A daily devotional moment by Chris Garcia
We are living in the last days. We are living in a time of great deceptions. Do you know what deception means? Deception means that you think you are right when you are wrong. It is because you have been deceived. Deception is a mixture of the truth with a lie. You perceive that your thinking is correct. You think God is backing you up, but in reality, He is grieving. He sees the motive of your heart. He sees the condition of your heart. If your heart is bound by the iniquity and the bitterness, then it is time to repent of that and let it go. Or, perhaps you may think that is a hard word. I agree, yes it is. You don’t think that I tremble at that Word? God does not want the cup clean on the outside only. He wants it pure on the inside as well. Here is another hard thing to understand. Do you know what the word "Pharisees" means? The word Pharisees means, the pious one. The world saw the Pharisees as pious. They had piety. They had an outward appearance of piety and humility, but inwardly they were ravenous wolves. Outwardly, they did not look like wolves, but on the inside, they were most certainly wolves. God sees the inside. So what do we do? We repent. We live a life of repentance. I remember this one time back in 2010, I had this revelation reading the Word. I was meditating on Ephesians 4. We were talking about the office of the gifts. The Gifts of Christ The apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, looking, at all of that. I remember that as I was there, the Holy Spirit gave me this revelation. I am going to try and explain it to you in a way that made sense to me at that time. Because God spoke to me inwardly and witnessed to me through the Word of God. It was like this. "Chris, the gift and the callings are mine. I give them freely. I give the gifts and the callings and it has nothing to do with works. It is all by My grace. When you stand before Me and you see Me face to face, there will be no gifts, no mantles. There will be nothing there. The only thing that I will see are the fruits." This is why the fruit of the Holy Spirit is the aim of the Believer. The fruit of the Holy Spirit. The gift is given because of God's sovereignty. The gifts and callings are given because of the assignments. To preach the Gospel. They are given on this side of the earth. There is coming a time when prophecy, tongues, and all manners of anointing will cease, when we see Him face to face on that great day. Why? Because we will no longer have a need for the gifts. We would be in need of the Giver because we are face-to-face with the Giver. There would be no need.
Why? Because we have the giver with us, that day has not come when Christ splits the precious sky. So what He sees at that moment, is fruit. Jesus calls Himself the Vinedresser. He says, “I am the Vine and My Father is the Vinedresser, every branch that is abiding in Me, bears much fruit, for without Me you can do nothing.” Salvation is John 17 “And this is eternal life, that they may know you and believe in the one whom you have sent.” That is taken directly out of the Word that Christ had stated. We are saved by grace through faith in Christ. There is no contradiction. Salvation is not according to your works. But salvation is to know the Lord. Salvation is to know Him and believe in Him. No deeds of the Law will justify man but simple faith in Christ. Now our sins and iniquities can separate us from Him if we go our own way. If we choose to deny Him. When we live a life of iniquity we are saying we do not know Him. We can be deceived. God is light. We can’t go about living in darkness and claiming to know God. The fruit is not a works thing. The fruit is the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace goodness, gentleness, meekness, kindness, self-control. That is the fruit. Not of your works but the fruit of the Spirit. The works of the flesh are the works of the flesh but the fruit of the Spirit cannot be worked or earned. Fruit can only yield. To clarify further, the person who yields to the Spirit bears the fruit. How do we come to yield? By knowing Him. As we come to know Him we continue to yield to Him and we produce fruit. Fruit, He is after fruit. Fruit is not earned or worked. Fruit simply yields. We are saved by His grace only through Christ. If we truly claim to love Him, we will know Him, our works do not save us. It is Christ that saves us. Faith without works is dead. Works are the evidence of our Fatih, but we are not saved by works. If you truly believe something, you will live it out. Your works don’t save you but if you truly believe you will naturally do the works of Christ. We are not saved by works alone but we are saved by grace through FAITH and then we are saved by the good works done by our faith in Christ.
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