“What’s The Best Book On Grace You’ve Ever Read?”

By Fred Pruitt

Someone on Facebook asked me the above question in a survey. This is my reply:

Hi, thanks again for another question. Folks have put me in the “Grace message” basket I suppose, but I really didn’t know there was such a message or movement until a few years ago when I couldn’t help but notice it on Facebook. Of course I had heard of Steve McVey, Paul Anderson-Walsh,  and many of the others who are now called “grace” teachers.

But I have come in from a different direction, in that I have been sharing “Union” with Christ for the past 30 years, which I will have to say can fit with the “grace” message, since “grace living” and “union living” can be described in pretty much the same terms.

To answer your book question, I have only read a smattering of the books that people normally associate with the grace message. In my earlier “searching” days I read every book I could get my hands on. But I hardly read any books these days, or very few. People are always wanting me to read this or that book, many of which I am sure are very good, but for me, once the Lord had given me my marching orders, and I have come to know and be fixed in that, I quit looking around for answers in other things or movements, and that cuts down quite a lot on the reading, and gives me time to write and give what I have been given.

It’s kind of like getting married. When I was single, I could date different girls. However, being married, of course I am with only one woman. Same with our callings or emphases the Lord gives us. I faltered around here and there for quite a while in my earlier years in Christ, trying out this and that. But right at about 30 years ago, the Lord opened me up to knowing an inner awareness or consciousness of 1 Cor 6:17 (“he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit …”), Gal 2:20, (“I live yet not I but Christ liveth …”), and John 15:1 (“I am the vine, you are the branch”). It is wrapped up in completion in John 17:11; 21-23, which is Jesus praying to the Father that we would walk in the same oneness He had with the Father, and that we would be given the same glory, SAME GLORY, that He had with the Father before the world began.

Jesus’ oneness was expressed in Jesus’ words such as, “I am my Father are one,” “When you see me you see the Father,” “The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father doing, the Son likewise does the same,” and “The Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works.”

It overtook me completely that this was and IS the truth about Him in me, and me in Him. So I took that wife to marry, so to speak, and have sought no other since, having been completely satisfied through the fixing of the Spirit in me. I  have learned that it is HE (as me), walking out on a daily basis in normal human living, God’s perfect expression of Himself in the world, according to that great word in 1 John 4:17, “As He is, so are you in this world.” And so many many many more scriptures that say this, confirmed by the Spirit in every experience and circumstance of life since He first brought me to this (through great weakness and failure on my part) astounding revelation, by the Spirit, of “Who” I am.

Therefore, I continue to pray for and bless my brothers and sisters in the “Grace movement,” as well as for all who seek Christ in sincerity. In addition, as it has fallen to me, I continue to press and believe that many will continue into a total oneness with Christ in consciousness and experience. This comes about as we realize in the innermost depths of our being, that we do not live a message, teaching or a doctrine, but we live as expressions of a Person, the Divine Person, not from some quality He has or some gift He gives us, but He-Himself, living as me-myself, which is quite a different ballgame.

We then come to the place where we no more go in and out, no more tossed to and fro by the latest new message, movement, book or doctrine. We find a complete inner satisfaction, through knowing that we are now fixed in the Head, Jesus Christ. And from that point, we now find ourselves both constrained and privileged to share with all our brethren the truth that we are each Christ formed in us. This has come by no effort or technique, no teaching or “application of kingdom principles” or some other self-effort technique of man, but through the revelation that we are instead walking in a Living Person, Who lives in us “both to will and to do of His good pleasure.” (Phil 2:13).

Finally, we find there is no “method” of entry, except that we, by faith and revelation of the Spirit, simply receive as a gift what God has done universally in the Cross and Resurrection, made particular in each of us by a simple word of agreement with what God has declared, even as Mary the mother of Jesus said to Gabriel, “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

Let this word of Mary, the mother of Jesus, be ours as well.

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