Fruit of the Spirit: Intro

A Christian is someone “in Christ” – Paul uses this phrase 164 times in his writings (or its equivalent “in Him”). As a bird flies in the air, a fish swims in the sea and a plant grows in the soil, so the believer “LIVES” in Christ.
In the allegory of the vine and the branches (John 15:1-17) the verb “meno” meaning, “to abide, to remain, to dwell” is used 10 times by Jesus.
I suppose the secret is to discover a way of doing this. For some the secret is “imitating Christ.” There is a danger here. There can be no genuine imitation of Christ apart from an historical knowledge of him. This is the defect in an otherwise superb devotional classic that Thomas a Kempis wrote in the 14th century. No painter can make a satisfactory copy of something of which he only has a vague notion. For Thomas a Kempis Christ is the sum of all excellence. So, he constructs a Christ out of his own notion of excellence instead of going to the NT to meet the living Christ. Simply to copy Christ is a good idea. If you can manage!
The great purpose of God is that we should “become like his Son” (Romans 8:29 GNB).
For me the secret is to try to live out “fruit of the Spirit.” After all we are given these by the Holy Spirit and we can seek to develop them full in our life. I think over the next few days I am going to look at them in my blog.