11. Seeing with Our Spirit
Whatever you tell yourself is true, that's what you believe. And whatever you believe, that's what you see.
God begins everything with the Word that He speaks. Everything that exists comes out of the creative power of the spoken word. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
In this statement the Word God speaks, Christ, and the immediate result of that Word – light, are directly apparent. But there are two other factors that are implied. The first is inside the word “let.” The second is the purpose of light.
Everything God speaks is spoken into darkness. There is a mechanism inside that darkness that is essential to the creative power of the Word God speaks. That mechanism is faith, and faith is found in the heart.
In creating the universe, God supplied the Heart, and God’s Heart is filled with faith. But we know that God has a much deeper purpose than just having a universe. We know what His purpose is because He tells us. His purpose is to conform us to the image of His dear Son – to have many sons just like Jesus, and to reveal Himself, visibly, to His creation through us, His image.
Second, the purpose of light is to see. Light makes all things visible. Light may shine brightly, but if no eyes see it, is ineffective. Light is for seeing, for revealing the reality and purpose of all things. The Light already shines; our problem is that we cannot see it. Of a truth, our entire problem in all of its ramifications is that we cannot see. But most people do not want to see; they fiercely do not want to see.
The lake of fire is God — light with no trees to hide behind. There is no need for anyone to hide. When the blood of Jesus is enough for us, when His cross is sufficient, then we gladly walk in the light with utter disregard for “ourselves.” We know He carries all of us inside Himself.
Placing ourselves into the light of Christ with complete disregard for all of our blemishes and failings, doing so mentally and in our hearts, is an essential exercise for us right now. Do it; especially when you are feeling your worst. This exercise is central to the renewing of our minds. Always say, “Here am I.”
But remaining in the light is not an exercise of “Oh God, please forgive me, I’m such a wretch.” No, that cry is darkness, keeping God at arm’s length, making little of the blood and cross of Christ and of His life in us. To remain in the light is to acknowledge the good things of Christ in us inside of our weakness.
There is nothing wrong with our physical body except that it is dying. But it is perfectly compatible with our walk into all the fullness of God; it does not prevent us in any way in itself. The problem is when we misuse the physical body.
Our physical body enables us to communicate with and to touch the physical side of God’s creation. For that purpose, it is a gift from God – and His dwelling place. But the physical body is our second body, not our first body. Our first body is our spirit. Our spiritual body enables us to communicate with and touch the spiritual side of God’s creation – heaven.
God created us as humans to live in both bodies at the same time. But our spirit is always larger and more substantial than our physical body. It has a greater impact on everything, both in heaven and on earth. Our physical body is a weaker second to our spiritual body.
God does not mean for us to use our physical body to dominate our spirit. Yet, that is almost all we have known.
The movie Avatar illustrates this truth in a powerful way. The main character, Jake, along with two other characters, has both a human body and a Navi body. He lives in both bodies at the same time. When he is asleep in one body, he is awake in the other, and vice versa. But his Navi body is much larger and stronger than his human body and has qualities that his human body does not share. The final showdown in the story is the fight over Jake’s human body. Fleeing from the strength of Jake in his Navi body, the enemy seeks to kill Jake’s human body. Jake uses all the power of his Navi body to redeem and preserve his human body.
Sounds like Romans 8, doesn’t it! The main point is this. When Jake was awake in one body, he was asleep in the other. And that’s exactly what the Spirit of God was saying through Paul in this dichotomy of walking “according to the flesh” versus walking “according to the spirit.”
Our entire problem as humans living in this present age is we are very accustomed to our physical body. We view everything through its qualities and capacities. We are awake to our physical body and thus asleep to our spiritual body.
Paul makes it clear in Galatians 5. There is nothing wrong with our physical body, its physicality or fleshiness – “sarx.” When we wake up into our spiritual body, when we live and walk in our spiritual body, then the physical body just automatically comes into its proper role and function in our lives. We can then enjoy all the fruit of God in the physical world that God shares with us in abundance, because we are living and walking and seeing all things through our spiritual body which is in the heavens right now.
All of our lives we have seen everything out from the perspective of our physical body on this earth. We judge everything by the seeing of our physical eyes, outward appearance. Most everything we have ever been taught in this world, from our parents, at school, from the television, from the pulpit, is out of the seeing and the living of the physical body, divorced from our regenerate spirit.
Now, the spiritual body, whether redeemed (the new man) or unregenerate (the old man), is still larger and stronger and impacts life on this earth much more than the physical body. But since all of the learning in this world comes to us to a large part through men who have wicked spirits anointed by demons, almost all of our ways of seeing and living, communicating and doing comes out of, not just our physicality, but out of the physicality of this world continually breathed upon by the unregenerate spirits of fallen men and women – self living for self, manipulating and controlling one another for selfish gain.
Here is this perpetual question that remains with every believer. How, Paul? How do I live and walk according to my spirit in all that it means and not according to the physicality and appearance of life in this world?
Our biggest problem is that we do not see through the eyes of our spirit; we do not see because we do not believe. Believing is a quality of spirit found in the heart and working through the will, whether unregenerate or redeemed. All humans believe. And the believing of the heart works first, directly and overwhelmingly on both sets of eyes, our spiritual eyes as well as our physical eyes.
Our spirit works powerfully upon us at all times whether we are awake to our spirit or not. Yet most of us remain ignorant of the reality of spirit.
Evil men become powerful in the natural world precisely by learning to use the power of their spirits and the demons that anoint them to manipulate and control the spirits and hearts of lesser men.
You and I are a living soul sandwiched between two bodies, a physical body and a spiritual body. Everything we perceive comes into us through these two bodies. And every way in which we extend ourselves outwardly goes out through these two bodies, both at the same time. But even though both bodies are in operation all the time, as humans we have remained oblivious to our spirit and its capacities, particularly its ability to see what is real (light).
Every person sees only what they first believe in their hearts. Those who believe in ghosts see ghostly phenomena all the time. Those who do not believe in ghosts see nothing of the sort. (We could use many more such illustrations.) The believing of the heart rules absolutely and totally all seeing of the eyes, both the physical eyes and the spiritual eyes. That’s how a magician works on the audience. He catches the believing of your heart and thus tricks your eyes into seeing what is not there or not seeing what is there.
And what rules the believing of the heart? Simple! The spoken word.
But when I say the spoken word, I mean both what we speak through our physical tongue and what we speak in the spirit of our minds. Whatever we tell ourself is true, we believe; whatever we believe, we see.
This works in both directions. It is said by those skilled in propaganda that when you tell a lie, tell a big one. It is easier for people to believe a big lie than a small one. It is the word spoken into people through the image on the television set that turns the hearts of all towards the Beast. The television, an image that speaks and causes, is capable of imparting a much bigger lie than any earthly device in history, especially when “the President” speaks as that image.
And when we speak negative things about ourselves out loud or in our own minds, we are shackling our spirit with chains of imprisonment.
God says, “Let there be light,” and God believes what He speaks. Then light becomes what it already is, and all things become visible for what they really are.
Light existed before God spoke. God’s speaking brought the reality of light into the physical creation. God gives us the same ability. The words we speak do not “create reality.” Rather, the words we speak bring into our life what is already true, either darkness to death or light to life.
So we speak what God speaks. After awhile we believe what we speak, and then we start to see God in all things. When we speak out loud and in our minds the good things of Christ inside of us (God has already spoken all spiritual blessings towards us – Ephesians 1), then we believe what God says and we see all things as God sees them, we see through His eyes, which, since we are one spirit with Him, are our eyes as well. When we see as God sees, the light is turned on.
And that’s when the proverbial stuff hits the fan. There are two huge problems with seeing. It’s why so few people actually take up the practice. These two problems have caused us to draw back from the light, to draw back from seeing.
The first problem is personal. In the early years of eye surgery, a doctor in Europe named Marius von Senden went around interviewing and studying people who had been blind their whole lives, received a cataract operation, and could now see for the first time. He wrote his observations in a book called Space and Sight. Sadly, that book is not available on Amazon.
The point is, if you have never seen light, you do not know how to see or how to process the new sensations coming into your brain. Seeing for the first time can be a very disturbing experience for many people. Many things they imagined in their minds when they could not see turn out to be quite different from what they thought. Putting together the meaning of all the details into a comprehensive whole, something those who can see just take for granted, is impossible for those who see for the first time. They can see bits and pieces of a cat, but they cannot put together the whole 3-D picture of the cat, especially when it is moving, in the way we just take for granted.
Very often, people who see for the first time enjoy looking at beautiful light and colors, but the moment they try to walk, they must close their eyes and revert back to their old way of “seeing” in order not to stumble and fall. Then there are those who cannot handle all the new sensations, they cannot cope with reality as it really is, and so they retreat back into their old way of living, pulling blindness back over themselves – to be safe once more.
There are even those who commit suicide because the new world of light is just too much for them.
If these things are true in the natural world, how much more true are they in our experience of beginning to see with the eyes of our spirit, with God’s eyes, for the first time? Things we thought were good and beautiful turn out to be evil and ugly. Things we thought were evil and ugly turn out to be good and beautiful. Sight can be very, very confusing to one who has never seen before.
You know how it is when you see for the first time a new and wonderful truth. You are so excited; you want to share this wonderful revelation with friends whom you love. But when you do, their reaction is the very opposite of yours. They cannot see what you see; they don’t want to, and you cannot understand why.
But this is why I don’t get excited about people who insist that they see the heavenly realms clearly. They don’t. To us who are just beginning to see, it’s all a confused mess of seemingly unrelated details.
Some assume that seeing as God sees means Satan is no longer a threat to us. Sorry, the accuser has been seeing inside the heavenly realms for a long time. The dragon lives in the same heavens as the woman clothed with the sun. Paul said that evil powers do their thing inside the very same heavenly places in which we sit as believers in Jesus. Those who are seeing through the eyes of their spirits for the first time, not sure of what it is they are looking at, are the most susceptible of all to the angels of “light.” And once they are convinced that they can see clearly, they become the voice of the serpent to the body of Christ.
But the real reason God keeps most of us blind is because He loves us. He knows that to allow us to enter the realms of spirit without an absolute certainty in the completeness of the blood and cross of Jesus Christ is to allow us to be set up for the destruction that comes through the heavenly levels of accusation.
We know of many people who moved in great realms of anointing, power, and Spirit, who crashed and burned into waste and confusion. The primary reason they crashed and burned was not the “sin” that entangled them; rather they became targets of the subtle accusation of the second most powerful psychologist in the universe. Don’t ever think that someone falling is proof that they were into devilish things. Rather, it is that they posed an enormous threat to the enemy, but were not sufficiently grounded in the love and blood of Jesus to stand.
Heaven is a mine field. It is raging war. To walk in the realms of spirit is to come under the guns of the big guys. We can walk in the Spirit in complete safety and confidence if we know four critical things.
1. The Blood of Jesus Christ flows over me continually and at all times. I do not “ask” for the blood. By my active faith, it is my constant covering. By it all shadow of any form of separation from God is continually banished.
2. The Cross of Jesus Christ is right behind me continually and at all times. It is not ahead of me, it is behind me, right behind me. Any time I stumble and fall, whoever did it, that guy is already dead.
3. The Lord Jesus Christ carries every part of me, my heart, my dreams, my failures, my sins, my flesh, my hopes, my mind, my emotions, my will, He carries every part of me inside Himself at all times and in every way.
4. Everything I am, every part of the human me, every aspect and angle of all my messiness and ridiculousness in this world, all of me, is Christ living His life as me. Christ is my life; I have no other life. I am the flesh of God.
This is the doorway into all that Christ is in the heavens. To seek to live and walk in the realms of spirit through any other means is to guarantee disaster for one’s self. Those who try will be destroyed. In Christ, the only thing you do is defeat the enemy, the accuser of the brethren. Outside of the Lord Jesus Christ, the accuser defeats you.
This is why many Christians call walking and living in the Spirit “new age deception.” It scares the tar out of them. And that’s fine. God has a plan and a timetable. The day will come when He opens the door into Christ for them as well.
But there is a bigger problem with the light turning on, with our seeing things as they really are for the first time. A much bigger problem. It’s the problem that got Elijah run out of town, Jeremiah thrown in a pit, Zechariah stoned, John the Baptist beheaded, Jesus crucified, Paul beheaded, Peter crucified upside down.
The moment you turn on the light, you damn the world.
And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed… John 3:19-21
The world… hates Me because I testify …that its works are evil. John 7:7
But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light. Ephesians 5:13
And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?’ Revelation 6:15-17
You and I want to see God, we want the light to turn on and the Daystar to arise in our hearts. We are the nightmare of everyone else on this planet.
We don’t read the verse in Revelation 6 wrongly. None of those people want to hear God speak. All He is saying is “Adam, where are you?” If any of them would just stop for a moment and give answer, “Here, right here, God, here am I,” then all their problems would be over. But just like Adam, they look for something to hide behind. Trees and fig leaves just don’t cut it anymore, now they need mountains and rocks. God does not condemn them; they just love darkness.
It was once believed in America that the free press would keep the brightest of lights directly focused upon anything and everything the Federal Government did. That every single person who lived within its borders should know exactly every tiny thing the federal, state, and local governments were up to.
Today, there is only darkness. The moment any government starts hiding things behind “confidential,” “top-secret,” “right to know,” then, according to Jesus, we know the reason they do is they, the government officials themselves, are engaged in evil, wicked, and unlawful actions. In a free society, it is the people who surveil the government and make them sweat. In a slave society, it is the government which surveils the people and looks at every little thing that they do.
We know the Federal Government of the United States must be engaged in continual evil and unlawful actions. Why? Because they are terrified of the light.
If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. John 15:18-19
If we want the light of God, we have a lonely road to walk. Most Christians chose to close their eyes and wait until “heaven” for the light to turn on.
John saw a people scattered across the earth in whom there is no deceit, no guile found in their mouths, and therefore none in their hearts. These are they who follow the Lamb wherever He goes. They follow Him into the light, and they follow Him into rejection. They follow Him into the loss of everything in this world, and they follow Him into resurrection life. You and I must see ourselves among that people; there is no other choice for us.
Now, let’s bring this back to our walking and living in the Sspirit, that is, in that fused union of our spirit and God’s Spirit. Paul said that we are in the Spirit. That is a given, factual, all-the-time reality. Our problem is we don’t know it.
So we speak what God speaks. As we do so, the believing of our hearts changes. We start getting the idea that what God says could actually be true and present reality! We catch glimpses of God filling us with all of His fullness. We pray with authority, and life and power moves out from us touching other people. We speak against the works of the evil one, and he flees.
We see the world and all things through the eyes of God, and we know LOVE, active and powerful. We know our Father with all boldness.