One of the saddest states that modern believers come to is brought about by their trying to ‘make it all work,’ trying to put the various religious ideas and doctrines together so that they fit into the believer’s personality and peculiar experiences. This dilemma creates the greatest self-effort man can exert.
I know of no one who has greater self-effort working than the believer involved in certain ‘faith ministries,’ or the commonly called ‘Word of Faith’ movement. When I was so involved, I almost destroyed myself trying to believe. The regiment of saying promises, confessing the positive, quoting the covenants, denying the negative, and resisting the Devil was greater self-effort than I had ever known. I thank the Father that this cycle is being broken in many lives, and believers are seeing the Christ-in-them as their rest. Of course, if Satan can keep the believer busy working for what Christ already is within him, he has destroyed that believer’s rest. It was never the Father’s intention to put chosen sons on this earth to labor and fight for what He, justified by the slain Lamb, already freely gives.
The real rest that was planned for us before the foundation of the world (Hebrews 4:1—3) was literally to hinge upon our seeing that we could do nothing to please the Father. It hinged upon our seeing that another had taken our place in sin, in crucifixion, in burial, in resurrection, and in ascension. The awful trick that Satan (who is the first preacher, as he preached to Adam and Eve in the Garden) played on us was to slightly twist the Scriptures (as he did with Eve, saying, ‘Hath not God said…?’). Again, he twisted the Scriptures by adding our own works to the finished work of Christ.
So, today, instead of us purely accepting the work that Christ has done as us (identification), we are tricked into believing that the Holy Spirit will somehow perfect that finished work, and we will prove more acceptable to the Father. By accepting this erroneous idea through their religious doctrines or training, believers have not entered into that rest.
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