How Can I Know?

By Fred Pruitt

Isn’t it still possible that I can go into unbelief and sin, and since that is so, How Can I know if a particular solution that appears for a specific problem is coming from Him, or from Me?

The issue is not whether or not that you can sin. The issue is that you now trust God in everything. We don’t judge ourselves or second-guess our choices by saying, “Maybe I should have done this,” or, “maybe I should have done that.” That’s for God to do, and His judgment of us is continually, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

You are fixed within yourself in union and unity with Christ in your inner spirit, expressing every moment by your soul and body. He doesn’t so easily give up His prominence in your life just because you are temporarily diverted in your attention to yourself as if separate. Why would He leave anything up to your ability to “believe correctly,” since you are dead and your life is eternally hid in Christ in God? You have no ability to do it. Only He can do even that in you (i.e., express faith), and He is faithful to do it.

There is nothing that can come from “just you.” “You” do not exist separately in some self-compartment by yourself. You are this moment a unified self in Christ, and you live accordingly. You cannot go off the path into some separate “will” that is outside the Father’s will. Even your stumblings are ordained of the Lord. What you might consider your mistakes or side-trails are of Him, that you might know Him completely in everything, positive and negative, in life or death, all is the Lord’s. We don’t live in the “possibility” of sin but in the absolute PROMISE of righteousness being expressed by our lives, since it is no longer we but He.

This whole “seeing yourself separate” is simply a temptation that we experience every single day of our lives, that we are just ourselves and all this is not true. It sure doesn’t look like it’s true sometimes, that God is leading and guiding us according to HIS will, but that is where we plant our feet and declare in faith that is it eternally no other than this, that as we were formerly slaves of sin, now we are continually instruments of righteousness.

Yes, faith is a jump into a darkness of unknowing, sometimes with little or no evidence of the truth of what we have believed. I know you have taken a certain path and everything has fallen down around you. Any of us might have tried to divert you from that path since it seemed so against “common sense” and we would have liked to have spared you from the consequences of some of those choices, which you made in faith but now seem to be wavering in your faith, of whether or not it was really God’s choice in you. But that has been God’s path, a path which has seen much pain with it, and we might say death, and I am standing with you that you are on the Lord’s path, and like in Psalm 23, “yea though I walk through the valley of death, thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff, the comfort me, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

This is your heritage, and it is working in you even now. So from that vantage we don’t give way to the temptation which would totally tear out the foundation of the building of Christ on which your life rests.

You asked about certainty. The certainty is in the faith, and in the Spirit. In the soul there is never any certainty, or at least we can say that sometimes in our soul feelings and reasonings we might “feel” certain, but in the soul that assurance is only fleeting. We may “feel” certain today but wake up tomorrow again uncertain. So we do not live from there. Spirit is certainty deeper within us than feelings or even “reasons,” and you are in that spirit-certainty. Soul may scream in agony and wondering what went wrong, but in the end you will see the resurrection and the wisdom of the Lord for every path you have been down and every decision you have ever made. You have never been outside His purview. Once in His kingdom, the kingdom of God in our consciousness overshadows every moment of our lives, and our eyes are inwardly opened to the fact and reality that God is all in all in us, and always has been. We look not to the flesh but to the Spirit.

And that’s who you are. Forget soul-certainty, and live in Spirit truth, regardless of the temptations that attempt to sift you every day. The temptations are God’s exercise of you, that you might know Him All in all. It is all the Lord in us. And ALL THINGS work together for good. Give up all judgment to Him, and you are not disappointed.

Finally, live in Proverbs 3:

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.

In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.

For years this was a “commandment” to me, but it has become a stated fact now. This verse is the fact of your life.

Much love,

fred