Living spiritually means minimizing the ritual and routine while maximizing the heart and soul.
I want to begin several studies on the theme of spirituality. The word “spiritual” means matters corresponding with, emanating from, or yielding results from the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives; the non-carnal aspects of life. This is of course a Christian definition when used in the church of Jesus Christ.
Jesus emphasized the spiritual side of life when he talked with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). He taught her “God is spirit. And they that worship must worship him in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeks such to worship him.”
Jesus is getting down to the basics here. Are we spirit-based in our worship of God? Living spiritually means minimizing the ritual and routine while maximizing the heart and soul.
When asked what is the greatest commandment Jesus replied,
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' (Mark 12:30 ESV)
A little reflection on this greatest commandment yields a conclusion that three of the four services of worship we give God are spiritual in nature: heart, soul and mind.
Many think that all this study about spiritual things is spooky. Remember the admonition of John the apostle who wrote, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1John 4:1 ESV). So certainly we ought to be careful. Nevertheless, for fear of contact or influence from evil spirits some believers are too fearful to seek true spirituality. They are like the man in the parable so fearful of failure that he dared not invest his master’s money that was entrusted to him.
God created us with capacity for physical and spiritual interaction because he made us in the image of God. Inasmuch as “walking by faith” is a spiritual exercise, being a spiritual person is just everyday life for Christian. Do not interpret your God-given capacity to be spiritual as an invitation to an evil spirit.
Having a capacity for spiritual communication means we can perceive, worship and receive from God the Holy Spirit. We live as followers of Christ in a spiritual kingdom. Jesus set it up this way. He said,
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. (John 14:16-17).
This was vitally important for the disciples to understand because Jesus spoke these words at the Last Supper which was his last opportunity to spend personal time with them. Luke wrote that Jesus commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. As promised, the Holy Spirit came on the feast of Pentecost about 50 days after the resurrection.
Having a capacity for spirituality is no guarantee of active spiritual living. Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well that she was wrong about religion in two ways. First, she worshiped a corrupt form of religion that had arisen in northern Israel. Secondly, she associated religion with a physical holy place, Jerusalem.
Jesus told her the Jewish faith of southern Israel (Judah) preserved the un-corrupted faith in the one true God. But the true faith itself was not to be restricted to any one specific physical place because God Himself is omnipresent by His Spirit. Thus Jesus anticipated the coming of a new era of spirituality for believers that was unknown in the Old Testament.
Jesus indicated a time frame for this spirituality by saying “the time is coming and now is…” He gave her the opportunity to get in as it were on the ground level of what God was doing. She responded with belief in him as the coming Christ.
Jesus spoke of the Spirit of God fully active in himself as being “the time now is”. The “coming” part referred to the work of the Holy Spirit in Christian believers starting at the outpouring of the baptism in the Holy Spirit at the feast of Pentecost after his resurrection.
We must all admit that we have not fully yielded to God. We have been hesitant and inconsistent in living spiritually the way God the Father desires. We should be spiritual all the time with all our heart, soul and mind. Paul admonished us to be fully yielded to the Holy Spirit, admonishing us to “walk in the Spirit” so as not to fulfill the desires of the flesh.
An old-fashioned dried-out piston driven water pump may be renewed by priming it and then pumping the lever. The resulting gush of water renews and restores us. But this assumes that the pump is connected to a viable water source and is not just stuck in the ground with no piping to the aquifer.
When God’s Holy Spirit flooded over the 120 believers on the day of Pentecost, people were attracted to the wondrous sight. Peter urged the spectators to “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is made to you and to your children and to all that are far off (future generations), even to as many as the Lord our God will call.”
Receiving the baptism in the Holy Spirit is like connecting the water pump to the aquifer in your life. This day of Pentecost was a parallel event to the Old Testament account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. As the miracle of new languages at Babel was God’s impetus to scatter humanity to the far points of the compass, the Pentecostal outpouring was now God’s promise to imbue Christians with power to carry the gospel to the limits of geographical space in the earth and throughout all generations.
On the day of the coming of the Spirit, rather than claim his status as the father of the church, Peter said in effect, We may have been the first to receive the Spirit but everyone who believes in Jesus will be included in this outpouring both geographically and generationally. The Spirit of God will bring gifts of prophecy to the old and visions to the young. The mighty spiritual force of God will come, he said, to sons and daughters, old and young, rich and poor, bond and free; even to as many as repent and believe in Jesus.
Before I received the Spirit I was a bit skeptical and afraid of evil influences. So I studied the coming of the Spirit in the book of Acts in chapter 2, then chapter 8, and on to chapter 10 and chapter 19. In the Bible people kept receiving this baptism in the Spirit of God for decades after Pentecost. I studied what Jesus taught at the Last Supper (John 14 – 17). Finally I realized that Jesus promised the presence of the Holy Spirit as a replacement for his personal absence. To ask God the Father to fill me with the Holy Spirit is simply to ask God for more of Jesus. This is the mystery of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Seeking spirituality is taking God seriously when he tells us “Ask and you shall receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). If this is you initial filling, then pray with expectation. Sometimes even those who have been filled with the spirit can get dry and thirsty. If the well pump is already there, you just need to prime the piston and get to pumping.
What is priming the pump? It is the same spiritual worship you had before. Ask… Seek… Knock…! Get serious with God in prayer and open your mind, heart and soul. Repent of past lukewarm attitudes (Revelation 3:19, 20). Continue to seek until the Spirit of God begins to commune with you daily as He did before.
This is seeking spirituality. To use a sports analogy, this is just showing up for preseason training. Seeking gets you on the team and on the field to begin training for the coming season. Last season is the past. We are just getting started.
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