Prayers for the Week: Fruit of the Spirit – Love

²²But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. ~ Galatians 5:22 (ESV)

Hello my friends, and welcome to this week’s Prayers for the Week post.  Today I’m starting a small series on the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.  Over the next nine weeks starting today I will be focusing on one of those fruits.  Today we focus on love.

Love

The concept of love is discussed throughout the Bible, and there are many examples of love that we can draw on in our quest to understand what it means.  There is the concept of being “in love” with someone, such as how a husband loves his wife and vice versa. We find a very powerful set of verses pertaining to love of a couple found in 1 Corinthians 13:

⁴Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. ⁷Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
⁸Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. ¹¹When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. ¹²For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
¹³So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:4-13 (ESV)

Those verses are often quoted in wedding ceremonies.

Other ways love can be found in the Bible exist throughout — even in situations where God disciplined His children because they didn’t listen to Him and commit to Him.  Just look at all of the times that the Israelites were exiled because they turned away from God.  But then, of course, God sent us Jesus — the greatest act of love that has ever been known in this world.  God sent His Son to us so that we might believe in Him, and in doing so, gain eternal life and forgiveness for all of the unpardonable sins that we have committed.  God sent Jesus to be the ultimate sacrifice for all of our sin — and Jesus loves us so much that He died on that cross for me.  And for you.  And for all of us.  All He asks of us is that we would turn to Him, that we would believe in Him and His sacrifice, that we would pray to Him, telling Him that we have realized that we are sinners, and ask Him for forgiveness and to create in us a new spirit, a new life.  That salvation that we speak of is open to each and every one of us, from the meekest, most gentle person to the killer on death row that has shown no remorse for their actions.  That, my friends, is what Love is.  Love is dying on the Cross for each and every one of us when you didn’t deserve that fate.  If you don’t have John 3:16 memorized, go look it up, and memorize it, and do me a favor and leave it in the Facebook comments below.

Love — it is the first of the fruits of the Spirit, and it is an outward sign that you are one with Christ.  Do you show love?  Do people know it? That is the question.

Now, please continue reading with our Prayer Requests and Praises below.

Prayer Requests & Praises

• Please pray for all of those that are having struggles with anxiety and panic.  Please pray for all of those, that God would send his Peaceful, Calming, Comforting touch to them, that they would know true Peace, and that their anxiety and panic would drift away.
• Amanda has a prayer request: I need more prayers! My husband’s oncologist is requesting a test on his already removed tumor tissue to see if he might be a candidate for immunotherapy. This is huge because that’s where all of the research is. If it comes back as no, we only have one more drug after the one we are on to use. Not many clinical trials exist that don’t involve immunotherapy. Please pray it comes back that he is a candidate. We will be scheduling another scan in the next week or so. I’ll be requesting more prayers for that – better than last time with no new cancer, none of the resolved tumors active again and the active tumors less active, resolved or gone. But I’ll bother you with those later!
  Also, our friend Jaime has been put on hospice care. She has a husband and 2 small children. Please pray for them as well. Thanks, guys!
• Please keep praying for my cousin Barb and her husband Tim. The results were not what we had hoped. The chemo is not working anymore, and the doctor is looking for clinical trials for him. Need prayers now, more than ever.
• Carol has a prayer request: Pray for my son Jeff. He is having Very difficult time.
• Please pray for my friend Clint and his family.
• Please pray for Paul and his broken toe.

Thank you all for praying, and please don’t forget to send us your own prayer requests!  Now, please pray the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray together:

Our Father, who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy Name.

Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done
On Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those that trespass against us.

Lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil.

For Thine is the Kingdom, and Power, and Glory
Forever and ever. Amen.

 

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