Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him.

Hebrews 10:38 KJV

In the beginning, God created man and placed him in Eden.  He was assigned the job of subduing the Earth.  After the fall, things changed, and things were changed.  God told the man, “By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19).

It was by the sweat of the brow that Adam was told that he would eat his food after the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had been eaten.  It would be with thorns and thistles and hardship all the days of his life.  And in the end, as God has originally warned him, he would die (Genesis 2:17).

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[The following is a letter I wrote to a friend, with a few edits for privacy]

Let me say this:  I appreciate your position, and I am not particularly in most of the camps that you might expect.

Summing it up, I hear about four main statements in your email.

First, there have been many different positions and view regarding holiness..  Which you cataloged quite well.

Second, you really don’t care which one is most doctrinally correct, but are sick of the compromise in your own heart and unless it can help with that, you’re not satisfied.   You said, “All I know right now is that I’m bound to sin and I don’t know how to get out”.

Third, You’re sick of the crap (scripturally, “dung”).  You want to know the experiential love, experiential forgiveness, and experiential cleanness of heart.  No more hypocrisy from yourself or others.  You want the real deal.

And, finally, the question of how to know anything arises.  “The only way I will know or anyone on this earth will know is if God shows us personally.”

I think some of these questions are proper place of a heart for your condition.  Let me remind you, however, truth is a person.

Let me present my Gospel, if you will…

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Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

Matthew 5:17-18

For too long, our theology has been laid out by theologians, and not by children.  Ask any eight-year old what it means that the Kingdom of Heaven is like leaven hidden in dough means, and they’ll tell you that it means, more or less, that the Kingdom of Heaven is like leaven!  It takes a real grown-up to tell you, after reading the words of Jesus, that the Kingdom of Heaven is anything other than what He just said it was.

What does the Kingdom resemble?  A little bit of yeast!  (Matthew 13:33).  What must we do to have life within ourselves?  Eat and drink His blood (John 6:53).  Simple, eh?

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A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

Matthew 7:18

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit (John 3:6).  The physical body and the physical soul are not evil creations.  In the beginning, God created them, and He called them good (Genesis 1:31).  Yet, fallen man is completely incapable of pleasing God on his own (Romans 3:11).  It takes Faith to please God (Hebrews 11:6), and this is given (Romans 12:3).

The life of the Christian is marked by ‘baptisms’ (plural, see Hebrews 6:1).  We are baptized (immersion, you go down into it) into Christ, and we are baptized (immersion, you come underneath it) into the Holy Spirit.  This was depicted in the wilderness by the Israelites being baptized into the Red sea (water baptism) and the cloud (the Holy Spirit) (1 Corinthians 10:2).

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The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.

Matthew 13:33

Thoughts and beliefs are powerful things.  Jesus said that to look with lust at a woman was to commit adultery, and to be angry at someone without a cause is to murder him.  Ultimately, it is what you think and what you believe that will either deliver you or condemn you to an eternal judgement of hell.

We can tend to look at our actions primarily, in the Christian life, but the unsurrendered self is perhaps the most dangerous weapon against the Kingdom, even as a believer.  Yet one sinner can destroy much good (Ecclesiastes 9:18).

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When any one heareth the word of the kingdom…

Matthew 13:19 (portion)

When someone hears a word of the Kingdom, something responds, this can no longer remain the same.

In the worst case, the word is misunderstood and stolen quickly away, yet, in other situations, a greater degree of change occurs.

Consider one of the more well known “Words of the Kingdom”, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believes on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  (John 3:16).  This is more than words on a page.  When Jesus spoke, he said His words were Spirit and they were life (John 6:63).  There was a content in the content, a message in the message.

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Then, from my right side, behind me, came the same voice of The Angel of The Lord, who had spoken to me since I was a child, saying: “I will teach you how to fish; but you must keep quiet-don’t say anything about it!” I answered, “I will.” He said, “Fasten on your lure.” This I did. Then he said, “Now, to catch those big fish you have to go way out in the deep water.” I swung and cast with all my might, and the line went out its full length. He said, “That was good!”

. . .

I got so excited trying to show the ministers how to fish that I jerked the lure completely out of the water, catching a fish about the size of the lure, seemed as though the skin of the fish was stretched tight over the the lure. I wondered how I would ever get it off!

(William Branham’s Third Pull Vision, excerpt)

William Branham was a man sent by God.  He was a prophet, but he was also a man.  When he spoke for God, he never made a mistake, but, in the day to day of his life, he admittedly made a few (as he points out himself, especially as regarding certain personal decisions).  He was no more infallible than the young prophet in 1 Kings 13, who, after he delivered a true word from God, was deceived by an older prophet who deliberately lied and deceived him to eat when he had been told not to.  That prophet, a true prophet, whose prophecies were later fulfilled exactly, made a mistake in his personal life (not his prophecies), and died prematurely because of it.  The same is true of William Branham.

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But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.

Galatians 5:16

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12:2

The best, and most perfect way, to live is free from sin.  This is why God gave His law through Moses, so that we might know life, and fellowship with Him.  The Fall is what happened, and corrupted all of the creation.  The Cross is what enabled us to live free from sin, and the desires of the flesh.

We are told, quite simply, to “put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:22-24).  This, to Paul, was his practical instructions on how to live without sin.

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[A]s He is, so also are we in this world.

1 John 4:17 (portion)

The Kingdom is like yeast that fills a whole lump.  The Kingdom is like a seed, which grows to an entire tree.

No where in scripture is the Kingdom ever depicted as incomplete, nor as coming in multiple installments or dispensations.  In fact, from the parables of Jesus, the entirety of the Kingdom is completely contained in its inception, just as with a seed, or with a bit of yeast.

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He who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought.

1 Corinthians 8:2 (paraphrase)

The most interesting thing about the gospel is that, you could have all the words right, you could say all the right things, have all the right demeanor and mannerism, you could know when to shout and how to dance, but you could be just as much of a devil as Judas was.  That’s right.  It’s what’s on the inside that counts.

You don’t have what it takes.  You never have, and you never will.  If you can do it, it isn’t God, and it needs to die.

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