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Building up believers and the New Testament church

The Foundation - Living His Life

In this time, many have lost sight of what God is doing in Christ Jesus. We must be brought back to our beginning place with Christ, to the foundation of our very salvation, to the basic walk of faith which is in relationship with the Lord. The reason we may have lost sight of what God is doing is that we have taken what God has revealed to us, and tried to understand it in a natural way. We have grasped it in our minds and have tried to know God's ways in our own way, rather than knowing God through faith, which experiences God in a daily walk.

We may have experienced God's grace and mercy, and partaken of His salvation, but God has called us to more than that--to a life in union with Himself. He wants us to walk in a place of fullness, coming to maturity by knowing and experiencing Him every day and in every hour of our lives. We need to realize what the foundational truth of the gospel really is. It is not just repentance, the beginning of salvation, the experience of one time. There is a basic and primary truth of the gospel that each of us must know in reality. If we do come to comprehend this truth, God in His mercy will then be able to bring us to that place where everything that He wants to accomplish will blossom forth in our lives.

Many of us have wrong concepts of what the Christian life really is. Our perception of every truth may not be wrong, but I refer only to that basic understanding of what the condition of salvation is. Some would have us believe that we can simply accept Christ, the act of a moment, and then go on to live in a state of trying to know God, trying to live better, and praying and reading the Bible. We are supposed to desire God to lead us, and we may actually experience His leading at different times.

But let me say that this alone is not the life of God that He sets forth in His Word. This alone is not what He came to do for and in us. If the situation described above is all that our personal concept of salvation is, it will be evident as our thinking expresses itself in our lives. A natural man is the product of his mind, and the mind that misses God's way, Christ, will always lead him astray.

In God's mercy, He is always longsuffering in His dealings with us, but there is only one way that we can please Him, and that is by faith. Some would think that we may just do "what we want to, when we want to," and ask God's blessing upon it. But that is not the gospel. These concepts must be cleared out before we can really see what we have in Christ Jesus. Natural concepts will lead us astray; reasoning and emotions can lead us astray. The devil's ways of misleading come in many different forms, and often it is the various workings of our minds that hinder us.

God wants to bring us back to the simplicity we had at the beginning of our walk in God. How simple it was! God doesn't want it to become complicated; we ourselves have complicated it. We may have let our desires control us, or made excuses--but beloved, there are no excuses in God. I mean that when God says that the life we now live is not our own, we must not add anything to that.