The Light Shines in the Darkness – Deux

The Light Shines in the Darkness – Deux

(This is so revised from the previous version posted Oct 4, 2010, that I have made it a completely new post.)

By Fred Pruitt

There is a time for every one of us, if we are truly to discover the “abundant life,” that the Lord puts us apart from everything we have known before to be “godly,” and strips us bare naked. It seems like all is “vanity,” as the preacher said in Ecclesiastes. We look out into the world and all we see is vanity. We look inside ourselves and all we see is vanity. (Vanity is self-focus — and to see all as “vanity” is thus to filter everything through the only lens we’ve ever known, i.e., the lens of our individual selves-in-separation, in which we see everything within and without as something “for me,” because, in a mindset of self-relying self, we can only exist in a state of “need.” We have no sufficiency of our own and thus seek sufficiency in the things we can hear and see and feel. Including and most especially the “works of God.”)

This is a very right place to be, because it is the plan of God that we would be reduced in experience to death, because until we know our own death in the Lord, we cannot truly know His life. Being “alive” to this separated mindset, is being dead to God in fullness.

That is why this false caricature of ourselves which the devil has constructed can only (to itself) die. It cannot change or improve, try as it may. As long as it tries to hold onto its life, it lives in death. But when like Saul at Gilboa, we fall on the sword of our own undoing to escape the enemies that are overrunning us, (Romans 7 “O wretched man”), we find the sword is really a Cross. We experience something akin to death, and that “death,” as real as it is, is the Lord’s death in us, and in that death we find the beginning of the “peace that passeth understanding.” In the darkness of death we come finally to rest.

Dead people do not do anything. They are not responsible for anything. They cannot respond to anything. They are dead.

Christians largely do not really know that they are dead people. They keep (and I include myself in this in past times) substituting “activity” for life, thinking if they will do these things, God will be pleased and bless them, etc. Now God does wink for a time at this ignorance, and because of God’s wink, many never really do come to the end of themselves, because God in some way blesses what they do. They see results. They see miracles, etc. In my beginning days I saw “results” and “miracles” of one sort or another. I won people to the Lord. And as I say, God blessed me in and despite my ignorance.

But after a time I wearied. Nothing was ever enough. I was never all that I thought I “should” be. All my thoughts were condemning to me.

And that is when the Lord put me into the reality of, “Be still, and know that I AM God.” To “be still” (inwardly and outwardly) is probably the hardest thing to do for a human being and even harder to do for a believer, because we are exhorted continuously from the pulpit, Christian books, etc., to do the opposite of “be still.” Instead we are commanded to “do more!” However, the Spirit uses this “self-activity” to bring us finally to nothingness, where nothing we can think of or imagine has any more value to us. We realize that in Christ we died. We may have known that in a conceptual way prior to this, but this is the time when the Spirit makes our death real, because ONLY the Spirit can bring us to this place. It is the place of Lazarus, dead in a tomb.

Only then do we begin to know the meaning of, “Be still, and know that I AM God.” This is the Spirit’s classroom, and He is the best teacher, because He has always been there, every step we have taken for our whole lives (and not just after we are born again). His purpose has always been to bring us to this place where we experience this futility. We must be emptied out before we can truly be filled. What is emptied out is this false consciousness of ourselves as selves separate and apart from God trying to approach him by formulas, works, sacrifices, etc. We become in a very real sense, “nothing.” As Paul says in Galatians, “For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself.”

What begins to happen when we come to this place of utter futility and death, we are then conditioned to recognize the Real Life that has been there all along, even while we were flailing around all those years “trying to work for God.” The Real Life is in us, and always has been, but we are all so full of ourselves, trying so hard to make ourselves pleasing to God, that it blocks our clear sight to the actual truth of our inner lives.

We have no independent life of our own, but were born to live God’s life. God’s Life expressed and demonstrated in, by, and as us. That has always been the plan.

Through the devil’s deception, he captured us in the delusional trap of separation. What does it mean, to be separated? It is like being a radio trying to transmit a signal when we are unplugged from the wall. Unplugged from the wall, apart from our power source, we can neither receive transmissions nor send them out. We are inert.

But it is also more than that. Another illustration that demonstrates this further point, is a computer. A computer has no “program” of its own, except what is hardwired to respond to the codes the software gives the machine to perform certain tasks. A computer has “faculties,” (memory, retrieval of information of stored information, display, sound, etc.), that are neutral, available for whatever program runs them. Which is very much like we humans. We have faculties of spirit, soul and body, available to the usage of the “deity” spirit who runs us.

The Bible does not let us have a middle ground. We live either in the kingdom of wrath or the kingdom of Life. We are either expressers of sin or expressers of righteousness. “He who committeth sin is of the devil,” 1 John says. Nothing gray about that. When we are partakers of the kingdom of darkness, our thoughts, deeds, and attitudes are darkness. We are free from righteousness, as Rom 6:20 says.

However, now that we have come into the kingdom of God through Jesus Christ, Paul says regarding our new birth, “having been made free from sin, ye became servants of righteousness.” And, “As many as are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God.” (Rom 8:14). That is, they do the works of their Father, the Almighty, and no longer fulfill the lusts of our former father, the devil.

Like the moon, I have no light of my own, but as long as I try to create the light and make light come out of me, at best it is a cheap imitation of the Real. However, when I realize that I have no light of my own, but that ANOTHER IS NOW LIGHT in me, then I have found my true place in the kingdom. “I live, yet not I, but Christ.”

After realizing our utter death into nothingness, we begin to see, by the Spirit in us Who alone does it, that even though we no longer live, somehow we still do, but it is no longer just us living, but Christ within us as the Real Life expressed by our human lives. This is even as the moon reflects the light of the Sun, and is only manifest to us because of that Light.

So for anyone who may be currently seeing the futility and despair in a low place, take heart! You will not stay there, because even though the Spirit has literally taken you to hell, REJOICE, because that is where you find Him in fullness at last!

Remember, it says in John, that God commands the “light to shine out of darkness,” and in Psalms, “If I make my bed in hell, lo, thou art there.” (Ps 139:8). You are then overwhelmed inwardly by the Life that fills all things, from the depths of hell to the highest heights of heaven.

Therefore, to those who are caught in this place in this current moment, they probably will be shocked that I say this to them, but I have to say of anyone in that situation, “Good!”

God has you right where He wants you (He always has, but this is a very special holy time), and He will not leave you in Hell, even as the Father did not leave Christ in hell.

“For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.”  (Ps 16:10, 11)

Rejoice, for the barren one will bear many children! And such are you!

Take heart, because I tell you it will not be long until you will say, “Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning on her beloved?” (SS 8:5). Who is this? It is YOU!