The Importance of Union With Christ.

The key concept of the Kingdom of God is union. The Kingdom is a love affair. When we stress the giving of power to people, when we emphasize the authority of the saints, we enter a dangerous area—the area of Antichrist and the False Prophet.

The issue is whether we are seeking to be like Christ or whether we are seeking to be part of Christ. Eve was seduced away from God by the temptation to be like God. Satan tempts us to seek to be like God, to exercise our God-given powers, to "leap from the pinnacle."

Meanwhile the Holy Spirit is whispering to the elect to forget the strife and clamor of personal ambition and to "come away" with Jesus to the mountains of spices, to the lions' dens, to the mountains of the leopards. It is in the personal knowledge of God, in the heavenly romance, that God's will is found; not in the arena of self-exalting power.

The Kingdom of God is a kingdom of love. Christ is bound to God by love and we are bound to Christ by love. Whoever would attempt to use such love to gain power, or authority, or an answer to prayer, or for self-exaltation, or to acquire material wealth, is not of Christ but of the False Prophet. The False Prophet is the individual who desires the power of Christ apart from union with Christ. The wise believer will flee from all attempts to use Christ for one's own purposes. When we strive to do the works of Christ but are not willing to carry our personal cross, then we are of the False Prophet.

The Kingdom of God is a revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who truly are called to be part of that Kingdom do not desire to be seen, or to have power, or to acquire wealth, or to be successful in the present world. The true saints have but one supreme desire, and that is to be part of the expression of the almighty God through Christ.

The elect always seek oneness with God through Jesus. They are an integral, eternally inseparable part of the one true God through Christ. Because of love and union there is nothing in them that is not of God. God is their All in all, but not so they can obtain wealth or achieve their own goal. That would be to peddle the Person of God. That is what Babylon, the great whore, organized religion seeks to do. Babylon attempts to use the blessings of God to accomplish its own goals in the world.

The true saint seeks God because the saint's goal is to be part of God, to be at rest in God, to be the expression of God. He finds rest in God and God finds rest in him.

To be continued.