“L” is for the way you look

O is for the only one—–ah, sing it Mr. Nat King Cole

As we launch into looking at the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), we’ll notice the primacy of love as that which the Holy Spirit produces in our lives.

“It would have sufficed to list only love, for this expands into all the fruit of the Spirit.”  –Martin Luther

Timothy George says, “Before love is the fruit of the Spirit in the life of the Christian believer, it is the underlying disposition and motivating force in election, creation, incarnation, and atonement.”

  As CS Lewis put it so well:
“God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing – or should we say “seeing”? there are no tenses in God – the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a “host” who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and “take advantage of” Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.”