Humbled by God's Love

I admit that I had a hard time getting my head around "self-control" as a fruit of the Spirit... Why wasn't it called "Spirit-control" anyway, if it was from the Holy Spirit? Then there was "Deception"... Was that really my problem? Do I tell lies? Maybe it is self-deception?

Christian Schwarz's definition talks about "Disciplined Love", "consistency" and "having power over yourself". His summary definition: "Self-control means sobriety and moderation in all areas of life. It's always targeted at achieving a specific goal". I gather the goal is to "serve other people better".

It is in the red (Truth) section, so relates to steadfastness and reliability. 

Now I don't know about you but to me this seemed just as fuzzy as some of the definitions of love that the book rails against. What did all this have to do with love?

It all looked too hard until last Sabbath afternoon when I decided to open the 3 Colors of Love book after several months. It opened to page 60, "1 Corinthians 13 and the spiritual color wheel" (wheel is the picture above).

Christian states in the first sentence that "Paul made it crystal clear... that even the most committed life is worth nothing without the fruit of the Spirit". I summarised it as: If my motive is not Love, any spiritual accomplishment is nothing. 

Then to test how strongly my life is driven by love, I took Christian's challenge of making my own personal version of 1 Corinthians 13:1.

So I sat down and wrote out a list of all the dreams and hopes I have, all the plans and all the projects that I'm working on. Then to each one I added a kicker, like Paul did.

It looked like this, in the only example I'm willing to share:

If I through NCD, helped Toronto church become so strong and healthy that we had have multiple sermons and plant another church to fit everyone in, if I'm not motivated by love for the church members and love for the lost, then it is worthless, pointless egomania.

And so on through all my dreams (there are four other big ones).

It was a God-moment. I sat back in my seat at the realisation of my great lack of love, my lostness and my total inability to do anything about it all.

I saw that all my busy-ness was a cover for my problems. I'm doing all these things for myself. I saw the depth of my sin and knew I was in a deep hole.

Suddenly my dreams looked unattractive and, to tell the truth, I just didn't want them any more. 

That probably sounds dramatic but that was the way it happened.

Suddenly I'm praying earnestly for God's love, because I just don't have it. I want to love Him with all my heart and soul. And I want to love people too.

The next morning I prayed earnestly before my Bible reading and God came through. My OT chapters included Deuteronomy 13:3-5,9. 

Wow did that hit home! My "dreams" were a test of my love for God and I had to be the first to strike the first blow.

Now I'm memorising Deut. 13:4 because, like all the commandments, it is a promise that I will be able to follow God and fear Him etc. because He has the power to do it. Now this is my aim, not all the other stuff.

I want to find out exactly what Self-control is and stop the deception. Time to start letting the Spirit love through me.

3 Colors of Love

Now it is time to get personal...
NCD provides tools for assessing and improving the health of the church but it also has tools for looking at our personal spiritual health and one of the best is in Christian Schwarz's book, "The 3 Colors of Love", with the Fruit of the Spirit Test.

The book's basic premise is that "the" fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23 is love. The other eight "fruit" mentioned are parts of love. Like the NCD survey, the Fruit of the Spirit Test finds the "minimum factor", the area in my life where I am blocking the Holy Spirit's work, i.e. the way I am most unloving.

And that brings me to the second premise of the book; the biggest problem thwarting God's blessing in both the church and in my life, is lack of love. So by letting the Spirit flower and fruit in the particular part of "love" that I lack, I will become more healthy spiritually (and so will my church).

I'm not going into detail but I want to share my Fruit of the Spirit Test results then report how I'm going at letting the Spirit work.

I did the test on December 15, 2012 (I'll tell you in the next post, why I put off working on it).

I am 55 years of age, male, a Seventh-day Adventist Australian.

Fruit of the Spirit Profile
(the higher the value, the better)
   Name of the fruit, Profile Value
1. Gentleness 104
2. Patience       103
3. Peace           99
4. Goodness       96
5. Kindness        96
6. Faithfulness 82
7. Joy              82
8. Self-control 79


Color Area Profile
Justice (Green)         267.2
Truth (Red) 221.8
Grace (Blue) 261.6

To sum up:
My minimum love value is Self-control.
My weakest area of love is Truth.
So these are the areas to "work on" so I can "grow in love".

Some reflections:
All the scores down to Kindness are grouped around average, 100, then the dropoff to around 80, which is the bottom 2.5%. Pretty dramatic!
Self-control, joy and faithfulness make up most of the Truth area. So no wonder it is lowest.
I neglect Truth so have a tendency to Deception. This is where I am most unloving.
I lack the primary virtue of Trustworthiness
By overemphasising Justice and Grace I have become Anarchic and Hypocritical.