We need to develop a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit where He becomes our close personal friend.
God does not have a lot of friends here on earth, He has a lot of people who serve him, but He only reveals his secrets to His friends.
Many ministries still have a lot of person ambition in them, they serve God on their terms, But not on His terms.
But maybe He will call me to sell all that I have and go to Africa to be a missionary? Maybe He will, but it doesn’t happen overnight.
God really moves in those 3rd world countries because they have nothing. The Church here in America is lukewarm, because they have all things. They are rich and have need of nothing, but that is soon about to change.
God is going to shake, shake, shake because we are at the end of the age. The marriage of the lamb in heaven is already being prepared, you would not believe what is happening there.
But Jesus’ wife is not prepared.
WHAT IS SUCCESS?
It is being a wholehearted lover of Jesus Christ!
Whatever we do in life, we only succeed at the highest level, if we can consistently encounter and experience the presence of God.
The only way that we can know by experience that presence is to understand the role and the work of the Holy Spirit in our life.
When we understand His role and work in our life, we can develop a relationship with Him that covers every circumstance of life, every crisis, every opportunity and being successful in spiritual warfare.
His job is to present us perfect in Christ before the Father. His job is to develop who we are in Jesus. He will be the one talking to us the most. He will help us in everything that we face. He is the one that we need the most in this life.
Jesus is inside of our spirit as the word of God, the new nature, our spirit is the spirit of Christ. You cannot tell the difference between His spirit and yours. As we partake of the living word, the divine nature, our spirit grows.
When Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father, He universalized His spirit so that He became a many membered body-1 corn 12:12
Jesus is in heaven interceding for us, the Holy Spirit is on earth living out those prayers in us. He takes everything that is happening in heaven concerning us and makes sure that we connect with it here on earth.
The Holy Spirit takes of the provision of Jesus Christ and shows us how to appropriate it in our lives.
He is my best friend, He stuck with me, through all the garbage I allowed in my life.
THE HOLY SPIRIT
The first and the last chapters of scripture are about the Holy Spirit. He is active in creation; He is the one that performs the father’s word, who is Jesus. Nothing is done in heaven except the Holy Spirit does it. He is the activation of the Word.
He is brooding over the face of the waters excited; we are going to create something. He has an irrepressible joy in everything that heaven does. Joy is the environment of heaven. No one embodies that joy more than the Holy Spirit. He was there joyfully at the start of creation with joy at the thought of everything that would happen and everything that He would get to be involved with.
He plans to thoroughly enjoy everything, every connection with us. He will enjoy breaking our soul life and rebuilding us. He will enjoy being there for us on our worst day, he will love to be there with us on our best day.
When we are in grief and our back is to the wall, when we feel that we have lost everything and we are in a pit, he will be in that same pit talking to us about how to climb out.
There will never be a day when He is not present in our life. The best thing we can do right now is to is to realize that the presence of God does not depend upon an emotion; it only depends upon a trust.
Jesus said He would never leave us or forsake us that should be enough. We have the presence of God whether we feel it or not.
There are going to be glorious days when we will feel it, because God is tangible and he loves to be tangible, but we also will have marvelous days when we have to trust that He is there. And not lean on our own understanding or emotions. We just have that simple place in our heart that God said it and I believe it. He is here because He said He would be and this has to be enough.
If we give the Holy Spirit one percent, he will take 25. If we give him 10 he will take 50. The Holy Spirit is the personification of the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is the carrier on earth of everything that is happening in heaven.
The Holy Spirit is brooding over us, He is thinking about us right now, what is next, where we are and what is coming. What we still need to be cut away from, what we need to be released into. He has plans for us. He is going to teach us how to be you in the kingdom. Everything that God does creatively comes through the Holy Spirit.
He is in the last chapter partnering with the bride, to get the bride where she is ready to welcome her eternal lover.
One of the objectives of Jesus was to announce the role of the Holy Spirit in bringing people into a vibrant new relationship with God. He spoke of rivers of living water which would flood out from our innermost being.
Part of how we relate to God, part of how we walk with Him is to recognize all the time that our very experience depends on something that He has already done.
WE HAVE A WELL OF WATER
If JESUS has poured out His Holy Spirit into us, then we have a well of water springing up into everlasting life.
We need to learn how to maintain the well, otherwise we will be crying out for more of the Holy Spirit rather than concentrating on overflowing with the Holy Spirit.
It is a poor prayer to pray for an infilling when we could pray lord let me overflow. Our praying depends upon us really understanding who we are and what God has already done. We need to stop asking God to do something that He has already done and start living on the strength of it.
We need to switch our attention from measure- I need a fresh outpouring-to overflow-Lord let me just overflow. The switch is when we start to understand that when we are in Christ measure no longer exists unless we want it to.
We must come to a place of truly believing who we already are in Christ. If we want fullness, then we need to be full. Think full, live full, talk full, pray full. We need to do everything from fullness not towards it. We need to tackle every situation as if we are already full.
When we deal with everything from a place of being in Christ then we are no longer a want to be Christian. We are real in terms of the kingdom.
We are bible believing when we live the bible. We are bible believing when we become the living embodiment of the word-this is the work of the Holy Spirit.
He is the one that says don’t think yourself towards fullness, think from fullness. Don’t move towards abundance, swim in it now, live in it now. Think about it, pray about it, plan from it, and talk yourself into that place now because you are full now.
The only thing that is going to grow is our experience of fullness, but we can have the reality of fullness now right where we are. It is just the experience that is going to change; it is going to get more powerful, more pronounced (noticeable or obvious).
But all the time we have this casual, up and down, in and out encounter with fullness we are always going to be living in our own version of measure.
We are full now, so we need to let our present reality take into account that we are full now. Next week because of the experiences that we will have we will be fuller.
We are exactly what we want to be right now in Jesus. We must think big, think strong, and think powerful. Don’t think weak, I can’t.
Paul said I can do all things; but he did not know what all things were. He had an experience of some things, but he didn’t know what all things meant, and he didn’t need to know, he just had an attitude in his heart, no matter what the all things are-future, I can do them to, because I am doing these other things now, I can do those things also.
Have a great altitude, don’t waste it, have a great mind-set, don’t weaken it. We are learning how to be strong, how to be brilliant.
If we are in Christ, whatever God’s name is, that is who we are. As he is in heaven, so are we in this world. We must think I can do this; I am more than capable of overcoming this. This thing cannot put me on my backside; I am going to knock it off its feet.
We are in Christ learning how to be Christ like. Our starting place is always from something not towards something.
What circumstance are we wrestling with, we are stronger than it already. A baby is stronger once it is born than it is in the womb. Even a baby has strength. The real strength of a baby is in the parent who is holding them. Just like us a baby can be driven around in a car.
The real issue is who we want to be in Jesus right this moment. There is no reason we can’t be it right here, right now. We are not a people who wait, there is only one reason that we wait, we wait on the Lord, we don’t wait for anything else.
Even when we are waiting patiently for something we are doing something while we are waiting, we are rejoicing we are giving thanks, we are expressing our hope and our trust. We worship, we are not waiting in a vacuum. We cannot allow a vacuum to exist in our heart.
We are more beautiful than we realize, and we are stronger than we know. The role of the Holy Spirit is to teach us who we are in Christ and who we can be.
There is no inertia (apathy, inability or unwillingness to move or act, Resistance to change) in the kingdom. We do what God wants us to do and we say what He wants us to say. We go where He wants us to go.
We are not waiting around; God is not reluctant to bless us. There is a quickening Spirit around our life because God would like us to speed up. Imagine being able to travel as fast as Jesus.
Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit and fire. Jesus honored the Holy Spirit. It is to your advantage that I go away, so that the helper can come to you. When the Spirit of truth comes He will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on His own initiative. Whatever He hears he will speak.
The Holy Spirit will disclose to you what is to come on many different levels. What is to come around the world, nationally, regionally, citywide, what is to come into our life.
He is the Spirit of disclosure. If we want to know what is coming up in our life, we need to have a conversation with the one who knows everything.
The Holy Spirit knows everything and can tell us anything. We won’t know if we don’t ask. One of His roles is to disclose things to us personally. He is the indwelling and empowering presence of God within.
He indwells us as a sanctifying work of holiness. We are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in us.
If we do not have the spirit of Christ, we do not belong to Him. If Christ is in us the spirit is alive because of righteousness.
The indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is what sanctifies us in our life to think like Jesus, to live like Jesus, to talk and act like Jesus, walk like Jesus, to be conformed to His image.
To live in a new covenant lifestyle, we must stop thinking with an Old Testament head. People pray for the Lord’s presence; he is already here, what are we going to do with Him. We live as if we want God to visit us when His intention has always been to take up residence.
The Holy Spirit is resident within us. If we think of presence as being resident, we will pray completely differently. Prayer is part of a celebration sandwich. Rejoice in everything, pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks. As we pray in a new awareness without ceasing, the Spirit will be moving in our lives.
The reason we rejoice twice as much as we pray is because our praying depends upon what we are rejoicing about. We are rejoicing that God is present. That He is resident, he is not out there, he is in here, and this is my reality.
So, we are not asking God to do something that He has already done. This is what separates us out from average believers to outstanding people in the Kingdom. It is what we perceive and think about, it is who we really are. When we know what we are rejoicing about, we know what we can pray from.
We pray differently if we pray from a foundation of rejoicing and thanksgiving. Rejoicing and thanksgiving should be the major things we do in life, the reason is that it gives us a place to live from. It gives us a launching pad. It puts the odds in our favor, in everything that is going on in our life, it gives us a mindset that overcomes.
It turns us from an overcomer into more than a conqueror. It turns us into a Caleb, we can do this thing because God is with us.
He is not only with us, but in us. God has taken up residence inside of us, this is the reality that we need to deal with. We don’t want to make things out there our reality. We must make things in our spirit reality.
What is in our heart should be the reality, the most real thing to us more than anything else. We can overcome anything out there from the place of who we are in our spirit.
So, our thinking, our conversations, our actions all come from the inside. The life of God comes from the inside to the outside.
God isn’t out there for us anymore, He is inside. He will be out there, and we will connect with Him, but our primary place of reference will be on the inside, it is internal and never external, because we are in Christ and He is in us. His Spirit can quicken us in every situation that we are in.
A temple is a building devoted to worship. Our prime ministry is always to God. To rejoice not just for things, but to rejoice in who God is, every single day.
We don’t make our worship something we do in a building; we are the building. What we do in worship will tell us who we are and how far we can go. The chief purpose of a temple is worship. If worship is not relational, then I am not sure what it is.
We do not worship God in meetings. We go to meetings to gather with other people with one heart, one mind and one voice so that we can worship corporately.
We must see ourselves as the temple, and the chief purpose of the temple was worship, adoration, rejoicing, thanksgiving. If we can maintain a spirit of rejoicing and thanksgiving, then we can obtain anything.
We need to settle it in our heart, that I am a house devoted to worship and worship is relational, it is not situational, we do not do it in events and conferences and meetings. We do it in life. If we just worship in meeting, we are going to live with a poverty spirit and measure.
We can obtain a place before the throne room that most people do not know exists, we can spend four hours a day worshipping the Lord but that is just getting by. We need to worship from the rising of the sun to going down of the same. We can go without sleep for a week because the glory would sustain us.
We need to develop spiritual muscles by being doers of the Word. Our chief ministry is always to God, we should not make anything else our focus.
At the very least we should give God a tithe of our day in worship, not just prayer, study, or meditation. We need to get used to always turning and yielding in our heart to the Lord. Daniel did it three or four times a day.
Jesus would worship and commune and pray to the Father because it was a delight to him it was never a chore.
We are going to need some discipline in our spirituality. If our discipline is not birthed-earthed in delight, we will not have the desire to see it through. Humans do exactly what they want to do.
We have passions for things that we save time to do. If we are going to have a passion for Jesus it must be rooted in delight.
The fruit of delight is always desire; we always do what we want to do. We need to look at ourselves as a temple in relation to the Holy Spirit. We are a temple that He fills. Praise, thanksgiving, worship, rejoicing, adoration are all main features of our life.
These scriptures reference the quiet work of the Holy Spirit that is always going on in our life. Sometimes the Holy Spirit comes in and He is loud and noisy because He is a paradox.
He is the nosiest and quietest person we will ever know. He is loud, exuberant, outrageous, comedic, but He is quiet almost secretive, He creeps up on us, steels up on us, He is present.
But He will want to focus on our obedience on our repentance and the need for continuous ongoing development of who we are in Jesus. Part of His criteria in our life is obedience.
The Holy Spirit indwells us for the sake of our maturity, causing us to grow in Jesus. He wants to make us like Jesus because he adores Jesus.
He knows the next thing that He wants to turn us into in terms of being Christ like. He only puts his finger on a part of our life that is not working, so He can give us an upgrade in that part of our life.
MOTIVATION
When we have that gentle pressure from the Holy Spirit, when we have that sensitivity, we will seldom need guilt as a motive. We only feel guilty when we are out of step with God. If we develop sensitivity to the HOLY SPIRIT, we will not need guilt as a motivation. Love will be our motivation.
Often, we allow things in our heart that shouldn’t be there and the real reason they are there is because we are not loving the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Love is our motivation.
When we are learning sensitivity to the Holy Spirit love is our motivation. If love is not our motivation, he will have to use guilt to bring us into a place of repentance, He would rather use love.
We must learn how to keep ourselves in the love of God. If we keep ourselves in the love of God it is so easy to hear His voice, it is so easy to know presence. What we are learning is partnership with the Holy Spirit who indwells.
HOLY SPIRITS MINISTRY
There are two aspects of the Holy Spirit’s ministry. One is His indwelling and the second is His empowering. With indwelling He is causing us to mature and to become like Jesus giving us victory over sin, making us Holy, giving us the character of Jesus.
With empowering He equips us to serve God. He gives us tools for ministry. He enables us to be effective and powerful as supernatural people.
People mostly have an understanding of the Holy Spirit as the empowerer. So, they are always asking the Holy Spirit to empower them so that they can be like Jesus. This is not how it works, He will not empower us to be like Jesus, He will indwell us to be like Jesus. empowering is about supernatural gifts it is not about fruit.
The fruit of the Spirit comes by His indwelling presence. We don’t ask the Lord for patience; it is not an empowering thing.
The Holy Spirit does not empower us to become like Jesus, He indwells us to become like Jesus. The fruit of the spirit comes with the package. He lives in us and establishes who we are in relationship between Him and the Lord Jesus.
The Holy Spirit has this agreement going on with Jesus and us. We are in Christ and the Holy Spirit is in us teaching us to become Christ like. So, we are becoming like Jesus , it going on all the time so we have to get into sync with it, we need to understand what is going on in the inside of us.
We don’t ask the Lord to give us patience, we thank the Lord that we have it as an indwelling part of who the Holy Spirit is. We need to understand the divide that has to come in our thinking here.
We do not want to be asking God to give us something from the outside that we already have on the inside.
John 20 Jesus breaths into the disciples and says receive the Holy Spirit, this is the indwelling. Acts 2 there is an empowering from heaven so that they can do the works of Christ, but Jesus gave them the Holy Spirit so that they could be like Him.
When we receive Jesus, we receive the Holy Spirit at the same time as an indwelling presence. When the Holy Spirit came upon them at Pentecost it was to put them in sync with heaven and the kingdom, so that they could do the works of the kingdom. They could be gifted, strong and powerful in terms of their ministry of the kingdom and their representation of it.
THE ROLE OF THE HOLYSPIRIT
The role of the holy Spirit is to keep the word alive and to teach us to be incarnational. That means we are a living embodiment of the truth. Whatever truth the Holy Spirit shows us we are meant to become it.
We must allow time in our schedule to become. We don’t want to get so busy doing that we forget to learn how to be. It takes time to process truth and to establish it in terms of our thinking, our language, and our behavior.
We must learn how to seal the Word to our heart, so that we can become.
The problem is that we hear a word from God, a message, a sermon, but we don’t take the time to meditate on it so that it becomes a part of us. We say good word brother, good word sister. But we don’t take the time to cultivate it, and then we go on to the next word, message. We are hearers of the Word, but not doers in the sense of being transformed.
So, we go to one meeting or conference to another, seeking a Word of the Lord. But we are not becoming the Word, we are not appropriating it.
In the culture in which the New Testament was written it was much slower, they processed things, they were much more in tune with the world around them and the world inside them.
These days we have so many things going on. So many pressures going on that we have to find our own place of rhythm. In terms of who we are, how we are made, how we get to walk through this life. How we flow through our day, how we flow through our week and our month is important. Knowing when our best time of the day is, knowing when our slowest time of the day is and using our day as much as possible effectively.
We are going to have to work out a rhythm with the Lord, it is going to become critical at some point.
The Holy Spirit helps us to pray. He will just tell us to pray about these three things, when we have many things to pray about.
What he is saying is let’s just talk for a hour together. It is not that He is saying to forget all the rest, he will take care of those things because he can read our heart, but what he wants is a conversation about certain things.
Prayer is two-way conversation, two way communication. Prayer is not just about talking but about listening. There are so many times that we hear what to do, while we are praying.
We are not praying to someone; we are praying with someone. So often in our prayer life we get to know what to do, suddenly the light comes on, what we need to do now is write it down.
THE HOLY SPIRIT IS A GENIUS AT PRAYER
Now I am talking about prayer and not intercession.
Intercession is where we birth things in the spirit. Sometimes people have strongholds in their life in which they need deliverance, and if we are not able to minister to them individually, we must intercede on their behalf to the Lord.
How many things do have to pray for today? Well let’s say 50, well let’s do one a minute, it is like machine gun prayer. We ask him what the best way is to pray about that, and then we do it, bang, bang, bang. Shotgun prayer is fun, we get a lot done. Anything done in the spirit is effective.
The Holy Spirit is a genius at this. He helps us to pray in all the ways that He likes to pray. If we don’t feel like praying, we ask the Holy Spirit who he would like to pray for, and we pray in the spirit referring to tongues. We follow his leadership. We are learning how to pray with His passion. He has a passion to pray. His passion is indwelling in us we just must tune into it.
I pray in tongues, on and off all day as I am doing other things in the Lord.
If He indwells us His passion indwells us, so we can never say that we don’t feel like it, we do, but we are not flowing in it at the moment.
The Holy Spirit is brilliant at rejoicing, because He is the most exuberant person you can know. When we don’t feel like rejoicing, He always does, we just must connect. He is in us so that all we have to do is to tune in, to connect. Sometimes this connection can have no emotion attached to it at first whatsoever, because it doesn’t need emotion attached to it, it just needs trust. We can trust like a much-loved child.
I can do all things through Christ, this is our default position, we become like a little child trusting in our father. We are a fascinating paradox. The Holy Spirit is astonishing at faith.
We learn from the Holy Spirit, when people don’t have faith for something, they can borrow ours. When we don’t have faith for something we borrow theirs.
But Lord I don’t have any faith for that, sure you do, I am in you, borrow mine. Everything the Holy Spirit has we can have. The Holy Spirit is a gift to us. Christ is a gift to us. Everything they are, is a gift to us. We have a mindset and a language that is based on fullness.
It is not based upon our capacity to receive. It is based upon our willingness to understand that God’s presence makes all of that a reality. Whether we feel it or not we can still trust for it. We can become the best person in the world because He indwells us. we can become the best person in the world at trusting. Why would we not want to be?
If we become like this child we will do O.K. A child could do this thing, a child could overcome the enemy. The child can bring it down from heaven. We are a child on the one hand, learning maturity on the other, when the pressure is on, we just become like a little child trusting in His Father. The child always wins because the child will trust implicitly. We need to let the child in us do the things that the adult might be scared of.
RIGHTEOUSNESS
The Holy Spirit forms the righteousness of Christ in us. He is holy and would appreciate us being the same, He has to live with us.
There is a way of thinking that He wants us to have. A way of seeing and speaking that sets us apart from the world, it makes us an enigma, a paradox; it will make us an object of scorn, contempt, and ridicule.
We don’t want the world’s approval, there is a cloud of witnesses that we want to hear cheering.
Being in sync with heaven may give us approval but is totally unnecessary for life, it is a bonus. We don’t expect the world to understand us.
If we are going to be somebody in the kingdom, righteousness is the only way to be. We cannot do it apart from being right, in our spirit, in how we think and speak and how we live.
We have to overcome old habits, they may die hard, but they still have to die. The Holy Spirit is going to be on our case about holiness. And He is not going to let us get away with it.
We can become sensitive to being holy. If we are sensitive to being holy, we will have some difficulties with people around us saved or unsaved who do not think the same way.
When we are born from above the Holy Spirit is a resident, so we don’t treat Him as a visitor. He provides ongoing experiences with the Lord. He already knows the places ahead of us where we will need encounters with Him.
By practicing sensitivity, we become sensitive to the place of encounter.
When we rush through the day, we are unaware of what is going on. A week goes by, and we have not had a meeting with the Lord, we have not had a meaningful conversation with the Holy Spirit.
We go through life, and we don’t see the places that he has set aside for us in the day. They are not always huge places. Sometimes it is just a place at the side of the road, a place where we can sit for a moment or two. There are places of encounter and experience that are allotted to us every day, we need to look for them and find them.
When we learn to live with a sense of presence, we can receive the gifts that are available to us each day. Then we start to walk within the abundance of God’s intentionality towards us. There are gifts available each day.
We need to practice a lifestyle that can spot them and see them, and this requires a sensitivity. Sensitivity means that we are open and aware and ready and willing for any kind of encounter with the Lord.
ALIVE TO ENCOUNTER
People go to conferences because they are looking for a place of encounter. If we want an encounter the last place we go is a conference. Our first place of encounter is in our relationship with God. We are forced into going to places for encounters because we are not alive to who God really is for us.
The Holy Spirit provides encounters and experiences because He loves to be at the center of everything. He doesn’t need to be the center of attraction, although He loves it, He is funny that way.
The Holy Spirit is alive to humor and laughter. In my younger days in the Lord, I would get myself into trouble, becoming fearful and fretful, and I would hear this laughter and He would get my attention and then show me the way out of the mess I got myself into, because He had my back, He has always been there for me.
The Holy Spirit loves to facilitate all our spiritual growth in this life. He loves to bring the very nature of God into our hearts.
The relationship between Jesus and the Holy Spirit is astonishing. Jesus has no problem saying that our relationship the Holy Spirit is better than if we knew Jesus after the flesh, when He walked the earth, it is to your advantage that I go away so that He can be with you.
The Holy Spirit says I just want to make you like Jesus because I love him. We are in the middle between these two individuals in our own heart space.
The Holy Spirit establishes grace for us. Grace is like a country that we live in, in our relationship with God. It is a major part of our relational connection before God. There are loads of grace all around us. We can be dense and still get something out of a situation.
He wants us to understand that this is the grace in which we stand. It is wide, it is deep, it is expressive.
He wants to teach us how to stand in grace and then how to be bold in that grace, how to come boldly before the throne of grace.
It is important to the Holy Spirit that He instructs and demonstrates the love the mercy and the kindness of God in how truth is presented and applied both to us and through us.
If the Father tells us to be kind and merciful to someone, the Holy Spirit will be that kindness through us. What God calls us to be or do the Holy Spirit will be to us.
God is righteous which means that He cannot command us to do those things and not be those things for us. The idea that God is mad and angry is a religious spirit. That is a worldly Christian construct. Those who minister these things, also manifest carnality.
Only once in my entire Christian life of 40 years did God get mad at me, because I use to keep getting myself homeless and be out in the freezing cold, so He spoke to me in an audible voice that sounded like thunder, and then provided a place for me to live.
LOVING OTHERS
We cannot injure another person without grieving the Holy Spirit. We need to take real care in how we think about other people. How we talk to them, how we live with people around us.
We don’t have to worry about this, we are going to get some astonishing practice in terms of learning how to love people who don’t love us. We are going to have some enemies to teach us how to love. We are going to have some human opposition to teach us how to be gracious and kind. And those people never come around at a time when it is convenient to us.
If we are practicing joy and rejoicing, we can sense the provision of God in everything. There cannot be anything adverse around us without something that is for us also being present in the same space.
We are learning to major in what is present for us, not focusing on what is there against us. If all our critics really understood how much they are contributing to the presence of God in our life, they would be seriously annoyed. We are either going to use those life experiences to grow spiritually or we are going to be used by those experiences in a negative way.
The Holy Spirit is brilliant at thinking along the same lines as Jesus. There is a way of thinking so incredible, so astonishing; it actually lifts us up in our circumstances.
He reveals the things that are hidden, there are things that God has hidden in our life right now, treasures and gifts, encounters and experiences that are actually in our life right now, but we can’t see them.
We need to discover a lifestyle that makes these things visible. It is called rejoicing and thanksgiving. We will be astonished at what having a thankful heart makes visible, the perspective that it gives us.
We would set time aside each day to give thanks so that we are tuned in to the right perspective. We would keep lifting our heart up before the Lord. If we did this, we would see the gift before the problem showed up. Some days we see a gift, and then when we look beyond it we see a problem and we realize that this is for that. We pick up something before we encounter the problem rather than afterwards.
The Holy Spirit makes our life a relational experience and encounter always. It is really helpful to consider the Holy Spirit a person and not a power source, he appreciates this. He does all the things that real people do. He thinks, he has a full range of emotions, he understands the place of the will, He is a chooser, a teacher, he prays, he can be lied to, grieved and disobeyed-acts 7. He is coequal in the trinity, not third in line.
Just as Jesus was sent by the father to be the visible manifestation of the invisible God, so the Holy Spirit was sent by Jesus to perfectly manifest His presence in the lives of His people.
The father sent Jesus to represent Him, Jesus said I only do what the Father is doing and only say what the father is saying-show us the father, if you have seen me you have seen him.
Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to represent Him. The Holy Spirit is always establishing Christ in us at every single opportunity. We become Christ like by the indwelling presence of the Spirit.
1corn 1: 21Now he which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God; 22Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.
We are sealed in Christ by the Holy Spirit. He indwells us and His chief role is to make us aware of presence always. We become a new creation in the presence of Jesus. We are in the presence of God because the Spirit of God indwells us. At some point we need to be trading on that in everything we do.
I am filled with the presence of God, I have the presence of God with me, there are days that we feel it and on the days that we don’t we love trusting. We will get to do both, we will get to trust and we will get to experience. If we are wise we will treat them both the same. If we experience the presence of God tangibly it is great, if we have to trust that the presence of God is with us, this is also great. It is the same thing. We don’t want to treat it as though it is different.
It is the indwelling presence of God in the Holy Spirit that provides us with the right, privilege, freedom and the authority in the spiritual realm and to express that in earth.
In genesis God breathed into Adam and caused him to be alive. Now Jesus imparts the very breath of God (the Holy Spirit) into His disciples and that is why we are alive unto Him. John 20 is receiving an indwelling life and breath to live by who God is; it is the right to become children of God. Acts 2 is the outpouring and the equipping and power in acts of service. John is the permission to be, acts is the power to do. John is the fulfillment of the promise that out of our inner being will flow, it is a release of presence. Acts is a release of power. We need the duality of the work of the Holy Spirit, one gives us power to become the other power to do.
We don’t ask the lord for power to become we realize we have an indwelling presence that enables us to do that.
The empowering presence of God can be noisy and loud, and visible. The indwelling work of the Spirit is often quite and hidden, it is still, it is peaceful. We would hardly know it was there unless we were looking for it. This is why it is important that we learn how to rest in the Lord and be still, When we are still we feel the Holy Spirits indwelling.
This is the reason we have meditation room, so that we can practice being still. We love stillness as a way of life. We just sit in His presence and feel the indwelling of His Spirit, the indwelling of the presence of God. if God isn’t tangible to us we are either learning how to trust, or we are not very good at asking or expecting that God would touch us.
When we receive Christ by the power of the Spirit, we receive the indwelling presence made real by the Holy Spirit. revelation of a person tells us how to be with them in relationship. We are learning that all the time in our own friendships, we are learning who we can trust for things. Who is trustworthy, who will keep their word, who can keep a confidence, who we can trust with things in our own heart. Revelation of a person, tells us how to be with them in relationship. Experience of a person denotes what we can expect from them in a crisis. Certain people will walk away from us. a real friend walks in when everybody else walks out. Encounter with a person tells us how much we can expect from a person in terms of integrity, trust and commitment. In difficulty some people will not want the phone call. Call me anytime but especially if you are going through something. We need to plan on being this kind of person to somebody else. If we sow this we will reap it. if we walk away, or cannot be trusted with something we will experience those things in our life with others.
When the disciples were in the company of Jesus on the earth, they walked in a tangible reality of His presence; his presence overcame every difficulty and supplied every need. When they were faced with needy people they didn’t know what to do with, they brought them to Jesus and would stand back and watch what He would do. When they were faced with a storm, Jesus would speak to it and it would be still. They had this tangible presence with them all the time. They learned in that three year period that the presence of Jesus was all they needed. When He laid hands upon them and sent them out they went out with His presence that’s what He gave them. Everything depended upon having Christ with them. Nothing has changed. Everything depends upon having Christ’s presence with us.
To get through every day, we have to meet every difficulty with the secret consciousness that the Lord is with me. That we can be prepared for anything and that our heart can be in perfect rest and joy, this is the Holy Spirit’s job. It is the holy Spirit’s job to make the presence of Jesus tangible. We need to partner with Him in the thing that He loves to do best in our life, to make Jesus real.
Two things Jesus promised about presence. I will not leave you comfortless; I will never allow you to be an orphan. You are a child of God learning to be a son of God. The second thing is that it is to our advantage to have the comforter with us.
When he promised the Holy Spirit, it was so that His indwelling presence would enable Him and the Father to take up residence in us. the Holy Spirit is absolutely crucial to everything that we are and everything we are going to become. He is the abiding presence and the work of that abiding presence is to glorify Christ’s presence within us. he is always going to show us Jesus. he is always going to speak to us, he is always going to connect with us, he is always going to be there. And He expects us to grow into a place where we have a deep sense of Christ within, because that is the hope of glory. He intends to make mercy and goodness follow us, to surround us, to be present with us. A lot of his work may be quite and still almost behind the scenes. There will be days when it is visible, where we cannot even stand up, we will be overtaken by something in those moments. He will always glorify Jesus, in us, to us, for us, and through us. We should expect it. to all who received him, he gave the power to become sons, the authority and the right and the privilege to become like Jesus. He loves to keep us in a state of unbroken fellowship and communion, this fellowship and communion ebbs and it flows from trust into something tangible and back again. If we are not feeling the presence of God we need to be trusting for the presence of God. When we are feeling the presence of God He doesn’t want us to be trusting for the presence of God, he just wants us to enjoy it. if we are not feeling presence we need to trust that He is there. We are always flowing so our communion ebbs and flows, what we do in the ebb is just as important as what we do in the flow. There is no difference in the two in terms of outcome. If we are in the ebb we can know the presence of God by trust. If we are in the flow we can know the presence of God by encounter. But we are going to know the presence of God either way. So we enjoy them for what they are. We don’t have to make a distinction between them, we can trust and we can experience both is a yahoo moment. We are indwelt so we are just getting over our bad self.
If we yield to the work of the Holy Spirit, we will know the reality of His presence. The place we start from is important, we start from being in Christ not moving towards Him. we are in Christ right now, all our current inability is part of the package. We are not undone by what we are not. What we are not is always outclassed by who He is. He knows what we are like with him and what we are like without him. The Holy Spirit is o.k. with who we are, he just has plans to change some things. And knowing the plan is critical to the relationship. The spirit reveals the presence of Jesus so that we can be made into His likeness. Christ dwells within by the power of the Holy Spirit. The presence of Christ depends upon one thing and it is the humility of dependence. I can do nothing of myself. All I can do is what the father is doing, I am totally dependent upon Him, I have to wait on him until I can see and hear. My meant and drink is to do the will of Him who sent me. This is the humility of dependence. Jesus depended upon presence. The one who knows us best loves us best. Jesus allowed the father to teach him, he let the father work in him, he permitted the father to carry out His own will. this likeness of Christ is founded on a deep dependence upon his father. This is the very essence of presence. It is the humility of dependence. I can only do what the father is doing; I don’t have any words to say of my own, I don’t have anything to do of my own.
People ask how we know these things in the spirit, we don’t know anything, we just speak what we hear, and we are just a conduit. I passed on to you what I saw about you. We didn’t know it before we saw it.
In our life we are being broken in the nicest possible sense. We are being broken to a place of deep humility, where we have the luxury of never having to trust ourselves again. Nothing we do is dependent upon us. this is a great release and relief. It makes us more sensitive to the nature and the character of God. we know that in and of ourselves we have no real power aside of presence. We need to love the presence of God more than anything else, more than we love ministry. We love presence more than power. If we love power more than presence we are going to ship wreck ourselves. There are many moving in power but behaving nothing like Jesus is. And that ship is just going to crash on the rocks at some point. If we love presence we will always have power in the thing that God has called us to do. The indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is where we love God and love life. In his presence we will always have power in the thing that God has called us to do.
The Holy Spirit has a passion for us that we need to pick up on what that passion feels and tastes like. any passion that we will have will come through our relationship with the Holy Spirit. all our excitement comes from Him. we can be massively encouraged all the time because of His presence. We get to make decisions about whether we are going to be discouraged or not. We don’t have to accept anything negative. The indwelling presence will always yea but there is a more excellent way. He has the ability to turn every negative into a positive, he is brilliant at that. We have to decide who we want to be. We need to ask the Holy Spirit how do you see me? There is a persona set aside for each of us. our persona is how we are known in heaven. this is not just some arbitrary work of the holy spirit, just generally I am going to make you like Jesus. very specifically he is going to make us like Jesus. within our calling, what he has got for us, he has a specific persona for us. How we are known in heaven is critical for our development.
Daniel was a man greatly beloved, that is what the angel said, that was how he was known in heaven. he was massively loved by God and felt it. he could stand in that whole nation against everything and win. It was the power of the one with the one.
Caleb was a man of a different spirit, as strong at the end of his life as when he first left Egypt. He loved the battle, relished the fight, when there was one last giant stronghold left, he told Joshua the lord has promised me this.
David was a man after God’s own heart. They all had a persona in heaven.
Gabrial came to john the Baptists father and told him what kind of person John would be. That was how he was known in heaven and he was not even born yet. Heaven was saying we already know who he is. This is who he is going to be.
God knows who we are and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is sent to establish our identity in Christ and His identity in us. all our tests in life and circumstances are all related to our persona. They are all related to how God sees us. we are all going to have different tests in life. All our tests are related to how heaven see’s us. this is why our tests are important. When we pass the tests we get to grow up in who we really are in Christ.
There is an indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, it is quite, it is purposeful, it is almost like a behind the scene’s thing, but we have to pay attention to it. letting our yes be yes and our no be no. when we give our word we keep it. being a river of encouragement, blessing everyone we meet, edifying people. Treating people with dignity. Learning to love people who don’t love us. learning how not to be negative. This quite work of the Holy Spirit in us is as important if not more important as pursuing the gifts, seeing people healed and set free.
Two works of the Holy Spirit one in us and one through us. when our life is under pressure we always conform to what is going on in the inside. We step back from ministry and take care of the real business. We work on the inward stuff all of the time. If we are going to become this person, then we need time alone with God. there is provision and treasure that we have to set time aside to appropriate. God wants presence more than power, but real power depends on presence. Jesus went aside from the disciples and the crowds into the mountains to spend time alone. We will be surprised at the provisions of God that he will bring into our lives, when we set time apart to spend with God. Jesus revered the Holy Spirit.
The holy Spirit is God to us, just like the father and the son. We rejoice in His passion for us. We are thankful for his willingness to present in all areas of our life. We are thankful for His passion for our development, that he loves encounters and experiences with us. he is an amazing teacher and he loves being in our life. He loves being the voice in our heart. He adores the Jesus in our heart. He is sent into our life as a gift to make us true as a person. he is tenacious, the embodiment of all that is good in heaven. the father and the son trust him implicitly to represent them in our heart and life. He is brilliant at everything. We are thankful for the way that he sees us. we are thankful for the provision that is around our life. He is teaching us the steps that we need to take right now. His grace is astonishing. His joy, love and peace are so outrageous. We are thankful for his indwelling our heart. He is the presence of God and he is here in our life. Everyday he is teaching us to work from presence not towards it. to work with who we are now and who we want to be. We ask for a fresh infilling of the Holy Spirit and a plugging of all the areas that leak so that we can learn to overflow. A fresh infilling of His presence. We ask for an experience and an encounter with Him that is tangible. So that we can feel and we can know. That tangible sign that he is here. We thank him for training and equipping us. we pray that we would live lives that are astonished and amazed, he does it really well. He is teaching us to live from the inside to the outside, we have a whole world inside that we can explore.