What then is spirituality?
To be spiritual simply means to have a mindset regulated by the word of God. It is thinking, speaking and acting according to the dictates of the Holy Spirit. It is a state of being where a believer is governed from inside out. In other words, your spirit is controlling your soul and body as directed by the Holy Spirit. See Romans 8:14-17, Gal.4:1-7; 1Cor.3:1-3. A spiritual man or woman lives his or her life as commanded by the word of God and not necessarily as convenient. When you are spiritual, it shows in your life style. The following traits will be the description of your personality:
1. You will embrace the covenant of grace first by new birth and then by the actual practice of the demands of the word of God [Jn.3:3-16, 16-19, Rm.10:6-11, Matt.7:24-27].
2. You will embrace the virtue of Consecration: consecration to God would be your lifestyle and not what you struggle with because your thoughts will be filled with thoughts of God always. 2Tim.2:19; Ps.11:3. Every plan of God has a foundation, if you do not understand the foundation, you will suffer frustration. The foundation for any great destiny is to depart from iniquity. Joseph lived like this and the best became reserved for him. Pharaoh said concerning him: “can we find a man such as this in whom is the Spirit of God?” [Gen.41:38]. This testimony is similar to that of Daniel in Dan.1 where he purposed in his heart to stay pure and undefiled. His life became conducive for the Spirit of God to reside in. The result is that he was blessed with true riches and was relevant in Babylon all his days. Consecration is to commit yourself to the ways of God and live by it and not other way. It is a demonstration of your commitment and faithfulness to God.
3. You will be properly described as dedicated to God. Prov.23:26; God does not say we should give Him our cash first, He asks us to give him our hearts and not our cash. If your heart is not there, your cash is wasted. The Macedonian Church exemplified this – 2 Cor.8:5 – “And this they did, but first gave their own selves to the Lord, and unto us by the will of God.” Also see what David said in Ps.51:16-17. When your heart is tuned to God, your sacrifice become acceptable otherwise they have no meaning to Him. What moves God is your heart. Dedication is getting connected to God and His pleasures. It is being there with Him at all times; it is being planted in His house. Ps.32:13-14 – dedication is always being there for God. It is not activity; it is being solidly attached to God himself. This person is described in Ps.1:1-3. Planted people will always flourish even in old age. Ps.61:3 describes a dedicated person as a tree of righteousness; the planting of the Lord that He might be glorified. Until your heart is planted in God, your destiny is not secured. John 12:24-26. About dedication, David Oyedepo says: “Until your life becomes a seed planted in the kingdom of God, it will not have the color God has ordained for it. Dedication is what determined the flow of the life of God to you. It is putting yourself inside the kingdom earth for a fruitful destiny.” See John 15:1-5; Eccl.9:4.
Transformation: Rm.12:1 – every dedicated Christian ends up being transformed to fruits.
It makes giving easy: It makes your life fruitful Jn.10:18
Wealth in every area of life answers to dedication.
4. You will love the Lord. Your love for God would be unquestionable. It is demonstrated in prompt and delightsome obedience to God’s instructions – 1Jn.5:3. The first and the greatest commandment that Jesus talked about is the love for God above all else. Matt.22:36-40. Abraham exemplified this and became a global bread winner to the point that God had to give His only begotten son to die to connect the world to the blessing of Abraham – Gal.3:13-14. Gen.12; 15; 17; etc. all these scripture show that God visited Abraham often. This is spiritual wealth – association with God. Their relationship so deepened that in Isa.41:8 God was proud to call Abraham His friend. Abraham’s love was at a cost; everything of value carries a cost. If you hate the cost, you have lost the value because value is a function of cost; you cannot get any more value than you are willing to pay. So the quality of your obedience is what defines the quality of your love. Jesus tells us how to know a true lover of God in John.14:21 – this explains why God visited Abraham often. You cannot genuinely love the Lord and miss His manifestation. The story of Abraham’s life ended like this: “and Abraham was old and well stricken in age and the Lord had blessed him in all things” – he was not a dependent on any human being. If you say you love the Lord, where is the proof of your love? How do you respond to divine instructions that come to you in your private devotion or through his prophets? Do you consider the work of God a burden and see God as one to be used instead of worshipped? Deu.28:47-48; Jer.23:36-39. Solomon is acclaimed the richest man in the bible for one reason; he loved the Lord and offered a thousand burnt offerings – 1Kings 3:3; his thousand burnt offerings would have been wasted if it was not motivated by love.
5. You will be addicted to the Kingdom of God: Kingdom addiction is absolute yieldedness, when God becomes the central focus of your life. It is when all His word has become law to you. It is when you rise up in the morning and all you celebrate till you go to bed at night is God. When God becomes the controller of the affairs of your life, everything will go in your favor. Those who love to see the progress, advancement and establishment of the kingdom of God are properly described as addicted to the Kingdom. Ps.122:6 & 9 – Jerusalem in this text stands for the Church of Jesus Christ today. The formula for kingdom addiction is clear; in Matthew 6:33, Jesus Christ said to seek his kingdom and his righteousness first and all these things shall be added to you. Where your heart is determines where God places you. This is not participating in the work of God for a show but because this is where your heart is. Many are in the kingdom for what they can get so they are always disappointed. But you will rise if you change and cause God’s matter to come first in your heart before your own. David exemplified this in 1Chron.29:2-5. Until you change position, your situation remains the same. See Job22:23, Mal.3:7; Jer.29:13, Ps.16:11 – how addicted you are to the advancement of the kingdom determines the level of abundance you enjoy.
This addiction is not in the volume of what you give but in the tenacity of your heart. How connected are you to God one on one? See what David said in Ps.132:4-5 – God has seen how much offering you drop for Him in Church; now He wants to see you drop your heart. Please do not let your offering deceive you; until your body becomes a living sacrifice, you are not in reasonable service yet. Joel 2:13 says to rend your heart and not your garment. Abraham exemplified his addiction with his only son as an offering to God. Apostle Paul sowed his life as a seed and God prospered him to the point that his legacies still speak today. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego all proved the value of the benefit of kingdom addiction. They attained to positions that others were trying to get in Babylon without contesting election just because they were addicted to God and were ready to die for what they believed.
So you see that wealth in the kingdom goes far beyond giving your money. You will observe that we have not mentioned giving of money so far because it is not the only crucial issue in prosperity.
God’s method of wealth: It is packaged in the blessing. What is the blessing? Gal.3:13-14 – the promise of the Spirit through faith. This has the ability to cause us to prosper spirit, soul and body.
Spiritual Prosperity/Wealth
A clear understanding of this cannot be attained without an understanding of the triune nature of man. 1Thessalonians 5:23
Man is a spirit; he has a soul and lives in a body. See Gen.1:26-28 and 2:7
God is Spirit and can only relate with man spiritually. See John 4:23-24. Man’s spirit is described as the candle of the Lord so that when God wants to communicate with man, His voice comes on man’s spirit like lighting a candle. Prov.20:27 – thus when God speaks to us, we experience a lightening of our candle – Ps.18:28.
The spirit of man is also referred to as the inner man or the hidden man of the heart. See Eph.3:16, 1Pet.3:3-4. It is the part of man which connects with God as God is a Spirit and spirits communicate with spirits. See John 4:23-24; God seeks those who will worship Him in Spirit and in truth because our spirits are described as His candle [Prov.20:27] for that reason, whenever He wants to relate with us, He does so by enlightening our spirits [Ps.18:28]. This is the real man that never dies; at physical death, it merely departs from the body [see Jas.2:26; 2Pet.1:13-15; 1Cor.15:1].
In 2Cor.3:18, we are told: “We all with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord are changed from glory to glory even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” The spirit is the real you. You are a spirit. You have a soul and live in a body. Your soul is the part of you that contains your mind, will and emotions. The mind is the part of you that thinks reasons and stores up memory. The physical reflection of the mind is the brain. The brain is a most remarkable part of us. It has the ability to store up three hundred million years’ worth of memory.
Text: 1Thessalonians 5:23: “… and I pray God that your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The soul realm of the tridimensional man as we saw last week is the realm of consciousness in man. It is made up of the mind, the will and the emotions of man. It is the window through which man’s spirit sees the world and the spirit realm. For a clearer understanding of the soul, let us break it up into three parts namely the mind, the will and the emotions.
The human mind is the most complex computer in the entire world. The brain which is the physical representation of the mind is referred to in science as the magic trees of the mind because the neurons that make up the brain are nerve cells that look like trees. The brain is said to process four hundred billion actions per second. We have a hundred billion nerve cells in our brains and each nerve cell can grow up to two hundred thousand branches. This means we have around three million years’ worth plus of space in our brains to build up memories. These trees like nerve cells of our brain take up a beautiful form that can be likened to a well-watered green tree or an ugly form which can be likened to a withered grey tree depending on the kind of thoughts you dwell on because thoughts are actually things. In fact it is these thoughts look like trees in the brain!
The mind is the part of man that thinks and reasons and stores up information in the name of memories and data. It also has the ability to process information and observations and eventually come up with a conclusion known as judgments. This in turn influences our emotions and our wills as we shall see later in this study. The judgments that the mind produce are either sound or unsound depending on how much influence the Holy Spirit and the word of God has over such a mind. In other words, depending on how spiritual the mind is. This explains why several people can attend the same Church at the same time and hear the same word of God but turn out differently. The extent to which a person can benefit from the word of God is the extent to which they have renewed their minds. Remember that at new birth, only our spirits are saved; our souls and bodies remain the same (John 3:6; 2Cor.5:17; Rom.12:1-2 and Jas.1:21). The bible tells us what to do with a part of our soul known as our mind to enable us save our souls from the spectacle colored by a wrong belief system due to our traditions and natural experiences prior to our new birth experience.
In Romans 12:2, we are told to renew our minds so that we can see clearly. Until you see clearly or view things from God’s point of view, you cannot rightly divide the word of truth and your knowledge of scriptures would be tinted by traditions of men and unbelief which make the word of God of no effect! The result would be your inability to make sound judgments in the issues of life and therefore not being able to enjoy the abundant life the Lord has already achieved for us. See Matthew 15:3-6; 22:29; Mark 12:24; 2Tim.2:15; Col.2:8, 16-23.
The importance of developing our souls to match up with our spiritual upgrade to the class of God cannot be overstated. In Isaiah 55:8-11, God was showing the distinction between His thought level and that of the natural man and therefore, His ways and the ways of natural man. We can see from this text that the ways of God are far higher than our ways and His thoughts than our thoughts. He went on to show that because of the high level of His thinking, His word never returns unaccomplished. This is why the Apostle Paul says that no word of God is void of power. If we are to operate successfully at this realm of abundant life to which we have been called, we must of necessity upgrade our thinking pattern to line up with that of God. The quality of your life therefore is determined by the extent to which you are able to upgrade your thinking pattern to match up with that of God. How do we get to do this? The bible tells us. We can renew our minds with the word of God to enable us live up to this new life otherwise known as the abundant life; the life lived in the realm of divinity. The process of mind renewal can be achieved by taking the following steps.
1. The New birth experience: The spiritual rebirth otherwise known as the born again experience is the foundation for mind renewal otherwise, we would merely experience a form of godliness that denies the power of God. No matter how much a plastic seed looks like the original, it can never germinate even when given all the right environment for it to do so. This is why your membership of a Church without the new birth experience that initiates you into the family of God does not grant you access to the abundant life. The best you can get from operating the principles of the abundant life without first laying this foundation is leanness to your soul in spite of the blessing that robs off on you and you do not want that. This is what gave rise to men like Hitler and Stalin whose lives could best be described as efforts in futility resulting in colossal wastage of lives and property. Until God gives you a heart of flesh which describes the New Creation Spirit, you cannot experience mind renewal which results in God’s word being inscribed in your heart by His Holy Spirit. Thus your soul cannot be saved. See John 3:3-6; Romans 10:6-10; James 1:21; Ezek.36:26-27; Jer.31:31-34; Heb.10:15-17.
2. Read the word, meditate on it until understanding is hatched and share it until it becomes a part of you, then study it until you can teach it. See 1Tim.4:13-16; Joshua 1:8; Ps.1:1-3. Scientifically, we are made to understand that every single thing we hear or everything that comes into our brains through our five senses, we think about them and then we make choices and convert them into a structural thing in our brain known as thoughts which look like trees. Scripturally, we are wired for love – righteousness, peace, joy, kindness, longsuffering etc. and not bitterness, unforgiveness or any form of carnality. If we believe what we hear that conflicts with the truth of God’s word, we become prone to deception and all the negative emotions that will cause the trees of our minds (the tree like neurons that make up the nerve cells that constitute the brain) which we talked about earlier to wither and look like grey withered trees. The result would be all kinds of sicknesses and diseases. Medically, most incurable illnesses like cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, insanity etc. have been associated with negative emotions. Recently, a Doctor was teaching at a service I attended and he said there is a research going on now to prove that breast cancer in women results from the negative emotion of unforgiveness. On the other hand, if we open up to divine information, they build us up and enhance the value of our souls. This makes the word of God indispensable in our quest for mind renewal. See Gal.5:16, 17, 19-23; 1Cor.13:4-8 etc.
3. Be an addicted student of the word and other literature relevant to your needs. Read books of great minds thoroughly influenced by God; listen to teachings that edify and encourage godliness and attend seminars and conferences relevant to your purpose and destiny. When you read resource materials of those who God has enhanced their thinking in an area where you are ignorant, you rob minds with the great and the result is an enhanced mind which helps to raise the lid on your thinking capacity and makes you more prone to rightly dividing the word of truth and less prone to wrong interpretation of scripture. Consequently your life is enhanced because you cannot be greater than your thought life. See 2Tim.2:15; Prov.23:7a; 20:13. When Apostle Peter addressed the Sanhedrin when they were called to question for preaching in the name of the Lord following the miraculous healing of a crippled man at a gate of the temple, the elders observed from the general demeanor of Peter and John that they had been thoroughly influenced through their association with the Lord. Think about what your life would be like when you are thoroughly influenced by the word and the Holy Spirit! See Acts 4:13.
The emotions and the will
The emotion of man is the part of man that feels. Man is wired to love and therefore demonstrate all the positive emotions enumerated as the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5:22-23 one of the most outstanding of which is joy as it expresses all of the emotions of love in one package. When a person is thoroughly influenced by the word of God, joy is the result in his emotions. In other words, he becomes joyful. See Jer.15:16; John15:11
The will on the other hand, is the part of the soul that is responsible for decision making. God has created everyman with a sovereign will such that whether or not we enjoy abundant life has to do with the use to which we put our wills. In Gen.2:16-17 where God told the man:
“Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
God automatically made it clear that man had a right to choose thus making his will sovereign. Man could choose to obey God in which case he would enjoy the abundant life or disobey God and suffer the consequence of not enjoying the abundant life. This truth is further clarified by God through his servant Moses in Deut.30:19 and in John 3:16 where God offers the free gift of salvation and says that whosoever will believe on the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved.
Based on the thoughts a man meditates, he could experience the positive emotions with which we are wired or experience the negative emotions which is not supposed to be part of us. Thus develop the emotions and the will to enjoy the abundant life; the following steps are required of a believer:
1. Read and meditate on the word. Put it constantly before your eyes, dwell on it in your thoughts until it begins to influence your emotions and you will become so joyful that you will find it easy to make choices with your will that honours God. See Romans 12:2; Jos.1:8; Deut.6:6-8; 1Tim.4:13-16; Jas.1:21.
2. Consciously speak the word over your life and refuse to speak the suggestions offered you by the circumstances you are going through. This is why the bible tells us in Romans 12:2 not to be conformed to this world but be transformed from it by the renewing of our minds. Mark 11:23; Romans 10:8-11; Prov.18:21. Your speech controls your emotions which in turn dictate the direction of your will.
3. Keep the right company. 1Cor.15:33; Ps.1:1-3; Prov.13:20. If you are friends with an angry man for instance, you will learn his way and lose the ability to exercise your will to make sound judgments (negative emotions resulting in wrong use of the will – see Prov.22:24-25; 29:22). A snare to your soul in Prov.22:25 refers to negative emotions resulting in wrong decision making!
4. Walk in the spirit: This will see you swimming in the positive emotion that love can bring about resulting in using your will correctly by godly standards. See Gal.5:16-17; Rom.8:1.
This is called the outer man or the physical person made up of the five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing.
Spiritual prosperity is therefore measured by the extent to which our spirits controlled by the Holy Spirit, leads our souls and bodies or influences our souls and bodies. For this to happen, we would have to learn to practice the art of hearing the voice of God and following the leading of the Holy Spirit. When you are led by the Holy Spirit, you are said to be mature or a son of God. See Romans 8:14-16. For you to hear the voice of God, you must understand the following truths:
1. It is God’s will to lead you. Ps.32:8;
2. You can hear the voice of God today.
3. The Holy Spirit speaks to us to guide us.
4. He does not speak of Himself but He tells us what He hears from the father and the Son and show it to us.
5. You are not to pattern your life like that of the world but as God wills.
6. When you abide in the Lord and His word abides in you, your will will become one with that of the author of the scripture.
7. Avoid deceiving your own heart so as not to be influenced by familiar spirits.
8. The fruit of the spirit are evident in a life that is led by the Spirit of God.
How to hear the voice of God
The above scriptures can be compressed into four steps namely:
Stillness: This means to control your thoughts so that your mind can be quiet enough to receive the transmission of the voice of God to your mind through your spirit.
Vision: This is the ability to see what God is saying through mental visualizing. This also involves using your imagination. For example, when God wanted to help Abraham build his faith for fruitfulness, He made him visualize his children to be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the sea shore. Gen.15:1-5. See Ps.16:7!
Spontaneity: The voice of God is received through the spontaneous flow of thoughts into your mind. This flow comes from your spirit by the word of the Lord impressed there by the Holy Spirit. See Ps. 16:7 in various translations.
Journaling: This means to write down what God is telling us. When we do this, we can receive more because we will keep the flow of thought going longer than if we do not write these down. Hab. 2:2.
Do not try to live by getting your direction through others, if you do, you will eventually end up in confusion. Prophetic gifts are for confirmation of God’s direction to you, not to set the direction for your life
SESSION 3: OUR ROLE IN RESPONSE TO THIS DIVINE INVITATION
1. WIN ONE PERSON TO CHRIST A MONTH
2. WRITE OUT THE NAME OF OUR TARGET PERSONS AND PRAY FOR THEIR SALVATION.
3. PRAYER AND PRAISE SESSION.
