Until Christ Be Formed in You – Part Two

By Fred Pruitt

“My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you …” (Gal 4:19)

When I sat down to write the first part of this article, Until Christ Be Formed in You – Part One, I had no idea I was going to tell some more of “my story.” It just came out. But I realized that it dovetails exactly into my original direction. So – to finish the story …

Here’s the thing. Since 1973, I had known from the Spirit that He had called me a speaker of the Word. It had happened almost immediately, sharing Christ with friends, family, strangers. My one almost “obsession” became to get the Life of Christ out to others. I had known then that would be what the rest of my life would be about. (Although when one is 21 years old, the phrase, “rest of my life,” has no meaning whatsoever.)

But after that second fall in 1988, I doubted that, too. I had simply been driven all those years to testify of Christ – first in my beginning days sharing Christ evangelistically to non-believers. But over the years the Spirit shifted His way in me toward maturing and struggling believers, that, as He taught me from within the Spirit life, I was to share with others the same Person, the One — 

“Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ. And whether we be afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation, which is effectual in the enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer: or whether we be comforted, it is for your consolation and salvation. And our hope of you is stedfast, knowing, that as ye are partakers of the sufferings, so shall ye be also of the consolation.” (2 Cor 1:4-7)

I KNEW that was my life, but when I took my ball and went home, and after reflecting a while, the confusion and pain overrode that drive to “get this out to others,” and shifted it into neutral gear. I just wanted to “be.” Anything else was vexing to my mind.

A regular normal guy with wife and three adult-approaching children. Janis and I had started life together in 1971 with John Lennon’s song, “Isolation,” as something of a credo ––

“Just a boy and a little girl

All alone in the whole wide world

I – e – I – so – lation ….”

(One has to hear it. Warning, it is probable that only true John Lennon fans will love this song – so it can be easily “skipped” to get on with the rest of the article. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZzXg0qYoAo )

Now it seemed, in some ways, it was back to that. Just us, alone in the whole wide world.

……

All that mindset broke of itself in 1999. I had never told God to “get lost” nor had denied Him (except by lack of testimony since my mouth was silent concerning the things of God during those years). Still, as those years went by, I began more and more to think (always under condemnation) that I had been “called” back then, but had subsequently “looked back” from the plow, and was therefore unfit for the kingdom. (Lk 9:62). At least regarding being a “worker” in the kingdom, anyway. I really thought I had lost my chance. I had been put out to pasture.

I hadn’t been “talking to the Lord,” nor had He talked with me, in any way that I was perceiving at the time. Certainly He was continually speaking as always in everything, but I was not tuned in.

And that’s about when the Spirit showed up. I was NOT looking for Him. I had gotten used to our somewhat peaceful life of doing nothing much. We lived out in the country twenty miles outside Macon, Georgia. We had friends we loved and they loved us, and we enjoyed being with them then and still do now. Life wasn’t “perfect;” there were many problems certainly, but it was livable and we were somewhat content with it.

Especially the last couple of years. We lived in a large mobile home with a catfish pond and 300+ acres of forest around us. There were a few others living around but they were not close. We loved to come home from our job working at a little cafe for breakfast and lunch, sit on our deck, get toasty and watch the wildlife. Deer or turkeys might happen by. They said a black panther lived in the forest, but I never saw him, just a huge horse that ran wild out there.

But mostly we sat on our deck and watched a blue heron and a kingfisher we befriended through my “duty” of feeding the catfish in the pond. When I first started going out to feed the catfish in late afternoon, if the heron was there it would leave. But there was a kingfisher who was upset with me for quite a while, dive-bombing me and squawking at me, until he saw that my stirring up the water was beneficial to him.

Same with the heron. At first it would fly off when we came out onto our deck, about 100 yards from the pond. Gradually it began to get used to us, so that at the end he would just retreat around to the other side of the pond when I fed the catfish, since he also saw that I benefited his fishing efforts as much as for the kingfisher. We could have used some more money, and had a few other problems straightened out, but since I had mostly given up any ambition for anything except peace and quiet, it was the closest I could get to the peaceful pastoral life of a “country gentleman.”

As I said, I didn’t think He was looking for me or wanted me.

But one day it was as if He just tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’m back!”

I had done nothing whatsoever to instigate it.

Over the next few weeks, the Truth just came flooding back in. I had forgotten the words. I had gotten rid of all my books, even the Norman-autographed books. To this day I can’t remember what I did with them. I still liked to read, and had taken to reading good novels. And more and more, I had begun to see signs of Christ in the novels I was reading. But almost like the days when the scales were falling off when I knew I was born again, this time the crusts were falling off again.

What the crusts revealed in their absence was much different from that first time all those years before. It was no less dramatic or life-altering, but the “stuff” of the revelation was different. In the beginning, it was revealing Jesus Christ, Who, “Was, Is, and Is to come,” and through Him The Father and the Spirit. Those initial days found my heart “burning” over and over as I read the scriptures and heard the Spirit in them and began to understand them, hearing Christ. But still, even though I knew Jesus had “come into my heart,” I had no cognizance of what that meant. In my consciousness Jesus, God, devil, angels, heaven and hell were all separate “beings, states or things” apart, outside “me.”

This next time, however, the revelation opened up in me in a new revelation of “Him as me,” in a much more “fixed” way than I had walked in those years before. I have told friends it was like I woke up one day and the “message,” which had been words in my head that I believed with tremendous struggle, that is, constant inner conflicts and continual condemnation through relentless temptations – high “ups” with great elation, and dizzying spirals downward (“spiritual bi-polar”) – but then, as “He as me” rose the second time, the revelation went crashing into my “spiritual backbone,” and replaced the wobbly in-and-out quality which had ruled for so long, with the inner “rod of iron” of the Spirit.

No more being a “double-minded” man. The constant struggle, for me, in that “who am I?” business, for years and years had always been the temptation to disbelieve the very thing I confessed and exhorted others to confess – “Christ as me.” But when I discovered the inner “rod of iron,” an upholding not of man but of the Spirit, everything changed. Temptations did not cease still to this very moment. But the Spirit had done a work, call it “brought me to a new level of faith and understanding,” and the result of that “work,” was an inner settling of that question now for all time and eternity. “Yes – I AM!”

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. 4 How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. 6 If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” (Ps 137:1-6)

 

All my Christian life I had sought the fulfillment of the key which I saw early on unlocked everything, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:3) My true inner eyes began to open. I “saw” what Norman had drummed into our heads so many many times, “To ‘know’ means to be mixed with the thing you ‘know’.” As Adam “knew” Eve his wife. He “mixed” with her, becoming “one flesh” with her. And in Christ we have become “one spirit” with Him. (1 Cor 6:17). 

It was like springtime again in my inner self, as things that had looked dead during all that 10 year winter, now came to life one by one. Frozen rivers loosened. The whole inward countryside was well-watered again, becoming green and lush. Flowers bloomed. Trees budded. The “time of the singing of the birds,” came into my heart again.

I remembered again that I had been crucified with Christ, though somehow still alive, but it was not “me” but HE alive in me as the “Life of my life,” and the river came flooding again. It was like waking from a long dream, when the Lord “restored the joy of my salvation,” and I knew again I was upheld by His Spirit. (Ps 51:12)

The waking up continued over the next few months, so reorienting our pastoral view of life, that we packed up everything in a U-haul Truck and moved up to Louisville, Kentucky. The Buntings had kindly invited us to stay with them for a while until we could get our own place, etc., and we took them up on it. And there, in the basement of the Bunting’s house (affectionately called during the September meetings – “the men’s dorm”), was where I began to scribble all this stuff.

Praise the Lord for His boundless grace and mercy!

In a sense it came to fruition when I realized one day that the “fulfillment” of Mark 4:26-29 had sneaked up on me:

“And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come.”

What hit me was that the kingdom of heaven had grown up in me and I had not noticed it happening. I knew I was like the man who cast the seed into the ground, coming back to check on it now and then, only to find one day it has sprouted with a little sprout. Then it grows and grows until it gives a harvest and becomes like a “tree planted by the water,” that gives life and sustenance to everything around it. And all this, “he knoweth not how!”

“O wow! That’s me!” I exclaimed to myself. While riding on this up and down roller-coaster, exalting and denigrating of my “self,” over years and years of struggles, temptations, failures, joys and sorrows, this “kingdom” had been growing up in me, unnoticed by me! Is this not grace in its uttermost? He was bringing His own kingdom to fruition in me all the while I was focused on myself through “manifold temptations,” battling the constantly recurring theme, “you are not in union with Christ – look at you, etc. etc. etc.”

I knew the battle had been won. And that is the point I wanted to come to.

We grow up. It is God Who does it, and not us. This is a clear and present truth. The time element or the types of struggles, losses or temptations we may endure is irrevelant, compared to the gold of the Spirit born by grace through faith in each of us.

He told us He would bear fruit through us as branches on His vine, and He told us there would be pruning as well. We have no dogma for that. We walk where He leads, even when it might seem He is not leading. We learn be it darkness or light, His upholding is under all our steps.

This is because we do not follow a “message,” “doctrine,” or a particular “corner” of the Truth, but rather the Whole Truth which is embodied first in Jesus Christ the Lord, and through Him by grace embodied now in us who are called according to His grace. We embrace a Person, known not by the flesh but “known” in the Spirit, Who is as easily describable as is a Wind –

“That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” (Jn 3:6-8)

Let us understand, we live a “spirit” life. And part of that Spirit’s life in us, is bringing forth Christ in us, through the “things we suffer.” 

“Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him … But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” (Heb 5: 8-9, 14).

This is where He brings us. The passage above is something akin to the Romans 7 – 8 transition in “Hebrews” terms. By the “exercise of our senses,” we become conscious persons. In the training school of the Spirit, by the exercise of our senses (spiritual senses) through the life-path the Spirit leads us through, we come to know both ourselves and God in ourselves, that is, we become conscious sons. We know Who we are, and we have learned that He manifests Himself in power in our human weakness. Weak in the flesh, and mighty through God.

Does the mystery all clear up? Does the mist clouding our vision recede? Yes and no.

Yes, for all the Promises of God in Him are Yes and Amen in the now! And to live is Christ!

No, because for this time it is always a walk of faith and not sight. The “mystery of God” becomes more mysterious, more “past finding out.” Yet, also every day the visible testifies as parable to the invisible. So we see God as the Wholly Transcendent, (above and beyond us “dwelling in a light no man can approach” [1 Tim 6:16]), and God in the immanent (fully “in” the warp and woof of the here and now).

In the Spirit is Life and peace. In the world there is tribulation and struggle, and many other things.

As long as we are in the world, we live in and experience the things of the world. We feel it as intimately as anyone else. The “world” I am meaning is not necessarily human society on planet Earth, but the dark world of “self-for-self,” from the beginning run by “the prince of the power of the air,” of which we all partook (Eph 2: 2,3), before we were translated out of darkness into light (Col 1:13; Acts 26:18). Having been delivered from that world, we are now able to love the world as God loves the world, without the perversion of possessiveness. Being free then we know we bless the world as Christ’s presence in it, and love the world as the Father loved the world, so that He sent His Only Begotten that through Him the world might be saved, a Promise extended to “whosoever will” …

And now we see He has continued to send His Only Begotten in you and in me, and in all who love Jesus Christ in their hearts.

But because we are in the world but no longer “of” the world and therefore seeking nothing from it, it becomes the setting for outgoing blessing, salvation and the deliverance of many former captives.

Paul said he had learned to be content in all things, whether he was rich or poor, had food or didn’t have food, had a shelter or didn’t have a shelter, whether he felt good or did not feel good. That’s a romantic notion to a Peter-type guy, like me in some ways, going in. Okay, I can confess “I am content in all things.”

Some people I suppose are content with just the confession. Okay, the confession is the reality, it’s all done, amen, this is true, amen, God has done it, I can claim it. But what about being in situations which “require” that satisfaction? Let us not think that this faith we express does not go through the trial of fire, whereby it is proved steadfast and unmoveable! That is exactly what it does – everything is submitted to the fire, and what is Christ will remain and what is not Christ will be burned up in the flame.

Let us be clear. God is about reality. Not just “concepts” we believe in, but tried and true “experience” whereby we walk the life we confess, and experience the consciousness that comes with that experience.

It’s like reading recipe books all day and all night, and believing you are a cook. At some point one must “cook” something, which makes the “believing you are a cook” expressed and solidified into a consciousness of being “a cook.” One is not just a “theoretical” cook. Who wants one of those?

That’s why I gave up long ago getting into silly arguments over concepts about God we “believe” to be true. I told some folks a while back to not come to me arguing with me about their hypotheses – go live what you say for a while and then come back and tell me. If it holds up, you will be the better. If not, you will also still be the better. That is how we learn.

But there is no argument if you tell me you walked through a wilderness, and the “idea” that God “can furnish a table in the wilderness,”(Ps 78:19), which was theoretical on the front end, has now become solid fact, proven true, by virtue of the fact that yes, God CAN and God DOES furnish a table in the wilderness, and you can testify to that because He has set the table for YOU! Then we are like the other village dwellers in Sychar, who told the “woman at the well,” “Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.” (Jn 4:42)

One becomes the living witness, the flesh “embodiment” of the Living Christ, not because of the teaching or doctrine we have absorbed, but because it is not we, but He, yet it is WE! We are witnesses, those who have “seen and heard,” and by that “seeing and hearing,” the Word of God has come to us and into us, we walk around the Living Epistle of Christ that Paul said we are. (2 Cor 3:3).

This is when the “active” life kicks in! This is the “walking across the Jordan on dry ground” to “possess our possessions.” Not the outer “busy” activity of “doing something for God.” But the productive Life of the Spirit that leads us into the productivity of the Father. Norman wrote that “no man can out-pray, out-think, or out-work a man in whom the Spirit of God is.” Something like that anyway. And he is right.

This is not a “do nothing” life. Rather, it is a “do everything” life, with this one difference from how we may have been living before. Now we KNOW we are led of the Spirit. It has nothing to do with how much “time is spent” doing something, or the number of things we might do, or even if we appear “successful” to eyes that see only the visible. It is simply a rest in the Spirit, knowing that whatever comes up, as an obstacle, or a challenge, or a temptation, or a new direction – whatever – we are adequate to meet and overcome it! It is peace to know we walk as He walks, talks as He talks, and affect the world as He affects it! It is peace and rest to know we do not have to spin our wheels on endless activity, but to know that He moves us every moment of every day exactly where He wants us for the benefit of the world! Whether resting or working, whether praying or watching television, it is all “to live is Christ.”

We have purpose! We have drive! We live by the “shedding abroad of the love of God” by the Holy Spirit Who is given us. Once across that great Romans 7 divide, a whole new “life of the Spirit in Christ Jesus” opens up, and we see how we have been called, how we live now in the Spirit, how we have been justified, RIGHT NOW GLORIFIED with HIM, declared co-inheritors with Christ (can we fathom for even a moment what that means?), and solidly “fully persuaded” that nothing can separate us from Him, ever again –

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8: 35-39).

And there we now stand, Christ in us, as us, ready for the Father’s next instructions. “Workmen” who no longer bear shame, but have now been prepared and “thoroughly furnished unto all good works,” (2 Tim 3:17), and are truly ready for anything.

This is the glorious travail of the Spirit and the Body as we each find “Christ formed in us.”

How much of this we will fulfill in this current generation, I do not know, but for my part, I am ready to say that for this time now, as the whole creation groans and travails for the manifestation of the sons of God, so are there sons who are now coming on the scene to answer and fulfill those groans and travails of all the elect in this day who are “looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.” (Tit 2:13).

So therefore, I will urge this again:

“Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.” (Matt 9: 37, 38).

Knowing all the while of course, that we are the laborers He is sending into His harvest.

The blessing of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be with us all!