9) Walk Of The Spirit - The Walk Of Power CHAPTER 8 For you desire to be led by the Spirit. You desire to be led from this natural place to that natural place. But know this: Long before I led you to be a force for Me in the natural, I begin to lead you in the spiritual. For I lead you from glory to glory, from a place of unrest to a place of rest so that when I give you what I would have you do, it will stand the fire and pass the test. So enter into My grace. You have yet to experience the best that I have. For it is a place of rest, saith the Spirit of Grace. It is My best. ------------------------------------------ THE CHANNEL THROUGH WHICH THE HOLY SPIRIT SPEAKS We can never receive enough teaching on the intellectual level to make us victorious in life. Therefore, if we dont learn to fellowship with the Godhead in the realm of the Spirit, we will never progress very far in fulfilling our divine call. Weve seen that its our awesome privilege to have the third Person of the Godhead living inside us to oversee Gods plan for our personal lives. But in order to take advantage of the Holy Spirits expert leadership, we have to understand how He communicates with us as we pray in other tongues. You see, the Holy Spirit always speaks through the same channel. We need to become familiar with that channel so we can differentiate His voice from every other voice, thought, and impression. First, we must understand that God always communes with our spirit. If we dont know how to identify the difference between God communing with our spirit and the devil fooling with our mind, we will walk in the wrong direction most of the time. Why? Because the devil has studied mankind for six thousand years, and he has learned some unique ways to set us up and keep us walking around in circles in our lives. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man In order to discern the voice of the Holy Spirit in your daily life, you first have to understand the operation of the spirit, soul, and body of man. I have sat under many teachers on this subject. Most isolate all the verses they can pertaining to the spirit, the soul, and the body. Then they may draw three little circles on a chalkboard and outline the characteristics of the three parts of the man, saying, This is your spirit. This is your soul. And this is your body. I didnt have too much trouble understanding the operation and characteristics of the body. But I had a hard time grasping the difference between the soul and the spirit. According to the great Bible teachers of our day, the soul consists of a persons mind or intellect, his will, and his emotional faculties. It is the part of man that needs to be renewed by the Word. I totally agreed with this. And I knew that when mans spirit departs from his body, his soul goes with him. But beyond that, I couldnt quite understand how mans spirit fit into the picture. So I tried to understand this subject, I asked God, Lord, what is the difference between me and a dog? Now, I like dogs, but they dont have a spirit. They dont go to Heaven the way people do. Animals do exist in Heaven, but they didnt go from here to there. They were created in Heaven. They live there. As far as anyone knows, animals born here on earth just return back to the dust after they die. But evidently, dogs do have a soul, because they have intellect, emotions, and a will. So what is the difference between a dogs soul and mine? It is this: My soul finds immortality within an immortal spirit. When God created my emotions, my will, and my intellect, He held these forces in His hand and said, This is the soul of man. But within what confines would He house these forces that make up the essence of who I am? This is where the operation of the spirit came in. God created these forces that make up the soul and placed them in an eternal substance called the spirit. It is the immortal spirit encompassing the soul that gives the soul its eternal nature. Characteristics of Mans Spirit We can gain some insight into the spirit of man by looking at what Jesus said in Luke 16:19-22: There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich mans table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abrahams bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried. Even though the rich man died and was buried - even though the flesh on his body was in the grave - in verse 23 it says that his spirit went somewhere else: And in HELL he lift up HIS EYES being in torments, and SEETH Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. There it is in black and white - the spirit man has eyes! Notice it also says that the rich man was in torments. That is speaking of strong emotions. So the rich mans spirit man also had emotions. Now look at verse 24: And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. My goodness, people in Heaven have fingers, and people in hell have tongues! We better think about this for a moment. Either our spirit man possesses all the rest of the body parts as well, or there is a bunch of spiritual tongues and eyeballs lying around in hell while spiritual fingers float around in Heaven! It stands to reason that if my spirit man has a spiritual finger, tongue, and a pair of eyes, he also has every other body part as well. That is basic. In fact, lets take it a step further. If I were to separate my inner man from my outer man and leave the two standing next to each other, my physical body and my spirit man would look a lot alike - except for the fact that my spirit would be without defects. In fact, all the defects that were programmed into the human race when Adam fell would be gone. Now, if my outer man were to hold up his finger and say, What is my finger made out of? you would say, Its made out of flesh. If you answered in more detail, youd say, Its made of cells, blood, bone, and many small compounds. Well, if my physical man is made out of physical material that you can name, what about my spirit man? What if my inner man held up his finger - which the passage in Luke 16 proves the spirit man has - and asked, What is my finger made out of? You would say, Well, uh, a heavenly substance. Hmmm, lets see - spirit. You wouldnt be able to break it down any further. So my inner man fills my outer man finger for finger, hand for hand, arm for arm, leg for leg. I have physical eyes and spiritual eyes. My spiritual eyeball fills my physical eyeball. Lets take this a step further. Within my inner man is the nature of the new creation, containing such spiritual forces as love, peace, joy, and dominion. The inner man is my stabilizer in life. He never fluctuates up and down. His only inclination is to go up higher in the realm of God. The part of me that fluctuates between up and down is the emotional make-up of my soul through which my spirit man operates. My emotions want to go to the highs of extreme happiness one day and to the lows of deep depression the next. But my spirit man never wants to go anywhere but up into the high places with God. My inner man fits into my outer man, and one day my old outer man is going to say, I quit. At that moment, I - my spirit man - will step out of my body and go home to Heaven. It will be glorious! So I have a spiritual brain that fits into and operates through my natural brain in this physical body. It is within my spiritual brain that the soul is housed. Identify the Channel of Communication In the natural, you dont hear with your ear one day and with your big toe the next. In the same way, your spiritual anatomy isnt designed for God to communicate with different parts of your spirit man depending on what day it is. Every time God talks to you, He will communicate through the same channel. Therefore, if you can isolate and identify that channel, you can open a door to a spiritual treasure house that no man can close. When we hear Gods voice, it seems as if it comes from somewhere deep down in the center of our being and rises to our mind. Most of us have enough sense to know it doesnt originate in our natural mind; it comes up to our mind. I always wondered where that deep inner well was that Gods voice came from. I wanted to discover how to uncap and monitor it so I could listen to the Holy Spirit on purpose, just because I wanted to hear Him. Well, in First Corinthians 14:14, it says that if I, Dave Roberson, pray in an unknown tongue, my human spirit is doing the praying under the influence of the Holy Spirit. I came to realize that if thats true, Then somewhere within my spirit the Holy Spirit has to bring that supernatural language into existence and then deposit it in my spirit. A transfer of those tongues has to take place from the Person of the Holy Spirit to my human spirit. Otherwise, it wouldnt be me doing the praying. The Lord once gave me an inner vision to show me how the Holy Spirit transfers His supernatural language to my spirit. In the vision, I saw the outer man and the inner man. The outer man, the fleshly man, was the darkest of the figures. The soul was another shade lighter, and the spirit man was absolutely light. I saw the Holy Spirit literally creating or bringing into existence His supernatural language in my spiritual mind, which was actually encased within the natural mind of my outer man. What science has labelled the subconscious is actually the spiritual mind. Scientists say that it possesses incredible ability that far exceeds the operational capacity of the physical brain. So when the Holy Spirit creates His supernatural language in you, those tongues originate way down deep in your spirit and then come up into the recesses of your spiritual mind, which lies within your physical mind. This explains the fact that when the Holy Spirit speaks, it is not a surface speaking. It comes from the depths of that spiritual mind and bursts outwardly into your intellect. Thats why if you dont let the tongues come out of your mouth, those supernatural words will bypass your mouth and drift up to your thoughts, and youll hear the tongues in your natural mind. Now, as long as you let the supernatural language that the Holy Spirit creates come out of your mouth, your mind is free to think of other things. For instance, Ive made it a regular practice to read the Word while I pray in tongues. But what if you stop that flow and stop speaking those tongues out? Can you pray in tongues in your mind? Not effectively, because you actually complete the channel of prayer by allowing the Holy Spirits language to come out of your mouth. If you dont speak out that language (and it can be just a quiet whispering under your breath), eventually your mind will shift over to something else and dismiss the tongues, and youll find you have stopped praying. You have cut short the flow of prayer coming through Gods channel of communication. The Door to Another World When you pray in tongues, you immediately put yourself in the Spirit, because you open the door to another world. You have opened the channel to your own human spirit, giving yourself direct contact with the Holy Spirit, so lets isolate the door through which Gods voice comes so you can recognise when He is speaking to you. After the vision that showed me how the Holy Spirit transfers His language to the human spirit, the Lord instructed me to do something very unusual. (During this experience, I was under a heavy anointing, unaware of my physical surroundings. It sounded like His voice was coming from everywhere). He said, Son, now I want you to learn to locate the channel through which I communicate with you. (Most of us operate out of that channel without any idea where it is!) Then the Lord instructed me, Pray in tongues for a while. I obeyed until He told me to stop. Then He said, Now listen. As I kept quiet and listened, the tongues continued to come up from my spirit and explode across my intellect. Even though I wasnt speaking the tongues out of my mouth, I could hear them loud in my mind. I realised then that the channel through which the Holy Spirit creates His supernatural language is the same channel through which He brings revelation, visions, prophecy, and so forth, to my mind. Get Acquainted With Gods Channel Of Communication Ill tell you the truth - the only reason I can teach on these matters in detail is that the Holy Spirit taught them first to me in detail. And He couldnt have done that unless the channel of communication between me and God had opened up so I could accurately discern His voice. You se, it is as you pray in tongues that the channel is actually opened through which God communicates. This is what happens when tongues for interpretation operates. The tongues open the channel for what is about to come. Once that channel is open, the Holy Spirit can send the interpretation through in the same manner He sent the tongues. Then the more you pray in the Holy Ghost, the more familiar you become with that channel and the greater your ability to recognize when God comes across the same channel with a vision or with revelation knowledge in your native language. As you consistently give yourself to praying in tongues, that channel of communication will become increasingly clear and definite. Youll find it easier and easier to enter into the rest of faith as you learn to shut out the world and hear the voice of God within. It wont be long before you will immediately know the difference between mental energy and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But if youre not consistently allowing the Holy Spirit to create that supernatural language in your spirit as you speak it out of your mouth, it will become much more difficult to shut out the external circumstances. You wont find it easy at all to monitor your spirit for what God may be saying to you. As I faithfully kept praying in tongues, I learned how to listen to that channel. I know now where His voice comes from. I know where visions come from that burst suddenly across my mind. I also know where revelation knowledge comes from, because all of these things originate in the same part of my spirit. I know how to shut down in the middle of all kinds of chaos and monitor that channel through which God communicates. I may receive an inner witness, a check or warning signal, or a vision. I may hear Him speak to me in English. No matter what turmoil is going on around me, I can shut it out and wait for whatever I need to come through the channel of divine communication - and you can do the same! What You Have That the Old Testament Saints Didnt As you begin to pray out the mysteries of Christ in other tongues, what happens? You open up the channel. Now you can experience direct communication with God - something the Old Testament saints longed for but couldnt experience. Jesus said concerning John the Baptist that there had never been born of woman a greater prophet than John (Matthew 11:11). I read that years ago and thought, How can that be? What about Elijah? John the Baptist didnt have the miracles in his ministry that Elijah had. I thought Elijah was quite a great prophet. Think about what he accomplished in his ministry: raising the dead, stopping armies with fire from Heaven, flying off in a chariot. Those are some exploits! But Jesus said that John the Baptist was greater. Why? John didnt perform miracles. All he did was eat wild locusts and honey and tell people to repent. So why would Jesus say that about John the Baptist? Because of all the prophets under the Old Covenant, this man had more knowledge of Christ than any of them. God chose him to be the forerunner who would preach about the coming Messiah. Then Jesus made an even more remarkable statement. He said that the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than John the Baptist! Imagine - Mary Wallpaper and Joe Public are greater than the greatest prophet under the Old Covenant! Why is that? Because the prophets of old werent born again. They hadnt received the new nature of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. They didnt have unlimited access to God. But as a tongue-talking, praying believer, you do! When we were born again and received the nature of God, the most important thing we received was the capacity to understand spiritual things. Thats why Heaven sent us the Teacher of all teachers to come and make sure we attained the discernment, wisdom, and understanding of everything that God is. I have the Teacher living inside of me, and my channel is open. Now He is going to teach me how to go all the way in to attain the highest God has for me. He has bypassed all the trash in the soul and the flesh and has deposited Himself in my power plant, my spirit man. Now He says, I want to teach this man his authority in Christ. He keeps praying in tongues, so he must want Me to teach him about it! So Im going to bring his new nature forward with all the authority that has been given to him. And anything in the flesh or soul realm that gets in the way is going to end up looking like its in the undertow of the Titanic! The Four Ways The Holy Spirit Communicates Having located the channel through which God speaks to us, lets discuss the four basic ways the Holy Spirit uses that channel to communicate. First, He communicates by the inner witness. The Bible says that the Kingdom of God, which is within us, is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost (Romans 14:17). The Holy Spirit who dwells inside of us is a continual Source of absolute peace. He will continually pour His peace throughout our being if we will let Him. Therefore, the inner witness is often manifested as a disruption to that flow of Gods peace, alerting us to a wrong turn, a problem, an obstacle, etc. Second, the Holy Spirit communicates by revelation. The reason God communicates with our spirit and not our physical mind or intellect is that our spiritual mind has the capacity to receive and store millions of bits of information per second. That kind of reception is in Gods class! When the Holy Spirit speaks to us in our native language, He has slowed Himself down to ultra-slow motion, such as the way a camera is set when filming a plants growth. Thats what it is like for the Holy Spirit when He has to slow down to speak to us in the language we understand. So the Holy Spirit loves to communicate by revelation. He likes to encapsulate an entire revelation and send it through that same channel. All of a sudden, the revelation hits your spirit and explodes outward. You receive the entire revelation in a hundredth of a second. For instance, you may be praying in the Holy Ghost, meditating on the Word regarding a pressing problem in your business. All of a sudden a revelation capsule explodes inside and you exclaim, My gosh! I know what to do for the next ten years! And I got it in half a second! So you call all your business partners together, and it takes you fifteen days to lay out the plan you received in half a second by revelation. Why? Because your spirit has to feed one little piece of revelation knowledge at a time to your intellect, which then converts it to your native language. Do you want to increase these types of experiences in your life? Then spend time praying in the Spirit. You will keep the channel wide open and promote peace and edification in every area of life. Third, the Holy Spirit communicates by the audible voice. You may be thinking about something else, when suddenly He says something in your spirit that seems audible to you. You hear it as clearly as if someone were standing next to you speaking. I wish God would communicate to me this way all the time so I could hear Him that clearly. But He doesnt. In fact, I have only heard God audibly one time in my entire life - at the Kathryn Kuhlman meeting that I related earlier. He called my name three times and then said something to me about my ministry. Other than that one time, the Lord has always communicated to me inside of my spirit. It was just a matter of developing my ability to know when it was Him and when it wasnt. The fourth and less common way that the Holy Spirit communicates is by vision. For example, the Lord sometimes communicates to me through what I call teaching visions. These types of visions assist me at times in understanding the Word of God. I usually only receive these teaching visions when I am praying in tongues while meditating on the Word, or when a strong anointing comes on me as I am testifying or preaching. When the visions occur, they explode across my mind with lightning speed. So whether by inner witness, revelation, audible voice, or vision, the Holy Spirit always communicates through the same channel - that supernatural doorway into another world. Our part is to open that channel by praying in the Holy Ghost so we can begin to learn how to discern the voice of God. The Anointing Within: Inoculation Against Deception Ill tell you another important benefit of becoming familiar with the way God communicates: When you go into a meeting where someone is teaching false doctrine, that wrong teaching wont be able to penetrate into your spirit. Youll be able to discern what is going on as you sit in a meeting. Is the devil attacking the service and the Holy Ghost fighting for it? Or is a wolf behind the pulpit, trying to steal the wool off the sheep? You see, developing the ability to discern what is not true, even if it is spoken from behind the pulpit, is one of the first results of consistently praying in tongues. praying in tongues is an inoculation against deception. Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit came, He would guide us into all truth (John 16:13). No wonder John later said this about the Holy Spirit: These things have I written unto you concerning them that seduce you. But the anointing which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the SAME ANOINTING TEACHETH YOU of all things, and IS TRUTH, AND IS NO LIE, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him. -1 John 2:26,27 What did John mean when he said that you have no need that any man teach you? Well, the truth is, most deception takes place behind the pulpit. Thats where great religious movements are born that deny half of the Bible. For instance, when the devil talks church leaders into removing the right to speak in tongues out of their bylaws, that particular denomination takes a step into deception. Just because someone stands behind a pulpit doesnt make him right. He is only right if his teaching lines up with the Word of God. Truth is truth and stands by its own merit. So how are we going to know when someone is teaching wrong doctrine, whether intentionally or out of ignorance? By the anointing inside of us that is truth and does not bear witness to lies. In the legalistic, ultra-Holiness church where I was first born again, the people would do all sorts of things to raise money for the church, such as selling anointed pieces of a cut-up preaching tent (I was first in line to buy one of those!), anointed oil, water from the Jordon River, and even wallets that were never supposed to go empty. (I went broke buying that wallet - and then I even lost the wallet!) Or sometimes we were told to give a love offering to prove God for our lost loved ones or to have a visiting prophet prophesy over us. But the Gospel is not for merchandising, and none of the things of God are for sale - absolutely none of them. So after praying in tongues every day for a year, I went back to visit my old Holiness friends. But when they started using the familiar gimmick tactics, urging the congregation to give a love offering to buy some coveted blessing, my spirit went dead. I thought, Whats wrong with me? I used to get all excited just like everyone else when they talked about this kind of thing. Have I backslidden without knowing it? No, I hadnt backslidden. The Spirit of Truth inside of me, my Teacher who cannot lie and bears witness only to the truth, had been activated through many hours of praying in tongues. He was causing me to discern the lies that had deceived me in the past but could not deceive me anymore. This is just one more reason why I strongly disagree with people who say that if you pray too much in tongues, youll get weird. A person who makes a statement like that is void of understanding. He would never say such a thing if he understood the role of this basic gift plays in hearing the voice of God and becoming familiar with the channel through which He speaks. No one who loves people would deliberately deprive the Body of Christ of such a blessing! The Candle of the Lord Lets look at one more scripture regarding how the Holy Spirit communicates with us. Proverbs 20:27 has something profound to say about the subject: The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly. What an incredible statement! My human spirit is the part of me that is created in Gods image; it is the candle of God. In other words, it is the part of me that the Holy Spirit ignites to illuminate my understanding of Himself, imparting unto me revelation knowledge. What do we do with a candle? We dont have much use for one in a bright room. We light a candle when the room is dark. We put it on a table top, and it throws illumination into the entire room. With Gods candle, our spirit man, the Holy Spirit searches out all the inward parts of the belly - all the dark places in our lives that need the light of His truth. This is the same searching process that takes place in us as we pray in tongues. He who searches the heart knows the mind of God and makes intercession for us according to the will of God (Romans 8:27). The Holy Spirit teaches us everything we cannot discern. He shows us mysteries and divine secrets we need to know about God and His ways. He is our first and foremost Teacher. If we let the Holy Ghost teach us, at times we will enter into different realms of anointings during prayer, such as tongues for interpretation or the deep groanings of intercession. There will be times when He will teach us mysteries during our prayer vigils. But no matter what happens in prayer, we will always come out the beneficiary if we yield our candle to the Holy Spirit, allowing Him to illuminate our inmost parts with the light of His truth.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 11:41:38 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015