I enjoy your stuff, though the one thing that I have trouble swallowing is this statement: “Regardless of our religious conviction, our spirit, soul, and body war against each other.”

• In the beginning, God who is Spirit walked with man every day. I believe we can safely believe God also talked to them, taught them, and loved them during this time. Man had an “everlasting” body, and as long as he ate of the Tree of Life or of the Spirit he would live forever. So the spirit of man followed the One, True, Spirit, - God.
• Just prior to the Fall, Satan tempted Chavvah (Woman) by using the Tree of Knowledge (of Good and Evil). This tree is the Tree of the Soul. Soul is comprised of the Mind, will, and emotions. Knowledge is found in the Mind and that is where the battle begins. That is why we are commanded to love the One, True, Spirit, - God with all our Mind or thought processes.
• This depicts the battle/war or temptations that still rage within ourselves. Satan desires for us to serve the Soul, and God desires for us to serve the Spirit. Satan, himself fell through pride, or thinking and he wants us to have the same end as he will have. In other words, Satan wants to take as many with him as he can through getting them to embrace the same error.
• Our physical body is caught in the middle. The body is to serve and carry out the desires of either the soul or the spirit - depending on which one rules us. So it is tossed both ways as we fight or give into temptation. This is what the Apostle Paul was talking about when he described times when he did what he knew he should not do, and did not do that which he knew to do.
• So it makes little difference whether we are Baptist, Assembly of God, Vineyard, Lutheran, etc. We all will go through the battle(s), to overcome and reach the future that God created us to have.
• Those who do not follow the One, True, Pure, Spirit – God still fight this but in different proportions. The soul or god of this world rather than the spirit is leading them. Their battle is against the “wooing” or love of the Holy Spirit of the living God. His love is an incredible attractant and His Spirit is brilliant in how He loves those who do not yet know Him. But man still tries to love darkness rather than light.

Even Jesus battled His soul. As His crucifixion drew near, He said his soul troubled Him and wanted Him to stop the crucifixion process that was about to transpire. So we find it has been this way from the very beginning, and is still rages within us today. Even after we have walked with God a long time, Satan does not give up.

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So many people who haven’t received Christ as their savior are on a mission to seek the truth. How can they end up so far from the truth. Why does the Lord allow them to end up so far off the course in their seeking?

To fully answer this would take a book, but if you will allow me, I’ll give an over simplistic answer that will cover 90% of the problems.

• Cause #1: Bitterness is an acidic pill to swallow. We become bitter when we feel justified in light of the pain someone causes us. God asks us to forgive those individuals as He has forgiven us. So many feel justified in not forgiving and do not want to follow a belief system that requires them to forgive. To the degree we forgive - we are forgiven. The Bible tells us our prayers are hindered because of unforgiveness.
• Cause #2: Ambition causes us to want all things for our benefit rather than for the benefit of others. And certainly not for the Glory of God. Ambition is a form of selfishness and pride. If God will not give us what we want, then we will find what we want through our other sources.
• Cause #3: Cultural indoctrination is very hard to overcome. Many are taught errant thinking about God from their childhood. Many of those continue to look for Him in “all the wrong places.” For example, if one has been taught that God is all things (pantheism) then it is difficult to convince someone that God made all things, but all things are not God. In essence they do not know where to look for the fulfillment they desperately need.
• Cause #4: Doctrinal programming is also hard to over come, especially when it teaches that if you join the church you are spiritual and “saved.” This line of thinking causes disappointment when a deep relationship with God is not formed with “brick and mortar or a denomination.” My experience is that the majority of those in the New Age are there because they found “brick and mortar or a denomination” less than fulfilling. They were never taught that there is a personal, and intimate relationship that can be found in God, not in an object or belief system. It is no surprise then that they feel closer to trees and fowl than to the church that they were taught is God.
• Cause #5: Ecstatic needs, or the overt dependency on supernatural experiences, as a sign of true spirituality is a driving force. From the previous sentence you can surmise that I believe that this need to experience the “other world” can be over done. Add to that the reality that the church as a whole is steeped in the philosophy of naturalism and relativism – thus driving those with a belief that spiritual experiences are real and for today elsewhere. Therefore they look for spiritual answers wherever they can be found and soon you have a perfect script for deception. The church or Body of Christ should be the first place one looks to know True Spirituality and the deeper things of God.

Regardless of errant thinking or errant searching, a great truth is this, “If one is really seeking for the One, True, Spirit, - God – He will be found.” God will not give up on them if they do not give up on finding Him – and they will find He has been near them and waiting all the time.

Blessings,
John Paul

41 comments

I totally agree with what you are saying about being plugged into the Source but where does the Body fit in? Maybe I don’t understand how it all works but aren’t we supposed to have an “Interdependence” on each other also?

• Yes, we are to be interdependent on each other, but we are not to make others our source. They are to be an aid to us, counsel to us, inspiration to us, and help to us. If we allow others to be our source, then we have made them our God. Conversely, if we allow ourselves to become the source of all things for others, we have taken God’s role and made ourselves God.
• God does use others to meet our needs, but aid is temporal and not day in and day out or permanent. Meeting the needs of the moment for someone is not the same as making someone need us. The result of allowing others to make us their source is that they take on a Victim Mentality.

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Are there really stages in our spiritual walk?

• Yep there are, and in most of them we feel less than spiritual until we advance to the next level of spirituality. It is here, from this vantage point that we can look back to see the progress and the process of our growth pattern. I wish the spiritual life was so simple that we need not be concerned at all. But, to most of us it is not. A positive is that it is the very act of being concerned that insures we doing well and we will make it.
  • You see, to be concerned about our life in God means we do not take His presence lightly nor make His “light” within our lives a trite matter. To be concerned proves we value His light. God loves that we value or treasure His presence. To value Him insures He will not only give us more of His Spirit, but He will also insure that we will keep growing, and maturing to the next level of True, Pure, Spirituality. This is seeking Him with all our heart and we are guaranteed to find Him when we do so.

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You have stated that our relationship with God can ebb and flow, why would God do that?

• Yes, our relationship with God ebbs and flows. There are times when we have done nothing wrong, but He seems far away. One illustration for this is actually found in the sanitary laws of Scripture. Scripture tells us that during the womans time of monthly purification, the husband is to not be intimate with her. This is not because she has done anything wrong, but during this time she is actually being prepared for fruitfulness or ovulation.
  • Paul alludes to this law when he talks about how husbands and wives are to intimately respond to each other (Ephesians 5) and how that even in mentioning these matters he speaks not concerning husbands and wives but, it is a picture of Christ and the Church and when applied that means how Christ relates in intimacy with you.
  • Sometimes it is not that we have committed any sin, or that we have omitted anything we should have done. Sometimes the Lord withdraws from us to prepare us for intimacy, ovulation, or fruitfulness.
  • As the woman in the Song of Solomon, we hear our love at the door and we delay responding. When we do go to the door and open the latch He is gone. Here, we begin to long for Him so much we go on a search for Him.
  • Here we find a secret, “In the lack of His presence we yearn for His presence.”

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I thought you always had spiritual experiences. I was surprised to hear you describe your stage one and two.

• Spiritual experiences do not make one mature. Jeremiah was called before he was born, but there was no maturity there. Samuel was given a national prophecy when he was five or six years old, but he was not mature.
• Gifts or supernatural experiences are just that - gifts. They are not rewards for good behavior or maturity.
• I was struggling in stage one and two through my early twenties. During this stage I messed up a lot and really needed a lot of forgiveness. The sensitivity that I had with the gift, which I did not know I had, left me sensitive to a lot of worldly thinking. I would fall and run to the light, fall again and run to the light, over and over. I had no clue of how much The Light loved me.
  • All I knew God to be was harsh, full of judgment, waiting to punish me, and this left me with a great amount of fear of failing Him.
  • Like King David, it was the very thing I feared that came upon me. It is here that I learned that “what you fear you empower,” and “what you focus on you make room for.”
  • I never knew He loved me - and you - until I was in my 40’s. Sad, but true.
  • It is so much easier to serve God out of love rather than out of fear - I wish I would have known this when I was so much younger, like when I was 10 years old! It is His love that penetrates the veil of blindness we walk in when we fall prey to the god of this world.

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How long are the Spiritual Stages you wrote about?

• At the risk of over simplifying, each stage is as long as it takes you to overcome and master the solution to that particular stage. I stayed on some stages for years, and in other stages for months.
  • If stayed a short time in any stage I then had to repeat that stage.
  • A quick exit from any stage is more a sign of stubbornness than a sign of maturity.
• It seems the longer I stayed in a particular stage, the more lasting the result, which is hard but good in the long run.

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I am 17, am I too young to be pressing into the deep deep things of God and desire to just know the intimacy of his glory and of his presence? The answer to both of those questions I believe is no, But I don’t know why breakthrough isn’t occurring. I desire to be blasted by God and know the measure of who he is?

• You are correct, the answer is no, you are not too young - but you are inexperienced. One of the most difficult lessons we must learn as we walk on this spiritual odyssey is to “be as patient with ourselves as God is with us.”
• It is often our impatience that makes us feel we are not making progress and therefore failing God.
• Our inexperience makes us feel that if we can do more, God will respond to us. If this were true, then God would have just endorsed “justification” or spirituality by “works” and not justification by faith.
• We cannot entice God to do any more than he will do. However, we can clear the wax from our ears, and scales from our eyes. But, even that cannot be done if God does not grant us the desire to do so. If God does not grant anything, then such spiritual thoughts will never even enter our mind.
• The fact you are wanting this is an enormous plus to your future growth.
• If you do not quite you win!

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Your questions about spirituality are very good, I’ll try to answer more on the next blog.

Blessings,

John Paul

37 comments

How do you communicate with God in a spiritual sense?
There are several ways to have communication with God. To get back to basics, let’s begin with just two. If you can master just these two life will be sooooooo different.

1. Start with Who He is

• The first step to communion with Him is worship by acknowledging who He is. It is the recognition of who He is that releases our spirit to commune with Him. In this moment His Spirit releases our spirit. This is why it is important that we ingest/in-filled with His Spirit. His presence in us really shortens the time between “the ask and the answer.”

• Worship - this is the basic structure of the Lord’s Prayer (MT. 6). Start with who He is. Most of us start with what we need. It is the identification of who He is that gives us confidence that He is capable of answering what we may later ask. It is the reality of who He is that separates Him from all the gods of this world – He answers they do not.

2. The need for peace

• Begging, pleading and the like are more closely related to the false prophets who did such at Elijah’s challenge to them on Mount Carmel. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Peace. His presence in you will always produce peace – yes, in the midst of down town traffic. Even Elijah found that the small voice is where God spends most of His time.

• This is why so many hear from God when they relax, or they are driving, working, or doing anything but pleading. If God answers us by our pleading, then he has just said we can earn His love. Peace before Him says we “trust” or have “faith” in Him.

Why am I continually frustrated in my desire to be spiritual?

• For those of you who have been frustrated in your search for spirituality, frustration when the One, True, Spirit – God does not answer is usually an indicator of us having an agenda that is not His. I have found, when I have had these times- and I have - that I need to back up and ask different questions such as, “Am I doing what you want,” or “Is there something I am missing or not seeing, or “Is there a question You want me to ask that I am not asking?”

• The less we are concerned about the solution – the clearer the solution becomes. Why? Because we no longer predetermine the boundaries His response to us needs to be within – we’ll accept anything He says. Sometimes the greatest peace comes when we are at the end of our rope.

Going to “hot spots”

• The greatest “hot spot” we can run to is within our own heart.

Can we communicate with other believers when we are asleep?

• The man from Macedonia did. He came to the Apostle Paul and asked him to come and help them. Why? God wants us to be interdependent on others to fulfill our purpose and call. Paul needed direction and the Macedonians needed help. None of us are Islands unto ourselves.

Are we always aware of how God flows through us or is this just a part of “being” in God?

• I have gone through a few spiritual growth stages. During the first stage I was more aware that God was not on me, because I seldom felt He was. In the second stage, I felt God only came to me during Dreams or at the altar when I was repenting - so I got re-saved every Sunday. In the third stage, I felt God’s spirit pushing me all the time. I could not get away with what I used to get away with.

• In the fourth stage, there was a major change. I walked into something infinitely spiritual or I should say, something infinitely more spiritual (the Holy Spirit) walked into me. In the fifth stage, I was aware when He was not as intense some times as He was at others. Here I learned that when the Holy Spirit lifts His intense presence it is because we are not located where He wants us to be. In the sixth stage, I learned to find where the One, True, Pure Spirit was. Here I learned to feel the weight (Kabod) of His presence or glory. I began to long for that weight of His presence.

• But, it is in this stage that I am in now, the seventh stage that I have found a deeper contentment and joy in my walk with God. Here, I feel Him in me every moment. I truly know that I live and move and have my being in Him. Being in Him, yet He enjoys being in me. This is true “being.” It is here that I have noticed the presence of God’s Spirit within me has marvelous impact on others. It is here that He radiates from me, beyond me. Here He touches others before I get to them, whether it is across the table or across the room. Yes, He will flow through your eyes, your smile, and through anything else that you will let Him have.

This is what I want you to experience. This is why I write this blog so He may become such, within each one of you.

I’ll answer more of your previous blog questions next blog.

Blessings,

John Paul

28 comments