1 - Introduction - Living like a real Christian An introduction | Page 8

I am sure that there are many amongst us who, when looking back over their life,
can see God’s pruning at various stages. God is not being mean when he prunes
our lives of the things that we think are so important and that we build our
reputations upon, but He was in fact being kind to us because He knows that the
bearing of fruit will have eternal value.
There are many other examples in the Bible of similar things happening. Maybe at
this point you could exercise your mind by thinking of examples like Gideon who
had to have most of his army pruned away from him in order to be affective in
God’s hands (Judges 7). In Genesis 11 we have the story of the Tower of Babel and
of the people who disobeyed God by building the great tower. They stood back
towards the end of the project and expected God’s applause and yet I can just
picture in heaven God saying to the angel, ”Go and prune that thing away, it is
stopping the people from being who I want them to be.”
Prayer Thought: I am fully aware that pruning can be a very uncomfortable
process, but won’t you thank God today for His will of good intent on our behalf
and pray that you will become more cooperative with Him and then enter into a
deeper surrendered relationship with Him.

FRIDAY
John 10 v 10 – “…I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
In our journey of discovering the secret to fruitfulness let us today move from
MORE FRUIT TO MUCH FRUIT.
At the outset let me remind you that our God is a God of abundance. We don’t
ever find Jesus doing anything by way of half measure and that His expectation of
each one of us is that we should find Him to be the key for our fruitful living. In
John 15 we have Jesus being very specific on the key to fruitfulness,i.e. it is found
in abiding in Him. This “abiding” term involves more than just fulfilling certain
spiritual disciplines and, I believe it true to say that, just because you’re doing the
spiritual disciplines doesn’t mean that you are “abiding”.
Jesus is referring here to the supernatural element of bearing fruit. The fact that
God is in us should be reflected in our life that He now lives through us. Sometime