It is important for us to have a strong spirit which enables it to grow. It is our spirit that first encounters the presence of God, and we must build it to a point where our spirit can maintain the presence, and handle the manifestation of the glory of God.
When our spirit is quickened and becomes alive to God the kingdom of God is now within us. We then have to learn how to let the river of life flow continually in us and through us so that it produces a kingdom atmosphere around us.
Heaven is attracted to the Christ in us. When Jesus is formed in us and manifested through us then God has a shadow that he can fill and the Spirit of God can rest upon us.
It is when we learn how to be continually filled with the Spirit that we begin to have heavenly encounters.
We do not have to understand everything, we just need to open our spirit and receive from the presence of God.
What dwells inside our spirit is the presence of God; this is what keeps our spirit. Our spirit is who we really are. Our soul is to be a reflection of who we really are. It is our soul and our spirit that will go into heaven. Our spirit is going to carry the image of our soul so that people will know who we are.
Our spirit is as bold as a lion, when the life of God is flowing into it. With our spirit we come boldly to the throne of Grace. But our spirit is also contrite because of our soul’s tendency to act independently of God.
Our spirit is all about being, our soul about doing. Without our soul in submission to our spirit it does dead works for God, or is condemned for doing something else. As our soul submits to the flow of life in our spirit, the anointing of the spirit leads us into living works, co-laboring with God.
Our spirit needs to be as bold as a lion, but also like a lamb willing to lay down its life. The lion and the Lamb must be in our spirit. You cannot just have one aspect; you must have the other as well.
It is a developing of both, where there is the tenderness and the love and passion for God and the aggressiveness and the pursuit of obtaining the desire to get hold of the realm of heaven. You must have both of these, the surrender and the victory – both sides.
To build our spirit is vitally important in our life and walk with God. To be able to build something we need to give it the right kind of food. We need to feed our spirit with the right nutrients for it to grow. It is the preparation of your spirit that is important.
The first thing that is important in our spirit life is the issue of meditating. The Bible says – man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth God – Matthew 4:4.
We need to learn how to meditate on the Word and how to apply it to our life. We need to learn how to wait on the Lord and how to pray. We need to learn how to worship.
The second key to building a strong spirit is worship. It says in John 4:24 – God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
Worshiping does not mean just having a good time singing. We have to learn how to enter into the courtroom of God.
The Bible says – enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise! – Psalm 100:4
So we come before the Lord with singing, and we enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.
Worship builds intimacy with the presence of God. If there is no intimacy in our worship we are just singing songs.
Intimacy is built out of worship, out of the yearning, out of a longing. Basically, what worship means is we yield and bow down to someone who is greater than us. Worship means absolute surrender – it means we are giving all that we are to God in surrender. We are submitting, we are surrendering we are looking for God to come and touch us and fill us as we surrender.
There is supposed to be an encounter with the presence of God in worship. If we do not spend time worshiping then part of our spirit will be unable to behave spontaneously and express feelings openly because we will not be getting the nurture and the love of the presence of God into our life in a personal way.
When we go to church we are not going to have a meeting with God, where we try and pull the presence out of the atmosphere.
We need to learn how to bring the presence of God into the church.
We need to have strong worship in our daily lives, which our soul uses to engage God and then we have intimacy, which builds a relationship with God.
There is a difference between engaging somebody and getting to know them. In our personal time it is very important to spend time aggressively pursuing God in worship and then tenderly submitting to him in worship.
Worship is a vitally important part of our life as a believer to grow our spirit. We must worship with our spirit. And we must worship him in truth. This means we are not concealing or hiding anything, we allow the Spirit of God to continually search our heart.
It is as we are filled with the Spirit that we are transformed. He begins to interpenetrate us.
Because our spirit is not built to a place of being able to see the kingdom, we may think it is impossible to have heavenly encounters. But it is a learned process and there are things that we can do to activate ourselves towards it.
We will never experience heavenly encounters until we first learn how to be in the spirit.
John was in the spirit, when he heard the call to come up here in the book of revelation.