Our soul is our natural human life; we have natural needs built in it. We have a need for love, acceptance, affirmation, significance, purpose, security. Where are we going to get those needs met?
Before our spirit was born again we had no choice but to look to the world to have these needs met, that was our only source.
So were looking to the world for love, acceptance, security, significance and purpose. How were we going to get those things? -By what we do. We seek those things on a performance basis.
We try and get these things from the world in which we live. We may have attained some of these things in our pursuit of happiness. But most of us ended up disappointed, damaged, hurt, rejected, and experiencing fear, guilt and shame.
God has created us in such a way, that the things the world offers to meet our needs will eventually leave us empty. There is a hole in us that can only be filled by God because that’s how He created us to be, to have a relationship with Him. Only He can really meet all our needs. So what we are really looking for is a relationship.
Every person born into this world is looking for a relationship with God, it is built within them, yet they may not even realize that this is what they truly need.
So we have built within us this yearning for relationship that we try and out work through the world. Of course that causes damage, hurt and pain.
When we begin to become conscious of the deepest need of our heart to know God and God reveals himself to us in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we call upon the name of the Lord, our spirit gets saved. All who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.
If you have never experienced God in your spirit, you need to call out- Jesus save me! Save me! We have to respond with intensity! We have to call out to God! Reveal yourself to me; I want to know you personally, for our spirit to be born again, because sometimes a person’s soul will block them from this experience.
God has reconciled the whole world through the death of Jesus on the cross. The sin of the whole human race has been dealt with. A perfect provision has been made.
The problem is our spirit is dead in trespasses and sin, our spirit is separated from God, and this is why our spirit has to be born again. Our spirit has to be activated through contact with the Spirit of God.
When our spirit becomes alive unto God, we have access to a new source of life; it is called the fountain of living waters.
The fountain of living waters is in us, the Holy Spirit is in us, God’s presence is in us, so now we need to learn how to draw from the inside out, where all the things we need can be found.
What we need is found on the inside of us, not the outside. God inside of us becomes everything we need. As we open the door of our spirit to the love of God inside of us, so that our spirit becomes aware of it through the flow of the Spirit, the living water, we find purpose. We find security, significance, love, and acceptance.
When our spirit is born again we experience the eternal life of God on the inside of us. We now have two sources of life, the life of God that our spirit has access to, and the natural life of our soul, in which we have looked to the world to meet its need.
We can become pulled in two directions; the flesh and the spirit are in conflict with one another to who is going to be the source. If we keep looking to the outside we keep fueling and feeding that which will damage us.
If we look to the inside then we can choose to be transformed by the love of God, then we won’t need to look to the world anymore to have our needs met. God wants us to draw from Him on the inside of us.
If we continue to draw from a well that has got a hole in it (the things of the world) we will never be truly fulfilled and we will continue to be damaged.
Jeremiah 2: 13 For my people have committed (performing an activity with a distinct purpose, or a goal in view) two evils ( if something was evil in the eyes of the Lord, there is no further court of appeals) ; they have forsaken (meaning to leave, to abandon) me the fountain (a spring, a flow)of living (a living thing) waters, and hewed them out (dig) cisterns(well) , broken( break down) cisterns, that can hold (to supply )no water.
Our life is like a tree, it has lots of fruit on it, that’s what people see and experience when they get to know us, or they get close enough to us if you let them.
Some of those fruits may be rejection, anger, fear, anxiety, worry, low self-esteem, insecurity, guilt, shame, depression, and addiction.
If some of those things are still operating in our life we have to look at where they came from. What are the seeds that created the roots that created that fruit?
We need to think about it, what we are still connected or chained to, that we do not want to be. What experiences, what memories, what emotions, what Hurts, pains, rejections, betrayals.
We may be rejected, abandoned, betrayed, disappointed, hurt, let down, abused in many different ways. All of us probably have had those experiences but the question is-are we still yoked to them, are they still affecting us. Are we allowing people in our past to still damage us today because we’ve not separated ourselves from them by forgiving them and releasing them?
Our heart is described in the Bible as soil. We may have some bad soil resulting from the lack of love, acceptance, affirmation, affection, appreciation, encouragement, identity. Our heart can be a soil of insecurity which is open very much for negative things to take root in that negative soil.
What happens is a seed of offense comes along from the things that happen to us, that cause us to have negative experiences. If we do not deal with those seeds of offense, they stay in the soil of our heart. They affect our emotions.
Now what happens is our responses to that negative experience, that seed of offense, causes us to feel something. We feel angry, we have bad attitudes, we feel hurt, resentment, perhaps fear, insecurity and that produces in us roots of bitterness, those roots go down deep into our heart and they affect our will and they affect our subconscious mind.
And once they are there, they just don’t stay under the surface they produce the fruit of resentment. So our behavior is coming from those roots which came from the seed because we were hurt. The root of resentment causes us to behave a certain way, the fruit is seen in the things that we do and say.
The root is all the pain and hurt we feel on the inside, the fruit is what we say that we release in the atmosphere, and the way that we behave.
Some people respond in different ways to what goes on in the soil of their heart, but they generally become reason filters. We see the world through all those things, the root of bitterness, the fruit of resentment, that’s how we see the world. Everyone is against us, we may feel a victim, we may feel useless and a failure and it filters everything through those things, which causes us to make our choices based on those filters and most of the time those choices are bad choices and they get us into deeper trouble, they draw us to more of the things of the world to try to fix it or to cover it up or to blot it out.
But actually what we must do is forgive and release. We have to deal with the seed of offense. We can try and dig up the roots, we can try and keep cutting off fruit but all it does is just prune it and it re-grows.
We have to get rid of the seed. Once we have forgiven and released the person, the situation, then that seed can be removed. If the seed is removed then there is nothing to produce the roots. All we then need to do is repent for the bitterness in our heart, and those roots will be removed. Then we just need to renounce the behaviors and the patterns and the coping mechanisms that we have developed and the filters that we have in place and that fruit can be removed.
Then God can put into our hearts a new seed, the truth of who we really are, the revelation of His love and our identity and our destiny in Him. Then that will bring security to our hearts, because we will know who we are and then when someone says something negative, or we experience contrary circumstances we won’t receive it.
When we experience the love of God- that He accepts us, then that will produce good roots that draw down from the inside and draw on the river of life and His love to bring transformation.
Then we experience the peaceable fruit of righteousness, we live and we appear totally different because we been transformed by the power of love when we choose to forgive and release the things that we have experienced that became seeds of offense.