It is as we learn how to maintain a right spirit where our spirit is fellowshipping with God; that we will find that it is not that difficult to submit to anything the Lord requires of us. It is when our spirit is out of fellowship with God, where our spirit is not communing with God that we become agitated over little things and we find it difficult to walk in submission to the Lord. When our spirit is submissive to the Lord, we can resist the devil and he flees from us. But if our spirit is not right we find ourselves being oppressed.
It is the things in our heart that war against our submission to the Lord that must be exposed so that the Lord can deal with them. Most of our problems are in our soul life (self-will and our thought patterns).
When our spirit is communing with the Lord, the fruit of His Spirit comes forth in our spirit enabling us to allow the Spirit of God to deal with the things in our heart that are against Him. Without the infilling of the Spirit we have no power to deal with these things. But when we are filled with the Spirit we are able to lay them aside. The Holy Spirit shows us an area of our life that is out of order, we agree with him, and through the infilling of His Spirit we are able to deal with it. We displace it with more of the Lord.
We are not going to come into maturity until our submission to the Spirit of God is absolute. The Holy Spirit must reveal everything in us that hinders this submission. Our bondservant relationship to the Lord is foundational to the fulfillment of our callings.
Paul was a bondservant of the Lord called to be an Apostle. He was first a bondservant and then an Apostle.
Our Human nature is fallen, we are by nature Liars, every human being has lied, and it is rooted deep in our sub-consciousness so that we have to practice honesty. Any area of our life not in submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ will cause us to lie. We do not want to, but we find ourselves covering over.
Proverbs 28: 13He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.
We need to confess it and forsake it, to come into agreement with God concerning it. As our spirit is in communion with God, He grants us a spirit of repentance and then the blood cleanses us and God covers our sin with the blood.
Rom 4:7 Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. 8Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.
Proverbs 29:1He, that being often reproved (chastisement) hardeneth his neck (stubborn attitude), shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy (healing).
God is longsuffering and merciful not wanting anyone to perish, but all to come to repentance.
All the problems in my life are a result of not dealing with the sin in my life. I had to come to the point of death, before God could deal with them. But I am now on the pathway of recovery to wholeness.
When our heart is not right with God, we can perceive it in our spirit. In order to get rid of a problem we have to know that God will forgive us, and in that forgiveness there is power to remove the sin. The word forgive in the Greek means to let go from the power of, to send forth or away. It is to remove the sin from us so that it has no more power over us.
All sin is the result of deceitfulness in the heart-deceitful lusts. In the presence of the Lord there is fullness of joy and at His right hand are pleasures forevermore. No good thing will he withhold from those who walk uprightly before Him. The reason we are in bondage to different sins is because we lack wisdom, the principle thing. The human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked; we need a new heart, a new spirit, and the Holy Spirit causing us to walk in the Lord’s ways.
The conditioning and responses of deceitfulness have been worked in our heart, so that it seems impossible for us to get free. When we yield to sin in our members, the next time it becomes easier to deceive our selves again.
Specific problems and sins vary from individual to individual, the way the Lord sets us free is to first let us taste of His goodness (His glory or nature) so that we know from experience there is something better than the pleasure of sin that only lasts for a season. Then the Holy Spirit works in us a determination that it irrevocable (impossible to revoke, undo, or change). This thing has to go. We have to forsake it.
The biggest problem some people have is the difficulty of facing the fact that there are still things in their life they need deliverance from.
When a person’s spirit is not right with God- communing with Him- the result is murmuring and complaining, becoming critical and judgmental, the sins of arrogance, disobedience, selfishness, and rebellion. They are walking according to their own understanding, not participating in the life flow of the Spirit (the life of God).
We have to forsake and renounce everything that is not like the Spirit of Christ if we want to become mature in the Lord. The bride makes herself ready, and adorns herself with white linen (righteousness acts). We need an honesty of the heart, we need to be delivered from the tendency to justify ourselves and believe for His justification.
We have to walk before the lord in honesty and humility, with a repentant spirit so that the minute something is wrong we are able to acknowledge it, get rid of it, and receive cleansing. This is one of the keys of walking in His righteousness. We must maintain all the qualities of a right spirit.
Because we are a three part being, our soul and body affect our spirit. We can sense in our spirit something is wrong. It seems as if our spirit is not strong pressing into God. Sometimes we cannot point out a specific sin or act, it is a state of heart, something in our very nature- we are backslidden in spirit (our soul or body is taking the ascendancy). Jesus died to not only loose us from the acts of sin, but the very nature of sin.
As long as we are hungering and thirsting after His righteousness, having a right spirit with God, He will continually fill us. The moment we become complacent (self-satisfied and unaware of possible dangers) the life of God is not activated in us.
We have to come to the place where we live with a continuous rejection of all that is evil. We can only do this if we become totally occupied with things that are greater than our self, things that are spiritual. As long as our spirit is continually communing with the Lord, no matter what we are exposed to concerning evil, it will not have the power to move us.
The Holy Spirit is continually moving us into greater measures of God’s nature. Being under the conviction of the Spirit is a good thing, the time to worry is when we become a little calloused and we cannot feel the conviction of God in our spirit.
One of the qualities of a right spirit is an aggressive spirit always pressing into more of God. The moment we become indifferent (showing no care or concern for or interest in something) to prayer, waiting on the Lord, worship, and meditating upon His word, we are in danger. The day that we are not being prodded (to incite or encourage somebody to take action) by the Holy Spirit, is the day that we have either grieved Him or quenched Him. The thing that should drive us to pray is the sudden realization that we are indifferent to prayer.
Psalm 51: 6 Behold, (indicates a strongly felt agreement) you desire (to delight in) truth (God’s standard, faithfulness) in the inward parts,(inner being) and in the hidden part(in secret) you will make me to know( to know experientially) wisdom.(experience, skill)
If we want to walk fully pleasing to the Lord we need to have an honesty of heart, we need a deep integrity; we need to walk in truthfulness. God desires truth in the inward parts, His word is truth, when the truth is dwelling in our heart, then we know wisdom. When our spirit is right we can discern the truth.
It is the will of God for truth to dwell in our innermost being. Way down deep below the conscious thought, below the subconscious level into the center of our being- our spirit.
The Holy Spirit reveals the self-deception that is in our heart. Unless we allow the Spirit of truth to dwell in our heart, we will walk in deception. There will be great deception in the end times, but Satan cannot deceive us unless we deceive ourselves. It is very difficult to deceive an honest man. The deceivers are the ones who are deceived; the con-man has to con another crook, or someone who is selfish. Selfishness and deception go hand in hand.
Down deep in our heart we must have honesty and a sense of integrity. There must be a willingness and determination to walk in the truth. Once the human mind has sinned, it becomes conditioned; there is a certain quality in it that now makes it easy to sin again.
When we have areas of our heart that are not in submission to God, we naturally walk in a hypocrisy, we rationalize, find excuses for it, we justify it in some way and this comes naturally. We portray our self as something that we are not. This is the self-nature, guilt causes us try and hide what is not right in God’s sight- It is better to be honest and confess that we are all messed up. The self-nature is proud by nature and must be humbled, until we have no more confidence in self.
If we hold the truth in unrighteousness, having knowledge of the word but not walking in it, it causes our mind to become reprobate. It takes a lot of honesty of heart to face the fact, that our heart is deceitful without God’s continual attention to it. It is human nature to unconsciously make excuses, to not face the truth.
We have to keep our heart sensitive to the truth. We condition our spirit to walk with God, according to the honesty and the openness of our heart to the Spirit of truth. To walk with God is to walk in the light, we have to let the Holy Spirit search our heart, and we have to be sensitive to the truth. The truth is a person, it is the Spirit of God, and as we allow Him to dwell in our heart, He exposes everything that is not like Him.
As we develop an honesty of heart, we then immediately confess our sins and shortcomings. There is something about pride that causes us to cover over, and then the Spirit of God cannot cleanse us or remove the root of the problem, because we are refusing to let it come out and be exposed. Humility and honesty of heart go hand in hand. Jesus cannot be glorified in us, until we are willing to let everything in our heart be exposed.
It requires a diligence and an intensity of spirit to walk with our heart open to God and honest before Him. Unless our spirit is active and pressing into God, darkness will come over us.
God has given gifts ministries unto us. God is restoring the fivefold ministry, so that we will no longer be children who walk in deception-tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.
Things that the conscious mind does not register can be flashed on a television screen and the subconscious mind will record it. We are living in the day where the condition of people’s thinking can be programmed.
Religious people are basically dishonest in their heart and will be deceived in the last days, only the elect will not be deceived because of the honesty of heart and humility they walk in. The religious people will be the ones who will persecute us; the time will come when they will want to kill us thinking that they are doing the will of God.
This honesty of heart requires getting everything out in the open, to lay things out before God and man to our own hurt, so that the ultimate good of that integrity before God, to be a man after his own heart is attained.
We have to speak the truth in love, so that we can grow up in all aspects into Him. Our love of the truth must be an expression of the truth in love.
The greatest way to be self-deceived and wind up in some church that is not led by the Spirit is to be a hearer of the word and not a doer of it. We have to live by every word the Holy Spirit reveals to us, or there will still be deception in our heart that will cause us to miss out on what we could be walking in. When we hear a living word from God we need to make every effort to walk in it so that it can be sealed to our heart. We dare not hear the word of the Lord without making every effort to walk in it!
We cannot excuse or condone what we do, we cannot conceal it, and we have to get it out in the open. We confess this is wrong, God help me! We let it be in plain sight with no hypocrisy, for it is far worse if we create a deception in our own heart.
We believe in holiness, yet it may look as if we are not very holy, but the only way we are going to enter into that holiness is by maintaining an honesty of heart. All our faults begin with deception that covers over with hypocrisy-and this is the thing that God hates and abhors.
It is through honesty of heart that we enter into a spiritual condition of sanctification. To walk in sanctification is to honestly look to the Lord to lead us and guide us in every word that the Holy Spirit reveals to us. We cannot draw back but must press into this or it will not work. If we do not walk in the word we are hearing, then we are holding the truth in unrighteousness, we are not retaining the knowledge of the Lord in our heart.
We need spiritual ears to hear the truth and walk in it. If we do not walk in it, we automatically become dull of hearing.
It does not matter what we have wrong with us as long as we are in motion and have an honest and repentant heart. We have to keep our heart open to God and honest before Him. It becomes dangerous when we have developed an image of our self that is not true, and then find that we have to much spiritual pride to humble ourselves before the Lord, to confess our shortcomings and ask the Lord for mercy.
We will not be rejected because of our weaknesses, but we can deceive ourselves out of a walk with God if we do not begin to practice honesty of heart. God desires truth in the innermost parts and in the hidden part He will reveal his wisdom, it is the secret place-our spirit in communion with His.