And so, the Christian who is led by the Spirit is beyond the fear of the law, beyond the fear of death, beyond the need for works of the flesh, because he is now free for love. We are now free to bear the Holy Spirit’s fruit in the desert of human misery. Because we belong to Christ, every single part of us belongs to God. Not just our brains or our Sunday mornings; no, every part of us belongs to the God who made a wild and dying plant alive in order to bear the fruit of the Spirit. Our every second is no longer our own but a double-gift from the God who created us and is now redeeming us for present and future glory. This reality has immense ramifications for how we live our lives. We no longer get to say, “I will try to make time for prayer or to contribute to Christian love or share the Gospel”; no, our entire lives are about being led by the Spirit and belonging to Christ. We work and sleep and eat not for ourselves, not to get more things than we can ever use, not to build our own little slice of heaven, not to worship the idols of our small and unimaginative age; rather, we do all the necessary aspects of life so that we can have time and space to grow the fruit of the Spirit, to grow the fruit which shows Christ’s total and uncontested reign in our hearts as it is in heaven. Every Christian will lose battles in this fight (otherwise it wouldn’t be a real war), but we must face the future as those who know victory has already been won in what Christ has already done.