|
|
|
      
|
Day 3 - Consecrated Hearing Thursday July 26 by David Demian
(to listen to this message, click here)
Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. (Romans 10:17)
In this season when the Lord wants to release to us a new measure of faith to possess the promises, one of the key foundational areas God wants to consecrate is how we hear Him.
Every person has two receptors for hearing God: one is called the mind and the other is called the spirit.
For some the primary way we relate to God is
through our spirit. Now my spirit functions by discernment because it does not
have the capacity to reason like the mind; instead it discerns, it simply
knows/recognizes if something is of God or not. Jesus talked about this in John
10:4-5 when he spoke the parable of a good shepherd. The sheep know the voice of
the good shepherd and they follow it – but because the voice of a stranger is
unrecognizable to them, they won’t follow it. How then do we get this ability to recognize or discern the voice of God? Where does this come from? From the time we receive Christ as our personal saviour, the breath of God, His spirit comes alive in our spirits. And so when we encounter something spiritual, immediately our spirit recognizes (some people say witnesses) whether or not it is the same spirit.
Now other people have their minds as the first receptor. When they hear God speak or encounter things of the spirit, immediately the information goes to the mind for processing. But since the mind functions on the grid of reason, it does not discern spiritually but simply makes the judgment of whether something is reasonable or not. And whatever is not reasonable gets canceled, and whatever is reasonable gets passed onto their spirit.
In Isaiah 55:8-9 God says
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”.
God thoughts and ways are higher that ours – meaning they are beyond our human comprehension. So if I choose to walk with God through my mind, then I choose to limit my whole spiritual life to the confines of my human intellect. But since our natural minds cannot possibly contain or comprehend God, if I walk with God through my mind, I will miss out on everything that is “super-natural” – that is outside of the realm of the natural. Because I will have already canceled (been unwilling to accept) anything that defies human logic and reasoning.
When God spoke to Joshua to march around the walls and they would fall down this defied human logic. When He spoke to Gideon and told him to gain the victory by putting the torches in the jars this was impossible. All the stories in the Bible that stir us are those when God manifested Himself as greater than time, circumstances, and human understanding.
And this is why Paul talked about the importance of us living by our spirits: The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. I Cor 2:10-14
So what do we do then with our minds? Do we just shut them down? No, God doesn’t want to eliminate our minds, He wants to sanctify them. As Paul taught in Romans 12, we need to allow our minds to be transformed and renewed.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is - his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:1-2
God’s desire is that we can come to the place where our minds can say, “Yes in the natural this is impossible but if my spirit witnesses that this is God, I choose to believe it and act on it despite what is reasonable”. And if we’re wise, we begin to recognize this battle and we bring our minds into submission to the Holy Spirit quickly!
Living by the spirit is challenging because if our spirit witnesses that something is God (this is the seed of faith) but our mind is saying “No, that is impossible” this can bring real inner conflict. This conflict is the stretching of our faith; our minds are being challenged to believe the impossible. And as long as we have a desire to walk with the Lord and to know His ways then this tension will never end because there is no end to the glory and majesty of God! So as we grow in our relationship with the Lord, He will continue to challenge us to greater and greater levels of faith. The moment we get comfortable or used to a certain level of faith, He will open a new horizon, a whole new dimension. And our minds go through another stretching, and another stretching and another stretching. That’s why it’s easy to start living in the spirit, but hard to maintain it because it can be tiring to living in a place where we are constantly being stretched and challenged.
I really believe that because the Lord wants to release us to a new level of faith in this season, the faith to possess, He is challenging us to live deeper, more radically, in the spirit than we have ever lived before. He wants to consecrate our hearing so that we are listening to the Holy Spirit with our spirits and we can live constantly in the realm beyond reason. The realm where God is the God of the impossible and where everything IS possible to him who believes.
For further meditation: John 4:24, Romans 8:5-14, Romans 10:17, Romans 12:1-2, I Cor 2:10-14, Galatians 5:25
David can be reached by email at director@watchmen.org.
Pauline - Singapore Raymond - Wetaskiwin, Alberta Many people I've told this to have problems accepting it, but yet what I hear from God is that he is preparing his A team for the upcoming games (latter day events). It has given me a very different perspective on many things that had bothered me before and is helping me to overcome my fatigue and mental uneasiness. To know that I'm going through training puts a very different light on many things in my life. I work just as hard, and even more so now, with more life, joy and resolve to complete my training. Where I had thought of giving up (in the moment) before, I know it's just the next wall to push through in my conditioning. Most importantly, if I don't manage to push through the wall this time, I will the next, or the next time after that. It's just a matter of staying with it.
|
David Demian is a man of 
