Tag Archive - spirit

Who am I?

September 25, 2009 • 1 Comment

From BobHamp.com

“Watch, I’ll show you what I’m made of.” We say this when we want to show others our strength or capabilities. Wouldn’t it be cool to figure out what we are really made of? And I don’t mean like skin and bones. I mean how we are put together.

Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete. 1 Thessalonians 5:23

The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Genesis 2:7

In the Bible we find an account of the creation of man that can be really helpful in figuring out the make-up of our being: “God formed the man from the dust of the ground.”

  • God formed a physical structure which had no life in and of itself. “He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”
  • The Spirit of Life, the Spirit or breath of God entered the inanimate form
  • The man became a living being…( a self or a soul)
  • The man became an independent entity, still containing the breath of life, the Spirit of God.

Man became a physical form, made to be an independent being (a soul), containing the breath of God. What made the man who he was came from the fact that he was born from the breath of God.

Living from this center, from the Breath of God, meant that through his physical self, God Himself was empowering Adams life.

When Adam sinned, it was the Breath that left him. The “self” remained, but it was disconnected. A soul without the Spirit. While the spirit had been the way the man connected to God and the spiritual realm, the soul was how the man interacted with his natural environment. Without the Spirit his mind, his will, and his emotions, became his source of power, and source of truth.

When we are “born again” it is this Spirit which is birthed in us, or gives us birth from the Heavens (spiritual realm).

Once the Spirit of God is re-established in us, we are still faced moment by moment with the exercise of the will as to whether we will live from the Spirit within us, or whether we will live out of our soul.

Living by the Knowledge of Good and Evil still has us living from the soul, our disconnected self. Knowing God, the Tree of Life, restores a power source, greater than us.

Thinking from the mind, will and emotions is different than tapping into the Spirit of God and having your mind renewed. This is the kind of “thinking differently” we are after.

That which is flesh is flesh, that which is Spirit is confusing

June 1, 2009 • 0 Comments

From BobHamp.com

Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit (John 3:6).

Nicodemus, the one to whom Jesus spoke these words, could not have been more confused. Jesus might as well have downloaded Nic’s brain into a computer program. His head was spinning and this Rabbi was confusing him. He recognized the words, but the meaning of the words seemed just out of reach.

This distinction between spirit and flesh still challenges each of us today. As we learn to “live by the Spirit” it can be like learning to speak a foreign language, or learning to communicate with a member of the opposite sex.

Engaging God’s Spirit can cause strong emotions, but sometimes strong emotions come from our flesh, and prevent us from tuning into God. Allowing God’s Spirit to speak through us can cause a great surge in confidence, but this very confidence can become dangerous pride. Encountering God’s Spirit can result in powerful experiences. These very experiences can later become a distraction from an ongoing experience of God’s presence. Some of the things produced in us by His Spirit can be imitated without His presence, as we fall again into self-reliance.

See the trap? Measuring outward experience may not necessarily tell us anything at all about whether or not we are being moved by the Spirit. In fact, measuring by outward experience can convince us wrongly that we are living by the Spirit.

When we are dependent on and guided by the Spirit of God, it is a strange partnership between our willingness to grow in dependence and familiarity and God’s willingness to be patient and train us. God makes a move, then it is our turn. He initiates an engagement and watches to see what we do. He wants to inform us, then empower us and then demonstrate Himself through us. His goal is to get us to learn to walk out the whole process empowered by His working.

So we Hear God. Now what. We heard because He spoke. But we focus on our hearing.

“I’m pretty good at hearing God,” we think (or worse, say).

Then we proceed to tell others what we heard, and how we heard, and how cool it was. At some point we diverge from God’s goal. We think His goal is that we go now, and do what He said, regardless of whose energy we engage. God is standing back at the starting line to see how far we will run before we realize He has not moved since He spoke. Will we run ahead without Him?

Step by step Living by the Spirit starts to make sense. Well, that’s not really the right way to say it. We begin to understand. Well, that’s not really the right way to say it either. We grow in familiarity and surrender. We become less willing to take another step without Him. We become more sensitive to His impulse and the shifting of our wayward motives. We grow familiar with the “groove” of being moved by Him.

It is a maturing process. Can it be measured? Sure it can; watch for these signs: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, meekness, mercy, and self-control. If these qualities are not in you, and are not produced around you consider the source. Spirit or Flesh.