Moving By Faith Into the Promises

By Fred Pruitt

Dear Fred,

I read in your testimony about Norman Grubb that [you said], “I went to Norman for help from him to solve my problems, but he wouldn’t even touch them, didn’t even SEE them, but just told me WHO I AM, despite them! …[I] saw the “WHO” of WHO I AM. HE, Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, through the Holy Spirit, I saw, IS my very Life! Norman didn’t fuss with me about my frustrations and fears and problems and the terrible darkness that had overtaken me — he just “turned on the Light” – and darkness fled!”

Brother, in my life, that light has not yet come on, and the darkness has not fled.  I perceive the truth here, but I fight daily to resist suicide.

Here is a verse I try to quote on behalf of myself:

I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the LORD has done. (Psalm 118:17)

Regarding the “exchanged life,” in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, by Hannah Whitall Smith, she says,

“…According to the command in Rom. 6:11, by faith to reckon ourselves “dead unto sin.”  The Lord makes this a reality, and leads us to victory over self, by the daily and hourly discipline of His providences.

I need revelation on this.  She also shares this principle:

“He [The Lord] will always overcome it [any given battle] when we will put the matter into His hands, and will stand aside and let Him fight. Never once, when I have done this, have I been disappointed; for it is blessedly true, although so few seem to know it.”

This is where I want to be, brother Fred.  I want to successfully entrust my battles to the Lord, and not take them back.  This includes chronic illness, fear, –and living the exchanged life.

Would you please pray the Lord will carry me there?  That he will grant me a spirit of wisdom and revelation to know Him better (Eph. 1:17)? I don’t want my life to end prematurely.  I want to bear fruit.

You guys there have received revelation I so want and need.  My pain in this life is often intolerable.

Gratefully yours in Christ,

_______________________________________________

Dear ________,

Let’s start with your words quoted here: “Brother, in my life, that light has not yet come on, and the darkness has not fled.”

What you have written there, which I know is what you “feel” and believe you are experiencing, is simply not true. I understand that you feel you have not had the “revelation,” and you keep waiting and waiting, but it does not become real to you, even though, as you stated, you long for that reality of Christ in you, as you.

The reason I say your sentence is not true, is that, even though what you consider your “experience” is your reality and to you the light has not come and the darkness has not fled, I am here to tell you it has indeed already come, and the darkness has already been vanquished, and the only thing left for you to do, therefore, is to simply agree that this is so.

To be quite plain, you confess unbelief. You make your experience to be your truth, rather than what God has plainly said and already IS your truth in your inner man. The way to enter into consciousness of this is the one same faculty of our humanity that you use scads of times every day — your faculty of “reception,” or “faith.”

You are doing the opposite of Abraham, who believed what the Lord told him, even though he did not see the fulfillment with his fleshly eyes until many years later. God says directly to each of us, including you, “I will dwell in them and walk in them, and be their God.” “You are the Light of the world,” said Jesus to the multitudes on the mount. You are complete in Him, needing nothing. You are a branch growing out of the True Vine, which is Christ, and therefore as a branch of Christ you bear the fruit of Christ.

You already ARE in oneness with God. Jesus prayed in John 17:11; 20-23, that we would live in the same inner oneness with God that He (Jesus) did, and that we would be given the SAME GLORY (Shekinah Glory) as the Glory in which the Godhead dwells. This is what Jesus prayed, and did you ever see any of Jesus’ prayers go unanswered?

Isaiah 60:1 says: “Arise, shine, for thy light IS come, and the glory of the Lord IS risen upon thee.”

The verb is present tense — Open your eyes and see, thy Light IS IS IS IS IS IS Come! The Glory of the Lord IS IS IS IS IS IS IS risen upon thee!

I assume you have received Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. How did you receive Him? If you are like many others, you just said in some way, “Lord, I receive you, and I ask you to come into my life,” etc. And He does. Some people have an “experience” of being born again, some people do not, but the “experience” in this case is NOT where we place our bets, but on the One Who fulfills His Own Promises and Word within US!

I am only telling you what I have learned myself through many years, and that is to take the promises of God as the Spirit enlightens them to me, and to simply believe by my word of committal, or word of faith, that they are true, RIGHT NOW, for me!

That is all a “word of faith” is. It is simply a verbal or some other concrete committed “word” placed in the object of the faith, and then we find that the faith-object, whatever it is, produces its own truth or reality.

People are very confused about faith mostly, and I find that most think that it is some kind of high-powered special “mental believing” that we have to build or work ourselves into, but that is really not what it is. Actually, it is easier to demonstrate faith at work, than to define it conceptually.

Here is a great example of what I am talking about. Start with a chair. If you come into a room and you see some chairs, you select a particular chair that you want to sit in. Two things have occurred at this point. One, you first found and selected your soon-to-be object of your faith, the chair. Now, this is just to make a point of this, and is an exaggeration of what we actually do in selecting chairs, but bear with me and you’ll see what I am talking about. Because when you select your chair that you want to sit in, obviously you are making the “assumption,” or have the “belief,” that the chair will hold you up when you sit in it.  That is theoretical until you sit in the chair, which is the commitment to your word of faith (or decision to sit in the chair). Your first word of faith is that you choose a particular chair out of the others possibilities. THAT chair is the chair I want. The second “word of faith” is, “I will now go and sit in the chair.” So you walk over and turn around and start to sit, believing all the while that this particular chair will hold you up. Your final leap of faith is while sitting, when you get to point of no return, i.e., that you have freed your leg muscles from holding you up and you “plop” into the chair the last few inches. That last little “plop,” is your complete relaxation and trust that the object of your faith, the chair you selected, now takes over and “holds you up.” You can raise your legs off the ground and there you are, still held up by the chair, and no longer by your own legs that have given way to the chair.

Now we apply that same thing to these realities that you are saying you know are true, but you just do not “know” intimately their truth for you. And that is where your personal “faith” comes in.

Faith is just deciding and committing to what we decide, really. It has little to do with “mental believing.”

What is the truth about you? All these “darknesses” that you confess, or the words and promises God has spoken particularly with YOU in mind?

Your “mind” may not believe it or see it, but we do not live from there. We live out of the inner dwelling of the Spirit, and He equally indwells all and each of us Who are the Lord’s, no greater in me than He is in you, as mighty in you as He is in me.

When I began in my union “infancy” to believe and confess that Galatians 2:20 was MY truth, MY reality, MY walk, I looked and felt the opposite (still do). But WHO is the object of that faith, where I say “Christ walks and lives as me.”

Christ is the object. And just as with the chair I did not trust in my ability to hold up the chair, but rather surrendered to its ability to uphold me, it is the same with these realities that God says are ALREADY OURS! The object of my faith is Christ, not me. He is the One responsible to fulfill His own promises and truths that He has already provided in us even from the first moment we were born again.

However, it takes some time to see this, but when we do, when we realize the simplicity of faith is to simply say to the Lord, just like the Virgin Mary when Gabriel told her she would bear the Christ child, “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

Mary knew SHE could not produce this child, that only the Holy Spirit could do  it, but she confessed her faith in the promise that Gabriel made, and the reality that Gabriel stated was birthed out of her nine months later.

It is really that simple. You seem to be waiting for some “change,” or special “revelation,” or some special knowing or experience that you can recognize and by that go over the top, and I do not deny that those things happen sometimes to some people, but those things are not the object or goals of our faith. Our object is Christ, the One Who has done it all, and continually does it all, and we learn to simply say what He says is so, and it is “so” in me! It doesn’t matter what your mind says. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. Faith testifies against appearances to the contrary, and says what seems not to be evident truth, is the truth anyway because God has said it. (Rom 4: 17-21).

This is our learning to live in the Spirit and not according to the flesh in our faith. How did Jesus live? Earlier I said He prayed in John 17 that we would have the same “oneness” with God that He had. Here is how Jesus described it in Himself: “I and my Father are one.” “The Son can do nothing of Himself,” and, “The Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works.” That is Jesus’ Galatians 2:20 experience with God (since Jesus was also fully man) — that is — Paul’s description of Gal 2:20 along with many other statements of his — is the exact same reality Jesus was describing in the above quotes.

And this IS NOW your reality. You confess downward. Turn it around my friend. Quit waiting on something to happen. Confess the truth, because it is already true. You are in the heart of the Godhead in your spirit, and this process you are going through, this frustration, fears, etc., is what is pressing you into your true identity in Christ by the Spirit. This is NOT the devil having his way with you. This is a place the Spirit has brought you to, and through which HE HIIMSELF is taking you to the other side by these pressures you feel and experience. And it is yours the moment you realize you have, as the Scriptures say over and over, died in His death, in which we lose our “own life,” and rise again in newness of life, which is He in us. This HAS happened, if so be that you are in Christ, and certainly you are. Therefore what I am describing IS your reality, which you “receive” simply by agreeing with the Lord that Gal 2:20 IS the truth about you, NOW! THAT is the faith that receives.

Arise, shine, thy light IS come, and the glory of the Lord IS risen upon thee!

I also have used Ps 118:17 for over 30 years, too. I have had many moments of despair, but always that word came to hold me up. Everything completely changed one day, because I, too, sought these things for a long time. I was continually “asking” God for the very same things you are asking. One day the Spirit said to me, “When are you going to believe that I HAVE already given you all you have asked for?”

“When you pray, believe — ”

“Oh, I see, you ARE my reality! Praise God.

May He overtake you in this way as well. Write again.

Much love,

fred