What really are the eyes of your heart, the eyes of your understanding.
Ephesians 1: 16 do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: 17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge( epignosis- God speaking to you by revealing the truth to you) of Him, 18 the eyes of your understanding (dianoia-imagination) being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power 20 which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places.
The eyes of your heart are your imagination, the screen of your mind. When you are dreaming you are seeing in the eyes of your imagination, the screen of your mind. When you close your eyes, you are not supposed to see black, you are supposed to see in the realm of the spirit.
Most Christians cannot see in the Spirit, because they have never learned how to develop their spiritual sight. And they do not have two-way conversations with God, God is supposed to be more real to you than a human person because he lives on the inside of you. When you pray or talk to God, you are supposed to hear his voice, hear him answer you.
This is foundational teaching; it is not way out there. But most Christians are deceived, they believe what man has taught them in church, not what The Holy Spirit has taught them personally.
Why did God give you imagination? So, you can imagine. Very simple isn’t it. It’s an incredible gift but the church has not really understood it. Our English understanding of imagination, is to fantasize, to daydream, thinking about something that is not a reality.
But when God speaks of our imagination, he is talking about seeing in the unseen realm which is more real than the natural realm, because the natural realm came out of the spiritual realm. It was created when God spoke. First God saw in his imagination, and then he spoke it into existence.
But to see in the Spirit, or the imagination, we must be filled with the Spirit. Or else we are just seeing what has been deposited, programmed in our brain.
Our brain cannot think, it is like a computer and must be programed. Our spirit is the part of us that thinks (1 Cor 2:11). Our brain is programed from the outside in or the inside out. Outside in is our soul seeing or hearing in the natural world. Inside out is our soul seeing or hearing from the Spirit of God inside of us.
Our soul is like a switchboard that interprets what our body is sensing or what our spirit is sensing.
As your soul becomes more pure, it becomes exceedingly powerful. We are transformed, and the word means changed into another life form by the renewing of our soul, or the renewing of our mind.
Right now we have corporate prayer, we have corporate worship but there is going to come a time when we have corporate imagination. This is going to split open the heavens, where we are all seeing in the spirit.
Jesus as our example only did what he saw his father doing in heaven. The problem is that Christians do not see what their father is doing in heaven, because they cannot see in the Spirit, they have not experienced the feast of Tabernacles, a face to face relationship with God, where the veil between heaven and earth has been torn in their experience.
They have experienced Passover where their spirit has been born from above. They have experienced Pentecost where they have been baptized in the Spirit, where they receive power through the gifts of the Spirit, but they have not experienced the feast of Tabernacles.
OUR IMAGINATION MUST BE DEVELOPED
We see in Genesis 11:6 corporate imagination in the human race, but in independence of the Lord. It says and the Lord said, 6 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they imagine to do will be withheld from them.
Nothing shall be restrained from them which they imagine doing, that was corporate imagination, that was at the Tower of Babel and God said I am not going to have this, so he confounded the language, brought disunity and scattered them.
But the principle remains the same and God said nothing can be restrained from what they have imagined doing now. Right from the beginning God makes clear this principle of imagination and the churches have been a little scared of it and probably not understood it properly. But the ironic thing is imagination is the key to reality and we’ve had it the other way around. You think imagination is not reality. Imagination is the key to reality.
The Bible teaches us, there are over 380 references in the Bible to seeing in the invisible, either through visions, dreams, but these are all seen in our imagination, on the screen of our mind.
Jesus said in Matthew 5: 27 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
The eyes of your heart, imagination. Jesus said imagination is reality. Even though you did not commit adultery in the natural realm, you did it in the spiritual realm, you are guilty of adultery.
God has given us a tool (imagination) in which we can reach over into his realm, we can cross over into the realm of the spirit.
It is called the vanishing point where you crossover into the spirit realm. There is a word in the Hebrew that describes it olam-translated everlasting in the English, it means- the vanishing point; generally, time out of mind (past or future), eternity.
Ephesians 1:17 that the God of our lord Jesus Christ the father of glory may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him.
God is saying, the father wants to give us a spirit of wisdom, so we really have insight into the true nature of things and revelation in the knowledge of him.
The eyes of your understanding being enlightened that you might know what is the hope of his calling and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints.
In the amplified version it says the eyes of your heart being enlightened. King James version says the eyes of your understanding being enlightened. It is talking about a set of eyes here, eyes of your understanding and this verse tells us that we have another set of eyes, the eyes of the heart.
The heart links soul and spirit, there is a bridge there and if your conscience is clear, the bridge is open to the spirit because the conscience is a gateway and if your conscience is clear then the heart is open, your open to the realm of the spirit,
The inner eyes, the eyes of the heart, the eyes of the imagination must be activated. As you lift up your heads with its gates, which is your mind, emotion, imagination, you start to crossover.
You do that in worship, you are using your Imagination, you are using your mind, your using your heart, but there is a crossover point when you move into spirit. When you pray in tongues, you continue to speak, until you get into a flow, which is a crossover point. We start out in our soul and our soul is a bridge taking us into the spirit. When you learn to prophesy it is the same way, you might have just one word God has given you and you use your mind, you start out on that one word or phrase hoping you won’t mess up and the flow develops as you crossover into the spirit.
When the Lord said to Peter, I want you to come to me and walk on the water. It would never have happened unless he got out of the boat and God didn’t lift him out of the boat. In his own natural strength, he got out of the boat. There is an element where we start something in the natural, in our soul life that makes way for us to crossover into the spirit realm.
Understanding that is important. So, you have another set of eyes, the eyes of the heart, the eyes of the imagination. Now when you lift up your gates, that’s the heart, your imagination, your mind to the Lord another gate will open which are the eternal gates.
Psalm 24:7 lift up your heads, O you gates! And be lifted up, you everlasting doors! And the king of glory shall come in.
Two gates are spoken of in that passage. Lift up your gates and then it talks about the eternal gates will open.
First believe that these gates exist, that they are eternal and will take you into his realm.
You have another set of eyes. Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine the front of your house, you know what it looks like.
This is the beginning of using your imagination. As we learn to relax and lower our brain waves, we will begin to see things more clearly.
When you turn your heart to the Lord the veils will begin to fall away.
The majority of God’s communication with men was in the realm of visions and dreams, it wasn’t the spoken voice.
2 Corinthians 5:7 we walk by faith and not by sight. People say I don’t have to see in the spirit realm we walk by faith. What Paul was saying was that we walk by faith by what we see in the invisible realm not in this natural realm. Because what’s happening in the natural realm is very different. We don’t walk by natural sight, we only walk by what we see in the invisible.