First the natural…
Our natural senses take time to develop. Hearing is one of the first to function, and we know that babies can hear sound even in the womb. The hearing nerve is connected to every organ in the body except the spleen, and it even continues reverberating for a short while after death. But we only learn to begin to make sense of what we are hearing through constant repetition and practice.
Our natural sight improves gradually too. If I look at you, what actually happens is that light is being reflected from you and enters my eye. That projects an upside-down image onto the back of my retina, and my brain learns to interpret that as ‘you’.
But when we are first born, we can only see a few inches: just far enough to recognise our mother’s face, in fact. Over the next six months or so, our vision gradually improves until we see fully. That gives us time to process ever larger amounts of information, and gradually make sense of what is around us, the natural realm in which we live.
…then the spiritual
For most of us, that has not been our experience with our spiritual senses. Maybe we have become aware of spiritual things, but almost no-one in the church has been teaching about how to experience them, so we have not really given our spiritual senses chance to develop.
When we first started out following Jesus, we probably continued to live mostly in the natural world, with a little of the spiritual thrown in occasionally. Those occasions were perhaps when we experienced amazing times of worship or when a preached word really impacted us. But spiritual awareness is not reserved for special occasions, and it need not be subject to what goes on around us.
We can learn how to engage in the spiritual realm just as we learnt to engage in the natural. Let us allow our spiritual senses, like our natural senses, to develop through repetition and practice. Step into, and step out of, the realm of heaven. Then we will gradually begin to make sense of what is around us, the spiritual realm in which we also live.
We can do this. God intends us is to live in dual realms of heaven and earth at the same time, just as Jesus did. He intends us to manifest power and authority as the spirit beings we really are. He intends us to manifest our destiny in this world.