Checking into the Spirit
Connecting with God
There’s probably about three categories of people here tonight:
- Some of you have been Christians all your life
- Some of you had no church background, or a little, but you have made a commitment to Christ
- and hopefully there are many here tonight who are checking out this Christian stuff and want to know more. Someone has dragged you along. I hope that you will find this church pretty normal, welcoming and also thought provoking.
I am speaking to all of you on one level or another. At student.soul we believe that there is a dimension to us as human beings that is more than our physical bodies and our brains. When we look inside there’s an extra dimension.
DIAGRAM: Body and SOUL/SPIRIT vitally connected but with different functions.
INTERACTIVE EXERCISE Close your eyes for a moment. Take a look inside. Imagine you are looking into your soul or spirit or into the inner part of yourself. Some of you have connected right into your spirit, this is a familiar place. Others of you feel this void, it’s weird. Some of you, your computer is searching, the search icon is roaming because it’s been a while. RELAX, BE STILL, just be here. You are connecting with yourself in an inner dimension.
You may or may not believe you have a spirit. In Christian terms: It’s the spiritual part which sustains our life, and if the spirit is not there, there is no life. If you have seen a dead body or touched one you will know that it is rock hard, there is no life left.
One interesting question is: are we spiritual beings first, captured in a body, or are we physical beings with the spirit added on?
If we want to know God we will have to activate our spirit. If we want to know God better, we will have to first access the spirit, not the mind.
When you fall in love, you don’t do that logically, after considering all the pros and cons. It’s an attraction, an affair of the heart. Being connected to God is like that, it’s in the spiritual dimension, the heart. We don’t physically see God, but we may see, feel, experience God in the spirit.
Coming to Jesus, who is the doorway to God, does not make sense. I have to reach out to trust Him and I have to activate something called faith. Faith is of that other dimension. And faith in Jesus Christ changes something. It alters my chemistry, my whole way of being. Of being human, of being in the world.
Don’t hear me saying It’s all spirit and no mind or understanding. Those dimensions are really important. But your spirit knows a lot more than your mind knows already. Inside we know whether someone is trustworthy or not. You are already summing me up whether you have acknowledged that with your mind or not.
We don’t practice seeing in the spirit or being led by our intuition or the Holy Spirit, because our minds dominate and we are more used to that. We trust our minds more than our hearts or the Holy Spirit. But I believe that our faith and experience would be a whole lot more real and what we long for if we could get this back in perspective.
INTERACTIVE EXERCISE: Put your index finger right up to your nose. Now try to focus on it.
For kids raised in the church from birth, God has been so close to them all their lives that he’s now like that finger – hard to focus on. That means you long for God but maybe you can’t find Him because He’s too close. It may be possible that you never experienced God in this dimension or very rarely. The biggest challenge for you is to move from an: “I know all about God” relationship to an “I know God” relationship. From the head to the heart. It may be a bit like you’ve been so in it all your life that you have never experienced God as your first love. You see others have amazing encounters with God, but for you it’s more of the same routine. You love God, you want to be faithful, but you want more.
You don’t want boring.
For some of you coming to Dunedin and leaving the home church is your opportunity to break out, find a better church, something more interesting. Or it’s to not go to church at all!! Give me a break!! Relocating is a really crucial time for either connecting with a church or disconnecting!! Be aware of how that may be affecting others around you in the halls. If you fall into this category,What you may need is a crisis. A crucial recommitment experience. This is the booster rocket experience. I had a friend who would drive me nuts by saying: “Helen it’s all in your head, you need to find God in your heart. It’s about being a being, not about doing!!” And I would go: fine but how do I do that???? I needed some real encounters with Christ and I needed to sort out my stuff. You may need to face your doubts, your anger, your underlying guilt, your feelings of not measuring up to this Christian worldview you’ve been around all your life. The real reasons for your passivity…why I do not encounter God when I worship.
One of my conclusions over the last year or so is that people can come to church, whether Christian or not and go away without ever having connected with God. It’s not primarily about singing songs of worship, these may help. But you can sing songs and your heart is far away from God. It is about a deeper spiritual connection of my spirit to God’s spirit. That is something I want to help deepen this year. We will do our best to help you and provide opportunities this year, but it is your responsibility to seek for this. You must make some deliberate choices. Don’t be satisfied with the relationship you currently have.
One thing I am 100% sure of, is that when you get this together you will have a depth of maturity and connection to God that nothing will shake and you will be satisfied. One of our stated values here is DEPTH. We want you to find God in such a way, in a whole way, that you will survive varsity and marriage and jobs and crises and still be a Christian when you are 95.
Let me finish with some thoughts from Psalm 24
Psalm 24 is a ritual for coming to God and entering his presence- opening up to him. It has three parts.
A Psalm Of David.
1 The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it; 2 for he has founded it on the seas, and established it on the rivers. 3 Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? 4 Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully. 5 They will receive blessing from the Lord, and vindication from the God of their salvation. 6 Such is the company of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob. Selah
7 Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. 8 Who is the King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle. 9 Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. 10 Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory.
In the first part of the psalm, v.1 and v.2, God is proclaimed as the Lord of all. This is giving God His rightful place and honour as Creator and King over all.It puts us as human in perspective to the Eternal.
Then the question is asked. Who can come near to God? V4. Those with clean hands and hearts. This, I want to propose is not about being sinless, perfect or blameless, or being a good person, but about the desire of our hearts to admit we need someone bigger than ourselves, that on our own we stuff up and that we want to be walking humbly with God and devoted to Him. Micah 6:6-8. Look at the life of David in this respect.
And then the question and answer ritual. What can we do to enter God’s presence? The gates of the temple are challenged to yield to allow entry to the King of Glory.
Let us think of ourselves as the gates and doorways of the temple. Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit 1 Cor 6:19-20 “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own, you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body.”
God seeks to present Himself but it is in and through us. We have to yield, to open up, lift up our heads and hearts to give God access. To make that connection is a deliberate action on our part. Be lifted up, O ancient doors. Why so low? The gates were destroyed in the destruction of the temple and the rubble made entry difficult if not impossible. How are our gates? Are they so low and misused, lying in ruins, rusty? Lift up our gates Lord. Let us grant you access to our hearts again or for the first time.
INTERACTIVE PRACTICE Let’s practice connecting with our spirits again: Close your eyes. Check into your spirit. You may want to ask God to give you a picture of this. Invite God to come into your spirit in some way. Open UP YOUR GATES AND DOORWAYS, Raise them up in faith to the King of Glory.You may see an image of this, but maybe not. You might hear God or some inner voice saying… Or you may feel some sort of emotion right now. Or maybe you see, hear, feel nothing at all. This is really strange to you. That’s ok. This may take some practice.
For more on this come to the service on the 21st March