At the moment God has called out a people for Himself and that people has failed to go right on in full growth to the accomplishment of His purposes. God, viewing the whole as unsatisfactory and as disappointing, and failing in so large a degree, does not abandon nor surrender His original intention, but again and again comes back to it, and concentrates His main and supreme attention upon the full thing. While He may not be casting off His people or abandoning them in their state, (He will not do that; they are His people) from the inside of His people He will move to have that in the midst of them which is according to His own mind, and that is the man-child. It is because His testimony is at stake, and His people on the whole (see the first book of Samuel) are not in a place of spiritual power. The testimony is not functioning among them; not because of the Lord, but because of themselves.