In the beginning of the New Testament, in Acts, there are the gifts, signs, and miracles. But when we come to the last Epistles, such as 2 Corinthians, the Epistles to Timothy, the Epistle to Titus, and First, Second, and Third John, we do not have signs, miracles, or gifts. In Revelation the gifts and miraculous things are not mentioned. All these books deal much with the matters of knowing Christ and of being worked on by God, by the Holy Spirit, through the cross that Christ may be wrought into us, that we may be mingled, blended, filled, and saturated with Christ.

We have to come back to God's Word, where we do not see any stress on doctrines, forms, gifts, healings, or speaking in tongues. The focus and stress in God's Word are Christ the living One. The enemy is subtle. This is why the apostle told us that while they were preaching Christ, on the one hand, negatively, they warned and admonished people, and on the other hand, positively, they taught people (Col. 1:28). Why was there the need of warning? Because some subtle things were brought in by the enemy.

In Colossians 2:8 Paul said, "Beware that no one carries you off as spoil through his philosophy and empty deceit." Philosophy is something good, not something sinful or worldly. It is not something in black and dark clothing, but something in a white and bright garment that can carry us away from Christ. It is something nice and good, but something deceiving, sidetracking, and distracting. It separates us and carries us away from the right track, which is Christ Himself. Whenever we pay our attention to anything other than Christ, we have been sidetracked already. If we focus on something other than Christ, regardless of how good it is, we have been sidetracked; we are no longer on the right track.

Brothers and sisters, here is the battle. We are not fighting with men; we are fighting against the enemy, the cunning one, who has been damaging the Body of Christ for all the past generations, sometimes by bad things and sometimes by good things. Hebrews, Galatians, Colossians, and 1 Corinthians do not deal with bad things but with good things. The book of Hebrews deals with religion, Galatians deals with doing good according to the law, Colossians deals with the best human invention, philosophy, and 1 Corinthians deals with gifts. But all these things are substituting for Christ, replacing Christ, usurping the ground of Christ in the believers. This is a battle. We need to pick up the burden to pray for this. The enemy is fighting to frustrate, to damage, to mix up, to confuse, and to complicate the pure building up of the church.

I look to the Lord that our eyes may be opened to see these things in a thorough way until they become transparent to us. We need to see that Christ is the center, Christ is the circumference, and Christ is everything.