Genesis 1:26-27 (Amplified) tells us, "God said, Let Us (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), make mankind in Our Image (after Our Likeness), and let him have complete authority over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the (tame) beasts, and over all the earth, and over everything that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in His Own Image, in the Image and Likeness of God He created him; male and female He created them."
The part of us that God created in His Image and Likeness, was our spirit. Jesus said in John 4:24 (Amplified), "God is a Spirit (a Spiritual Being), and those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and Truth (reality)." The flesh part of man was made for contacting this physical world. It was the earthly house that contained our spirit. 2Corinthians 5:1 (Amplified) says, "For we know that if the tent which is our earthly home is destroyed (dissolved), we have from God a building, a house not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens."
The "tent" Paul writes about, is our earthly body, in which our spirit dwells while we're here on earth. Your spirit dwells in this body and is the part of you which God made in His Own Image and Likeness. In order to be as He is, we must learn to function by and through our spirit. We've only lived, had contact and understood the world, by our senses, since Adam's fall. After Jesus' resurrection, our spirits have been made alive again and in fellowship with the Father again. We never knew how to live by the spirit, before being born-again, so we contained our new creation spirit person in this body and subjected it to only sense knowledge of God.
Our faith has been so limited by natural man's thinking, that the expectations we have for our new creation, born-again spirits, are limited to simply going to Heaven, when we die. This is the most important part of believing for ourselves, but isn't the most important part of our helping others. We hold onto our faith with the Holy Spirit's help and we clean up our natural man from sinning, but we've limited God from using us to set the captives free from the things besetting mankind.
During Jesus' earthly ministry, He produced the will of God even in this natural realm and thus, He revealed the heart of God to those who didn't believe. We will only walk in a very limited reflection of our Heavenly Father, until we understand the Spiritual aspect of our salvation. We usually judge ourselves by such progress we make in the flesh, as not drinking, cussing, fornicating, and stealing. We've neglected the Holy Spirit's teachings of our true person, the one made in God's Image and Likeness. We've remained spiritual babes, in our new creation person.
The struggle to keep our natural man in control, becomes less and less, as we learn to walk by the spirit. When the spirit dominates the flesh,, through the teachings of the Holy Spirit and God's Word, the flesh loses control and we live holy before God. Satan couldn't stop us from becoming born-again once you finally called upon and believed in Christ Jesus, you became a new creation. This act of faith changed your entire destiny and satan no longer had any hold on your spirit. The only thing he had left that could control the new creation, was your fleshly, carnal person that didn't know God.
Satan's master plan was to keep the Church carnal in our thinking, so he could keep the ability of God from working through us. We're disappointed when things don't work like we think they should. I'm amazed when anything works at all, especially when we don't understand the Spiritual Wisdom of God. Grace has carried us this far and it will lead us Home, but Grace is much more than that, when we understand what really took place when we received Jesus as our Lord and Savior.
Paul writes about something we must understand more in our lives, in Hebrews 5:14 (Amplified), saying, "But solid food is for full grown men, for those whose senses and mental faculties are trained by practice to discriminate and distinguish between what is morally good and noble and what is evil and contrary either to Divine or human law."
Paul instructs us to train our natural man to yield to our new creation man, by God's Word and the Holy Spirit. Our Father created us to be led by our spirit and to have our fleshly, carnal man subject to our spirit. Before being born-again, our fleshly, carnal nature was in control and we were trained by our senses. Our spirit was in subjection to the flesh and the flesh was in subjection to the world. We knew no other way to live.
Now that we're born-again, our spirit is alive and in fellowship with God's Spirit. Now our carnal man is subject to the Spirit and is no longer in control, so we must learn how to train the carnal man from God's Word and His Spirit. Jesus says in "The Parable of the Sower," that "satan comes at once and by force takes away the Message that was sown in the people." We become a threat to satan's kingdom of darkness, when we function in the Spirit. Satan can't prevent our being born-again, but he'll try keeping us ignorant of the Spirit realm. We become dangerous to his kingdom, when we understand who we are and what we have in the Holy Spirit.
Many would be surprised to learn that most of Jesus' earthly walk, was as a Teacher. He spent more time teaching, than doing anything else. After being baptized in the Holy Spirit in the Jordan River, Jesus taught about God's Heavenly Kingdom. He spent three and a half years, teaching His disciples how to carry on His ministry, after He left here. There's a big difference between how the early Church functioned from how today's Church functions.
The signs, miracles, wonders, healing and move of the Spirit that followed the early Church, is noticeably lacking today. This is because the enemy didn't have time to take away the Message that was sown in the hearts of the early Church, like he has today. It took satan nearly three-hundred years to teach the Church to rely on their sense knowledge again and to deny the teaching of the Holy Spirit. Many today teach that the Super-natural functions of the Holy Spirit have "passed away." God hasn't changed, His Word hasn't changed and Jesus hasn't changed, so it must be the Church that has changed. We've been talked out of the Spiritual aspects of our salvation.
No comments:
Post a Comment