Living in the Freedom of the Spirit - Week #19

The Lord bless you! This week we've read chapter 24 on Worship and the Emotions in which Tom Marshall speaks of how the emotions of the human soul connect with the capacity for communion and communication in the human spirit. The Christian virtue of hope is a strong focus of this chapter.

The emotions and how to deal rightly with them has been greatly neglected by Christians, but the Holy Spirit is bringing more and more understanding of this in these times. Because we have undervalued the emotional part of our being, we live with suppressed emotions that do great damage under the surface to a person. It's wonderful to walk in healthy emotions, and it's imperative that we do so since the emotional part of us is the motivator of behavior.

Because God is Creator and Lord of humans and made each part of us beautiful, He has as much interest in a healthy emotional life as He does in a healthy mental and volitional life. They all go together. C.S.Lewis says that if you lose the good of one part, you lose the good of the other (speaking of heart and head). We don't function rightly with our minds (even if we are intellectually bright) if our hearts and emotions are asleep, not engaged with God's emotions.

Marshall points out that we typically think that "any control over the emotions must come from the will." But that easily becomes unhealthy suppression of emotions, and while the will may succeed in stifling emotions, it doesn't have power to produce emotions. For the emotions to be healthy and life-giving, they, like the human will and mind, must be subject to the spirit of the person; the author connects the emotions with the part of the spirit that has direct communion with God, either through spoken or unspoken communication.

Worship is the primary means through which we commune with God and taste His love and emotions. (In an age of massive emotional trauma, it's easy to see why the Spirit of God is awakening so much worship, particularly in music and the arts, etc.) Because of this, Marshall connects the gifts of tongues, healings, and miracles with this aspect of the human makeup and our walk with God and people. I'll let you read his rationale for this in the book.

I want to focus the rest of this posting on "hope, the neglected virtue." It is biblical hope that opens the human heart and keeps it open in the face of great difficulty. I'm going to share parts of my own notes on hope that are a blend of material I have gleaned from this book, from Leanne Payne, Joseph Pieper, and Oswald Chambers. I pray you will be helped and blessed as I have been with fresh understanding of how vital hope is for having an open and tender heart towards God that is able to receive from Him and others:

Hope is the confident expectation of something good. Hope has 3 basic roots: confidence, expectancy, security. “Hope, because it is confident, secure and expectant, creates in the person who has it an inner attitude of openness towards God, openness towards other people, and openness towards life. This is of extreme importance, because we will experience only what we receive, and we will receive only what we are open to. - Tom Marshall

We don’t measure our spiritual capacity by intellect but by the promises of God - I Cor.1:20(O.Chambers). If you are appropriating the promises of God, then you have hold of the virtue of hope. (I Peter 2:3-9)

We are to make every effort to gain these virtues. Grace never opposes moral effort; it opposes merit achieved by effort…Some don’t stand firm in their healing, because they don’t go on to “construct a soul” (May 20 reading of “My Utmost for His Highest”).

Hope leads to magnanimity (the aspiration of the spirit to great and noble things); and humility (an attitude of the will that acknowledges that God is Creator and I am creature) protects magnanimity from pride.

Hope is imperative to healthy emotions (Psa.42). Tom Marshall says, “The attitude of openness and expectancy that the Bible calls hope is vitally important for our emotional balance…Every good and perfect gift comes from our Father who is totally unvarying in His goodness (Jas.1:17; Rom.8:28)…Often we perceive situations as threatening or beyond our capacity to manage, and so we react defensively in fear, or anger, or irritation. But when we have an open attitude towards God…we see situations and circumstances from a place of inner security, we measure difficulties and problems against the ability of God who is for us and on our side.”

For emotional healing (one of the greatest needs in the Church today), hope is significant in three ways:
1. It gives the Holy Spirit access to cleanse and heal the hurts that often lie buried in our feelings…it is the expectant, trusting openness of hope that allows the HS into the emotions to deal with buried needs.
2. It enables the HS to remove emotional hang-ups that may have inhibited growth in this area of our personality. Many Christians are spiritually and mentally mature, but remain emotionally immature, and Paul says we are to grow up into Him…(Ep.4:15). The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of adoption who brings us into maturity as sons and daughters. He can remove the blockage, whether it be fear of failure, self-hatred, inferiority complex, etc.
3. This attitude of expectant welcome allows the Holy Spirit to express His nature in us. Openness is the key to how the fruit of the Spirit is grafted into our nature. The various manifestations of the Spirit’s nature are meant to be experienced in our feelings because they are themselves feelings and because feelings are the most powerful motivators of behavior.

Two enemies of hope:
1. Despair: a premature determination that you are not destined for fulfillment. This is a decision we’ve made, even if unconscious, and we must take responsibility for it. Repentance is needed.
2. Presumption: the perverse anticipation of fulfillment; the presumption that I’m ok as I am and that God will change me and therefore I can be passive about any moral effort on my part. This too requires repentance.

Humility teaches us that we are not complete and that any progress we make through moral effort is by God’s grace. Magnanimity teaches us that we are great and noble and must live up to God’s fullness for us.

How to nurture hope
1. Begin with confession and repentance of the sin of despair or of presumption and receive God’s forgiveness.
2. Begin regularly practicing the Presence of the Lord Jesus. We start this in conscious and intentional worship and adoration, times of personal and corporate worship, gazing on Him and allowing Him to define us. This requires discipline and patience and permission to fail. Hope is strongly connected with worship! Hope grows as one concentrates on the One Who is the Source of all good things and Who will never fail in any promise (Josh.21:45).
3. The regular exercising of the gift of tongues, if you have that gift, is a simple way to nurture hope.

Thank you, Lord, that you are the God of hope. Fill us with all joy and peace in believing so that by the power of the Holy Spirit we may abound in hope. (Rom.15:13). Show us, Spirit of God, where we have allowed despair or presumption to keep us from the healing and motivating virtue of hope in these days of testing and difficulties. Make us radical worshippers of Jesus in these dark days! Thank You that you are doing this for Your Church - we worship YOu alone...

Have a wonderful week! Next week we'll conclude this book with chapter 25, The Word Made Flesh. (Once again...a reminder that the next book is Wounds that Heal by Stephen Seamands.)

Living in the Freedom of the Spirit - Week #18

The Lord bless you! He is our Life and Light...Holy Spirit, I pray that You will come and flood our understanding with Light as we love and obey You. Thank You that you hear our prayer!

Chapter 23: Conscience and the Will
Keep in mind that the context of this chapter is Marshall's teaching on how the spirit and soul of man relate with one another. Chapter 22 was about the link between the intuition of the spirit and the mind of the soul. Faith enables us to take the risk of trusting the spirit's intuitive knowing over and above the natural mind of the soul. This does not in any way diminish the importance of the natural mind; it simply puts it in right relationship with the spiritual mind and is the vehicle through which spiritual truth is understood and communicated for the edification of both oneself and others around us. He concluded the chapter by making reference to the 3 gifts of the Spirit in I Cor. 12 (word of knowledge, prophecy and speaking in tongues) that most relate to the maturing and operation of intuition within the believer.

(It's important to pause here once again to acknowledge that we are referring to a Christian, one indwelt by the Spirit of God who is trained (not necessarily formally) in the Word, and also to acknowlege that we will never be infallible nor complete in these areas, which is why we walk and function in them humbly and alongside others in the Body of Christ who complement us.)

In chapter 23, Marshall links the conscience with the will of the person, showing that the human will is subservient to the conscience, which is part of the human spirit. This is what obedience is all about: "When conscience says, 'You ought', my will should respond, 'I will.'...There is no function of the human spirit more crucial to living out of the spirit than the conscience..."

However, the author acknowledges that some aspects of obedience need to be examined because of serious misunderstandings within the Church about true obedience. A couple of examples of wrong thinking on this are:

• Obedience is like a "moral medicine" - it's unpleasant so must be good for us.
• Obedience is conformity, "one of the most dangerous features of modern society".

Romans 6:16 shows that "obedience merely as obedience is not of itself necessarily good." My understanding as a young Christian was twisted in this; I was raised in the fear of authority, and while this was partially correct, I wasn't taught how to disagree rightly with authority. (This came, not only from family upbringing but from the culture at large that was bent towards authoritarianism; also Christian theology that got some of its biblical interpretation from culture, relayed this message of obedience and submission unhealthily.)

Because of the Lord's mercy and healing, my parents' humility, mentoring through great books, God-designed circumstances and my own obedience to Truth, I now have a much wider space in my spirit where the Spirit of Jesus continues to increase and I can stand up, look into the face of God, know who I am in His eyes, and agree or disagree healthily. I'm still maturing in this, but it's a wonderful freedom! (I would highly recommend Leanne Payne's book, Crisis in Masculinity, to you related to this...)

A fundamental truth about God must be understood in order to grasp the nature of godly obedience and submission; and that is: "...God has committed Himself in a remarkable way to maintain each person's moral freedom." In other words, God Himself never, in the slightest way, coerces a human to love and obey Him. We, however, in our fallenness and sin, do this all the time in our relationships, either by the force of sheer strong human will or by manipulation. God gains our allegiance purely through wooing us. He is the greatest Lover and wins the love of humans through wooing, never through force. (This concept, by the way, is important to get hold of in order to properly understand what biblical submission is about, because the nature of true mutual submission must have at its core the nature of God, which always makes room for the person's moral freedom, his voluntary response - biblical submission is never forced.)

Marshall goes on to say that "The Holy Spirit, indwelling our recreated spirit, will not move out into the soul life without the free response of our will. Omnipotence will not crush even such a fragile thing as finite, feeble human will, so deeply is God committed to our moral being."

Because of this reality, when a person is in right relationship with God (i.e., having been won by His love), "love is primarily expressed in obedience." Obedience is not something coerced from us but given willingly and gladly (Psa. 40:8;110:3).

"One of the apparent paradoxes of the Christian life is that obedience makes us free...Obedience and surrender, surprisingly, mean freedom and selfhood." So the more one obeys his conscience (which must continually be cleansed from dead works), the more freedom he experiences. This speaks volumes about the amazing nature of our God - He wants free and mature children and servants, love slaves, that He can entrust with His nature and mission on earth. He wants us, like Jesus, to be free to do whatever we want to (not in the absolute sense since we aren't perfect in love and obedience) because we are so aligned with His heart that His law is written internally on our hearts and we delight to do His will! We don't need the external laws because we love His law. The ongoing process of obeying His good will/law writes it on our hearts and we do it naturally.

The world and the flesh and the devil do not like people to be free. Free people are a threat to all of our systems in which we find identity and security in this life.

Rather than let this get too long, I'm going to quote highlights out of the chapter that I believe will be helpful to you as you partner with the Spirit to increasingly live out of your spirit rather than the natural powers of the soul:

• How then do we get free? There is only one way: that is by total obedience to the lordship of Jesus...But why does Jesus want to be Lord? Not so that He can 'lord it over' us...He wants to be Lord because He is the only one wise enough to guide our lives properly, and the only one strong enough to keep us free from Satan.
• How does Jesus set us free today? In the same way He set people free during His time on earth - by the power of the Holy Spirit (Lk. 4:18)...When we respond in obedience, the power of the Holy Spirit is released into the area of the human will.
• God's commands are also His enabling. When we respond with our weak human obedience to His commands, the power of the Holy Spirit can reach across into our human will so that the weakest-willed Christian can 'do everything through him who gives me strength.' (Phil.4:13)
• Not only is the power to do the will of God available only through obedience, but obedience is critical in knowing the voice of God...I may say I want to hear God speak, but actually I want to be selective in what I hear.
• Ultimately Jesus decided not on sense evidence, but by what He 'heard' in His spirit...His judgement was always right: because His obedience was perfect, therefore His 'hearing' was unimpaired.

This chapter concludes with touching on three of the nine spiritual gifts (I Cor. 12) that are particularly connected to the conscience: the word of wisdom, discernment of spirits, and faith.

"Wisdom...is related to attainment of goals...and because it is directive, calls for obedience." I can't speak a word of wisdom/direction into the life of another if I am not obedient to the Lord's word in my life

"It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of a clean conscience in the ministry of deliverance, because the presence of an evil spirit is ultimately known by discernment not by symptoms...Discernment is knowing the truth about a spiritual situation; and because it is the conscience that bears witness to truth, accurate discernment needs a clean conscience."

"Faith always requires a response from the will as well as the mind...Believing in the Scriptures always has a strong volitional element; therefore trusting and obeying always go together. (Heb. 11:8)"

As I have mentioned a few times before, the practice of "listening prayer" is vital in obedience. In the place of getting before God, listening to His word to me personally through the Scriptures, then obeying what I believe He is saying to me, I begin to develop my "hearing" to recognize His voice. Journaling is one of the best practical ways to practice listening prayer because it forces me out of passivity in relating to God.

Next week we will cover chapter 24 which is about worship and the emotions. Just a reminder that the next book which we will begin in a couple of weeks is Wounds that Heal by Stephen Seamands. Grace and peace to you this week!

Living in the Freedom of the Spirit - Week #17

(OOPS! As I was writing this posting, it was sounding familiar to me but it wasn’t until after I had finished that I realized I repeated last week’s chapter which Joan covered so well. My apologies – maybe my excuse can be “jet lag” for being disoriented! So for those of you who read chapter 23 for this week, it will now be for next week too!)

Many thanks to Sue and to Joan for filling in for me while I was in Thailand. They both did a wonderful job of not only getting the postings written and published, but of doing it with joy!

Truth is liberating, and this book is full of truth; and what I appreciate so much about the book is that it not only states true concepts, but the spirit behind the words is life-giving. It’s apparent that Tom Marshall was a man who lived these realities because of the life that comes through his writing.

We’re in the final section of the book now, looking at how living from the God-ordained source (which is the human spirit indwelt by the Holy Spirit) is possible. I want to recommend another book here along these lines, and that is Watchman Nee’s Release of the Spirit. It is especially strong for understanding the life lived from the spirit rather than from the soul.

The strength of Marshall’s book related to this theme is that he recognizes how important the human soul is in walking in the Spirit. This is the realm that the Lord seems to be highlighting to His people and one which we as a Church have often bypassed in our desire to walk in the Spirit.

Our chapter for this week is chapter 22, Relating Spirit and Soul. In previous chapters the author has been emphasizing the spirit of man and God’s intention in creation that man and woman be ruled through their spirit. He pointed out that the three functions of the spirit are: the capacity to know (intuition), to obey (conscience), and to relate (communion).

In this chapter he deals with the importance of the soul and how it relates to the spirit. The three functions of the soul are the ability to reason (mind), decide (will) and feel (emotions). Quoting Marshall:
* Knowledge received in the spirit is meant to rule over the reasoning of the mind.
* The conscience is intended to direct and control the decisions of the will. * The function of communion is to rule over the emotions.

Marshall goes on to make an observation about God that is foundational in our understanding of His beautiful nature and character as He relates to humans: …although the Holy Spirit resides in the human spirit, He will go no further without the desire and consent of the human will…He will not force His way into the closed areas of our life anymore than He will force His way into the heart of the unbeliever. Dwelling within our spirit, the Spirit lives by His own law of vulnerable love.

In the rest of the chapter the author shows how the soul relates to the spirit in the area of knowing. Revelation is knowledge that reaches the human spirit; it is received intuitively and is what awakens faith. Contrary to what we often hear, faith depends on knowledge, but this is not cognitive knowledge. It is the “direct, intuitive knowledge that comes from God to our spirit. Our rational mind has difficulty with that kind of knowledge.”

Like you all, many times in my walk with God I have rationalized myself out of obedience to something that I sensed God was saying to me, because it didn’t make sense to my natural mind. More and more I’m obeying the promptings of the Spirit in my spirit, and the more I practice this (taking the risk of faith), the more I’m discerning His voice.

Marshall gives a stern warning that unbelief is not a benign weakness but the rejection of revelation knowledge and is a great barrier to the flow of the life of the Spirit in and through us. He points out that if we are to grow in receiving and operating intuitively, we must become childlike: “Unless we are willing, like children, to trust the divine knowledge we receive in our spirit, we will never understand the ways of the kingdom of God.” This is, of course, all within the boundaries of biblical revelation.

The role of the human mind is to receive the revelation knowledge from the human spirit in words. In other words, the mind puts shape and form to knowledge that has been received in the spirit. This is important for the sake of one’s own understanding of what God is doing and saying and also for the sake of communicating to others around us. And so the ongoing renewal of the mind (alignment with God’s Word) is absolutely imperative in order to be able to discern and understand the intuitions of the spirit; at the same time, I don’t believe we can properly understand the Word of God without obedience to the intuitions in our spirit. So it isn’t a linear process; while we are developing our minds according to the Word of God, we are growing in faith and trust as we obey the intuitions in our spirit – because we are never perfect in either of these realms, there’s room for mistakes, and the Body of Christ around us provides accountability and protection as we mature.

The author closes the chapter by showing how three of the gifts of the Spirit (word of knowledge, tongues, and interpretation of tongues) aid us in our capacity to know intuitively. Thank the Lord for these gifts – they both demand faith to operate in them and also strengthen our faith and the ability of our mind to express spiritual truth.

Lord Jesus, thank you for Your own dear Spirit who is in and with us to bring us into the intimate knowledge of God and then enable us to communicate the unknowable to others. Come, Holy Spirit, and increase Your work in my heart and Your people’s hearts for the sake of Jesus and the glory of God.

Have a blessed week in Him!