Two weeks into our “In Season” series about the fruit of the Spirit, we spoke with Lead Pastor Luke Uran and Associate Pastor Josh Pardee about all things summer here at First Free.

What prompted this new series and where are we going with it?

Luke Uran: The Lord has been teaching me a lot recently about the work of the Holy Spirit, and walking according to the Spirit. As we were processing and praying through what summer series we should do, we wanted to do something where it’s not like we’re going through a book verse by verse. With people gone on vacation in the summer, if they miss a Sunday, this way they are able to pick back up. Hopefully they want to go back and listen and get caught up, but this way it’s more a series of one-off sermons.

All that to say, the Lord just laid on my heart to talk about the fruit of the Spirit. The title is “In Season.” In the life of a follower of Jesus who has the Holy Spirit within them, the fruit of the Spirit is never something that’s out of season. Each and every day is the season to allow the Holy Spirit to continue to produce that fruit in our lives. So I thought, what better time than now for us to talk about what this looks like? Yes, to build up the church but then also to go outside the walls of the church and to live the life that Christ has called us to live.

With the last series (Recalibrate), you said you felt like there was a message specifically for our church from that passage in Revelation. Is there anything about this series that you feel is directed specifically to our church family?

LU: It’s more general this time, but these are good reminders. In recent years, I know some of our adult communities have gone through the fruit of the Spirit. Some Life Groups have gone through it. This is one of those things where we look at the life of a believer becoming more and more Christlike — the sanctifying process. It’s continuing to produce that fruit in us as we abide in Christ.

Josh, you have the next one this Sunday, about peace. What would you like us to be thinking about?

Josh Pardee: I’ll be talking about how we frame peace. The Pax Romana that we learned about in history, and how Rome kept promising peace but how their peace was promised through brute force and annihilating any opposition. We’ll compare that to the Pax Christi, the peace of Christ. And how we still try to live out Rome’s peace. We think of peace as tranquility, convenience, absence of disruption, escaping problems. So we’ll talk about how the peace that the world promises is the avoidance of opposition. But the peace of Christ transcends opposition.

This past year, we’ve heard cries for peace, and people have different ideas of what that peace looks like and how to pursue it. Peace is a proactive posture. It’s not just sitting on the sidelines. Jesus says in Matthew 5, we are to be peacemakers. So there’s initiative there. We receive the peace through Jesus’ death and resurrection, and that is also our invitation to die to ourselves and live out that Christlike pattern, and then invite others into that.

We tend to make peace circumstantial, don’t we?

JP: Yeah, and the problem with that is that your peace is always at risk. You’re always trying to control, manipulate, hold onto it. It’s not real peace.

In the Galatians 5 passage about fruit of the Spirit, there’s a line that says “against such things there is no law.” What do you think that means?

LU: Paul was writing that we are freed from the power of the law by the grace of God. When you look at the 613 do’s and don’ts of the Old Testament law, what Jesus has said is you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. When you play those out and allow the Holy Spirit to produce that fruit within you, and live according to those commandments Jesus gave, you’re not going to be condemned if you’re living love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Obviously we’re all still sinners in need of a savior, but that’s the way Christ models for us to live.

We have the second combined service at Summerwood coming up this Sunday (July 11). The first one was pretty encouraging, right?

LU: The first one was awesome. It was great to see the number of people who came out. It’s fun to be able to get together like that as one body. It was a very celebratory Sunday with it being Father’s Day, but most of all with the six baptisms that took place.

JP: It is fun for the opportunities to do things together. It encourages and hopefully fosters an environment where we are a multigenerational church and that’s one of our values. To have spaces where we can cross over and have conversation, and maybe not be as set on being one service or the other, but that we are one church, is a good, healthy thing that we want to continue to see blossom in the future.

For us it was good because we saw a lot of faces we hadn’t seen in a while.

LU: For that, it’s really fun. It’s fun for us, as we’re preaching, to have everyone together once in a while. And Nathan and Renee do a great job working together in combining worship.

Anything else we should talk about?

LU: There are so many great things happening right now, especially in our student ministries and kids ministries. Summerama, Totarama, the Family Movie Night, the chemistry show that’s happening in August. For the movie night at Summerwood, there were 360 people there, and I think only about 60 of those people were First Free people.

Our student ministries just got back from camp, and now they have a local mission trio coming up and they are meeting again on Wednesday nights. And then the Summer Music Celebration a couple of weeks ago … it’s always nice to have the choir and orchestra together. There are just so many good things happening.

It has to be fun for you guys, after working in an empty building for a year, just to see activity again.

LU: I was saying to (Kids Director) Kari Heckler the other day, it’s nice to be able to look out my windows and see kids running in the field again. Last year there was just nothing.

JP: Even just the mood on Sundays. People are glad to be back together. The Mother’s Day and Father’s Day lunches were very simple things, but people just loved having a reason to stick around to be in the company of other people. That has been huge.