Satan knows that God will not work where His commandments are not being kept. If he can pressure us or confuse us doctrinally so we do not do what the Bible says, his kingdom is in no danger. Christ will never be formed in us.

In the present hour Evangelical teaching does not emphasize the need to keep God's commandments. Though the arguments of the teachers are clever, the bottom line is that we do not have to keep Christ's commandments.

Satan has won a tremendous victory by persuading the Christians they are not required to keep God's commandments. This persuasion comes from the philosophy of Gnosticism, a philosophy that has corrupted Christian thinking from the first century and is poisoning our minds today.

It is only as we keep Christ's commandments that He is formed in us.

The formation of Christ in us. The new covenant is the forming of Christ in us. This is the covenant of God with man. Christ is formed in us as the Holy Spirit enables us to keep the commandments found in the New Testament.

We have been commanded to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. The adamic nature can do little more than gaze mournfully at such a directive. But the Spirit of God can bring this to pass.

As we pray each day to gain the ability to love God to this extent, Christ nourishes us in the spirit realm with His own body and blood. His body and blood penetrate and transform our inner nature. A new creation comes into being. The new creation is not us, it is not Christ, it is a new creation formed from the integration of Christ's own Substance with our original nature.

The new creation loves God with all of its heart, soul, mind, and strength.

The formation of Christ in us. The forming of Christ in us is the forming of the Kingdom of God in us. This is salvation in its purest sense. It is our change from the image of Satan to the image of God in all that we are, think, do, and say.

Such change occurs commandment upon commandment, here a little and there a little. Thus we are changed into the image of the Glory of the Lord. This itself is the new covenant, the Kingdom of God.

The reason Satan strives mightily to keep us from obeying the commandments of the New Testament is that the thought of Christ being formed in us terrifies him. He knows his kingdom cannot be destroyed by the efforts of flesh and blood. Only Christ has the wisdom and power to tear down all of his works. Christ was revealed for the purpose of destroying his works, and Satan understands this well.

We work out our salvation, the change from Adam to Christ, from the living soul to the life-giving spirit, with fear and trembling. We have learned how readily we can be deceived, how easily we can be led off the track of the daily transformation and spend years in the fruitless efforts of the flesh to obtain its own survival and security, its own pleasures, its own accomplishments and memorials.

We are saved with difficulty, as Peter says, because of our enemies and our resistance to radical, profound change in what we are in essence. We hate letting go of what we are in the depth of our personality. God in His love sends burning, fiery tests and sufferings to drive from us the love of the world, the lusts of our flesh, the lusts of our eyes, the pride of life.

To be continued.