Start Your New Life Today (4 page)
We should learn to value unseen things in the spiritualrealm more than the things we see with our physical eyes.
Your body tries to boss you around. The combination of the soul and body, “the flesh,” fights the spirit to do as the soul wants. For example, on a Sunday morning when you wake up, your spirit may say, “Let’s go to church!” but your body may say, “I don’t want to get out of this bed.” Some people may obey the body and go back to sleep; other people will follow the spirit and say, “Body, I don’t care how you feel—we’re going to church!”
After a person is born again, the flesh wars against the spirit, and the spirit wars against the flesh. They are continually antagonistic toward each other (see Galatians 5). The Bible does not say the lusts of the flesh will go away and you will never be tempted. The flesh will keep warring against the spirit, screaming demands at you that will lead you into trouble if you continually walk according to the flesh: “Give me a banana split.” “Buy those clothes and charge them to a credit card.” “I want a donut.” “I want a donut again today.” “I want two donuts today.” “I want three donuts today.” “Where are my donuts? Drive to the store and buy my donuts.”
The Bible does say if you walk in the spirit, you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. To live in victory, a believer must understand the functions of the spirit, the soul, and the body and know how to discern the difference between the leading of the Holy Spirit and the desires of the flesh—what it thinks and feels and wants. A believer must know how to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, or as the Bible calls it, “walking in the Spirit” (see Galatians 5:25), in order not to fulfill the lusts of the flesh.
Spirit and soul should work together, and the body should act as a servant to both. You walk in the spirit by learning to make right choices, and letting the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, Who now lives in your spirit, empower you.
Your Spirit—The Real You
Do You Want Misery, Mediocrity, or Victory?
I
am convinced only a few people ever enjoy the fulfillment of God’s perfect plan for their lives because they don’t know how to listen to God’s leading or know how to follow Him. We can live the abundant life if we learn to listen to the leading of the Holy Spirit who came to live in us at our new birth.
Even though I had accepted Jesus as my Savior, sincerely loved and wanted to obey Him, and was very active in church for years, I was miserable. I understood I was saved by faith and would go to heaven, but I did not live in victory and was not affecting anybody else in a positive way. I am not sure my daily witness would have encouraged anyone else to make a commitment to Jesus.
During all those years as a Christian, I didn’t realize God wanted to communicate directly with me. I certainly didn’t understand He intended for me to enjoy victory in my daily living and simply enjoy life itself. I was unhappy and dissatisfied, and people like that usually make others unhappy. I went to church on Sunday but it was not enough. I longed for a deeper relationship with God and I did not know how to have one. Just going to church and trying to follow rules would never give me the deep contentment and joy for which I longed.
As I sought God for something deeper, He began teaching me His Word and it renewed my mind and changed the way I thought about everything. Through His Word, He helped me understand He does want to communicate with us individually and has a plan for our lives to take us to a place of peace and contentment. God’s will is for us to attain knowledge of His plan through His divine guidance. We should do good works, but they should be done out of our relationship with God and not as a method of trying to earn something from Him. I serve Him because I love Him, not to get Him to love me. God’s love for us is unconditional. He cannot be bought with good works.
God does want to communicate with us individually and has a plan for our lives to take us to a place of peace and contentment.
Knowledge is progressive and we don’t learn everything we need to know about Jesus overnight. Jesus told His disciples He still had many things to say to them, but they would not be able to grasp everything then. Jesus was going away, but the Father would send the Spirit of Truth to guide them and to teach them all things and bring to their remembrance everything Jesus told them. It was advantageous to them for Him to go away, because without His leaving, the Comforter (Counselor, Helper Advocate, Intercessor, Strengthener, Standby)—the Holy Spirit—would not come to them.
When Jesus spoke these words He was talking to men with whom He had spent the previous three years. They were with Him day and night, yet He indicated He had more to teach them. You would think if Jesus was with you personally for three years, day and night, you could learn all there is to know. From a human perspective, I think if I had one uninterrupted month with people, I could tell them everything I know, but Jesus said to expect more. He was telling the disciples, and us through His words recorded in the Bible, He will always have something to say to us about new situations we are facing. The Father would send His Holy Spirit to them, and us, to help. The Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth, advise us, and empower us to live the life God desires for us.
When we receive Jesus, we become adopted sons and daughters of God. Everything Jesus has is ours in our joint inheritance. We need only learn how to receive it by faith, and that means we may not always feel or see anything, but we choose to believe God’s Word as truth. Jesus became flesh and experienced the types of things we experience and understands our needs (see Hebrews 4:15–16). He was led by the Spirit, just as we can be led by the Spirit. He overcame temptation, just as we can overcome temptation. He chose to come to earth in a fleshly body so He could be our High Priest and understand everything we go through.
Jesus was confined to a body, just as we are, and could only be in one place at a time. But the Holy Spirit is able to be in every single one of us everywhere we go, all the time, individually leading and guiding us. God knew we would need help in understanding His plan for us and sent the Holy Spirit to dwell inside every believer. The Holy Spirit tells us what He hears from the Father. The Holy Spirit is our Guide, our Teacher of Truth, our Counselor, our Helper, and our Comforter (see John 16:7). He will never leave us nor forsake us. When we learn how to listen to Him and follow His leading, we can trust Him to lead us on the right path every day.
Follow His Lead
T
here are three functions of your spirit. The first is fellowshipping with God. The spirit is the place where you fellowship with God and the place you really hear from Him. The second is intuition or discernment. Intuitive living by your spirit comes with learning to “hear” God inside yourself in a way the Bible calls “a still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). It is an inward witness, a peace, a spiritual knowing different from head knowledge or intellect. It is a way of knowing things that don’t come from stored knowledge or because you learned them somewhere along the line. It is a deeper knowing, a sensing of truth. Life is so much easier when we simply follow the inward witness rather than ignore it. This means if you don’t have peace about something, don’t do it.
There are times when I know that something is not right for me to do and I don’t even know why. Everyone else might be doing it, but I sense in my spirit it is not what God desires for me. I have learned to trust that “inward witness” even more than I trust my own thoughts, feelings, or will. It took a long time to make the transition, but life is much better now that I have.
The third function of the spirit is conscience. Your conscience is the best preacher you’ll ever hear, and it preaches to you all day long. Many people have no personal relationship with God, no real fellowship with Him, because they have a seared or hardened conscience. They have ignored their conscience for so long it is no longer soft and tender. They are able to do wrong things and not sense much conviction. Pray that God will soften your conscience and learn to listen to it because it is God trying to speak to you.
There are also people who have an overactive conscience. They tend to feel guilty about everything. The only remedy for this is a thorough study of God’s Word in order to learn what God’s will really is. He wants us to enjoy a life of freedom, yet not use that freedom as an excuse to sin.
Walking in the Spirit means listening to the advice your friend Jesus is giving you through learning the Word and listening to God’s Spirit living in you. It means following your enlightened conscience and not doing something if you don’t have peace about it; basically, doing what God tells you to do. If you are not accustomed to walking in the Spirit, it will take time to learn how to do it. But God is patient and will continue to teach and change you.
Walking in the Spirit means listening to the advice our friend Jesus is giving you through learning the Word and listening to God’s Spirit living in you.
Over the last few years, I’ve developed a habit of occasionally stopping for a minute to see what I sense in my spirit about something. When the devil is putting wrong thoughts into your head, accusing you of being incapable or unable to succeed, it is amazing how taking a minute to hear from God will set you back on track.
In the early years of my ministry, my mind would start telling me,
You’re not going to make it. This is not going to work—it’s stupid. Nobody cares what you’re doing. You’re not even hearing from God, anyway. You have no business trying to teach people anything.
The enemy, the devil, was using those kinds of thoughts to accuse me and keep me from working for God. You may have times in your life when your thoughts are saying,
Give up
and your feelings are right in line. You want to give up; you feel like giving up, perhaps other people even tell you to give up, then you get quiet somewhere for a minute and say, “Now, Lord, what do You have to say about this?” You will hear Him say, “Keep on pressing forward and never give up.” No wonder the Bible says in Psalm 46:10 (
KJV
), “Be still, and know that I am God.”
The closer you grow to God, the easier it is to develop a lifestyle of making the right choices. Philippians 2:12 says to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. This means after your salvation at the new birth, you build your relationship with God by studying, learning, praying, and fellowshipping with God. You let your relationship with Him affect every area of your life. God is not willing to live in what I call a “Sunday morning box.” He wants to invade every day of your life and be involved in everything you do. I encourage you to turn your will over to God and let the Holy Spirit work that salvation through your soul—let Him think through your mind, teach you to love what He loves, and use your emotions and your will to serve Him. Many people would be comfortable using all their emotions at a football game, but they feel uncomfortable displaying emotions in their worship of God. We need to realize that He wants us to use everything He has given us in serving Him. Make all of your resources available to God. Be willing to use your energy, talents, and finances in serving Him. As you let His light shine through you, it affects the people around you in a positive way and they begin to want to know Jesus too.
The Right Truth at the Right Time
W
hen Jesus told His disciples the Father would send the Spirit of Truth to guide them into all truth, He was describing a method the Holy Spirit uses to free us in areas where we struggle. In 1976 I reached a point in my life when the Holy Spirit knew I was ready to face truth and let Him do a thorough work of healing in my life.
Many of us live in a false reality we have developed to protect ourselves. I spent a lot of my life avoiding issues that needed to be dealt with. I blamed other people, felt sorry for myself, and had a bad attitude, but none of that was changing any of my circumstances. One of my difficulties was developing and maintaining good relationships. I was convinced all the other people in my life were the problem, and they were the ones who needed to change for us to get along.
One day, as usual, I was praying for my husband to change in some area, when the Holy Spirit began revealing a truth to me He knew I was ready to face. As He began speaking to my heart—impressing on me the truth I needed to see—I saw the source of the problems I had been blaming on everyone and everything else. As I was praying, the Holy Spirit caused me to realize the source of the problem was not my husband. The source of the problem was me! I was devastated emotionally for three days as I looked in shock at the extent of the deception into which I had led myself by believing everyone except me was the problem. The Holy Spirit gently unveiled the truth to me of what life was like for the members of my family who had to live in the same house with me. I saw I was hard to get along with, impossible to keep happy, critical, selfish, dominating, controlling, manipulative, negative, nagging—and this was just the beginning of the list.
It was extremely difficult for me to face this truth, but as the Holy Spirit gave me the grace to do it, in that year I began a life of learning how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit working inside me to transform the ashes in my life into beauty. My life became a series of new freedoms, each preceded by a new truth the Holy Spirit revealed to me. Many of the truths I teach people today came out of that initial truth the Spirit of Truth led me to in 1976.
Truth is wonderful. Jesus said it will make us free. But as wonderful as truth is, we must be ready to face it. Truth is often harsh; it shocks us into a reality we may feel unprepared to see, but if God is revealing it He knows the time is right. As tough as it might be at the time to press through the pain rather than avoiding it, we will be so glad to live in the freedom and rewards it brings.