We are on a journey and that journey is a discovery of the spiritual realms. Because our spirit is born of God, we now have access to the spiritual realms.
That realm of the Spirit is in us, because God is within us, the kingdom is within us, and it is also around us, and it is also in the heavenly realms outside of us.
But first we must learn how to engage in the realm of the spirit that is within us, before we can engage in the heavenly realms that are outside of us.
There are two pathways that we can follow to engage that spiritual realm, the pathway of relationship and the pathway of responsibility.
The pathway of responsibility has to do with going into the kingdom realms outside of us, to bring the manifestation of the rule of God down upon the earth.
The first pathway is a pathway of relationship and that leads to a deeper intimacy with God. It is a pathway that flows from the inside out.
So, the presence of God in us wants to flow through us and around us to touch the world around us. Just like when Jesus was here physically, he touched people all around him every day with healing and deliverance, now he has gone back into heaven, and He has released the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has come to live in us and though us when we open our spirit to Him.
God does not want His eternal life to stay locked up in us, He wants His life to flow out of us, and it flows out through the gateways of our spirit, soul, and body to the world around us. We need to learn how to be filled with the Spirit, so that His life can flow through us to the world around us.
When we are talking about the gateways of our spirit, soul and body we are talking about the senses they have. We call them gateways because the Spirit of God in us flows through them.
Our spirit has eyes, our soul has eyes, and our body has eyes. We may have heard the phrase; our eyes are the windows of the soul. People can look into the eyes of our body and see what is going on in our soul.
Our soul has been conditioned from the outside in. What we have seen with the eyes of our body, has gone into our soul, into our mind and imagination. We may have some pictures in our mind that we need to be cleansed of. This is why we need to be careful what we look at.
The eyes of our hearts are different from the eyes of our spirit. When it talks about the heart in the bible it could be referring to our spirit or our soul or both. But most of the time it is talking about our soul.
When I talk about the eyes of our heart, I am talking about the eyes of our soul, our imagination. Our imagination is not a bad thing, although it has worked against us in the past, through the conditioning and programming of the world.
The eternal life of God, and his glory needs to flow into our spirit and then into our soul so that it can cleanse and heal our mind and imagination.
We need to learn how to activate the eyes of our heart, our imagination. God has given us our imagination to communicate with Him and uses our imagination to project things that we can see on it; God uses our emotions so that we can feel Him. He uses our mind so that we can understand the things that we perceive in our spirit and the things that He speaks in our spirit.
The heart speaks of our inner being, what is happening on the inside of us, in our spirit and soul. Our heart is like a garden; we need to learn how to tend and cultivate our garden.
The river of life flowed from the throne of God in Eden, and then it went into the garden that God created for man and then flowed out from there to water the earth.
In Ezekiel 47 it talks about healing waters flowing from the temple (we are now a temple of the Holy Spirit) and as flowed out it started ankle-deep then deeper to the knees and then to the loins and then it was so deep that it became a river and brought life wherever it went. This is God’s desire for us, that we would bring life wherever we go. And that people would be able to engage with God through us wherever we go.
In John 4 it talks about living water. When we drink it, it becomes in us a source of life, a fountain, a flow and if we continually engage in that source then that source according to John 7 becomes a river flowing. It is great to have a drinking fountain that we can drink and get the source of life to help us every day through the difficulties of life.
But the fountain needs to become a river, and this happens through understanding the gateways of our spirit, soul and body, learning how to open them and see that river flowing out through them.
The river of life flows from the throne of God. In our spirit there is a throne and a seat of government. Who’s in charge of our life? Either our soul, our self is upon that seat, or we can learn how to surrender our spirit to the presence of God inside us and let the flow of His Spirit govern our life.
In the new birth of our spirit, we have been given a choice of who is going to rule in our life, of who is in charge. Our spirit has a built in yes to the will of God, so all we have to do is to learn how the river of life flows into our spirit, and then our soul and out through our body. This is called the pathway of relationship or intimacy. It is a pathway into experiences and encounters with God that become a way of life.
When we lived on the human level, our own soul was in charge. We have been in charge of our own life and have not made too good of a job of it, so the best thing we can do, is to learn how to surrender to the leadership of the Holy Spirit.
What we want to do is first make Jesus the lord of the gateways of our spirit.
The gateways of our spirit are the gateways of hope, faith, revelation, intuition, prayer, the fear of God and reverence are all summed up in one major thing and that is worship.
We tend to think of worship as singing to God and that is a part of it. But worship is about being obedient to God and surrendering to God. Worship is what they did when they came before a King, and they knelt. So, we need to learn to kneel before God in our own spirit and say God I surrender to you and I surrender all these gateways to you, and then the flow of life can come through us to engage the world around us.
We need to have all these gateways active and flowing. Our spirit can sense the Lord. As our spirit senses the Lord, then the life of God can flow through the gateways.
One of these gateways is the fear of the Lord. Before our spirit was born again, self was on the throne. Our soul has been conditioned from the outside in. Through the pressures of life on the outside our soul responded by murmuring and complaining, getting upset and mad. We got fearful and afraid.
We have soul desires that we tried to meet through the things of the world. We got involved in relationships and got hurt. We have all experienced the manifestations of self and all the manifestations of self, fall short of the glory of God.
God is holy, and as our spirit senses the fear of the lord, in our spirits awareness of the holiness of God, we experience the essence of God.
The fear of the Lord is our spirits awareness of the holiness, the majesty, and the awesomeness of God. The fear of the lord is an experience where our spirit is partaking of God’s Spirit in His holiness. And it is the holiness of God that sanctifies us.
So, the fear of the Lord is not being scared of God, because we are partaking of God, and it is something our spirit wants. But in that awareness, we also see the things in our soul life that fall short of His glory, and this causes our body to tremble in a good way.
In our spirit we will to know the fear of the Lord, the holiness of God, and then it flows into our soul, into our imagination and we see how we have fallen short of His glory and our body trembles; it shakes a little bit. Or we just become aware of things, like our calling, our destiny and our body twitches.
Once our spirit senses the fear of the lord then that gateway of our spirit is open and active.
I keep the fear of God active in my life daily, so I can feel the effect in my body, I have control over my spirit, and so I can turn it on or off.
I have been so in tune with the fear of the Lord that my body would so shake, that a brother in the Lord, who did not yet experience it, told me I need to get on some kind of medication.
But it is something that comes in degrees, and the presence of God can affect us in difference ways.
Repentance is a gift of God, and we have to learn how to maintain a repentant spirit, by learning how to open up our reverence gate. The Holy Spirit will lead and teach us how to open and active all the gates of our spirit, so that our spiritual senses are aware of the lord, and we can sense the Spirit of God moving in us.
Our spirit is a part of the essence of God himself; he absolutely loves it.
We activate our spirit through focus, speaking, just being aware of it. The only time it really doesn’t seem to be active is when we are not aware of it, when we are just living in our soul and doing our own thing , until we do something our spirit convicts us of.