bearing fruit year after year. Which is more important? You hardly have to ask. Underneath the two lists—the works of the flesh and the fruit of the spirit—there lies Paul’s whole vision of what happens to someone when they come, through faith and baptism, into the community of the Messiah’s people. (Notice how, in verse 24, he speaks of Christians as ‘those who belong to the Messiah’; and how he assumes, as he does in 4:4–7, that all such people are indwelt by the spirit.) There are various stages