We go from grace to grace, faith to faith, strength to strength, and glory to glory. We go from one level to the next in our spiritual growth in God.
The grace of God is the flow of the Spirit of God in our life. Grace is the influence of the Spirit, his nature and abilities at work in us. We are under the lordship of Jesus Christ over our spirit, soul and body.
We are not under the law. The law is something that is outside of a person, rules and regulations. People who try and keep the law have fallen from grace, they are on the human level and are relying on their own abilities to try and obey God.
The grace of God lifts us up to a higher level, a higher standard, it is the Spirit of God in us working to desire and to do what he is revealing to us, and then we walk it out in the spirit.
Our obedience is a participation in the divine nature. It is being a vessel of honor, in which the Spirit of God works through. The Spirit of God moves us and we yield to the influence of His Spirit in us. We are co-labors with God. God gives us the words to speak, and when we speak them they are filled with his Spirit and life. He moves us to do something and our works become living works revealing the nature of God.
Every new level we attain in the spirit presents its difficulties, because people are accustomed to one atmosphere and then they step into a whole new one.
Can you tell the difference between reading the Old Testament and the New Testament? In the Old Testament, with its stories of wars and kings and judgments, all the things that happened were on one level.
And then the New Testament opens and we find the Lord Jesus Christ going about casting out devils (Matthew 8:16–17). That was a new level.
In the Old Testament you didn’t worry about the devil in Goliath. You didn’t go and try and cast it out; you just wanted to cast a stone in his skull and kill him (I Samuel 17:49). It was on a physical level. But to come into a new level is quite a different thing.
What people do not understand is that the Kingdom of God goes from one level to another. And in these different levels we face different things.
When we get on a different level, everything seems to be different; we may feel confused about the things we are facing now, because they are things that we have not faced before. We are on a new level, and we are facing different things on that level.
It was very different for people to move from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and it is just as different for us to move from this level of the restoration of the Church into a new level that is leading to a greater expression of the Kingdom of God upon the earth.
The kingdom of God is a family. We are coming into a oneness of spirit with one another. When we come into a oneness with another believer we will find that what comes against them, now comes against us. Everything that they are going through, we are going to go through too.
Now we can either absorb it and almost go under, or we can dilute it, evaporate it, dispel it, toss it back on the Lord to take care of it for us, so that we become one another’s strength.
In our oneness we are adjusting to a very, very difficult thing: the fact that we are really one and we are touched with one another’s infirmities (Hebrews 4:15, KJV). We are touched with one another’s battle. We bear one another’s burdens, and the strong bear the infirmities of the weak (Galatians 6:2; Romans 15:1).
Because we are moving more in the realm of spirit, many of us are approaching what I call a “free spirit.” A free spirit is a person, who is more aware of things of the spirit than anybody else, and because of that it can become a greater problem to them; they can be more sensitive to things.
A free spirit is a person whose spirit is free enough that it starts touching everything around it. When we come into contact with a person we can feel the different spirits that are manifesting in them.
We can begin to discern the different spirits at work in different areas of the city and things that have happened in the past.
We are coming into a new level of awareness. So we need to learn how to deal with it.
Joshua said, “We have not passed this way heretofore” (Joshua 3:4). But that doesn’t make any difference; somebody has to break through sometime.
On a lower level you can say, “We have learned to live and deal with things on this level!” But we are not going to deal with problems in the same way up on this higher level. We are going to be reaching into the spiritual wickedness in the heavenly places, the principalities and the powers (Ephesians 6:12);
We have to become spiritual people, we have to learn how to see in the spirit, how to feel in the spirit, how to discern things in the spirit.