Spiritual Beings Having a Human Experience

[HKHaugan]

Spiritual Beings Having a Human Experience

That title is the beginning of leaving the old life and breaking the champagne bottle on the bow of the new. It’s an inner realization you are launching into something bigger than yourself. Spiritual reality is God’s reality and He has invited us each into it. It’s spiritual, personal, relational and always full of newness. It’s not measurable and it’s never ending. You’re sailing into the ocean of recovery, restoration and renewal where you are becoming a focused spiritual being, a God-created being. It’s driven by the wind of the Holy Spirit in a spiritually hungry reborn heart and mind. Every situation and every day are new with new challenges and a new way of reacting. In Jesus you have a new focus, a new identity, a new attitude, a new inner guide and a ‘newness’ manual to keep you on course (Lk.5:36-39). Life is eternally founded and grounded in God, no longer subject to the fear of reefs, shoals, sharks and shifting sands of relational survival from one day to the next. Life is new where you are right now.

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end, they are new every morning, great is your faithfulness (Lamentations 3:22-23).”

All of this amazing reality begins and develops in the birth, life and death of Jesus, God the Son. His Resurrection is the seal of Him being the true way. Therefore, He is our new focus. He is our new identity. His attitude is an all consuming faith in His Father leading Him into new situations every day. His inner guide is our guide, the Spirit. His manual is our new manual, Scripture. There He is recorded as always being on the move, therefore, our new motivation.

That ‘newness’ manual reveals seven basic themes Jesus followed as He walked the hills and shores of Galilee. They were themes He lived to show us what perfect humanity looked like in everyday life. Because of Him, our first insight is to see ourselves and others as spiritual beings. All people everywhere are spiritual beings whose minds are designed to believe in God, whose hearts are called to trust Him and whose spirits are motivated to act by faith spiritually, personally and relationally. Let’s put a name and description on these themes we see in the Lord Jesus:

1.Image of God, He demonstrated every human being is an image of God (Gen.1:26, Heb.1:3, Col.1:15).

2.Child of God, He lived as a child doing the will of His Father (Mt.1:18, John 1:12).

3.Looking Forward, He was always teaching and sharing Himself while He was on the way (Mt.4:19).

4.Newness, He gave a sense of importance to each person being a new unique individual (Jn.20:17).

5.Maturity, He showed that maturity was not something you get but something you become (Mt.5:3-12). Jesus grew in wisdom and stature with God and man (Lk.2:52).

6.Location, He centered all His activity in Galilee where He lived. He never went far away. He moved among family, friends and enemies (Mt.4:23-25).

7.Every Next Moment, He made awareness of every moment as an opportunity (Mt.6:11). Every next one is a progressive step in building a disciple of Jesus with a new idea of righteousness which is being right through faith in Jesus. They are dimensions of awareness Jesus had in everything He did. That awareness was to do His Father’s will, by faith. In them we have the keys of the Kingdom wherever we are, whenever we need them, whatever the demand, whomever we are with.

These dimensions of spiritual awareness are the guidance points Jesus gave us in His brief human existence as He moved about in the unexpected, the unanticipated and unplanned moments. This is why He was on the move. He was living in the atmosphere in which each of us live. That’s how we live every day. Let’s take them one-by-one so we get a brief overview of what it really means to be a spiritual being having a human experience.

One thing we need to say before we start to describe them. We are not thinking of these themes as a course in self management. Rather, they are momentary contexts to train our awareness so that we react spiritually instead of from fear. Any moment will make a demand on us that will require our reaction to be based on one of them. Jesus was perfect in all of them which is why we rely on the Spirit to alert us to be like Jesus in that moment. We are an upward looking people with an outward vision that keeps us moving forward. Every next person is an image of God to be given priority at that moment.

Examples may help us here:

Image of God. You have a mind, a heart and spirit. You’re in a group of strangers or at meeting or shopping. Everyone around you is an image of God. Practice seeing them that way and stay open to the Spirit if a contact is made or you are led to make one. You have been set up with a spiritual appointment.

Child of God. You are a child of God having been born spiritually. You run into someone in need. You discover they also have been born again so they are a brother or sister in the Lord. You’re there to meet the demand of that moment perhaps with prayer or something you can do or both. Just be alert.

Looking Forward. Shopping, gas station, hospital, park, library, walking, neighborhood, workplace, traveling, vacationing, but mostly where you spend most of your time: these are opportunities to share faith, help or whatever the moment brings. Sharpen your awareness. The idea is to use them to look around and be aware, look forward, anticipate. It may be a witnessing event waiting to happen.

Newness. Everywhere you are in every next moment is a new moment that has never been encountered before. You are the only one who has ever or will ever, be in that moment, in that place at that time. It’s seeing everything as new because every next moment is new and this is the moment you personally were made for. The fact that the verb will is used over a thousand times in the Bible indicates we are a future people looking forward to the next moment as an opportunity. Even the noun will is a forward looking word. New, new, new, think new wherever you are.

Maturity. Maturity is not a static thing you reach. It’s an ongoing process of development. Obviously the previous themes are how we mature. When you’re looking forward, realizing how new the next moment is, seeing people as images of God and so on, you are maturing.

Location. Again, 99% of everything we do is where we live, work and play. Our physical and social locale is where our body is. Our mind may be thinking out there somewhere but the reality is where we are and it is 99% relational. There is no more exacting example than that of Jesus who never took His disciples any farther than Galilee’s terrain with its people, its families and its leaders. How much of our time in this modern age is spent on issues that distract us from concentrating on where we spend 99% of our time?

Every Next Moment. This is so central. Every moment we think, feel and act is an opportunity to get into the Word, pray, share, witness, plan, grow and just simply be a child of God, a brother or sister in the spiritual family, serving one another, looking at living a blessed life. A life that is new, exciting, opportune and---now get this---eternal.

What more could you ask? What more do you want? What more could He do?