Be ye holy, as your Father in heaven is holy. That's kind of my main point in this Rant series. Because while it may seem like an instruction... it's really a revelation. Not so much telling us TO be holy, as telling us HOW to be holy! Jesus never sent anybody on an impossible mission. God always provided what was required before requiring it. He made grass before He made cows, right? So we don't ever need to look at what God tells us to do as something that WE have to do. Certainly not something that we have to do on our own. It is the power of God working in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure. He puts the want to into our hearts, and He put the ability to do it into our bodies! The trick, then, is knowing how He is holy. Yesterday we saw that even in the Old Testament it was generally agreed upon that God is holy. I think there were (and, unfortunately still are) a lot of misconceptions about God. I think we've tried to make Him in OUR image way more than we've accepted and understood that we have been made in HIS image. We have twisted the God who is love around and made Him look more like Zeus--an angry, distant taskmaster with a lightning bolt in his hand poised and ready to strike every time we mess up. That's not God. That's not love. We've twisted holiness to be "never making a mistake." Guys... if you never make any mistakes how can learn from your mistakes? More is learned through failure than success. And the only true failure is failing to try again. The only way to fall from grace is putting yourself under the Law. So, you know, don't do that. Where there is no law, there is no transgression. Where sin abounded (before the cross) grace did much more abound (on, and through, the cross). We are not slaves. We are Son(s). We are not sinners. We are saints. We don't have to try to live up to some unrealistic, and unattainable, idea of "holiness." Not when we understand that loving people is the most holy--perhaps the only holy--thing you can do. It's all about love. Be ye holy and God is holy. God is love. Therefore, love is holiness. It's like that old Mother Teresa quote, "If you want to change the world, go home and love your family." Just be the best person you can be to the people in your road. Just pour yourself into the people that are ready, willing, and able, to pick up what you're laying down. You don't have to be someone you're not. And, in fact, you can't. What you ought to do is just accept and embrace who you are. Who you REALLY are. Which is who you are in Christ. Which is who Christ is in you. Let the light shine no matter where you are. God is light, and there is no darkness in Him at all. As He is, so are we in this world. So that means WE are light and there is no darkness in US at all! See it, believe it, BE it. Don't hide your light under a bushel because you think you're full of darkness. Know (and believe) the truth, and let the truth make you free and set you free. Be holy because the Holy One lives inside you. And once you BE it, you can DO it. We don't do in order to be. We do because we be. Who you are--what you believe--is what will manifest in your life. Right believing produces right living. Knowing and believing that God is love and He loves you is what equips and empowers you... to love. Knowing that He is holy and lives in you is what equips and empowers you... to be holy! And, friends, those things are one and the same! God is holy. God is love. As He is... so are we in this world!

I want to start today's Rant with a passage of Scripture from the Old Testament. Isaiah 6:1-3 in the New Living Translation, to be exact. And I want to show something that I think is both very simple and very powerful."It was in the year King Uzziah died that I saw the Lord. He was sitting on a lofty throne, and the train of his robe filled the Temple. Attending him were mighty seraphim, each having six wings. With two wings they covered their face, with two they covered the feet, and wtih two they flew. They were calling out to each other, "Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of Heaven's Armies! The whole earth is filled with his glory!" Very cool, right? A couple of things here. First off, even in the Old Testament where a lot of the time God looked more like man instead of the other way around (because of man's imperfect perception of God), one thing that man knew was that God was holy. Heard here from the mouths of the seraphim. You see God on His throne and you hear him being declared to be holy. That tracks. Pretty much everybody agrees that God is holy. Holy holy holy, in fact. We've made songs about it, haven't we? So even without necessarily having a proper understanding of what holiness IS... we know that it's God. "I don't know what IT is, but He's got it." Like that. Which is why later on, with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, with the Revelation that came to John (the disicple that Jesus loved) when he put his head on Jesus' breast and heard the heartbeat of God, we see things like this: "We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them" (1 John 4:16 NLT). God is holy. God is love. See what I'm getting at? Be ye holy as your Father in heaven is holy. Love one another as Jesus loves you. It's all the same idea. The same commandment. The same thing. And that's the whole point of this Rant series-- what is holiness? Letting God love you and loving Him back by loving the people you come into contact with! Love is the most holy (and perhaps the only holy) thing you can do. Man, it drives me crazy when I see religious folk refuse to help people because they are too busy "serving God." "Sorry, I can't do that, I have to go to church." Buddy, you just churched your way right out of love. And, as always, I'm not against a church building. I simply think it's more important, and more effective, to BE the church than to "go" to church. And we BE the church by loving people. By helping people. By being there for people. Letting people know we care and showing them who God is by showing them what love is! Look, it's not about cerimonal washings and fasting and some of those things that people put so much stock in. And I'm not against washings and fasting. I'm simply saying... if you're choice is to fast, or to share a meal with someone who is hungry? To me the most holy thing you can do is to share that meal! Don't be religious about being holy! Just love people, and be sure that that's as holy as you can be! Guys, I say it almost every day: It's all about love. Giving what you've got (what God has given you) by knowing and believing you have it. By receiving it and releasing it. By filling yourself to overflowing with what you've already been filled with in order to let it come out of you... naturally. You don't have to strive for holiness. You are holy, as He is holy, because He is holy in you, and through you, and as you! When you understand what holiness is, and where it comes from, that's when you can BE who, and what, you already are!

You guys know I'm a bit of a definitions guy. I like to get to the bottom of things and know what we're really talking about. So let's look at 1 Peter 1:15, "But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation." And let's look at Strong's Greek Concordance (number 40), and see that "holy" means "sacred (physically pure, morally blameless or religious, ceremonially consecrated: - (most) holy (one, thing), saint. And since there doesn't seem to be a whole lot there that we can grab onto, we'll throw in dictionary.com too. "Dedicated or devoted to the service of God, the church, or religion." Basically, what stood out to me was "saint." But let's talk about "morally blameless" first. Because I think we think holiness means we can't make any mistakes. Check out Ephesians 5:26-27 (NLT), Christ gave Himself "to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God's word. He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault." You're welcome. Holiness is not about what WE do. It is about what Jesus did. About the work HE finished, and about us being able to enjoy the fruit of HIS labor. He washed us. He made us holy and clean. He did this so we could stop struggling with our spots, and wrinkles, and blemishes. I'm telling you: If you look AT the mirror, that's all you'll see. Surface stuff. The things the world has tried to pile on you in order to bury you, or bog you down, or drag you down. But if you look INTO the mirror you see Jesus. And in seeing Him you are transformed into that self-same image from glory to glory. Starting at glory. The glory is already there. Always has been, always will be. So stop thinking less of yourself. You're not a sinner. You've been saved by grace. You're a saint. Saints are holy. It's not about what you do, it's about who you are. And then when you know (and believe) that you are who God says you are, that's when what you do will line up with your true identity. What you do flows from what you believe. If you know who you are, you will act accordingly. If you know that you are holy--because God is holy, and He lives in you, and He made you holy--then you will BE holy. Think about this: God is love. Holy means dedicated or devoted to the service of God. Dedicated or devoted to the service of love! Loving people is the most holy--and perhaps the only holy--thing you can do. Love is holy. Being holy means receiving and releasing the love of God! It's that simply. And how, going back to our Strong's definition, do we be sacred? Physically pure and morally blamless? Not by trying to keep a law that was never given to us in the first place. But simply by loving people! If you want to do the right thing... let God love you and love Him back by loving the people you come into contact with. Let what's inside come out by filling yourself to overflowing with it. Know and believe that you are loved. Know and believe that you are the righteousness of God in Christ. Know and believe... that you are holy! Holiness is not something you can "get" or "achieve." Holiness is who you are. Because it is who God is. And as He is, so are we in this world! We need to start thinking differently about things. We need to shine the light of the world (that Jesus is, that we are) and see things clearly. Holiness isn't about being "better than everybody else." Or whatever religious mindset we get. Holiness is about receiving and releasing the love of God. Letting God love you and loving Him back by loving the people you come into contact with!

Buzzwords are a big thing these days, aren't they? Something that you can say that will prompt a response. And look no farther than the church world if you want to find a grip of them! Take something like "holiness" for example. (Good pick, we're going to look at just that for the next few days.) We throw this word around without an extremely strong grasp of what it means. Because it seems as though we've taken it to mean, "following the rules." Just as we've taken "perfect" to mean, well, following the rules. We seem obsessed with the rules! Perfection is maturity. So let's get that out of the way. And in the New Covenant there is only one "rule." A New Commandment for the New Man. Love one another as Jesus loves you. So, even by that definition--and the point I'm going to try to make in this Rant series--the most holy (and perhaps the ONLY holy) thing you can do... is love someone. Look at 1 Peter 1:13-16 in the New Living Translation, "So prepare your minds for action and exercise self-control. Put all your hope in the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world. So you must live as God's obedient children. Don't slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. You didn't know any better then. But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. For the Scriptures say, "You must be holy because I am holy."" A few things here. I love how it starts off with action and self-control. Because self-control doesn't mean do nothing... it means do the right thing. Just as rest is not inactivity, it is Holy Spirit directed activity. That's important. Love is maximum effort. You can't ever do more than to love someone. Which doesn't mean you have to overwhelm people. Love is not always big and loud. It can be soft and sweet. Depending on what the situation calls for, love comes in all different shapes and sizes. So then we see why and how we can even BE holy. And what we see is that it's not about US at all. Put all your hope in Jesus. Man! Those are words to live by, aren't they? Live as an obedient child. More good advice. Don't go back to the way things were. Once you know better you can do better. Like G.I. Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle. Then DOING what you know is the other half. Preparing your mind for action, and then exercising self-control. Understanding what it means to be holy... and then being what (and WHO--Jesus, love) you are! Here's the most important part of the whole deal: Be holy in everyting you do... just as God is holy. And, by the way, that doesn't mean try to emulate Him. It means accept that His holiness IS your holiness. God is holy. Period. Full stop. So any holiness we could hope for HAS to come from Him. He IS our holiness. Because He is love. God is love, and He loves you. That's the ultimate truth of the universe. And when you know that you ARE loved... that's when you CAN love. When you know that HE is holy, and He lives in you (and through you, and as you) that's when you can experience His holiness. Be ye holy as He is holy does not mean try to be like God. It means because God lives in you, you can experience Him. As He is, so are we in this world. His holiness is our holiness. What's inside comes out, as we know and believe that it's in there. As we fill ourselves to overflowing with what He has already filled us with. Here's my point though, and here's where we're going in this Rant series: Love is holy. If you want to be holy, you have to receive and release the love of God. To me it's that simple. And to me that clears up a lot of misconceptions!

I think a lot the time we are looking for love in all the wrong places. Or we're willing to settle for less than because we don't think we're worthy of love. We don't think we deserve it, or don't think we've earned it, or don't think we can have it. So we try to fill that God-shaped (love-shaped) void with anything and everything else. The entire book of Ecclesiastes is about this search for what can fill us. And it's all vanity. There is nothing that can fill a God-shaped (love-shaped) hole... but God (love)! And there is nowhere that we can go to, or find love, but at the source. Look at Hebrews 4:16 (NLT), "So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most." And look at Genesis 6:8, "But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD." He found it... because he was looking for it. And he knew WHERE to look. Finding grace in God's eyes is the same thing as boldy coming to the throne of grace. That's the source. That's where everything we need comes from. James 1:17 (NLT) tells us that, "Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow." I believe the KJV says, "Father of lights." Which I like because He is our Father and we are the light of the world! Every good and perfect gift flows down from, or out of, our heavenly Father. That is our source. Let me say it another way: He is the vine and we are the branches. He produces the good fruit (from the good tree... the Tree of Life) in us, and then we bear it. We make it available to the people around us. Because that's the key--you are what you eat, but it's a love FEAST. And feasts are to be shared with everybody. There's a parable in Luke chapter 14 about a banquet. And when the invited guests won't come, "...his master said, 'Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full'" (Luke 14:23 NLT). When you have what everybody--EVERYBODY--needs... it would be a crime not to share it. Unconditionally. Without reservation or judgment. Simply giving what you've got because A) You know and believe you've got it and B) You know how good it is and you want to share that goodness with the people around you! God blesses us to be a blessing. He gives us gifts so that we can share those gifts with each other. Love is giving. You can give without loving, but you can't love without giving. They aren't just connected, they are the same thing. Like living and loving. You can't live without loving and you can't love without living. They aren't just connected, they are the same thing. So when we're talking about the fruit of the Spirit--which is love--we're talking about eating it... and sharing it. Experiencing it... by giving it away. People are hungry. And they're hungry for something real. They're hungry for love. They want so desperately to have what we have. So instead of making them jump through hoops to get it... let's just give it to them! Let's just fill ourselves to overflowing with what we've already been filled with so that it can come out of us. Naturally. With every breath we take and every move we make. Let's get to the point where we don't judge whether or not we think people deserve love... and let's just love them! God and people. Loving God and loving people. Loving God BY loving people. That's what this life is for. That's what this life is all about. That's what this life IS. It comes from being healthy. Having the right diet. Eating the right fruit from the right tree. The Tree of Life. The fruit of the Spirit. Love!

Good fruit comes from the good tree. The Tree of Life. Jesus. The good fruit is the fruit of the Spirit. Which, since a seed can only produce after it's own kind... and the incorruptible seed is God... and God is love... the fruit of the Spirit is love. Period. Love, of course, is a multi-faceted prism. Shining the light in different ways produces different colors. If that makes sense. Love is the answer. But love comes in all shapes and sizes. That, friends, is WHY love is the answer. That's HOW love is the answer. You can always love people no matter what. You can always let what's inside you come out. You can be a thermostat instead of a thermometer. You can SET the temperature instead of just TAKING the temperature. What I'm trying to say, in my normal roundabout way, is that the fire in you is always hotter than the fire you're in. When the three Hebrew boys were cast into the fiery furnace, Nebuchadnezzar looked into the flames and saw FOUR men. And one of them was the Son of God! Because, guess what, God IS the fire. When we are totally consumed by Him, the only thing that gets burned off is our bonds, and we come out smelling like roses. So, to go back to my original metaphor, or picture, you are what you eat. Garbage in, garbage out. What is inside you--what you believe is inside you--WILL come out. It has to. Because it's too big and too powerful not to. Whatever you believe, that's what you empower. Don't give power to things that don't have power. Let the love of God--which is all-powerful, which doesn't mean MOST powerful, but means HAS all the power and IS all the power--swallow up and consume everything else. What you feed is what will grow. Make sure you're feeding it the right diet. The bread and the wine. The Lamb and the living water. These are the things that sustain us. These are the things that will help us grow and make us healthy. So feed on love. Let God love you and love Him back by loving the people you come into contact with. Receive and release His love. The Spirit and the bride say come. Come and get it. Come to the table that Jesus has prepared for you in the presence of your enemies. And then, guess what else, if you invite your enemies to eat with you... they might not keep being your enemies. You can destroy your enemies by making them your friends. Eating the right food--the fruit of the Spirit... love--is vitally important. But SHARING that fruit is equally important. You are what you eat. You can't give what you don't have and you can only give what you do have. So give it away. Share it. God is love--a love feast. Feasts are for the multitude. Don't be stingy with what you've got. Give it away. Share it. And in that way, truly experience it. Love is giving. If you want to feel love... love somebody. Give what you've got, by knowing and believing that you've got it. Let what's inside come out, by knowing and believing that it's in there. Fill yourself with what God has already filled you with. Make sure that you are focused on what really matters. What you magnify in your life is what manifests in your life. What you feed is what will grow. I'm going to keep saying it. Feed on love, and love will grow in your life. Starve the things that don't matter. Don't fight with them, just starve them of your attention and let them wither and die. Fruit is healthy. We can all agree on that. So make sure it's an essential part of your daily diet. Make sure you are eating the thing that will help you be healthy, wealthy, and wise!

I want to link a few memory verses together tonight. The first one, since we're talking about the fruit of the Spirit--which is love--is John 15:5 (NLT), "Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing." The vine and the branches. One of the quintessential pictures of God and man. I love it. I think it's so perfect. The vince produces the fruit and the branches bear it. What God has filled us with is what we can give to each other. You can't give what you don't have and you can only give what you do have. So it's important to know what you have. Which is the other verse I want to use today: "A tree is identified by its fruit. If a tree is good, its fruit will be good. If a tree is bad, its fruit will be bad" (Matthew 12:33 NLT). And you guys probably know by now that I'm not going to focus on dwell on the "bad." What I see in this verse is that we can understand ourselves by understanding the tree we are grafted into. When we understand that it is JESUS producing the fruit, we know that fruit will be good. Your true identity is who you are in Christ, which is who Christ is in you. Your true identity is Jesus--God in the flesh, love in a body. God in YOUR flesh, love in YOUR body. So instead of looking AT the mirror and seeing all the surface stuff, all of your mistakes and misdeeds and what have you, we need to start looking INTO the mirror and seeing Jesus. We need to see our roots, if I can say it that way. See where we REALLY come from. See our DNA, which, Spiritually speaking, is the Divine Nature of the Almighty. If the tree is good, the fruit will be good. We are branches of the Tree of Life. The tree is not just good... it is God! And God is love. The fruit (of the Spirit) that the Tree of Life produces--in us, and through us, and as us--is love! A seed can only produce after it's own kind, right? You can't get oranges from apple seeds. The incorruptible seed that is Jesus can only produce one thing: Love. That's the good fruit. That's what we bear. And by bearing it, I mean, that's what we present to the world. That's what we give. Guys, we are living epistles, right? Literally God's love letter to the world. We are the visible face of the invisible God. We are the thing that people can see, and hear, and experience, in order to see, and hear, and experience God's love! God works in mysterious ways because He works through people... and people are mysterious as could be! People do things that don't even make sense to themselves. People are messy. LIFE is messy. Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you deal with it. If you have the tools inside you to deal with it, you can make things better--for you and for those around you. If you know and believe that you have love inside, you can give that love. What you believe is inside you WILL come out. That's how faith works, and that's how powerful faith is. And faith works by love! Love is all-powerful. Which doesn't mean MOST powerful, it means ALL of the power. So we don't need to give anything else power over us. We can live... and love. We can live... BY loving each other. By letting the love inside of us come out (by knowing and believeing that it's in there). We can bear the fruit (again, of the Spirit, which, again, is love) by loving each other. Letting what's inside come out. Filling ourselves to overflowing with what we've already been filled with. Feasting on love--the literal love feast--and sharing that meal with others. That's what this life is all about!

You are what you eat. I've said it many times, and will probably keep saying it. Because it's important. What you put in (or what you believe is in) is what will come out. What you feed is what will grow. What you magnify in your life is what will manifest in your life. So it's important to be on the right diet. That's why Jesus would say something like what we see in Matthew 26:26 (NLT), "As they were eating, Jesus took some bread and blessed it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, "Take this and eat it, for this is my body." That's why the Bible uses pictures of food so often. The bread and the wine. The Lamb and the living water. That's the kind of diet we need to be on. And no diet is healthy without fruit. The fruit of the Spirit. Which is love. In fact, look at 1 John 4:16, "And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." The word "love" there is number 26 in Strong's Greek Concordance and it means, "affection or benevolence; specifically (plural) a love feast." Love is the six course meal (the six steps to the throne) that Jesus prepared for us in the presence of our enemies. Love is what makes the abundant life... abundant. Love is what it's all about. So let's be real: If you are what you eat, and there's a love feast available to you... you'd be crazy not to sit down. In fact, I believe that's what John was writing about in Revelation 22:17 (NLT), "The Spirit and the bride say, "Come." Let anyone who hears this say, "Come." Let anyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who desires drink freely from the water of life." It's not "Come... or else." It's, "Come and get it!" God has made this feast available to us by making HIMSELF available to us. He GAVE us His only begotten Son. Gave us His life. Gave us His Spirit. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. The Spirit and the bride say, "Come." Come and get it. Sit down and eat. And what else could the Spirit invite us to eat, but the fruit of the Spirit! When we get on the right diet it changes everything. When we focus on what's really important we don't have to stress out about everything and anything else. God is love. Love is a feast. God is a feast. Again--the bread and the wine. His body and His blood. The Lamb and the living water. It's all available to us. He has given it to us. All we have to do is respond. God made the Way of Grace. We respond with the Walk of Faith. Walking by faith and not by sight. Making sure that what we do lines up with what God wants us to do. And I know, on the surface, that can sound constricting. But, let's be real, we need boundaries and limits. We CAN do anything, but that doesn't mean we SHOULD. If God KNOWS what's best for me, it's probably not a great idea for me to go against that because I think I know better. You don't. And, by the way, obedience is a trust issue. If you trust God, you won't have a problem doing what He says. And when you understand God--that God is love--you'll understand that the only thing He ever tells you to do is love. God and people. Love God and love people. Love God BY loving people. It's not complicated. It's pretty simple, really. But unless and until you know what you have, you can't do it. Because you can't give what you don't have and you can only give what you do have. So, if you're not feeling great... change your diet. Garbage in, garbage out, right? Fill yourself to overflowing with what GOD has already filled you with, and you will not only give others what they need... you will experience what you need. What God has already given you!

What I want to say in this Rant series is pretty simple. It starts with Galatians 5:22, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith." It continues on, continuing listing what I think some people have referred to as all the different kinds of fruit of the Spirit. But here's my idea: The fruit of the Spirit is love. Period. Full stop. Look at Genesis 1:12, "And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that is was good." A seed can only produce after it's own kind. Apple seeds make apples. You can't get something different from a seed other than what is already in there. So, for example, the Tree of life can only produce life. The tree of death (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) can only produce death. When God told Adam that on the day he ate from the tree of death, he would surely die... God wasn't saying, "Do it and I'll punish you, kill you," He was saying, "the only thing that can come from that tree is death. Don't eat from it." Point being-- the Tree of Life only produces on fruit. Love. And then, if you continue to read on, you see what love is. You see the different aspects of love. Kind of like how there are all different kinds of apples. And I know that's not a PERFECT analogy, because each apple tree only produces one kind of apple, but come with me on this. Love is like a prism. Depending on how you look at it--depending on how the light (of the world) hits it--you get different shades and colors. Love is the answer because love is multifaceted. Love never fails because love gives you just what you need in every and any situation. So what I'm trying to say, in my normal wander around way, is that when we think about fruit... we ought to think about love. Start there, and then we can beging to explore all the different aspects of love. All the different flavors of the fruit of the Spirit. When we know and believe that it's all love, that's when we can really get into Ephesians 3:18 (NLT), "And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people shold, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is." Because that's really the whole point of the whole thing, right? Learning how to love by learning how we are loved. Learning what love is so that we can experience it. Knowing and believing that God is love and He loves you. And then taking that love and running with it. Receiving it and releasing it. Filling ourselves to overflowing with what we have already been filled with. Letting the love that's inside come out by knowing and believing that it's in there. Understanding that we can love in every situation. Because the fruit of the Spirit is love. And love comes in many different shapes and sizes. Love is joy. Love is peace. Love is longsuffering. Love is gentleness. Love is goodness. Love is faith. And on and on it goes. I'm telling you, in the "Love Chapter" (1 Corinthians 13) what we really see is a personality profile of Jesus. And when we understand that as He is, so are we in this world... when we understand that HE is our true identity... that's when we can see OURSELVES as all of those things that Paul describes love as. Love isn't just what we do, it is who we are! Because God (love) lives in us. Lives THROUGH us. And, as we're going to see in the rest of this series, the best way to understand that love is to feast on it. You are what you eat. The fruit of the Spirit is the diet that will keep us healthy, wealthy, and wise! 

When you're free you can do what you want. But that's only part of it. When you're free... you no longer have to do the things you were in bondage to. No longers slaves. Free. That's what the Spirit of the Lord is all about. Look at 2 Corinthians 3:17 (NLT), "For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." Pretty cut and dried and simple. Now let me add my constant Pastor Tom wrinkle. The Spirit of the Lord is the Spirit of love. Because God is love. Where the Spirit of the Lord is... there is love. Where there is love... there is freedom. Now add this to that: "Owe nothing to anyone--except for your obligation to love one another. If you love your neighbro, you will fulfill the requirements of God's law" (Romans 13:8, NLT). We don't owe anybody anything... except love. And I don't think Paul meant that in terms of loving people because you are obligated to. When you feel obligated to do something, you'll do it... but you won't like it. Love is not about forcing yourself to do anything. It's about being free to do what's actually, trully, really in your heart to do. I think Paul was simply saying, "On a human level, the one thing that connects all of us is love." Like, if you're going to do anything for anybody... just love them. And love them in the way THEY need to be loved. Don't try to "love" someone the way you wish you were loved, in the sense of "I like chocolate, so I'm going to give you chocolate because that's what love means to me." Because they might not like chocolate. Build that relationship and that connection with them and find out what love means to THEM, and then love THEM the way it will mean the most to THEM. Love is not about you. It's about receiving and releasing the gift you've been given. If you're "loving" someone in order to get something from them... that's not love. Period. Full stop. Because love is never about getting. Becuase love IS giving. We don't need to get anything, because God has already given us everything we need. He gave us His only begotten Son. He gave us His life--His abundant, everlasting, eternal, Resurrection Life! He gave us His Spirit. The Spirit of His Son that has revealed to US that we ARE His Son(s)! And if you are Son and not a slave, if you are a saint and not a sinner... then you're free. Free FROM the law, and sin, and death... and free TO live and love. Because living and loving are not just connected, they are the same thing. You can't have one without the other and you can't do one without the other. Our freedom from death means freedom to live. No longer do we have to be bound under a fear of death. We have been given eternal life. Absent from the body is present with the Lord. That's enough of a "what happens after my body dies" for me. I don't have to worry about it. I'm free from it. So that means I can enjoy my life while I'm here. I can LIVE while I'm alive. I can enjoy the gift I've been given by giving it away. By sharing it. I'm free from worry. I can cast my cares on Him because He cares for me. I'm free from trying to earn my bread with the sweat of my brow. Jesus sweated great drops of blood and redeemed me from that curse. I'm free to dance. Free to walk in newness of life. I'm free FROM being held back and dragged down by the old, and I'm free TO experience everything that is available to me in the new. We don't even have to let anything hold us back from being who we really are. We are free to be. Free to know and be known. Free to love and be loved. Free to live!