I

You long for God to delight in you, yet you are far from God.

What is the matter here? What is the matter here?

You accept only His words, but don’t accept His pruning,

much less can you accept His every arrangement,

and have complete faith in Him, complete faith in Him.

What, then, is the matter here?

In the final analysis, your faith is an empty eggshell,

one that could never produce a chick,

one that could never produce a chick.

For your faith has not brought you the truth

and your faith has not given you the life,

but has instead given you an illusory sense of sustenance and hope.

II

It’s this sense of sustenance and hope that is your aim in believing in God;

it is not the truth and the life, not the truth and the life.

Thus does God say that the course of your faith in Him

has been none other than trying to curry favor with Him

through servility and shamelessness,

and can in no way be deemed true faith.

What can faith such as this accomplish?

The purpose of your faith in God is to use Him to achieve your own aims.

Is this not further a fact of your offense against God’s disposition?

III

You believe in the existence of the God in heaven

and deny that of the God on earth,

yet God does not recognize your views, He does not recognize your views;

He approves of only those who serve the God on earth

with their feet placed firmly on the ground,

but never those who never acknowledge the Christ who is on earth.

No matter how loyal such people are to the God in heaven,

in the end they won’t escape God’s hand, God’s hand that punishes the evil.

These people are the evil; they’re the evil ones who oppose God

and have never gladly submitted to Christ.

Of course, their number includes all those who do not know

and, further, do not acknowledge Christ.

from The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. How to Know the God on Earth