It is very important for us to have a strong spirit and be able to contain some of the things that will happen with us. The reason you need to build a strong spirit is because, when the glory comes in the marketplace, you do not want to be incoherent, and you do not want to be falling all over the place shouting, so people think you are mad. (They may think you are mad anyway, so it is not going to make much difference! But you know how it is.) Because your spirit man is the thing that encounters the glory of God, you must build it to a point where your spirit can handle the presence and manifestation of the presence of God.
Being in the spirit is a wonderful experience, but I do not chase being in the spirit, I chase God. I chase the glory of God. I chase and I want Him. So my desire in everything I do with my spirit man, including the building up of my spirit man, is to pursue God – to get to be with Him more. I want to spend as much time as I can with God. Even when I am talking with people I am very present with them but I am seeing something very different and I am very aware of things that are going on.
As I teach this in conferences, saints of old come into the meeting and deposit scrolls of revelation of the things I have been teaching into people’s lives. You need to know that because some of you are sitting there going, “I can’t do all this.” That is okay, you cannot do it, but the Holy Spirit can. God’s Word does not return to Him without bringing back fruit from the earth (Isaiah 55: 11).
So, when we are speaking like this in the spirit, the spirit world translates it and deposits it into our lives. You do not have to understand everything here, you just need to open your spirit and receive from the presence of God.
You should be able to live in both worlds quite easily, to be present in the natural and to be present with Jesus in the spirit world. But, because many of us have not exercised our spirit to be able to be present with someone and to be also present with God and the Holy Spirit and see what is going on in that world, because your spirit is not built to a place of being able to do that, you may think it is impossible. It is not impossible, it is a learned process and there are things that you can do to activate yourself towards it. I want to talk about how to build a strong spirit, because there are some really simple keys.
When God made Adam in Genesis it says – and the Lord God formed Man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul – Genesis 2:7.
So, right there in Genesis we have the foundation for a body, a soul and spirit. What dwells inside our spirit is the presence of God; that keeps our spirit. You see, your spirit is who you really are. My soul is a reflection of who I really am; it is my soul and my spirit that will go into heaven. My spirit is going to carry the image of my soul so people will know who I am. I have met people in the spirit and I know who they are by that image. They look a little bit different because their skin is not the same, they carry different garments and they move and talk differently and that is okay, that is what it is all about.
Our spirit is as bold as a lion, when the life of God is flowing into our spirit we come boldly to the throne of Grace. But our spirit is also contrite because of our soul acting independently of God.
Our spirit is all about being, our soul about doing. Without our soul in submission 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.
Your spirit needs to be developed with some simple things. This is really the lion part of your life. There is the Lamb part of being in love with God, walking with God, experiencing God and doing all those lovely things with him. But there is also an aggressive side and the lion and the Lamb must lay down together in your life. You must have both. You cannot just have one; you must have the other as well.
If you are too aggressive there will be a devil under every teapot! You do not have aggression in your life and it is all worship, everything will be fluffy and lovely and your soul will really be in charge of what is going on. What you need is a balance of both these things inside your life. It is developing 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.
When God made Adam a living soul in the Garden he would come through Eden and walk with Adam in his garden. Then Adam would go and walk with God in Eden, which is God’s garden. In that translation place the life of God and being near the person of God would be part of who Adam was because Adam had that breath in him.
When Adam sinned he literally lost that breath and so the sustaining of who we are is now done by the soul when you are in an unsaved condition. When you get born again that breath comes back into you again and you get rebirthed into the reality of what Adam had! But our problem is we do not understand what Adam had. We do not even know what it was like there – but Scripture paints little pictures of what it is like and we will talk about some of those.
I love walking in Eden. I love walking in the garden. I love that whole realm and what it is about because then I can speak to God as a father, not a God who is on the throne, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. If you do not know what those words mean, they mean all-knowing (omniscient), everywhere and in everything (omnipresent) and being all-powerful (omnipotent).
To build my spirit is vitally important in my life and walk with God. To be able to build something you need to give it the right kind of food. I have been involved in working in gymnasiums. If you work out and do not eat properly you will die because your body will rob from Peter to pay Paul when you are not getting the right nutrients inside your body. So, first in the natural than in the spirit world. It is no different in the spirit world; you need to feed your spirit with the right nutrients for you to grow. If you’re just going to push iron and push it and push it and not eat properly you will find your body starts to atrophy and you will not build big muscles. You have to eat the right food to build big muscles. What God is looking for is you giving yourself the right food, the opportunity and doing the preparation. You see, when preparation and circumstance meet, you then have the miracle. What God is looking for is the right circumstances in your preparation – and it is the preparation of your spirit that is important.
The first thing that is important in your 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.
The word of God, the enriching word of God has come out of the mouth of God and has been written by the hand of man. God did not stand there and write the Bible; men did. It was inspired by God, but written by the hand of man. So the word of God needs to be the basis of our meditation.
Meditation according to Strong’s concordance means, to ponder, to imagine, to revolve around your mind, to mutter like a sheep. Over in New Zealand we know what sheep are. When you understand what a sheep does, then you can understand how the process of meditation works for you. In the morning when the sun comes up, a sheep will go and eat as much grass as it can and fill it’s gut. Then, when it is full, it will go on find a lovely, sunny place in the middle of the paddock or it will go and lean against a fence and get this kind of glazed look in its eyes. Then it will stand there chewing over and over. When the Bible talks about meditation that is what it means: to mutter; to mumble over; to chew.
This sheep wants to get every bit of energy out of the grass, so it takes its time with the grass. It is like us, we read the word and we gorge ourselves and then we go away. It just passes straight through you because you have not worked with it. Many Christians lives are like a drain pipe – it goes in and it goes out and does nothing in between. Meditating on the word of God is getting the in between thing. It is taking the word of God and taking your time with the word. I cannot just read the Bible. It is impossible for me to read the Bible anymore, because I know the moment I start to read it I’m going to get caught by a Scripture. It is going to go into my brain, I’m going to get captivated by it and within 15 minutes I’m going to be looking at a doorway, because the word paints a door. But that is practice and the reason it happens that quickly is because I practiced doing that.
Meditating is vitally important in our lives. When you meditate you must seek to understand what the word means, to understand how to apply it to your life or understand what implication it has for you, to understand what response you need to make and to understand what your role is in the word. You see, if you are in Christ Jesus you have a role in the word. You have a role to play in the Bible. Did you know that? There are things that only you can do. The Bible says there are things in heaven, a record. God says he is written down things that he has dreamed about for us – Psalm 40:7/Hebrews 10:7. They are already written and each of us has a scroll that is like that. On the day when we die and go to be with God we see him face to face he is going to unroll your scroll and you are going to see everything you could have had – everything that he had dreamed about for you. He dreamed about it and it was, before the is existed. Wherever something “is” he dreamed about it and it was. The Bible says before the foundation of the earth he dreamed – Ephesians 1:4/first Corinthians 2:9. So that means before everything, before the record of what we call time ever started, God was already dreaming about you and he already had your scroll all wrapped up and done.
When a person remains in sin that scroll is in the trophy room of the devil. When a person is in an unsaved condition that scroll is in the trophy room of the devil. That is why the devil is trying to get as many kids aborted as he can, because they’re scrolls go into his trophy room. It is then lost to the earth, because each of them is a part. God then restores these children in heaven and grows them into a son and their scroll burns in fire and gets destroyed out of the trophy room. They are just things that happen. I cannot show you them in the Bible, it is just the way it is; it is just what happens. Building your spirit man is very important. Meditating on the word; you need to draw out of it, like with a lolly.
The second key to building a strong spirit is worship. It says in John 4:24 – God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
Worshiping does not mean just having a loud, clanky, happy time. It is vitally important you 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 you come before the Lord with singing, enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Singing and Thanksgiving are supposed to be a part of worship. Coming into his courts with intercession is actually how to enter the courtroom of God and do business in the courtroom of God. What I want you to see is that worship is vitally important to you as a believer. It builds intimacy with the presence of God. If you just have a happy clapping time in church then that is all you will ever have. There is no intimacy built in only happy clapping times. Desire is built in the happy times, but intimacy is built out of worship, out of the yearning, out of a longing.
Basically, what worship means is I yield and bow down to someone who is greater than me. Worship means absolute surrender – it means I’m giving all that I am to God in surrender. I am submitting, I am surrendering and I am looking to God to come and touch me and fill my life as I surrender.
It is a two-way street: I go, you touch me Lord, I come back; I go, you touch me, I come back. That is what worship is supposed to do. There is supposed to be an encounter with the presence of God in worship. It is very important in your personal life. If you do not spend time worshiping then part of your spirit will be deeply inhibited because you will not be getting the nurture and the love of the presence of God into your life in a personal way.
I get frustrated when I come into church and everybody in church is trying to take the presence of God out of the atmosphere to fill them. They have been too lazy and have not been worshiping at home so they could bring that with them to fill the atmosphere.
The first part, when people come in they want to pull out of the atmosphere, is the carnal. That is the natural. That is the soul wanting dominion and, because the soul is all people have ever been fed, that is what you get. That is why you cannot just have happy clapping times. You need to have strong worship, which your soul uses to engage God and then you have intimacy, which builds a relationship with God. There is a difference between engaging somebody and getting to know them, hugging them and telling them you love them. That is the difference between what worship does and what a happy clapping time does. Can you see the difference? It is very important for us to have a balance of this in our spirit life. In your 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. Strong’s concordance references John 4:24 to worship in spirit and in truth and the word truth there is given as – without concealing or hiding anything. It means that I can come with all my garbage. With anything that could ever insult God and I go there and I can engage him. The moment you turn up there you change – just by turning up there. You do not carry what you are into the realm of heaven. You become who you really are when you go into the realm of heaven. That means when I go into the realm of heaven I transform into who I am, which is something totally different from what I am now. That is why I can come boldly, because his glory in me transforms me into the image of the son, which enables me to present myself before him. That is why worship is important, because it is a transforming and changing process inside of us.
Isaiah says – they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint – Isaiah 40:31.
I can remember being in the spirit one day. I went through a doorway and I was standing on the edge of this precipice and there was just nothing in front of me except I could hear one of the spirits of heaven blowing the wind. I knew what it was because I had been meditating on mounting up on wings like an eagle. I had done a study on Eagles and the way they feel the wind underneath them in the morning so that they can rise on the wind. I can remember standing on the edge, just nothing in front of me, except I could hear the wind blowing and I could feel it was coming. I remember standing with arms outstretched like an eagle, waiting to feel the wind blow under me and it happened. I got lost, totally lost for about an hour and a half, just being tumbled about by the glory in the wind of God. It happened again at night. There are just wonderful experiences that we are supposed to enjoy! We are supposed to have them; that is what our life is all about.
You need to wait on God. The word wait is an interesting word – in the original – because it means to bind together with twisting or to entwine together. When you are waiting on God in a place of worship you are twisting yourself into his nature. You are entwining yourself into his character. You are entwining yourself in and around his glory and his presence and you become one with him.
The Bible says – but the person who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him – 1 Corinthians 6:17.
Many believers seem to have taken that out of their Bibles because their religious concepts say I cannot be like God. Well, I am sorry, you are going to be like God because you are his son and you carry the same DNA as his. You are going to be like him and there is nothing you can do about it! The way to develop your spirit is by twisting and entwining yourself around the presence of God until you become one with him.
There is a place of intimacy. It is one of the four chambers of the heart called the dance floor. On the dance floor you entwine yourself and become one with the presence of God and are led by him in a dance in the realm of the kingdom. The dance floor is the most amazing place to be with God, twirling around in the arms of God as a father, as a friend and as a lover. Often when we see these kinds of words our brain has a fleshly concept and thinks no, that can’t happen! Well, yes it can because we actually become one with the Spirit of God and join our soul with his.
It is really important for us to get to grips with how to build our spirit. Another way is fellowship. In Proverbs it says – iron sharpens iron; so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend – Proverbs 27:17.
You need to have fellowship with one another and I do not mean just hi, how are you today, nice to see you. That is not having fellowship; that is just saying hello. Fellowship means becoming acquainted with someone – hi, how is it going there Jane? Tell me what’s happening in the spirit, etc. That is how you become acquainted. You see, when you are acquainted with someone you can love on them. This is the testimony of Jesus Christ in the church: that the world may know them by this love, one for another – John 13:35.
It is the fellowship that enables all of us to come out of our sin and to expose ourselves and to be vulnerable. One of the reasons I believe that the devil mocked God was because of his vulnerability as a child with Adam and Eve, playing in the garden with them. I love playing with my kids and wrestling them, I have wrestled Jesus. We do things like that and it is really cool!
What God is looking for is fellowship in the body, proper fellowship. Fellowship produces unity. Where there is unity God commands a blessing. Where there is unity, where everyone dwells together in union, then the power of God will be displayed. If you want the power of God displayed in your church you need to find that unity in fellowship. And it does not just mean saying hello to everybody on Sunday. It means getting knitted in with others in the body because each group is supposed to be knitted in with another group. Each one is supposed to have connections within the house of the Lord so that you have unity and a house of God. If you want the glory you need to get into unity.
But it is important to be cautious with people. You need to be cautious because not everybody is the same as you and not everybody has the same integrity as you. Sometimes you will find people with mouths that runoff, so we need to be careful. There are boundaries that need to happen as well within the fellowship in unity. It is not just telling everybody your secrets. It is getting to know them and you being known by them as you begin to share. I love having some of these guys who come with me, because they get to see me in my humanity. They get to see who I really am. I am not a spiritual geek, I am a spiritual freak! There is a difference. One is a thing I can choose to do; the other is a thing I just am. What I’ve hungered for is relationship and you only build relationship when you spend time with someone.
I love going fishing with my friend Rob, and we yank away and we catch fish and it is just glorious! We go fishing and we talk away, catch fish talk a bit more. It is one of those things you just do. That is what the Bible is saying about fellowship: to get linked together. It is the linking process that brings the glory of God. What happens is my gate links with your gate, and our two Gates linked with her gate, and our three Gates link with his gate, and our four Gates link with their gate and there is an exponential rise in the presence of God. It goes one times, 10 times, 100 times, a 1,000 times. One shall put 1000 the flight, two shall put 10,000 flight – Deuteronomy 32:30; it is just a spiritual principle. When you are linked together properly there is an ex-potential increase in the flow of the presence of God into a meeting. That is why you need to have fellowship, one with another, properly, in the right way in the Holy Spirit.
Most believers pray in the spirit for five minutes a day on average and they struggle with that. The reason they struggle is because there spirit is not built up. The only way to building muscle is to use it and use it. One of the things I’ve learned to do is to read the Bible before and while praying in the spirit. You can get caught up in the realm of the kingdom by reading the Bible and praying in the spirit. It begins to captivate your mind, reading, the Lord is my help, etc. You can begin to quote Scriptures, because of your meditating and your speaking forth the word of God. Praying in tongues is a vital key.
You can pray in tongues in English, you can pray in the tongues of Angels and you can pray in the tongues of men – one Corinthians 13:1. I’ve seen it all happen in a meeting, and one of the most important things for us to understand is that there is a diversity in tongues. One of the gifts of the spirit is praying in tongues. We have a spirit that prays in tongues and then there is the gift of tongues. That is a totally different thing than praying in tongues. The gift of tongues is an exercising of a gift for a specific purpose when you pray in tongues you are exercising your spirit. The Bible says – he who speaks in a strange tongue edifies and improves himself – 1Corinthians 14:4.
That means you. The reason you pray in tongues is to build up your spirit. The word edify means to build up – it means to make strong inside. That is the whole objective of praying in tongues. What I’ve learned to do is not just to pray in tongues with my mind going, I wonder what I will be having for breakfast today…? MMM, that dinner smells really nice… Man I’m going to have a huge day today; I have got so much I need to do. That is like wiping butter all over the carpet you are walking on. It is actually doing nothing.
The key to praying in tongues is having our mind captivated with the object of your desire, and the way it becomes captivated is to work with the word. If you have not memorized Scripture you go and read it until you can memorize it. I can quote long passages of Scripture just because I have read them over and over. When you begin to pray in tongues and you are meditating and mulling over the word while praying in tongues, in the realm of the spirit, your spirit man starts to savor it and drink it in. Your spirit man is then built up and become strong. That takes practice. I was not able to start praying an hour a day in tongues when I first started. If you can do that, well, hallelujah! You are a little bit ahead of me. I went five minutes and then 10 minutes. That was a real struggle when I first started praying in tongues. Praying hard in tongues 10 minutes a day was exercise enough, like I had just run 10 miles! But often it is because we are weak that we cannot do it. It is because our spirit has never had dominion over our soul and our body and made them do what they are supposed to do.
When you pray in tongues it stirs you to have dominion. It stirs your spirit to yearn after God. It stirs who you are, making you into something different than you are and making you into what you are to become. It stirs you up and that is what it is for. It stirs you up; makes you stand, and makes your soul submit in your body conformed to the image of the son of God. You have to do it! No one else can do it for you. You cannot live off this or that conference for the next 20 years, that won’t work. All that will ever be is a nice experience. You need to take what you have and work with it. And let me tell you – it is hard work!
When you do not want to pray in tongues and your soul has total control over your spirit, it feels like one big failure! As you pray, and your mind is saying no, sorry, this isn’t working… Old this is such a pain… ahhh, nothing is happening here and you go on and on and on. You need to say, soul, shut up! Because it is just your soul wanting to see in charge and you need to make it submit. When my soul gets like that I target it and I going to the gateways of my soul. I go into my conscience Gates speaking in tongues and I speak to my conscience – you will submit, into my mind gate, you will bow. Make it do what it is supposed to do. And the only reason I can do that is because I have practiced. As you practice the pathway, it becomes familiar and then it is easy. You need to practice.
Another key is speaking the word of God out loud. You need to take the word of God and decree it. Father, thank you that your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light on my path – Psalm 119:105. Thank you, Lord, that your word directs my steps, and my steps are ordered by the word of God – Proverbs 16:9, Psalms 37:23. Thank you, Lord, that I do not stray from the left or the right because you are leading me – Isaiah 30:21. Father, thank you that I hear your voice and I choose to obey it – John 10:27. I just take the word and pray it. You need to take the word of God and throw it into the spirit world.
God made this statement – the most high does not dwell in temples made with hands – Acts 7:48
God dwells in the words that you have spoken to create an atmosphere for him to dwell in. That is why they would offer up praises and do those kinds of things in a temple, because the things you speak create an environment for God’s fire to come upon the offering that you create for him. I do not know about you but I want to glory fire of God to come around my life. I want the glory to come over me. I want it to come and touch my life so that I can touch the world that is around me. Until I have touched the glory in my own life, I will never bring the world into being touched by it. You need to experience it in your own life first. It is hard work, but oh, the rewards at the end! I have been in situations where, if I had never built up my spirit, I would never have had victory.
I can remember one day, praying for a woman in our church in the ministry room when it was first set up. I said – I want you to follow after me, father, in the name of Jesus, – father in the name of Jesus – I renounce – I renounce… And then she hissed and her eyes were red and split like cats eyes. Now this is a physical human body changing into something that is inside of them, manifesting. It only took me a few seconds to say –whoa! Rock on! Bring it on! Why? Because I had built up my spirit with the truth of the father, I thank you that when I speak, my words confront and destroy every work of the devil. Father it turns them over. Father, when I speak I thank you that men and women are delivered.
Mark 16:17 – these attesting signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons.
Now if you do not believe Christians can have devils, you need to perhaps pray. Pastors can have them too. I have had some interesting experiences with pastors!
Psalm 34:4 – delight yourself also in the Lord, you will give you the desires and secret petitions of your heart.
But you need to meditate on the word. You need to spend the time cultivating your spirit. You need to spend time with God, doing some of these things that will grow you, so that when the glory turns up, or when you turn up in the glory, then your body does not get freaked out. Because your spirit man is the candle of the Lord – Proverbs 20:27.