A former pastor read somewhere that I wrote that a person wins in our world today, through his spirit. She made contact and asked where one’s spirit is…, is it located in your heart?
She experienced major traumatic events over a long period of time. When trouble is very serious in nature and persist over a prolonged period of time, the effect is that God becomes very distant and small in your mind. The trouble, on the other hand, grows like insurmountable mountains. It is like the blind man whose walking stick broke and he cried “no more ground anywhere.“
I will briefly try to answer her question.
We don’t know where our spirit really is. Especially because we live in a world that has increasingly restricted truth to a sensory-observable world, which believes that only what we see is true: “seeing is believing“. We are rational people who believe that only what we can scientifically prove is true. The “World from above“, God’s world, the world of the Spirit, has disappeared from the scene. We, in the modern world, have become poor in that we no longer have windows “upwardly“. And if we try to think in this manner, the philosophies of our modern world darken our “windows”, just as great trouble, and personal trouble, cloud our “windows”. We are impoverished and struggling in the world of the Spirit.
Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at the well: “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth (Jesus).” (John 4:24). Jesus emphasises that in worship, our contact with God will primarily be a spiritual event.
Nicodemus who was a Pharisee and member of the Jewish Council, as well as clearly religious, came to Jesus in the night. Jesus said to him: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” He could not imagine how an old man could be born a second time. That’s when Jesus answered him: “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” About his surprise, Jesus explained to him: “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit… the wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3: 3-8).
Our heart is a wonderful organ in our body, a fantastic pump that pumps day and night for years, but God’s dwelling place where rebirth take place, is not located there. We don’t know where, but somewhere in us is our spirit; after all, we are created in God’s image and likeness, and are also created as his representatives. We are more than flesh and blood.
It is in our spirit where God changes us. It is there where we first experience his presence, where rebirth and later the baptism in the Holy Spirit take place. There we experience God’s reality, his boundless (far beyond our understanding) power and his love in us. (See Paul’s two prayers in Ephesians 1 and 3 in which he asks what the Holy Spirit should work in us.)
It is from this workplace of God in us, that He directs and guides us through the Holy Spirit. It is here that He makes us strong and wise, and makes us more than conquerors in a turbulent world.
When the believer speaks in tongues while the Spirit of the Lord comes upon him/her, they must speak loudly, clearly and thoughtfully. They must experience the conversation and the content vividly so that they can understand and start to “live” the content. Paul wrote that he who speaks in a tongue builds himself (See 1 Cor. 14, 18). For example, they must experience the emotions that God’s greatness and love bring so that they can become strong, cheerful and wise.
A Christian firstly wins in his spirit.
Greetings
Jan Hattingh
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