Wright - Cultivating the fruit of the spirit: growing in Christlikeness

For several years, the British medical establishment ran a public awareness campaign on the importance of including plenty of fruits and vegetables in a healthy diet. They recommended that everybody should have at least five portions of fruits or vegetables in their daily meals. The campaign was popularly known as 5-A-Day. Have you had your 5-A-Day? people would ask each other.

In 2013, Langham Partnership UK and Ireland, under the leadership of our then executive director, Ian Buchanan, ran a campaign to encourage people to grow in Christlikeness. Langhams vision is that Christians and churches around the world should grow in depth of spiritual maturity, and not just grow in numbers through evangelism. And that means growing to become more like Jesus. We believe that such growth in maturity comes as we feed on the word of God, particularly as it is faithfully and clearly preached in a way that makes a relevant impact on peoples lives and contexts. That is why one of Langhams primary goals is to raise the standards of biblical preaching.

It was decided that the main content of the campaign would be a series of Bible studies and videos on the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. This was partly because we knew that John Stott, the founder of Langham Partnership who died in 2011, prayed every morning that God the Holy Spirit would cause that fruit of the Spirit to ripen in his own life. So, since Paul lists nine items in his portrait of the fruit of the Spirit, Jonathan Lamb (who was the program director for Langham Preaching) came up with the idea of calling our campaign 9-A-Day: Becoming Like Jesus. We should be as careful every day to cultivate the nine qualities that make up the fruit of the Spirit as we are to make sure we get our five portions of fruits or vegetables every day.

The Bible studies, videos, and other supporting materials for 9-A-Day can be found and downloaded for personal or group use at http://uk.langham.org/get-involved/free-lent-study-guide and at 9aday.org.uk/the-9-fruits .

In preparation for that campaign, I undertook to preach a series of Bible expositions on the fruit of the Spirit at the Portstewart Keswick Convention in Northern Ireland (my homeland) in July 2012. Out of those expositions came the short, condensed talks that I did on video for 9-A-Day (available at the above websites), and it is those expositions that provide the basic material for the chapters of this book.

The preached origin of the material leads to two further observations. First, this really is the kind of book that you need to read with your Bible handy beside you. In every chapter I have surveyed some of the depth and breadth of biblical background to each of the words the apostle Paul mentions in his fruit of the Spirit. So there is a lot of Bible exploration as you read this book, and I hope that is enriching and encouraging.

Second, since I hope this book will be helpful to other preachers (as well as general Christian readers), I have deliberately not included much by way of illustrations and stories. That may seem strange since sermons need appropriate illustrations to help emphasize their main points and make them memorable. And certainly every one of the items in the fruit of the Spirit could be illustrated abundantly with examples and stories. But one crucial element of good preaching is that it should be not only faithful to the biblical text, but also relevant to the local context of the preacher and listeners. So I hesitated to multiply examples drawn from my own context in the UK. Rather, I drew many examples from the stories and characters in the Bible itself (especially from its main characterGod himself, as he reveals himself both in the Old Testament and in the person of Jesus Christ). It is then the responsibility of any preacher who wants to use this book as a resource for their own preaching to think of examples drawn from their own cultural context, and to illustrate and apply the biblical challenge of the fruit of the Spirit in a way that engages and impacts the hearts, minds, and lives of their own people.