The grace of God is incredible. But Adam chose the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which is the “do it yourself tree”, it is a way of living basically unto yourself, family, friends, deciding for yourself that which is good for you, family and friends, which is called a path, or pathway, a road, the broad way.
This path Adam chose to live on developed his soul. He lived by his own will and by his own thinking, reasoning and emotions.
As Christians, we have two choices on how we are going to live. We are either going to live from our spirit, from the inside out, through our spirit’s connection to God or we are going to live from our soul.
If we live by our soul, that means we’re independent of God. We live only by our natural mind, our natural emotions, and our own will, the functions of our soul and the senses of our body. I call it physical sense knowledge.
I want to talk about Jacob, because I believe it’s important that we kind of grasp this. And it says in Genesis 28: 11 So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep.
Jacob was running away because his brother was going to kill him. And he had been running, he stole his birthright and the blessing of the birthright, and it says, he came upon a certain place and stayed there all night.
Because the sun was set, he took of the stones of that place and put it down for his pillow and laid down in that place to sleep.
The Japanese slept a bit like that with a stone in the nape of their neck (The nape is the soft, back portion of the neck located just below the hairline) they didn’t put their head on it, it just kept their neck.
And it says, and he dreamed. So, he went to sleep and he dreamed and a ladder was set up on the earth and the top of it reached into heaven and the angels of God were ascending and descending upon it.
And behold, the Lord stood at the top and said, I am the Lord, God of Abraham, your father and the God of Isaac. And the land wherein you are now sleeping, I will give it to you and your seed.
And your seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and they shall spread abroad to the west, and the east, and the north, and to the south. And in you shall thy seed and all the families of the earth be blessed.
And behold, he said, Jacob, I am with you. And I will keep you in all places wherever you go, and I will bring you back again into this land, for I will not leave you until I have done those things which I have spoken to you about.
And Jacob woke up out of his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I didn’t know it.’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How dreadful this place is!’ Then he said this, ‘This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’
Then Jacob rose early in the morning and took the stone that he had put at his head, set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on top of it.And he called the name of that place Bethel “which means house of God.
We need to understand that Joseph was born with a great destiny over his life, just like you and I have a destiny, you have a purpose, there’s a reason for you being born.
So, he was born with a destiny, but he spent all his time and his natural strength, his natural energy, his natural mind, trying to bring to pass, trying to find his way into the destiny of God for him.
And he was conniving, and he cheated Esau, and he tried to use his ingenuity to get into his inheritance and his destiny and then ended up running until he came to this spot where God apprehended him.
When he lies down to sleep, he meets the Lord in a dream, who brings a profound revelation to him. The ladder went from earth up to heaven, angels up and down.
The first time in his life, Jacob did not initiate this activity. He couldn’t stop it. He didn’t start it. It was the activity of God. It had nothing to do with his cleverness or his conniving. It was God’s activity.
And this activity went all the way from heaven, all the way down to the stone where he had his head on.
God was saying to him, Really, Jacob, you cannot enter what I’ve got for you until you stop trying to do things your own way, in your own strength, with all your conniving.
Jacob, he said, I am the God of Abraham and Isaac. He never even mentioned Jacob. He said, I’m the God of Abraham and I’m the God of Isaac. He didn’t say he was the God of Jacob.
But God goes on to say to him Jacob, you see this land where you’re asleep? He said, “This is your inheritance” I’ve promised your father’s. You don’t have to fight for it. You don’t have to use your own strength and try and take hold of this.
He said, “I’ve given this land to you and your seed after you”.
Then God says in verse 15, Jacob, now listen to me, I’m going to be with you. I was with Abraham, I was with Isaac, and now I am going to be with you.
From this day, I’m going to be with you. For the first time in his life, he realized that God was with him and he didn’t have to struggle and fight for all of this.
For the first time in his life Jacob wakes up and he says what a dream! I’ve had a meeting with God! You see Jacob had no idea of his purposes in God, his place in God and up until that time, God was just the God of Abraham, he was the God of Isaac but as far as Jacob was concerned, he was a million miles away.
Abraham knew God personally; Isaac knew him personally. But Jacob didn’t know God personally, only what his father told him about him. He knew about “the birth right”, “the blessing of the birthright” and coveted it, but he did not hunger after knowing the Lord personally.
YHWH said, Jacob, stop running, stop conniving, stop running your own life and let me run it.
Jacob said, this is the house of God, the gate of heaven. Then he took some oil and poured it on the stone and called it the name Bethel, “the house of God”.
It’s the first mention of the house of God in Scripture. He said, this is the house of God. What was the house of God?
The stone with the oil on it. Think about this. Jacob didn’t point to the top of the ladder and say, That’s the house of God. He said, this is the house of God. The stone with the oil upon it, this is the house of God.
Jacob was no longer a thousand miles away. The house of God was the stone with the oil on it.
Now you’ll see from the word of God, the Bible you are a stone, you are the stone and God is the oil and the two are one.
Ephesians 2: 19 Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, 22 in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
It’s talking about you as a living stone built into the kingdom you are the habitation of God.
We’ve been trying to define church for a long time, a physical building is not the church where people are gathering, you are the church, you are the house of God. You are that living stone. But it must be anointed.
It must be with God’s anointing that you fulfill His purpose. And God is not up there or over there somewhere.
People are always going somewhere to find God. He’s in your newborn spirit. He’s on the inside.
When God is external to us a thousand miles away, we always have to take our little bucket to another meeting and get it filled up and it runs out by the end of the week, so we need to fill up our little bucket.
But when God is on the inside, you don’t need that. You have the well on the inside. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Christ wants to live His life through you.
And Paul says, it is no longer I, who live.
Galatians 2: 20 I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh, in the faith I live of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.
Paul said, I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I’m still alive. But it’s not me, but Christ lives in me now.
So, Paul says, I am crucified with Christ. What was crucified? What did he mean by that?
You hear all kinds of things. You’ve got to die to this; you’ve got to die to that. What was he saying? What was crucified?
His independence. My independence is now dependent upon Christ. I’m dependent totally upon him and the partnership of the Holy Spirit.
He stopped living his own life, his own way. He had surrendered to obey God.
He lives this life in the flesh by faith. But by who’s faith? It is not his faith, but God’s faith.
He still lives in the flesh (his physical body). But all that Jesus is was placed into his spirit in a seed that must grow.
All that Jesus is was put into you, all his genes were in a seed now conceived in your spirit.
When we live from our spirit, out of the flow of our spirit instead of from our soul.
The soul is not evil.
But when we live from our own natural mind, our own reasoning, our own emotions, we make choices depending upon how we feel, what we desire, what we will, we are living from our soul. But that was never how God intended it.
When we live from our soul, we are soulish, but independent of God. We are living from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
It was always God’s intention that mankind should live out of their spirit, through their soul, through their physical body, to touch the world.
Understanding this is very, very important.
You see, the soul becomes the vessel which the spirit uses. The mind of God from our spirit floods our physical mind giving us understanding of God’s will.
YHWH’S emotions flow into our spirit, out into our natural emotions, and we feel how God feels.
We don’t move independent of God. We don’t make major decisions in life independent of God.
We say, God, I want to do what you call me to do, the way you’ve called me to do.
I want to be sensitive to your will. I surrender my will to you. Then the understanding of how he wants us to live, “his will for us”, comes up out of our spirit and flows into our understanding.
And by our natural will, we make a choice.
The natural will is not evil. It’s a tool. We use it to choose the will of God.
The feelings of our spirit should flood our soul.
Psalm 87: 7 “All my springs (It refers to an underground source of water coming to the surface) are in you.”
David said, all my springs, all my initiatives in life, all my springs are in you, Lord, this comes from our spirit. Our spirit uses the soul as a tool.
One of the problems with spirit filled Christians, “The Pentecostal misconception”, is that Christians are always trying to be in the Spirit.
They want to be in the spirit. They’re not quite sure what that means, but that’s where they want to be.
They want to walk in the spirit, they want to be in the Spirit, there must be nothing soulish, nothing fleshly.
If you ask yourself, am I in the spirit or am I in the flesh?
Am I in the spirit or am I in my soul?
Are my prayers in the flesh or do they come from my spirit?
The things I doing for God, are they just dead works, are they in the flesh, are they of the spirit, living works?
I have been a Christian for a long time, so I know if I am in the spirit or in the soul. But when you first start walking with God, if you go down that Pentecostal Road, you’re going to be in utter confusion.
This is because God wants a seamless integration between spirit, soul, and body.
And if you’re always thinking, am I in the spirit? You’re going to be confused. It doesn’t work that way, you basically learn by retrospective revelation. I should not have said or done that, I was in my soul and not my spirit.
I just try to be continually aware of my spirit and focus on the Lord and acknowledge him in all I do. I intuitively look to the Lord and focus on what he wants me to do next. And I just rest and try to redeem my time so that I do not feel like “We’ll I really didn’t get done today what I should have”.
God’s life and mind and will is supposed to permeate from your spirit all the way through your soul and out through our body.
We need to look at the history of the church. We need a historical look at Greek influence and culture on the modern-day church.
There is a wrong spiritual concept which is widely adopted by the church.
The Christian faith was born within a climate of prevailing Greek culture.
The New Testament was written in Greek because of this.
And the Greek mind followed basically various philosophers, but mainly Plato and Aristotle.
The Greek mind was influenced by these two guys. And Plato saw reality in extremely dualistic terms. He saw the mind, which he called the spirit, as being immortal.
Totally separate from the material world. He taught that spirit and matter, or physical and spiritual, or spirit and matter, were not compatible. They couldn’t mix. They had no relationship with each other.
So, he has the concept that spirit cannot relate to flesh, cannot relate to matter, cannot relate to creation. They are different, and they are not compatible.
And Plato greatly influenced Western thought. Teaching that matter is separate and inferior to the spirit realm. Hence the term we have platonic relationships, non-physical relationships, which are supposed to be superior.
At the turn of the century, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, adopted this Platonic philosophy almost unchanged and brought it into the church as a framework for theology.
They saw matter as something observable, but with no life or spirit in it, and the conclusion was that matter and spirit cannot interact. That’s the secular Western mind that’s taught in all universities. It’s a secular Western mind set.
That’s why in the West we don’t see a lot of miracles, because it takes an interaction between the spirit and matter for miracles to happen. And matter and spirit cannot interreact.
This was around because it was Greek culture, and John the Apostle, wrote in 1 John 4: 1 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God.
Don’t listen to all these prophets. He said, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
And he’s talking about this teaching of duality. And he said, hereby we know ye the Spirit of God, every spirit that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh. That is a true spirit, that is of God.
There is a mixing of spirit and flesh. And He goes on to say, 3 and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.
He said, this is the spirit of Antichrist’s teaching. This teaching is proud, logical, and secular humanism.
John 1:14, he said, The Word became flesh.
Now, the incarnation was a glorious mix of spirit and flesh. Well, you understand that there is an interaction. How many of you know that a piece of wood is not dead? It’s made up of atoms, which are moving, protons. It’s alive. It has life in it. You can burn it, but you don’t destroy it.
You just change its structure, the atomic structure of it, but you release energy, but you can’t destroy it. What powers the atom?
Colossians 1: 17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.
The word consist synistaō means sustained by union.
By him everything continues to exist. If you took the Spirit of God out of this world, everything would die. Trees would die. Everything would crumble.
By Him, all things continue to exist. There is an interaction between spirit and matter. Trees, birds, rocks, flesh.
Now, we’re not talking about every tree having a spirit. But the life of God is in everything. That’s why it wasn’t difficult for Jesus to turn water into wine, because the Spirit of God just had to rearrange the molecules. Wine is a very complex molecule, but he just changed the molecules.
It was an interaction of spirit upon matter, that’s all. From a Christian point of view, you see this.
The Greek philosophers, which came over into church, influenced western thought, and the modern equivalent is that flesh is evil.
This philosophy says your emotions are not good, you mustn’t be emotional because that will deaden your spirit. It’s not of God to be emotional. Then why did he give you emotions? Just to deny them? How many of you know your feelings are important?
When your life is committed to God and you’re living from your spirit and you want to please God, your feelings are touched by God and what you feel is very important, because through your spirit God’s feelings about something flow into your emotions.
God speaks through your feelings more than many other things? The major way that God will lead is not by a voice or spontaneous thought. It’s based on a check or a feeling in your spirit. That is the major way God leads you.
If you’re going to deny your feelings, then you are going to deny one of the ways God speaks to you. Of course, not everything you feel is of God, but I think you know what I am saying.
You say well I only want to be in the spirit. Forget all that. Just keep your heart connected with God and you’ll feel how he feels that intuitive thing, that connecting with God is a feeling it’s not a voice. It’s just a feeling; there are no words. It’s just a feeling.
It’s an interaction of your spirit upon your emotions. And you feel what God is feeling. Now, if you deny that and say, you know, I want to be in the spirit, you’re going to miss God.
We have this kind of concept around, don’t listen to your feelings. How many of you heard that in counseling? Don’t listen to your feelings?
Well, you know, you’re going to miss God a lot of the time. Because most of the time we are led by feeling how God feels about a situation. And that’s in your emotions.
They say, well, the natural mind is an enemy of God, you mustn’t use your brain. Your mind must be crucified. Now, that might be good for some people, but for most of you it wouldn’t.
They say your mind must be crucified, and you must be in the spirit.
Your spirit only has your mind and your consciousness to express God’s will and purpose to you.
What comes from your spirit is light. What explodes in your mind is inspiration. That comes from light in your spirit into inspiration in your mind, where you know the things of God.
We understand that the natural mind, is an enemy of God, but that is going by what your physical senses are telling your mind or reasoning independent of God. We understand that. The secular mind. It is anti-God.
But we as Christians, we dedicate all our faculties to the Lord. So, please, take notice of your feelings.
Let’s dump that teaching, otherwise you’re going to miss God. Your feelings are important.
But what about the five physical senses. How many of you know that God connects directly with your five senses? Directly.
How many of you know that discerning of spirits primarily works through one of the five senses? You say, but they’re physical. They’re in your body. Of course they are. Go put them there. Hearing, touching, tasting, smell, seeing.
Touching especially. How many times you touch something and quite often, if I’m ministering to people, sometimes I don’t know how to minister until I touch them. Then there’s a connection.
John G. Lake had an anointing that he could go virtually into any hospital anywhere, take hold of a person’s hand, and know what was wrong with them, diagnose the cause of it, the reason for it, and what the disease was.
But it didn’t work unless he took hold of their hand or touched them. Then there was an interaction between spirit and flesh.
Some people are very touch sensitive in the realm of the spirit. If I pick something up in a shop, an artifact, and it has a spirit origin, I react immediately physically to that thing, I have a physical feel. Spirit interacts with flesh and flesh interacts with the spirit.
How many of you know that you can smell the presence of the Lord? How many of you know that certain realms of the spirit realm have a smell? How many of you know that poverty has a smell?
You can go into a house, and it has a smell of poverty, no matter how clean it is, but there’s a smell there. It’s a spirit. Spirit and flesh interact.
You say, you’ve got to be in the spirit. Forget your nose. But that’s the way it works.
We have this Greek philosophy that has come into the church, and some of the early church writers swallowed I and brought it in as a framework for theology. And it’s come down through the ages so that we say, our flesh is evil, we want to be in the spirit and forget the soul.
If you try to live like that, you’ll take on a religious spirit. God wants a seamless integration with the whole person. Why is it that sometimes when you come under the anointing, you feel it like electricity running through you? You’re feeling it, and you’re feeling God, physically.
You say, you can’t do that. You must stay in the spirit. Stop trying to divide yourself. We live from our spirit, which seamlessly integrates with our soul.
In fact, you can’t tell when it’s integrating with your soul and your physical, it’s so seamless, it’s so easily done, you can’t tell when it’s happening.
You just say, Look, I really feel… And people say, Well, that’s not spiritual. But what you’re feeling is God. You see, we live from our spirit.
If you constantly try to divide those parts, you’re going to be in real confusion.
God flows into your spirit, and your spirit floods your soul and floods your body. And all this is a result of an intimate relationship.
People say, how do I get to know the Lord’s voice? God speaks in many, many ways. God can speak to you through an unbeliever. Many times, I’ve been walking down the street, and two people are walking past me whom I don’t know. They just walk past. And as they walk past, in their conversation, they say something to each other, not saying it to me. And there’s that feeling.
Just a feeling and sometime later in the day, you hear that phrase on television. God spoke to me from television. You hear the same phrase.
After you’ve heard that phrase three or four times, and you sense God, is saying something.
God can speak to you many, many, ways. Many ways. He’ll speak to you in the flesh. He’ll speak to you on television. He’ll speak to you from people, you meet, speak to you in dreams. He’ll speak to you in dreams. He’ll speak in many, many ways.
We live from our spirit. But you say I want to know the Lord’s voice. You know what the main principle is?
You’ve got to be willing to always listen to Him, not just when you want an answer for something. When you understand this, you’ll start hearing the voice of God, not just when you want to hear from God. You tend not to listen any other time, but you start when you’re committed to hearing God, listening to God at all times with a heart that will want to do what the Lord is saying to you.
When you start practicing this, you’ll start to hear from God. There’s no great mystery in hearing God. It’s an attitude. It all comes back to an intimate relationship with him.
When you’re connected to God in relationship, he will flood your spirit, soul, and body. That is what it means to walk in the spirit.
You don’t have to think, am I in the spirit or am I in the soul? You will just know by experience.
When you are confused you will be thinking, well is this my emotions? Is this the natural mind? Is this the spiritual mind?
It’s not as simple as it sounds, the natural mind, the spiritual mind, they all interact and when you have a walk with God you will begin to know the difference.
Otherwise, there’s no way you can know. Don’t try to keep dividing yourself.
God wants just a natural walk with Him. Your spirit soul and body are supposed to be filled with his Spirit.
This teaching of duality of am I in the spirit or am I in the flesh cuts the flow of God from your spirit to your soul and to your body and that cuts it off.
As you start practicing this, you’ll start to look different. Because the spirit of God flows out of your spirit into your soul and into your physical body and your face, your countenance, your mood changes, the glory of the Lord is upon you.
This is what it means to be under grace, you are just being yourself, and it’s purely the grace of God. You’re not under the Law, where in yourself, you are trying to keep all these rules and making sure you are obeying every scripture, that is a lot of word, and a walk with God is a flow of the Spirit.
Where is God? You’re not like Jacob- you see that stone, that is the house of God. He was a million miles away from knowing God, but God changed his name, that is a type of the new birth in the Old Testament.
Go lives on the inside of us, and we begin to understand the way that he works in us.
And you must be very careful. Because you run here, and you run there, trying to find more of God, when he is living in you. Just relax. The government of God over your life is a government of rest.
We go to this meeting, that meeting, this convention, that convention. Why? Now there is nothing wrong with that, but why do you go? To find more of God?
You can’t find more of God than is already in you.
You can go for fellowship, you can go for worship, you can go for some teaching, but you can’t find more of God in just doing those things. It is a walk with God, and everyday thing. He’s living on the inside of you. You are just getting to know him, because you want to live a life of pleasing him.
Jacob thinks that stone is anointed. God was not up there at the top of the ladder. He was not down there by the stone, that’s the house of God, no you are the house of God.
These are types and shadows of our relationship with God. They all have a spiritual meaning, to our life as a Christian.
In the Old Testament, God dealt with his people on a physical level, in the Gospels he dealt with his people more on a soulish level. In the New Covenant God deals with us on a spirit level.
A lot of spirituality, if we really want to flow and walk with God, most of it has to do with our focus.
Your focus, what you believe. If you believe that God is in you, and flowing into your spirit, your soul and your body, He will be.
If your focus is that God is just in your spirit, and not in your soul and body. You are not going to develop that intimate relationship with him. you won’t feel much of God. You will not be able to tell when thoughts come into your mind, if they are from yourself, your brain, you’re purposefully thinking upon something, or from the enemy.
But if you want to be continually filled with the Spirit and walk in the spirit, you learn how to focus on the Lord, and his life is going to flow into your spirit and from your spirit into your soul and body.
God will fill your emotions with His emotions. He will fill your feelings, so those feelings are not, you know, sinful or evil.
I’m talking about when we’re committed to God and flowing with Him. You see our focus, what we believe we get, according to your faith, would be unto you.
Do you believe in the life flow of God in you, that his emotions flow into yours every, and that his thoughts flow into your mind, and the Holy Spirit lives in your body and will use your physical senses for his glory?
These Christians who are trying to be real spiritual are a little spooky, a lot of the things they say, do not bear witness with my spirit.
Your focus, your conception, what you believe, is what you’re going to get. Think about that.
You say, that’s oversimplified. No, it isn’t. According to your faith, be it unto you. That’s why we must be careful with what we believe, we must be like little children always looking to the Father. A lot of the things I use to believe, I don’t believe anymore. The Holy Spirit has corrected me. And what I now believe, I have a lot of scriptures for, but it is contrary to what is taught in Church, because Christians have been taught a lot of things in church, that are actually false doctrines. So, I must be careful what I say or else I will lose them, they will think I am teaching heresy and reject me.
But there will come a time when I am going to teach and preach what I truly believe. And then people are going to have to make a decision, to take the time to try and understand why I say the things I do or call me a false teacher and reject me.
God meets people where they are at, And I have seen God use people whose doctrines were totally messed up, but he looks on the heart of an individual, their motives, and he has to work with what he has got.
In this age we are living God does not do a lot of things sovereignly, He works through his body on the earth. We are his hands and feet, we are his mouth, he moves through us to change the world we live in.
We must be careful about what we believe, because what we believe is what we get. We must stay open and be willing to let the Holy Spirit correct us.
Do you believe that you will feel the feelings of God? Do you believe that? And that is what you will experience. You see, it’s the grace of God, you know?
It’s just God, it’s none of us, it’s the grace of God. We were bought with a price.
1 Corinthians 6: 20 For you were bought at a price; therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s. It says your spirit and body is God’s. Your soul is you. You are powerful, you have a sovereign will. You are going to believe what you want, you are going to do what you do, and God is not going to interfere with that, he will teach you, through sowing and reaping. We were put in this physical body so that we would learn not to trust in ourselves, but in Him.
says, you’re bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body. Not just your spirit, but in your soul and your body.
Romans 6: 13 And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.
That’s your members, the functions of your soul, “your mind, your emotions, your will, your imagination, your reason your conscience and your choices”. Also, the five senses of your physical body, yield them unto God, like a person who was alive from the dead.
And let your members, these areas in your soul, in your physical body, let them be instruments of righteousness, instruments of your spirit filled with the Holy Spirit, the new man.
1 Thessalonians 5: 23 Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.
Your soul is not evil. He said “I want your spirit to be preserved blameless”. You say I thought my spirit was perfect. No, the seed of God in your spirit is perfect, the Christ in your spirit is perfect.
Now we don’t live our emotional life, or we would be a roller coaster. All our springs are in God, our directions are in God, but we feel His emotions touch our emotions.
Don’t shut your feelings down because you shut God out. And don’t go around saying, “Am I in the spirit”? Just walk with God and the things you do and say will become more spiritual, and less fleshy.
Somebody will say, I don’t know if I’m praying in the flesh. The question is what are you praying in? Whose mouth is it? Then you say I think it’s just all coming from my natural mind.
The question is, can you speak without thinking? Can you pray without thinking? No.
But we’re told to pray in the spirit. We’ll when we pray and we mostly start out purely in the flesh, natural man or woman. So, we’re going to just do it. We just start praying about a few things we should pray for, but as you do that and you keep praying then you connect with your spirit and your mind aids your spirit, it is a good servant, to make the connection. You pray and you connect with God and after a while you’re connecting, you’re flowing in God and it’s easy to pray.
You say well you know what shall we pray for tonight? We’ve got to get the mind of the Spirit. Well, that’s true. When we first started praying we do it in the natural, and we do it in the Spirit.
Sometimes we’re in God, and sometimes we’re in the natural mind. We know God hears it all anyway. Because we’re praying in the will of God, what He’s required of us.
Sometimes we’re in a better flow than at other times. Sometimes we are not. You’ve got to stop this whole thing of, you know, am I in the spirit? Because you’re going to think most of the time, you’re not, and then you’re not going to do anything. Just do it.
You start praying. Sometimes when you’re kind of not sure, you get to get into praying, what the Lord will direct your thinking.
We’ll is it God, it can be God. It’s not always, though.
Another way is just to keep praying around, right across a broad spectrum until you hit on something that we catch a flow on. You’ve hit the will of God.
Just pray for a while in the natural until you connect. When you connect, go down that road until it’s finished. No great mystery.
It’s just your spirit, gets involved in it then. You’re praying with your natural mind until your spirit connects with it.
It is like worship. How many of you know, when you come in and everybody starts to sing, you’re not in the spirit. You’re all in the flesh. All of you. You can’t get into the spirit that quickly. Actually, your supposed to come to the service filled with the Spirit, but most Christians don’t do that. You you’re your coming, you’re tired, you had kids, this, that and the other, maybe have some trouble getting there, and you’re thirsty, and this and that and the other, and you’re going to start to worship God. We’re going to sing.
But it’s not long before you make a connection. And there’s a flow, right? Because you focus, your heart, your mind, your emotions become set on God, and you connect.
But you start in the flesh in order to connect with the spirit. And what happens when you connect with the spirit, it floods your soul, your mind, your emotions, your will, and your physical body, and you’re flowing in God.
You see, it was Plato and Aristotle in their teaching on the flesh being inferior, the natural being inferior to the spiritual. When that was brought into the church as a framework of theology, it took the church down a road that blocked them from God, because God never intended that.
He made you spirit, soul, and body. We interact with God in spirit, soul, and body. There should be times when you feel God physically in His presence. There should be times when you feel Him in your emotions. That’s not wrong, that is the normal Christian life.
God is flowing through your emotions, as well as in your spirit.
You must break out of the wrong concept in order to flow with God. God does not want non-physical relationship. He wants to connect with your spirit, soul, and body.
It is kind of easier said than done. Jacob ran all his life until God got a hold of him and said, look, Jacob, see all this activity, all this is working for your future. It’s all working for your destiny. See all those angels? Up and down, all of that activity is connected to your destiny to bring you into what God has got for you.
He said, Jacob, “Did you start any of this”? Did you start it? Can you stop it? He said, “I’m working all of this, but I’m waiting for you to shut down.” Just stop trying and running and conniving and doing all these things.
Commit your way to me and trust me. Isn’t that a lot easier? And he did from that point on.
I mean, he had some trouble with his father-in-law over the next few years, but God brought him through everything.
But all that activity, he didn’t start. And you have a destiny, you have a purpose in God, the next few years are important that you come into what God has got for you.
But I want to tell you, all your self-effort, your striving will never bring you into it, because it’s by grace.
And grace is giving you something which you don’t deserve. It’s unmerited favor you can’t work for it, but it is much more than just favor.
God doesn’t grant favor because you try, try, try to do better. And so, it’s by the grace of God and when you know the will of God and when you clear on what God is saying you do it, you obey God, that’s all you have to do
And he’s long-suffering because we don’t always get it right the first time, right? It takes a while sometimes to get things right.
He’s long suffering until we get it right. But when we know it’s right, say, yes, you align your will with his will and do it.
And then all his resources come into play, his divine provision.
Everything has been seeded into your spirit for God’s purpose for your life. It’s already all there waiting. Everything that you need to fulfill your destiny has already been seeded in your spirit and it is out there for you in the realm of spirit. You have been blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ.
You don’t have to earn it. Just love God, begin with your legal identity in Christ, and just walk with Him. Obey Him when you know something to be right and you understand it’s God, obey Him, take some risks.
It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong, God’s not going to hit you if you get it wrong. He looks at your heart and you’re trying.
So, if you’re not sure it’s God, take a few risks. God cannot steer a parked car, get in motion and God will correct and guide you. It is just trial and error for a little while until you get it right.
And then once you start walking with God, God will bring you into what he is purposing for you, it’s supposed to be a life of relationship and walking with God, not a struggle to find your way in and to bring to pass God’s purposes for your life. He said no, just get to know me, I want to be your friend you be my friend and we’ll do this thing together. That’s all he asks of you. Nothing more.
You say, well, I might miss God. If your heart is for friendship with God and to walk with him. He’s not going to let you miss his perfect will for your life. He’ll get through to you. One way or another, he’ll get through.
But he just wants you to walk with him. It’s just that daily check in your spirit. It’s not even a voice. It’s just that inward intuition, that inward teacher. You just feel right or you feel wrong about it. Learn to sharpen that up.
Some things just don’t feel right. Get that intuitive guidance, not a voice, not words, it’s just feeling.
Our spirit has all these senses we begin to learn. The physical body, we know what hot and cold is, we know what touch is. You know, if you touch fire, you’re going to get burnt, you know what that sensation is. That’s in the physical. You’ve learned all of them through trial and error. From a little child, as you grow, you learn to do what certain sensations in your physical body are telling you. Hunger is one, another one is Cold, heat, pain, all those sensations.
But you see, you’ve got all those senses in your spirit. They’re not voices, their senses. When you touch something that’s hot, there’s not a voice inside that says, that was hot. It’s a feeling. And it’s very effective in conveying the message.
You walk with God, it’s the same. It’s a feeling. And you learn. You hone that. You learn those feelings, those senses.
And there are all different kinds of feelings in your spirit, but you learn to feel how God feels. You learn to feel when something is wrong, you learn to feel. Have you ever felt that it’s a very, it’s usually not strong, but it’s just a feeling that you’re grieved with something, you feel God. What’s happened is the Holy Spirit is grieved, or your own spirit is grieved and it touches your feeling mechanisms, your soul life, your emotions and you feel grieved, it’s God, you’re linked to God in your soul and you feel how He feels there’s all kinds of feelings. We learn them in the physical body, we’re not talking about voices, we’re just talking about feelings.
You’ve got to learn those feelings in the realm of your emotions as they’re connected to God, the Spirit of God, and what they mean.
Sometimes you can just touch a person, and you feel sorrow. What is that? I mean, it’s not a voice saying this person’s got real sorrow in their lives. You just get near them, you touch them and sorrow engulfs you. What is that?
Through God, you connect with him.
Now, let me just say something to you. It’s very important. Don’t try and connect with a person.
Like you’re praying for this person, and you just want to connect, you want to see what they have. That’s wrong. Okay, that’s purely psychic.
Now, you can do it. Christians are good at doing it. You know, you’re going to lay hands on a person. Your spirit is transmitting everything you are 24 hours a day, and you can’t stop it. In your aura, I know that’s an occultist word, but you know what I mean. The emanation of God from you, the emanation of your spirit is everything that you are. That’s how occultists can read it and they’re quite accurate,
But you don’t connect with the person you connect with God for that person. If I connect with the person I can deal with all kinds of things that God doesn’t even want to deal with. You’re not interested in that. God will clean it up some other way, deal with it some other way.
If I go through God, I get a clear picture of the person. Very important, because most Christians, when they lay hands on somebody and pray for them, they connect with the person instead of connecting with God. They read off that person.
Much of prophecy in the charismatic movement is just reading off the person’s spirit. That’s all it is. Their spirit just emanates everything and they read it off. They don’t connect with God; they connect with this person.
You always go to God and then to the person. You never go to the person directly. I hope you understand what I’m saying? Very, very important, because most charismatics get it wrong.
It’s very easy to read a person’s spirit, if you practice for a while. It really is. But you mustn’t do it, and you mustn’t get into that, and you go to God first. You connect with him; you draw from him and then you minister to the person. I don’t want to know everything about you. I’ve got enough of my own problems. I don’t want to know everything about yours.
But when you go to God, then God will, because of His love and His compassion for that person, then you’ll just feel how God wants you to feel in that situation.
But if I connect directly horizontally with you (not vertical, where I am connecting with God for a person) I’ll feel all kinds of stuff which God doesn’t want me to feel at all, or understand.
We go to God first then the person who we want to prophesy to. I go to God first, always connect with God first. And if I don’t get a strong connection, I don’t prophesy over them. Because You can prophesy over one after the other just like that in the flow, if you’re in the ministry.
So, you must be careful, go to God and connect with God for that person, on behalf of that person. And over time we just kind of learn how to flow in that.
See, the realm of the Spirit, it’s not complicated, and it’s all by the grace of God. God is not a thousand miles away, he’s not up there, he’s not over here in that meeting, or over here in that meeting, you are the house of God. You are the church, the temple of the Holy Spirit. And he’s there wherever you are, 24 hours a day, whether you work, whether you’re on the bus, you’re the church.
But it’s by the grace of God. We don’t deserve it. We don’t earn it. It’s his unmerited favor and empowering presence upon our lives. You live from your spirit and let it flood your whole being out of relationship with God.