Sometimes, God asks us to do something unreasonable, and our minds try to talk us out of it. The mind deals with information, and the spirit with revelation. It can be difficult for those two elements to coexist. But we must submit our mind to our spirit.
1 Corinthians 2: 14 but the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. We can only discern prophetic words in our spirit.
We must return to the roots of our inherent spirituality and begin to believe as the early Christians did, who practiced their walk with the Lord.
When we become Christians, we did not invite Jesus into our head: faith is primarily an affair of the heart(spirit) not the mind. Our mind will undoubtedly play its part but not from a place of logic but spiritual intuition because we must all daily be renewed in the spirit of our mind-Ephesians 4: 23.
We received salvation from a fragment of the truth. We did not know the whole Bible nor the history of Jesus. Someone and the Spirit touched our heart and we opened up to the claims of the Kingdom.
Our spirit needs less data than our mind. Our spirit receives revelation, our mind can only process information. When Jesus walked on water his disciples were terrified thinking it is a ghost. Peter said if it’s you Lord bid me come. Jesus did not throw Peter an instruction manual on how to walk on water. He just smiled and said one word. Come, was all he said and on the strength of that one-word Peter walked on a substance he had no business being on, except that he had permission.
The mind acting alone will always require more information. It will have more questions and we’ll want everything dotted and crossed before it makes a decision. The problem with that is that God will not explain himself. He does not make requests for our approval.
The spirit is destined to respond to revelation, the mind is not. When we are renewed in the spirit of our mind it is because it has come under the rule of the spirit regarding revelation.
The spirit responds to God’s word in revelatory form. The mind follows the spirit, and our mind is empowered to think through the “how to” of God’s instruction. The command instruction to obey comes from the Spirit to our spirit.
The way that we come into salvation is the way that salvation is sustained. As Jesus is established in our heart by the Holy Spirit we are also taught how to think as he thinks. Our mind must be under the rule of our spirit or we are rendered useless for believing the impossible. The mind by itself can only rise to the possibility of something miraculous. We give mental assent to something without acknowledging the reality of it in spiritual terms.
It is our spirit that recognizes the voice of God and sees his imprint on a situation. Our spirit rises to the probability that something amazing is about to occur. We believe.
Repentance is not just about thinking again, it is about turning our thinking away from mere logic to having the mind of Christ. True repentance is a wonderful invitation to think as Jesus would think about the issue or situation in front of us. Faith will always be at the mercy of our logic. A logical, analytical mind will always talk us out of a supernatural experience. It is not difficult to tell who a soulish Christian is for they always need reassurance. Their head is in charge of their spirituality, so faith always gives way to logic and reason. The possibilities of the Holy Spirit coming into our lives with his wonderful cheerfulness and abounding confidence is always much reduced when intellectualism rules our faith.
Of course, I realize that we need great thinkers and key intellects in the Kingdom, but never at the expense of faith, childlike trust, and the creative imagination so vital to a life being led by the Spirit.
Our hearts must increasingly come to a new place of enlightenment where we can see in the spirit.
Ephesians 1: 13 in him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation-having also believed, you were sealed in him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of his glory. For this reason I too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all the Saints, do not cease giving thanks for you, while making mention of you in my prayers; that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him.
I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of his calling, what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the Saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of this power towards us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of his might which he brought about in Christ, when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. He put all things in subjection under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
The Holy Spirit comes to each believer to enable them to realize, receive and inherit every promise that the father has set aside for them. Our faith grows exponentially as those promises become a reality and we learn progressively to live in the favor of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
In that context for life, it is so vital that the eyes of our heart are enlightened. It is part of our inheritance in Christ that we perceive our life from the father’s perspective. Knowing what the Lord thinks about any issue is a normal and necessary part of our relationship with him. The role of the Holy Spirit is to make us aware of how the Lord is thinking and to release to us in visual form the insights and intentions of the father. We have eyes to see and ears to hear all that the father would impart to us. This is such a tremendous, close, and intimate relationship that we have with Jesus. There is no value in ignorance when our destiny is confidence. They that know their God shall be strong and do exploits-Daniel 11: 32.
We are learning to live from our inner witness of the Holy Spirit and his presence in our lives. He is fully aware of heaven’s plans and lives to make us just as conscious and familiar with the father’s intention. Holy Spirit is a brilliant teacher who seeks to develop our understanding and practice of seeing from the heart and living in a place of sensitivity. On every level he instructs us in righteousness, which is right living across all the spectrum of life, particularly in the matter of faith and obedience.
There is no substitute for sensitivity and obedience as the driving force of childlike trust and mature faith. We are compelled to become sensitive; Finely tuned, susceptible and responsive to the father’s nature. Our heart will develop an acute sense of perception that is delicate and powerful. This is an awareness not rooted in head knowledge but is an actual spiritual, emotional, physical and mental experience of God. The father overwhelms all our senses and faculties in his pursuit of fullness in our lives. Fullness is concerned with touching every part of our being and releasing us to have great awareness of the love and joy of the Lord.
The Holy Spirit will give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that our knowledge of God does not get stuck at the mental level. Knowledge in this context is always tied to into an experience of God rather than just an intellectual notion of him. knowledge that does not lead to a deeper revelation in spiritual experience of God is not worth the knowing. Our mind is touched but our heart is unchanged.
We are enlightened so that we will know what the mind of the Lord is and how to experience his thinking over us. The first commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind-Matthew 22: 37.
This involves loving the Lord with everything that we are and have within ourselves. Our mind comes last in order of loving simply because it can never be first. The mind can only follow the spirit and must never lead. When the mind leads, we are reduced in our capacity to experience. It is our heart that is opened to Jesus. It is our heart that has received his life and presence. It is our heart that is the doorway to an ongoing experience of His life.
The very center, the spirit, the inner man of our life in God must be born again. We now live from the inside out. God speaks to our spirit to our mind. Our soul comes under the rule of our inner man (our spirit). Our will and our emotions are governed by intimacy and sensitivity to the nature of God. In that context our mind is set free to love the Lord and to enjoy his thoughts.
Wisdom and revelation enter our spirit and our thinking, and our mindset is renewed and enables us to live at a higher level of thought and perception. Wisdom is superior to knowledge. Wisdom in a Christian context is the understanding of how the Father sees; how he thinks, and how he likes to do things. The renewing of our mind is thinking the way God thinks. It is through wisdom that we develop a knowledge of God and his ways. Knowledge emanating from wisdom is the perception of thoughts leading to an experience of God’s nature and a way of behaving that is consistent with confidence that produces faith.
To love God with your mind is to be drawn into an invited experience of knowing his thoughts. I love the way God thinks! When we allow ourselves to think as he does our minds ceases to be a battleground and instead become a place where we love the Lord and his thinking. Meditation, the act of deep thought, becomes a place of worship and intimacy with the mind of Christ. We are designed to practice intimate thinking with the Lord Jesus.
Our thoughts therefore lead us to joy and the presence of God. Our mind, following our spirit, is now enabled, and empowered to support the heart with love and intimate thinking. Thus, we are consistently renewed in the spirit of our mind so that we are consumed by God’s mindset.
This is true enlightenment! It can only occur as the eyes of our heart are opened and made aware of the greatness of God. We are never overwhelmed by life when we are established in the majesty of God’s loving kindness. Enlightenment makes us luminous in the glory of God’s nature. We see the light about everything, and our spirits are made light. We walk in the light of his thinking, intentionality, and loving intimacy. He lifts up the light of his countenance (the face or its expression) upon us (Psalm 4: 6). This is a description God smiling when he looks at us.
He causes his face to shine upon us (Psalm 80: 3, 7 19). His very graciousness is a wonderful refresher leading to total peace and blessing (Deuteronomy 6:22-27).
From the place of wisdom and revelation our heart is enlightened and enlarged to live in a place of simplicity, sensitivity, and trust so that we will know who God is for us at any moment.
Meditation is not just a place of deep thought. It is also a place of deep worship in intimate contemplation of the nature of God. Out from that place of internal rest and stillness we hear the word of the Lord, and our thinking is corrected.
This is one of the laws of life in the Spirit, when God speaks from his heart we can never respond in our head. He is not looking for mental assent but a heart response. He does not seek our logical agreement or permission. We must respond in the channel of the message heart to heart.
The father always communes twice over an issue, speaking directly and indirectly. When our heart has received, responded, and obeyed his word then our mind is flooded with revelation releasing strategies and tactics of how to move forward in our obedience. Faith grows by hearing and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10: 17). Our trust and sensitivity to the Holy Spirit promotes obedience which creates movement and momentum. Faith is active. Our mind needs to become responsive.
This is precisely what being led by the Spirit means! Our mind serves our spirit. Knowledge serves faith, and our will is serving our obedience causing us to have greater experiences of God in the context of our current circumstances.
This is a critical discipline for us to recover at this time, otherwise what the Father speaks to us will make no sense. The heart response opens the mind to receive all the possibilities. Your mind must serve your spirit, or you cannot fully know God. If we respond to God’s heart only with our head, then logic and reason will close the door to the supernatural. We will be reduced to only having options in the natural world because the possibilities of heaven will be shut out.
When the eyes of our heart are enlightened our sensitivity to the Holy Spirit enables our creative imagination to begin to see what God is saying. This is so vital if we are to believe all that the Lord has in store for us. Our assignment in the Kingdom is in direct proportion to our identity in the eyes of the Father.
Moses had to lead over a million people from bondage to a tyrant into freedom, and then into full release as a nation in their own territory. For this to occur he had to see himself in a particular way. The Lord needed Moses to step up into a higher place of awareness so that his heart could operate at a higher dimension of faith and power.
In that context the Lord speaks these remarkable words to him in exodus 7:1-then the Lord said to Moses, see, I make you as God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet.
If you do not see it, you cannot become it. Identity must be visualized before it can be realized. If Moses does not see this high place of living, then he will be forced to speak to Pharaoh from a lower state of being. He will be reduced to asking for favors, just like all the rest of the people at Pharaoh’s court. Faith is then diluted to supplication instead of command. It is vital that Moses speaks to Pharaoh from this heightened sense of who he is in the Lord. Moses has to come to Pharaoh from a higher level of identity than Pharaoh himself possesses. Anything less and the mission is not possible. See! I have made you as God to Pharoah. In other words, by the time that the father has finished with Pharrell, he will only be able to view Moses in his limited understanding of things. That is, Moses must be some sort of God in human form. Ironically this is the spiritual perception that pharaoh has been taught to have of himself. This means then that the king of Egypt is about to meet more than his match at this level! Pharaoh has massive authority and will only respond to someone who demonstrates more.
We see the same truth about visual perception in Joshua 6:1-now Jericho was tightly shut because of the sons of Israel; no one went out and no one came in. The Lord said to Joshua, see, I have given Jericho into your hand, with its king and the valiant warriors.
See! See in your heart that I have given you Jericho, it’s king and the best of his battle-hardened warriors. The heart response is to see what the Lord is proclaiming over you and to return that image to the Lord in confession and declaration. Lord, thank you that you have made me this person already in the spirit. I confess that my life and current experiences are therefore all equiped to cooperating with the Holy Spirit to enable what you see to become my absolute present reality. Therefore, I declare that my will is given over to you that the person you see in me shall emerge on this day for such a time as this. Or as Mary put it concisely “behold the bondservant of the Lord, be it done to me according to your word” (Luke 1: 38).
Everything in Christ Jesus is yes and Amen! That’s heart says yes! Gods heart says Yes! In matters of the heart between you and the Father, reason must take its cue from divinely inspired imagination moving in trust and faith. The only time God will speak to your reasoning is when you have sinned. Then he says: come now let us reason together, though your sins be as scarlet, yet they shall be as white as snow (Isaiah 1: 18). Even here he invites us to see, by using pictorial language. Mostly the father invites our hearts into an experience of trust.
Proverbs 3: 5 trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.
When our heart produces trust, our mind is empowered to understand in a way that God requires for that moment. If our heart does not blame us, then we always have confidence before God (1 John 3: 21). What are heart imagines under the Holy Spirit, your faith can realize.
1 Corinthians 2: 9 but just as it is written, things which the eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him. For to us God has revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.
What God has prepared for us cannot be seen or heard until it has entered our heart. Our inner man is enlightened and then we see the purpose of God and we are open to hearing on a deeper level. Our identity is out of alignment with God’s essential nature until we see him as he is. He builds everything out of what we have seen.
When Jesus asked the question whom do people say that the son of man is”? He was essentially asking how do they see or perceive me? What you think about God is the most important thing in the world. That perception is driven by what you see that he is for you. Simon Peter received a spiritual perception of Jesus that changed his name and his personal identity (Matthew 6: 13-20). When we fail to see, then our identity is out of harmony with God’s perception of us and our inheritance will be unclaimed.
This is the most vital part of prophecy. When we prophecy we encourage people to see who they are in Christ. We restore them to an affair of the heart. We build up their confidence and their ability to know the heart and mind of God. All prophetic people are ambassadors of reconciliation, restoring people to their rightful identity. Prophecy restores the heart.
A lifestyle of heart lead responsiveness to the Holy Spirit is the essence of the prophetic gift and ministry. This type of sensitivity to God’s name and nature is the heartbeat of prophecy. Approaching the heart of God in prophesy is therefore about ruling in life through the heart. We recognize that our heart is the door that Jesus is knocking on continually (Revelation 3: 20). When we open that door in each situation then we have an experience of God in fellowship that is ongoing and powerful in its intimate nature. Our mind is incredible in establishing the truth that our heartfelt experience has opened to us. Spirit and mind working together will enable us to be transformed in life. The issue that is such a paradox is always about primacy. A paradox is two apparently conflicting ideas contained in the same truth; we have to die to live; give to receive; be last to be first. These are all paradoxes. Opposing truths acting out of alignment not competition. The church is both a body (fluid, changing, flexible) any building (rigid, unchanging and inflexible) the description of the church is both/and, not either/ or. The description of the Apostolic ministry is both agricultural and construction in a metaphor. One is organic, the other is organized. We need both, but the order is critical. We can only build the church by growing people, thus the organic has primacy.
The prophetic gift moves in accordance with Apostolic purpose and divine intent. The keyword in prophecy is always edified. Prophecy takes us from a poor perspective of God and self into a much richer outlook on life, so that we are built up in the natural and the spiritual dimension together. All prophecy has its roots in edification, exhortation, and comfort. Words that are hard to say must come from this foundation so that people can be built up in their revelation and experience of God.
We must come to a place where our spirit is a witness to what God is saying. Then we can release our mind to fall in line behind the word, begin the process of understanding it, and eventually speak it out. Our minds will often clash with the revelation we have received. Our minds will try to constrain us, telling us not to speak out the word we have heard. It may seem illogical. To combat that, we need to learn to move in the peace and relaxation of God. We prophecy as far as our heart will allow us to.