The love listed first among the fruit of the Spirit isn’t sentiment or romantic feeling. Paul chose the word agape, the self-giving love that mirrors the love God has shown us in Christ. Love stands first in his list because it’s the governing fruit from which the other eight grow, and it grows not through striving but through the Spirit’s patient work in a life rooted in being loved by God.
It took me years to recognize what I had been watching my whole life.
I grew up with a father who never said a hateful word about anyone, not in private, not in frustration, not even when someone had clearly wronged him. When something stirred him up, he’d grow quiet. He’d let the moment pass. Years later, when I was old enough to ask him about it, he told me why. He didn’t want to give God a bad look to anyone who happened to be watching.
I didn’t know what I was seeing at the time. I just knew my dad was different. He loved me with a love I knew I hadn’t earned. He loved my mother that same way. He loved strangers and neighbors and the people the world tends to overlook with the same quiet steadiness. After I’d left home, after I’d studied Scripture for years, after I’d taught Sunday School and led Bible studies, I came back to one of the most familiar passages in the New Testament and saw something I’d missed for a long time.
Paul writes in Galatians that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Nine qualities listed together, named as a single fruit. When I read that list now, I realize I’d been watching it my whole childhood. Every one of those nine things had been visible in my father’s life. But the root that produced the rest, the one that quietly held everything else in place, was love.
That’s not an accident in Paul’s list. Love stands first because love is what the Spirit grows first, and from that growth, everything else follows.
So what did Paul actually mean when he listed love first among the fruit of the Spirit? And how does love like that grow in a life?
Why Love Stands First
The structure of Paul’s list matters. He calls these nine qualities the fruit of the Spirit, singular, even though he names nine distinct things. As established in the anchor article on this series, that singular word is doing real work. Paul isn’t describing nine separate virtues you build one at a time. He’s describing one unified character with nine visible expressions, all of them growing from the same root.
And the root is love.
Joy without love becomes self-satisfaction. Peace without love becomes detachment. Patience without love becomes resigned tolerance. Kindness without love becomes performance. The other eight qualities exist as expressions of the first one. Strip love out of any of them, and what’s left isn’t the Spirit’s fruit anymore. It’s something flatter.
This is why Paul could write, elsewhere, that even if a person had every spiritual gift and every kind of knowledge but didn’t have love, they had nothing of substance (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). Love isn’t one virtue among many. Love is the soil the others grow in.
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23)
Notice the order. Love comes first, and everything else comes after.
The Word Paul Chose
Greek had several words for love. Eros described desirous, romantic love. Phileo described affectionate, friendship love. Storge described the natural love within a family. And agape described a love defined less by feeling and more by giving, the kind of love that decides for the good of another whether or not anything is given back.
When Paul reached for a word to describe the Spirit’s first fruit, he chose agape.
That choice matters. Eros has its place in Scripture, especially in the language of the Song of Solomon and the joy of marriage. Phileo shows up in many descriptions of the bond between believers. Neither word is unbiblical or unimportant. But neither was the right word for what Paul wanted to describe in Galatians 5.
The fruit Paul names is the love that doesn’t depend on whether the other person is loveable in that moment. It’s the love that gives without first asking what it might receive. It’s the love that mirrors what God has done for us, because the only way it grows in us is through the Spirit who pours God’s own love into our hearts (Romans 5:5).
That’s the love Paul lists first. Not affection. Not attraction. Not even loyalty. Something deeper, more durable, and not native to most of us.
What Love Looks Like in Daily Life
Paul gives a portrait of this love in a passage that’s been read at thousands of weddings and used in countless sermons. 1 Corinthians 13 isn’t actually about marriage. It’s about what agape looks like when it shows up in a real life.
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5)
Read that slowly.
Notice what Paul doesn’t say. He doesn’t say love feels deeply, or speaks beautifully, or performs visibly. He says love is patient and kind. He says love isn’t envious, isn’t proud, isn’t insistent on its own way, isn’t irritable, isn’t resentful. The portrait he gives is mostly what love refuses to do, and what it patiently does instead.
Most of what Paul describes happens in the ordinary friction of being near other people. Patience grows visible when something doesn’t happen on your schedule. Kindness grows visible when you’re tired. Not insisting on your own way grows visible when your way and somebody else’s way collide. Not being resentful grows visible after you’ve been wronged. This is love in the everyday, and it’s the agape my father carried. The grown form of it isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet. It’s the slow, steady refusal to let pride or impatience or wounded pride take the wheel.
Paul keeps going a few verses on:
“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:7)
That verse is about love under weight. Agape doesn’t snap when life turns hard. It bears. It hopes. It endures. That’s not the same as pretending nothing’s wrong, or refusing to grieve, or staying in something genuinely destructive. It’s the love that keeps showing up faithfully because the love itself isn’t tethered to circumstances.
This is what the Spirit grows. Slowly. Often invisibly. Over years.
We Love Because He First Loved Us
There’s a line in John’s first letter that holds the whole article together.
“We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)
This is the order. God loved first. Our love is response, not initiation. The Christian life isn’t a project of summoning love out of ourselves and pushing it outward. It’s a life shaped by being loved, in a way that begins to reshape how we love everyone else.
Paul says the same thing in different language. He writes that God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:5). The love that becomes the Spirit’s first fruit in our lives isn’t something we manufacture. It’s something we receive, and from that receiving, it begins to spill outward.
This is why striving doesn’t grow love. You can’t will yourself into agape. You can decide to act lovingly in a given moment, and that’s a good and right thing to do, but the fruit Paul describes isn’t built through decisions stacked on top of decisions. It grows in a heart that has been changed by the experience of being loved by God.
That love, the love God has shown us, is the foundation everything else stands on. The cross is the apex of it. The Spirit poured into us is the proof of it. And our love for the people in our lives is the slow, accumulating evidence that we’ve been loved like that ourselves.
You don’t have to earn the love that the Spirit is forming in you. It’s already been given. The question isn’t whether God loves you enough to grow love in you. The question is whether you’re learning, gradually, to live like someone who is loved that way.
How the Love of the Spirit Grows in a Life
What does it actually look like to grow in love the way Paul describes? Not as a project. Not as performance. As fruit.
A few things tend to be true.
Love grows in proximity to real people. The kind of agape Paul describes isn’t theoretical. It grows visible in your specific marriage, your specific family, your specific congregation, your specific neighbors and coworkers. You can’t love humanity in the abstract. You can only love the people God has put within reach of your life. The Spirit grows love in you by giving you actual people to love, often people who don’t make it easy.
Love grows as you let yourself be loved by God. Time in Scripture, time in prayer, time letting the gospel settle into the places of your life where you still half-believe you have to earn affection. These aren’t disciplines that pay out by some external measure. They’re how the source keeps filling.
Love grows as you stop rationing it. Most of us love the people who love us back well. We extend ourselves carefully. We protect our reserves. The Spirit, over time, begins to push love past those boundaries. We find ourselves caring for someone we wouldn’t have chosen to care for. We find ourselves serving in ways we wouldn’t have chosen to serve. That’s the fruit growing.
Love grows through ordinary faithfulness, repeated. My father’s love wasn’t dramatic. It was the same posture, year after year. Quiet when frustrated. Generous when given the chance. Kind when there was nothing to gain. That’s not a performance. That’s a long obedience in the same direction, with the Spirit doing the slow work the whole time.
Jesus said the world would recognize his disciples by one thing.
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)
Not by our doctrinal precision. Not by our cultural posturing. Not by our visibility. By our love. That’s the visible mark Jesus named, and it’s what the Spirit, in his patient way, is forming in every life that belongs to Christ.
Key Takeaways
- Love stands first in Paul’s list because it’s the governing fruit. The other eight expressions of the Spirit’s fruit grow from love as their root.
- The word Paul chose is agape, the self-giving love that decides for another’s good whether or not anything is returned. It isn’t sentiment, and it isn’t sentimentality.
- 1 Corinthians 13 describes what agape looks like in real life: patient, kind, not envious or proud, not insistent on its own way, not irritable, not resentful. It bears, hopes, and endures.
- We love because God first loved us. The fruit isn’t something we manufacture. It’s the Spirit pouring God’s love into our hearts so that love begins to flow outward.
- Love grows slowly, in proximity to real people, through ordinary faithfulness. It isn’t built by performance. It’s grown by the Spirit’s patient work over a lifetime.
Questions To Sit With
Yes, sometimes. The most discussed example is John 21, where Jesus and Peter exchange the two words in ways that appear close to interchangeable. The distinction between agape and phileo isn’t perfectly airtight everywhere in the New Testament, and it’s honest to acknowledge that. Paul’s choice in Galatians 5:22 still stands, though: he reaches for agape specifically, the word that across his writing consistently carries the sense of self-giving, sacrificial love rooted in God’s character. The texture in John doesn’t dissolve the meaning of Paul’s word choice in Galatians.
Biblical love is both, not either-or. Agape includes affection but isn’t reducible to feeling, and it includes decision but isn’t reducible to gritted-teeth obedience. Paul describes love that is patient, kind, and not easily provoked, all of which involve both the heart and the will. The fruit the Spirit grows over time integrates the two, so that loving choice and loving affection begin to align in the same person.
Yes. The fruit is a direction the Spirit is growing you in, not a finished state. You can be genuinely shaped by agape and still have specific relationships where love feels hard to extend, especially when the other person has wounded you or simply makes love costly. What matters is that you keep returning to the Source rather than treating the difficulty as evidence that the fruit isn’t there.
You don’t grow it by targeting it. You grow it by staying in proximity to the One who is loving you and the people he has placed in your life. Time in Scripture, time in prayer, ordinary faithfulness with real people, and a willingness to let the Spirit confront the places where love still feels rationed. The fruit follows the rootedness; it doesn’t precede it.
The fruit Paul describes is primarily directed outward, toward God and toward others. Scripture does include a kind of right care for yourself, especially when Jesus quotes “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39), which assumes a basic appropriate self-regard. But the fruit of the Spirit isn’t fundamentally a self-improvement category. It’s the love of God overflowing through you, not the love of yourself reflected back.
When Love Feels Out of Reach
For most of us, the love Paul describes isn’t where we’d say we are right now. We can name people we struggle to love. We can name moments we know our patience ran out, our kindness thinned, our resentment lingered. That’s honest, and the Spirit isn’t surprised by it. He’s the one growing the fruit, and growth is slow.
You don’t have to manufacture the love. You only have to keep returning to the One who has already loved you. Live in proximity to real people. Let the Spirit confront the places where love still feels rationed. Trust that the same Spirit who has grown this kind of love in others before you is at work in you the same way.
The love Paul named first grows the way fruit always grows, quietly and slowly, where the deepest work is hidden until the harvest. The Spirit himself is the one doing the growing, and he isn’t in a hurry.
Christ reigns. Christ restores. Christ will return.
Longing for Christ, learning to wait faithfully.
Your brother in Christ, Duane