About This Book

🌿 Life on the Vine: Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit highlights the importance of understanding and challenging cultural narratives that shape our lives. 🌿 Loyalty and allegiance to Christ should be our primary focus, shaping all other loyalties and allegiances. 🌿 The church needs to reflect the character and mission of God in order to bear good fruit and be the community God desires it to be. 🌿 The book explores the cultivation of the fruit of the Spirit in the face of dominant cultural forces. 🌿 It emphasizes the importance of joy, gratitude, stewardship, and peace in the Christian life.

Top Highlights

• We observe certain patterns of action, locating them at every point within some story that seems to make sense of them. When somebodyacts in a way that violates that story line, we either adjust our story line (and hence our view of them) or we seek to find out why they weren't "being themselves."
• the primary moral language of contemporary life is that of "rights."
• cultures are enormously complex webs of convictions, practices, institutions and narratives that give shape and meaning to the material realities of people's everyday lives.
• loyalty and allegiance is first of all to Christ, a commitment that makes relative all other loyalties and allegiances. Being a disciple of Christ requires a willingness to locate one's story within the wider, more-encompassingnarrative of God's ongoing relationship with Israel and the church through Jesus Christ.
• But in any case, where in all of this does one mention that one is a Christian? Why does it seem that this is somehow inappropriate to bring up unless one is asked about it specifically?