Salvation itself is the Kingdom of God, that is, the receiving of the Father and the Son into our personality such that They are on the throne of our life forever. To have God and Jesus on the throne of our personality forever implies total, utter obedience.

So the issue today is obedience. Our desire to be obedient should be spoken out loud so God and the rest of the spirit realm can hear us, and so we can hear ourselves. With the mouth confession is made to salvation.

Then God begins to make us obedient. The issue is God against our self-will. God keeps sending suffering in one form or another and we have to keep choosing to obey Christ rather than to try to dodge the suffering. It is through patient suffering that we enter the Kingdom of God.

God keeps us cheerful through the process of learning obedience, that is, if we have an obedient, trusting heart. If suffering makes us gloomy and depressed then it does us no good. In fact, we will become bitter, hating the instruments God uses to frustrate us. The same suffering will make the obedient, trusting believer a mature saint and the disobedient, faithless believer a bitter warped soul.

If we suffer with Christ we will rule with Christ. Suffering creates obedience in us and assists in the program of developing iron righteousness and fiery holiness in us. Until the scepter of iron is formed in us we cannot return with Christ to judge and bless the nations. The scepter of iron is found only in the overcomer.

‘He will rule them with an iron scepter; he will dash them to pieces like pottery'—just as I have received authority from my Father. (Revelation 2:27—NIV)

God has, as we have stated, brought many people through basic salvation. From this larger group a smaller population has been made aware of the work of the Holy Spirit in their life.

Now God is drawing from the smaller population a Gideon's army—saints who are willing to follow God in the program of death to their self-will.

When the remnant has been saved, filled with the Spirit, and obedient to the point of death, God will be pleased to charge Michael to cast Satan out of the heavens. The casting of Satan and his followers to the earth will cause enormous rejoicing in the heavens.

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: "Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short." (Revelation 12:10-12—NIV)

To be continued.