LIVING IN THE SPIRIT

LIVING IN THE SPIRIT

                Happiness is a product of the soul.  Joy is a product of the spirit. Happiness is a product of our emotions, but the joy of the Lord is our strength.

                “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Romans 15:13.

                If our religious experience is based in our soul, it will go up and down like an elevator. Some days you feel close to the Lord and some days you do not. Sometimes you are on a mountaintop and some days you are in the deepest of valleys. All of this is founded in the soul and the soul depends upon the state of your emotions to feel good and to feel spiritual.

                 A great deal of what goes on in Charismatic /Pentecostal circles is done to stir up the emotions in order to gain a spiritual high and it is nice to feel good, but true praying in the Spirit is not like that. So while your soul is up and down, up and down; you’re born again spirit is inhabited by God and He is unchanging and steadfast. Your spirit is not flighty. Instead you are seated with Christ in heavenly places. Eph. 2:6 Rather than being ecstatic and emotional like some people say, your spirit enjoys a quiet calm, a steady assurance and a steadfast faith.

                Praying in the spirit then is not done to achieve a spiritual high or an ecstatic experience, but to move beyond those emotions and into the quiet calm of the Spirit of God… beyond the clamoring and noisiness of the soul and into the realm of steadfast faith and revelation.

                What may have brought forth great emotions at the beginning is now something we do in obedience to God, realizing that we need more than our fickle minds to abide in Christ over the long haul. If we draw only from our minds (The soul), we are limited to whatever our minds may know, but if we can draw from our spirit in which God dwells, then we are drawing from an infinite source.

                Jude said in verses 20 and 21: “But you, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.”

                This is not a call to some self-fulfilling ecstatic experience. It actually refers to something Paul said in 1 Cor. 14:4 saying: He that speaks in an unknown tongue edifies himself, but he that prophesies edifies the church.”

                Some have deduced from this that praying in an unknown tongue is selfish. Well, that might be true if you are only seeking an ecstatic and emotional experience, but true praying in the Spirit enters us into that realm of the Holy Spirit that is beyond the clatter of our emotions and into the realm of revelation which is absolutely essential if we are to have something more than flighty opinions to share with others when we prophesy

                The devil has done everything in his power to put a smokescreen over the real thing so that people will avoid the true work and communication of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives. People chase after emotions, but emotions are of the soul. Emotions are not spiritual although they may disguise themselves as being spiritual, but in truth, the Spirit cannot be felt. The real Holy Spirit must be accessed by faith and praying in the Spirit gets us past our emotions and into the steadfast realm of faith and revelation.

                Edifying ourselves in this way then gives us something with which to edify the church because we are then speaking by the unction of the Holy Spirit and not just giving mental opinions. Do you want to hear from heaven, or do you just want to bat around the opinions of men?

                This does not make us infallible. After all, everything that comes forth from our spirit passes through the filters of our mind so that the messages can be colored by what we believe mentally. So our deepest prayer must be that we can become clear and pure channels of that which the Holy Spirit is saying to the churches. We humble ourselves before God. We lay down our pride of opinion at the foot of the cross. We lay down our spirit of argument and debate which surely comes from our worldly souls. We lay down our need to be right, which surely comes from worldly pride and we pray for the passion of conviction and power of God that can actually transform hearts into His image.

                We really do need to be taught by the Holy Spirit how to operate out of our spirit, rather than out of our souls. Logic has its place and the intellect can help us, but we are ministering to people who desperately need more than persuasion and mental agreement. People need… must be born again or they cannot see the kingdom of God. We need the Spirit of God to breathe eternal life into our spirits so that we can operate out of the Holy Spirit.

                How many times did Jesus say “Truly, truly I say unto you?” Here we see the passion of Jesus in trying to impart spiritual truth to those who were dull of hearing because they had not yet received the Holy Spirit. Finally, after His resurrection, Jesus told His disciples to sit tight. He said, “Don’t go anywhere or say anything, but tarry in Jerusalem until I have sent you the promise of the Father.”

                The Gospel of the kingdom was never intended to be preached in any other way than by the power of the Holy Spirit through people who had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

                Even though Satan has gotten into the mix and introduced his fake emotional substitute, does not mean that there is not a real thing to be sought. It was not easy at first to sort out the true from the false. It still isn’t easy, because in any given church that is Spirit filled, two people may be standing side by side. One of them has the real thing and the other doesn’t. One is operating out of the spirit and the other out of his emotions. One has a real and true relationship with God in prayer and a love for the truth, while the other is simply seeking after signs and wonders. One has lain all at the cross, while the other operates on pride and self- will.

                All real things come by way of the cross. All true gifts of the Holy Spirit come as we lay down our lives, our talents, our abilities and even our beliefs and we count it all as rubbish (dung) compared to that which only the Spirit of Christ can give. Phil. 3:8

                Like Paul, it is hardest for those who are highly educated to come to the foot of the cross. They often have so much to unlearn and so much pride in what they know, that it is hard for the Holy Spirit to reach through all of that and in fact He can’t until such a one is willing to lay it all down.

                Perhaps this is why God is going to use the nobodies to bring in the final harvest. Some of us nobodies are learning that without Him we can do nothing and so we rely upon Him more and more, crying out for revelation and Holy Spirit power to do what we cannot do.

                Don’t ever think that you don’t count in the kingdom. Don’t wait for the “professionals” to win souls to Jesus Christ. Souls are lost until they have the Spirit. We must be born again of the Spirit. John 3:3. We need so much more than conversion to a set of intellectual doctrines. We need Jesus dwelling in our hearts, by His Holy Spirit and in this arena the simple faith of a child is more effective than anything a university can teach you.

                Life in the Spirit is not for some sort of thrill-seeking experience or some emotional high. It is something we enter into by faith, so that we can become effective carriers of the Holy Spirit and Truth to others. “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and in truth.”  John 4:24. Spirit and Truth go together inseparably.

                Today we see a great falling away taking place because a large segment of the church sought after the signs and wonders and after prosperity rather than the full Gospel and so Satan was able to get in there and pretend to be Christ in their lives. They abandoned the life changing power of the Gospel and now they are seeking unity and power from the Pope, of all people. They are now following the spirit of antichrist.

                We must all learn to live in the Spirit. We must walk in the Spirit and pray in the Spirit, but the true Spirit of God will guide you into all truth John 16:13 and that truth is found in His Word and it is by the Word of God that we know if we are walking in the Spirit of Christ or the spirit of antichrist.

                “Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth is come, He will guide you into all truth; for he shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak: and he will show you things to come.” John 16:13.

                Notice that last sentence if you will. It says that the Holy Spirit will show you things to come. This is because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Prophecy. So the very fact that so much of the church seeks the signs and wonders of the Spirit while avoiding prophecy like the plague, tells me that they are being led astray. The Holy Spirit, among other things, puts us on God’s agenda and God’s agenda is spelled out in terms of prophecy. Prophecy tells us what God is doing and where He is headed. So if we hate prophecy, we hate God’s agenda and we become ignorant and static and easily misled.

                Receiving the true Holy Spirit then, will always lead us into the prophetic agenda of our Lord and that is what I see happening today. God is raising up a Remnant people who are getting on God’s agenda and they are studying His prophecies in order to know and understand God’s plan for these last days.

                So we pray in the Spirit and we study God’s Word and we give our all in order to be on God’s agenda, because ultimately, why would we want to be anywhere else? Selah