Christian love is that unbeatable goodwill nothing can change to bitterness or hate … There exists a paper written by Nurse Edith Cavell, penned immediately before she was shot for helping her fellow countrymen escape to England during the first World War. It runs like this: ‘Arrested (the date); Tried (the date); Condemned (the date). Shot at seven in the morning of October 12, 1915. With love. E. C.’ ‘With Love’ Edith Cavell could say under even those circumstances. The Christian life must be with love.” (Barclay — Ibid. p. 76-77)

When a beautiful child was dreadfully injured accidentally by a playmate — a friend of the little hurt one’s mother and father remarked: “Aren’t they wonderful! They are comforting the little playmate and his grieved parents!”

“If this is ever to happen, there must come into the hearts of men and women what we call a new spirit. And that spirit is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit not only unites people to God; He unites them to one another. Life in the Spirit is life in the conscious awareness of God; and he who is consciously aware of God can never hate. We only hate when we have forgotten God.” (Barclay — Ibid., p. 77)

Another fruit of the Spirit is joy, not merely ‘joie de vivre’, but the deep conviction born of God that life means good. Edward Hopper, the great American artist, once said: “You know when you go by on a train everything looks beautiful. But if you stop, it looks drab.” Well, one of the fruits of the Spirit is the dispelling of life’s drabness, making the commonplace sparkle with stardust, pulling eternity out of the dusty corners of time.

Peace is another fruit of the Spirit. Peace comes in no other way. It is God’s gift of growth to harvest through Christ by His Holy Spirit. Remember Jesus’ words to His troubled, fearful disciples: “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.”

“Clemenceau, the great French statesman, once said, ‘Human beings are like apes who have stolen Jupiter’s thunder. It is easy to see what will happen one of these days: they will kill one another to the last man. At most a dozen will escape, some Negroes in the Congo. Then they’ll begin the story again. The same old story.’” (Barclay — Ibid. p. 76)

Such pessimism would be justified, indeed it would be inevitable, if human beings were wholly responsible for the world. But if we believe in the Holy Spirit, then we believe that in the world there is another factor. As Stephen Vincent Benet put it: “Something is loosed to change the stricken world.” That something loosed is the Holy Spirit.

And today when the horrible Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the whole Middle East cauldron of hate and fear and cruelty burns more sickly bright, and the nations of the Middle East argue with the same strident unreasoning as angry schoolboys bickering over who threw the first rock, who is there spiritual enough and brave enough and faithful enough to stop worrying about saving face and start being concerned about making the world safe for forgiveness?

We Christians who, by God’s grace know a living Savior, and have experienced the gift of the indwelling Spirit, must not lose heart or hope, for that power God has loosed in His world will triumph.