Old Testament/ New Testament

The following words from Fred Pruitt in his booklet Free Will express life the way it really is in Christ:

"The Old Covenant was a covenant of separation between two completely unequal partners: God, who could fulfill His part of the bargain, and the people of Israel, who could not fulfill their part of the bargain. Now that's pretty much where everybody lives. We try to do our part, but keep messing up, and there is continual bemoaning by preachers and church folks everywhere over how God is continually thwarted from doing His mighty acts in the world because most of us are such lousy Christians. (And poor God, since He's so ineffective!)

"Certainly the vast majority of the believers unknowingly live in that old contract, 'I do my part, God, and You'll do yours.' But that deal was replaced in the Son. Though taught almost universally, such an arrangement has nothing to do whatever with the New Testament.

"The new contract, the new will from God, the new testament ratified through the death of the Son, is a party of One. He is the fulfiller. It is the word that came to Jeremiah the prophet: 'But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.' (Jer 31:33)

"This is the rest we enter into in the New Covenant, which is Christ in us, not as two dwelling side by side, but as two dwelling in each other as one. We live, will, desire, and love as one person doing the living, desiring, willing, and loving. Not as two cooperating. I will what He wills because He and I are one person willing.

"The only time when 'two' comes into the picture is when I am pulled by temptation, when I would know myself  'after the flesh.' But to know myself after the Spirit can only be by seeing out of the vision of God, from the inside out, in which He is in me and I am in Him and there is no dividing point of separation. And there we abide, or remain. And from there, out of that 'heart,' come all the issues (activities, realities) of life. (Prov 4:23) And that life is Christ.

". . . Do we think Jesus endured the Cross and the depths of horrific darkness, just to leave the whole shebang up to our faulty little dim selves to get it right and operate this thing correctly? We can fall into His arms, ceasing from our self-labors, and see if the everlasting arms don't bear us up. We can relax in Him, and come out of the boat; we can step out on the water, and if in our little faith we fear we'll sink, does He not take us up? 'My yoke is easy, my burden is light.'

"As the Hebrews writer said, let us enter into the rest of God, where we find continually, 'The Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works.' That's where we find our sabbath rest, when we cease from our own works, as even God did from His. (Heb 4:10)

"'What must we do to work the works of God? they asked. And this is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.' (John 6:29)

". . . This isn't the old admonition from the preacher in church getting us to rededicate one more time, resolving again to do better for God. We find instead that this is what God has 'apprehended' us for, for Him to find in our inner nothingness, the riverbed through which His water of life might flow out into the world. And we see Him living not just 'in' us as some separate entity in us, but living as the very 'I' that I am, He having put us on as we have put Him on, He in us, we in Him, walking in the rest and peace of the Lord.

"Our hands are expressing His hands, our eyes His eyes, our feet His feet.

". . . We are then living in a truly 'free will,' a will that seeks to go out of itself to give and expend itself for others, that seeks not for itself, to elevate or promote itself, but only to give the life that it knows in itself out to the whole world.

"'He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.' (John 7:38)"