It is so easy to create Ishmaels, and to call them the work of God, the miracle of God, the son of God, the blessing of God, the ministry of God, the promise of God. But if what we build is not built by God, if it is not the increase of His chosen Seed in us and through us, then we will sooner or later have to face the fact that we have labored in vain. If what we have created and loved and dedicated ourselves to did not spring up from the very life of the promised Son, then we have taken a true promise and applied it to the wrong birth.

I know that Christians generally talk about the “comings” of Christ that are outside of us. I mean, they talk primarily about the coming of Christ in the past as a Man, or the coming of Christ in the future in judgment. And I have no desire to detract from either of these very important realities. But I can tell you that what you and I really need RIGHT NOW is a kind of “coming” that takes place in our own hearts, right where the disease is found, right where the breach has been made.

True faith is a gift of God. It is a kind of inward perceiving and receiving of the living Truth, and all the subsequent beliefs, hungers, responses, and actions (i.e. feeding, willing, adhering, following, and growing) that are empowered by it, which keep the soul in the path of redemption, in the light, under the cross, in the way of purification.

Many have wrongly applied the outward work of Christ to themselves, even while their hearts and lives remained in a state of great enmity against Him. This has caused some to say “God has done all for me,” even while they have resisted and rejected what He desires to do in them. It has given room for the flesh to keep on living, reigning, thinking, willing, running, and loving the world, all under a cloak of the “finished work of Christ.”

After eating (and becoming) a lie, man severed himself, or broke himself off, from God's life and light, and then began to have a perspective, a desire, a will that was not from God, nor in God, nor for God, but rather from self, in self, and for self. Instead of loving things that he saw and experienced because they were various manifestations of God’s wonders, beauty, image, nature, truth, etc., man began loving things for personal and private and separate reasons. When man broke off from the will of God, everything he saw very quickly became a means to a personal end.

This is a great problem in the church today. We have so many who have not even begun to leave the land of Egypt (I mean leave the flesh, the first birth, the natural man), and yet they talk and sing of and celebrate the blessings the Promised Land. They haven't begun to leave behind the dark, dead, enslaved, and contrary nature, but they consider themselves safe and secure just because the Lord has BEGUN to manifest Himself to them in Egypt, and to call them out.

To say that we don’t have to be fearful and cautious and watchful in our fallen condition about the seed of evil in man, about our natural inclination to evil, about our twisted love for the world, about the ease with which we are deceived and harmed by the work of the enemy in our heart, is a great error. This fearlessness may look like “confidence in God,” but it is really SELF-confidence. Confidence in God is a continual looking unto Him, leaning and depending upon Him, praying, as He taught us, that He will “keep us out of temptation and deliver us from the evil one.”

Grace is a gift of God’s power, a measure of His life, light, and Spirit, a seed of His heavenly kingdom, that is given to men in order to grow in them, to work in them, to leaven them and change them entirely, removing every form of evil, sin, darkness, and death, and bringing their newborn, purified soul into a perfect union with its Creator.