All tagged spirit
Are you unsatisfied with your prayer life? Do you ask in prayer, and yet feel unfulfilled when you rise from your knees? Do you recite scripture in your prayers and cry out, yet leave your prayer closet feeling as though God might not have heard you? Well, perhaps you are missing a key lesson that was taught by Jesus... maybe you need to listen as he teaches us to pray in spirit and truth.
Is the Word of God alive in you? Is the gospel of Jesus Christ breathing within your being? If we really desire the Word to come alive and to fill us with the life that only God can provide, then we need the Holy Spirit moving within us. It is the difference between a grade school child reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, (the work of the poet Lord Alfred Tennyson), and sitting at Tennyson’s feet as he reads the verse he wrote aloud. Reading God’s Word is much like this, the Spirit brings life to the Word of God for us with the voice and understanding of God Himself.
Are you an occasional practitioner of the Holy Spirit? Do you do the things of faith in your life by utilizing your spiritual gifts, but then once they have been accomplished set those gifts aside, to be used another day? Or do you possess Spiritual Grace, which is a state of faith where the gifts of the Spirit are so ingrained in you that they have become inseparable from who you are in grace?
You have heard of the gift of the Holy Spirit, and you see the results of it in believers around you, but despite your desire for it, you remain barren and unfilled. Perhaps you have been a Christian for a long time, and in all those years you have not received the Spirit. You may have consoled yourself by saying that it will never be yours and that you will suffer on without it, but listen as God tells you to take heart, and that the Spirit is your gift as well.
Have you ever been anointed with oil? Has a Pastor, or elder, prayed over you as they took oil, and applied it to you? Did you understand what was happening at that moment, or did you think it was merely an aromatic balm, a lotion; and simply something symbolic we do in church? No, it is much more than that, anointing is a sacred practice and is Holy; when we do this the one being anointed is made Holy, Consecrated, and set apart for the use of God. Let’s look at this further.
Do we hear the Gospel of Jesus and worship God as we should? We might go to church and sing songs, even pray together, chant, and recite creeds, but these are all simply physical manifestations of faith that any unbeliever can imitate. What I am asking is this... Do we allow our bodies and spirits to join as one as we worship with the Holy Spirit by praising God and give Him all the glory and honor for the things we do in obedience to His will? Can we honestly say that we worship Him as scripture tells us to… by loving Him, entering into relationship with Him, and in spirit and truth?
Are you an individual? Do you see your spiritual and physical selves as being unique and independent of one another? How about your personality? In fact, our physical being is what we are, and our spiritual self is who we are. So it is that as physical individuals we are referring to our bodies, and although they are alike in many ways, God has made them unique. Our personalities, on the other hand, are experienced more than seen, and are boundless in their nature such that only God can truly understand them. When Jesus speaks in John 17:22-23, which of these is he referring to?
We are creatures of both natural and spiritual construction. It is God’s desire that our natural selves be disciplined, and come under the authority of the spiritual, but that wild and unschooled nature is not a passive student in this transition. Have you gained control over your natural self? Are you waiting for God to make this choice for you? Well, He has His desire in the matter, but the choice remains yours.
Has Jesus changed our lives? Has He altered the very core of who we once were, or do we put Him on like a change of clothes each day to cover up the nakedness of the sin that still exists as we strive for righteousness? We often portray ourselves as being one way publicly, and then retreat into a private world that is quite different... which of these is who we actually are? Are there things we hide beneath a shiny veneer of paper thin faith as we live out both our spiritual and physical lives?
What bubbles up from within us during prayer? Do we ever begin to pray and then hear ourselves as if from some faraway place; speaking to God in a language of groans and utterances that we can’t translate into words, but feel perfectly conversant in within our hearts? Our spirit, and the Holy Spirit that resides within us are speaking to God in a dialect unknown to us but understood perfectly in Heaven.
Have you prepared yourself for the challenges of faith ahead? Are you ready for the trials that lie before you, or are you totally out of spiritual shape? Be as Jesus was... ready for the moment of God's calling... be ready to join the Father in the race of your life.
The strongest people of faith that I know are those who are poor in spirit. This life was not chosen for them, but they chose it for themselves. Do you know such people? Are you one of them? Perhaps you are wondering what it actually means to be poor in spirit. Well, the very first blessing that Jesus taught us in the Beatitudes was about those who are "poor in spirit" and He does this for a reason. These are the people who yield all they are to the Spirit of God. They have laid down their own strength for the strength of God Himself. Is this who we believe ourselves to be? Are we poor in spirit?
Am I blessed as Jesus said I would be when He taught the Beatitudes? Do I see them as simple precepts for life, or does their spiritual undercurrent shake me? These very easily followed rules for living can improve the life of an unbeliever or elevate a person of faith to a dramatically higher spiritual plane. Are the Beatitudes impacting our lives and how? Do we read these blessings with the eyes of an unbeliever, or with the spiritual eyes of a true Christian?
I am thinking back to the moment I professed Jesus to be my savior, and the events that brought me to that decision. I am considering the strength of the gospel that I heard and comparing it to all the preaching I have heard since then. What made the message strike home with me that day? What have I heard since?
I went to sleep at my normal early hour last night, but I was awakened in a sweat, having been unsettled by a dream. I was worried about my teenage grandson who is at a crossroads in his life and is having a particularly rough time determining which way he should go. Through the Spirit, I knew I had been given this dream to comfort me and to teach and guide one of my grandsons. God often speaks to me through dreams it seems, and I felt that this was yet another of those occasions.