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The Daily Word of Righteousness
Presumptuous "Faith", #2
And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. (Luke 4:9-12)
Satan was inviting the Lord Jesus to "step out in faith on the promise of God." God has commanded us not to put His Word to the test but to love and serve Him. Putting God to the test is presumptuous and sinful.
There may have been a point in our life when we chose to believe a promise of Scripture and then received an answer as a result. That was God's goodness to us at that time.
But as we grow in the Lord we discover that an attempt to apply faith after this fashion no longer works. This is because God is drawing us closer to Himself. He wants us to look to Him, not to the blind exercise of our human faith.
The exercise of belief in an attempt to get what we want is not a loving entrance into union with Christ. It is of the spirit of the False Prophet. There is a world of difference between praying to the Father in Jesus' name, and commanding the spirit realm "by faith."
Salvation is not a means of living a happy, successful life on the earth. Salvation is the Divine plan for moving us from the power of Satan to the power of God. There are times when happiness and success are part of God's plan for us. There are other times when utter failure, pain, frustration, and piercing—almost unbearable—miseries are part of the Divine plan.
The goal is not that we always be happy. The goal is that we be changed into the image of Jesus and learn to be sternly obedient to the Father and to always trust in Him.
The current stress on success now, the answer to prayer now, healing now, is not of God. It is of Antichrist. Many believers already have reaped a bitter harvest because of the "faith" teaching.
Let us repeat. It is proper for the Christian to walk in confidence in the Scriptures, pressing forward to victory over every problem and pain. But maturing in the Lord Jesus means we ourselves begin to diminish and Christ begins to increase in us. As He does the victories begin to come, perhaps not as simply and readily as before but as part of an ever-deepening union with God through Jesus.
The darkness that even now is coming upon us is so profoundly satanic, so much more perverse and hellish than anything we have encountered to this point, that our formulas for victory will decrease in effectiveness. A desire for revenge may compel us to say or do something that is not of the Lord. Only the believers who die in the Lord and become part of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, will be able to survive the darkness and stand triumphantly before the Son of God in that Day. (from The End-time Judgments)