Emotions

In continuing to read from Manning’s book “A Glimpse Of Jesus” I came across the following that spoke volumes to me, a person who is highly emotional, feels deeply and passionately, always have and I trust I always will.

“To ignore, repress, or be inattentive to our feelings is to fail to listen to the stirrings and surprises of the Spirit within our emotional structure calling us to a creative response.
Jesus listened. In John’s gospel we are told that ‘he was moved with the deepest emotions’ (11:33). In Matthew his anger erupts, (15:7-9). He called the crowd to intercessory prayer because of what he felt, (Matthew 9:16). Would Jesus have restored the widow’s son to life had Jesus repressed his feelings?”

“Grief, frustration, and sadness all spontaneously broke through when he ‘drew near and came in sight of [the city], he shed tears for it and said, (Luke 19:41). There was no emotional restraint when Jesus roared, (John 8:44). There was more than a hint of irritation when Jesus was dining at Simon’s house, (Mark 16:6). We hear utter frustration in his words, (Matthew 15:17), and unmitigated rage in (Matthew 16:23). There was extraordinary sensitivity in (Luke 8:47), and blazing wrath in (John 2:16).”

“The gospel portrait of Jesus is that of a man exquisitely attuned to his emotions and uninhibited in expressing them. One finds in Christ no attitude of scorn, contempt, fear, ridicule or rejection of feelings as being fickle, flaky, and unreliable. They were sensitive emotional antennae to which he listened carefully and through which he perceived the will of his Father for congruent speech and action.”

I’m afraid that being a saint as well as being human is an incongruent bitter pill for many of us to swallow. Had God the Father not become incarnate as the son of God/son of man, humanity would continue trying to be something apart from a soul containing such wonder and beauty mournfully characterized as a lobotomized and emasculated automaton in the form of a human being!

Hopefully in the very near future I am launching out into a whole new arena, adventure, of moving away from what I find so very awkward and difficult, typing, writing, and into a mode, medium of communicating I do best, talking~Yay!!!
As soon as I learn how to do the ‘magic’ of posting audio/pod cast blogs, that is where I intend to travel
A very special thanks to Tracy over at http://www.fiercelyloved.com/blog/ for the realization of stepping through a whole new portal and expression of His amazing grace!

Thanks Tracy!!

Rich

Connecting the Dots

In our coming through the portal of grace into a new and living world, what lies ahead of us has never been seen or heard of before. It has not yet fully dawned on us what is ours. “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”.
Up to this point in being a human being we have only really known a two dimensional existence, all along thinking we’re actually alive.
In the re-birthing we received what was meant to be our “birth-right” that which even Adam and Eve did NOT have or ever experienced!

In a heart beat everything we knew changed and yet appeared to be the same. The finished work of the Father from before the world began as well as in space, time, and history was instantly ours, we became completely His sons and daughters. We were complete and yet this completeness had to be worked out in the area of our lives that was still totally unchanged, our soul.

The sinner from the beginning, Satan, the one who held us captive, we being dead in our sins and trespasses, instantly lost his death grip on us the moment we responded to this loving God and Father of grace. The Scriptures describe this as, “Being translated out from the kingdom of darkness into the marvelous kingdom of light, aka, the family of the Father.”

The kicker is, although completely set free in our spirit, our soul was now the targeted battle zone where, as the battle ensued, all of us will be tempted to believe the LIE that in fact nothing has changed in us at all.
We are now living in two realms at the same time, the spirit realm where we are seated in Christ at the right had of God, and yet we’re still here in space, time and our geographical locations. What’s with that?

Salvation is just another abstract concept seen, experienced apart from the God and Father our Salvation. The Father’s ultimate intention was never to free us from hell only to give us a front row seat in heaven, but in saving us to complete us, spirit, soul and body.
The spirit dimension of our make up was instantly made complete in the re-birthing, the body aspect is something that awaits each of us on the other side, and it is my opinion, from the beginning the body was always meant to be ‘disposable’. Now that leaves us with one last component of our being, our soul. This is where it gets very interesting!

The father of lies is very much alive and well within a component that was added to the original creation of man after the fall, called the ‘flesh’.
It is from this unseen, but very real vantage point he continues his hellish best to attempt at bringing and keeping us although gloriously re-born (saved) ruled by the dictates of our fleshly yet un-renewed soul, mind-will-and emotions.

I want to say here, that I am not trying to come across as someone who fully in any estimation entirely sees or knows about this subject matter, but what I do know is that what I am seeing and growing in IS the truth. The beauty of Him, Christ Jesus being the Truth, we each must discover through His grace alone at a personal and experiential level the truth for us.
Other wise, we will be deceived into becoming an outer display of an inner distortion, having only a form of Godliness, but without the substance, NO power.

To be continued…

Rich

Another Look at Intuition

Another Look at Intuition
(for further clarification regarding intuition, see excerpt following this post)

in·tu·i·tion [ìntoo ísh'n]

1. instinctive knowledge: the state of being aware of or knowing something without having to discover or perceive it, or the ability to do this
Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

To the best of my understanding, prior to man’s fall in the garden as a result of his treasonous defiance, three components made up his spirit: fellowship, conscience and intuition. After the fall, only his conscience remained intact. Intuition (formerly his direct connection with God) used to guide or instruct man’s conscience but it is now under the influence of the knowledge of good and evil.

From my perspective, in reading the account of Adam and Eve and their association with God, their relationship was external. It is my understanding that man was meant to become a living container containing the very life of God: “I have come that you might have life and have it in abundance.” Relationally it would no longer be God communicating with man from an external place but a living internal connecting. “He that is joined to the Lord, is one spirit.”

In no longer having direct, internal access to the Father until being reborn, I am now seeing why there are the Jim Jones’ and the David Koreshes of the world and why there are the masses that choose to follow people like this. The innate lie that has permeated our consciousness is that we need to dumb down and let someone else instruct us when it comes to spiritual realities. The people who followed these so called “God-directed men” were not all one sandwich short of a picnic. Our inability to discern knowing one another after the flesh versus after the spirit is because the intuition portion of our spirit was shut down in sin. After being reborn, we have become mostly led by our soul.

As the love of the Father takes its rightful place within us, this ability to intuitively receive of His heart and thoughts begins to free us to become those who are being led by His spirit and no longer dancing to the beat of some self-appointed mediator.

I love using pictures in my blog posts, but when I tried to find one depicting ‘intuition’ it was bizarre as to how most of them depicted some perverted spookiness.

The following thoughts are once again from my friend Bill Landon-The Life that is Real Life.

Rich

It must be understood that when I speak of sense knowing (eido in the Greek) I am not speaking about anything to do with emotion. Intuition is a faculty of the human spirit. Emotion resides in the soul. They are two distinct and separate human attributes. It is NOT emotionalism to speak of sense (intuitive) knowing.Intuition is a source of knowledge that comes from a subjective and nonintellectual path. Intuition does not rely on facts and figures or science. For this reason, intuition is not restricted to building on a foundation of what we already understand. As a result of this, intuition is extremely powerful and is capable of opening whole new areas of understanding to us. Intuition is the means by which we learn the things we can never be taught through objective, intellectual processes.

As I have spoken of before, the understandings we get from the intuition in our spirit are the result of the Father’s direct speaking to us. This is not weird and bizarre. This is a part of us that the Father intended that we have from the beginning. If the Father gave it to us, it may be clearly seen that the Father intended that we use it. God does nothing that is aimless.
It is through our intuitive learning that we have our intellectual understandings (another soul faculty) changed by the Father. We may learn directly in the mind—as with something we read or hear. Yet, we primarily learn from our intuition. It is only through the operation of intuition that we can be taken in totally new directions of understanding. Intuition is capable of giving us a quantum leap forward in understanding either about ourselves or about the world around us. It is the intuition that plants the seed. Our hearing and reading water this seed of understanding and help it to grow but the seed itself comes from the Father. This is very difficult for many people today to accept. We are naturally (from the natural person) uncomfortable with learning that we cannot objectively asses. Nevertheless, the truth of the intuitive teaching of the Father will be borne out in our experience. All we require to see the working of intuition in our life is to be open and submitted to the Father.

Listen Up (Can You Hear Me Now?)

We have all been born in sin, separated from the Life of God: by nature, ‘children of wrath.’

The reality is until we are reborn, there never was a real you or me, and having no other point of reference other than the one we like to call ‘human nature’, where do we begin to see that there is another realm available to us that will release us from this prison we think is actually our home?.

We all have been conditioned to believe the lie that we are alive and doing our own thing. Such is the power of deception, but what if that was nothing more than a custom designed matrix pulled over our eyes to keep us blinded from the Truth?

The truth, to my understanding, is that man was created nature-less, and as a result of his disobedience in the Garden forfeited the real life offered him as represented by the “Tree of Life.” Further in my understanding (and because there are no vacuums), by default man received a nature other than God’s. In the fall there was added to man’s physiology a metaphysical component called the ‘flesh’, better know as ‘human nature’, that now has been passed onto all of his progeny. When we were reborn, we received the nature of God the Father to become our only Life which was not just an add-on. However, this miracle of grace did not vaporize this component within us called the ‘flesh.’

There was nothing altered in the miracle of being reborn - apart from our spirit being made alive, quickened through His life-giving spirit. Our soul and body are exactly the same as before. Our bodies were designed by the father to be disposable. The real us is not confined to our looks, age, skin color, I.Q., gender, or anything else external. On the other hand, our soul is a vital component that has to be integrated into a spiritual union of oneness with God as our Father.
This sets up the battle scenario we all experience on a daily basis. In all of us, this ‘coming into union’ will be misunderstood at best and resisted at worst. Welcome to the real world!
This sets the stage for what I now want to try and share regarding, “Listen Up.”

As in everything related to God, a.k.a. true or real life, there are the counterfeits as well. If God is the Father of love, truth etc. (and He is), then as Jesus pointed out, Satan is the ‘father of lies.’

We, having lived for however long in sin before being reborn have all been conditioned to only know one voice: Satan’s, our surrogate father of lies. We see nothing strange or alien about this familiar and seemingly friendly voice…until the ‘voice’ of another is introduced to us. In fact the introduction of the voice of the Father is perceived as one speaking to us in a foreign language!

As Kevin Costner, playing the role of Ray Kinsella in the movie ‘Field of Dreams’ said: I'm 36 years old, I love my family, I love baseball and I'm about to become a farmer. But until I heard the voice, I'd never done a crazy thing in my whole life.

This voice, the voice of the Father is about to turn our world right side up, but according to our whacked-out so-called equilibrium, we see this intrusion being not of God because our world (according to us) is already, ‘right side up.’

To be continued...

Rich