WALKING IN THE SPIRIT #1 ROSS SMITH
ALL REFERENCES USED IN THIS STUDY ARE FROM THE AMPLIFIED VERSION
I have spent time this week contemplating the route which the Lord would take us and I feel inclined and compelled to study the theme of “WALKING IN THE SPIRIT”. This morning will only be an introduction to that, for we need to go into it in depth, for indeed the Lord is calling us to a walk which is IN the Spirit and BY the Spirit. We are not under any misapprehension of both the need and the possibility to walk in the Spirit.
Galatians 5: 25 If we live by the (Holy) Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. If by the (Holy) Spirit we have our life [in God], let us go forward walking in line, our conduct controlled by the Spirit.
Earlier in this chapter in v 16 Paul says
Galatians 5:16 But I say, walk and live habitually in the (Holy) Spirit – responsive to and controlled and guided by the Spirit; then you will certainly not gratify the cravings and desires of the flesh – of human nature without God.
Now this is a dimension that is available to us. The thing we do not understand is that dimension or the degree of both our submission and the Lord’s response to the person who dares to walk in the Spirit. I say DARE because it is a walk that has no clearly defined parameters, for if there were standard rules and regulations under which we were expected to abide, it would no longer be by the Spirit, but it would be by the mind. To walk in the Spirit and by the Spirit is a new dimension for most of Christendom, but I hasten to add that because there are no rules or no parameters that are established that clearly define that walk, there is no license given to any person to make their own rules and their own regulations. It is a walk that is DIRECTED and GUIDED and CONTROLLED by the Spirit of the Lord.
We are aware of some of the results even though we are unfamiliar with the means. God always acts like Himself and therefore if we are to walk in the Spirit, it will be expected that we also will act like God acts. We have, as the assurance of this ability and this possibility, Emmanuel. The word means GOD WITH US.
Matthew 1:23 Behold, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a Son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which when translated means, GOD WITH US.
We as God’s people can live and walk in the Spirit because God is with us. We are, however, more acutely aware of the NEED to walk in the Spirit than we are of the POSSIBILITY. And because of the imperative demands for us to achieve this goal, I feel compelled to address this subject, and as we proceed we will determine to what depth we have to go.
Firstly, as an introduction, I just want to explore some of the reasons why we may fail to attempt this walk. We don’t try so often to walk in the Spirit for many reasons. Then, secondly, in the days to come, we will look at the need to walk in the Spirit, and then we will come to that area of the possibility of walking and living in the Spirit.
Why is it then that we don’t attempt to walk in the Spirit?
Firstly, as we approach this question, I don’t want us to think that this question is being directed at us as a personal affront. We need to see what constitutes the general malaise of the church at large and the majority of Christendom that prevents the church from being effective. The church for so long has been impotent, and we need to review those attitudes and activities, those doctrines and principles and pedantics that interfere with God’s way. Man has intruded into the realm of God’s way.
1 The church has lost its consciousness of the divine presence. We sing HOLY SPIRIT YOU ARE WELCOME IN THIS PLACE. We sing the song and before we get to the next song, or the reading of the Word, our mind is off on some diversion. We have lost the divine consciousness. It’s obvious that the church lacks that reverential fear and again, I suggest, that the heathen show more respect for their sacred sites than the people of God do for the Holy Spirit in their midst. We see tremendous upheaval in our nation as our aboriginal population declare that this is a sacred site and they go to great lengths to preserve the sacred nature of it even though it may be occult.
How then have we lost this consciousness? It has occurred in several ways.
A There are the programmes
B Then there are the promotions
C The personalities and
D The pedantic.
Let us look briefly at these.
The programmes of the church today are just not producing the sort of Christian who can experience and appreciate the life that follows a walk in the Spirit. The whirring of the wheels of the church programmes blocks out the still small voice of the Spirit. The church is so hyperactive, being there, doing this, engaged in all these other things and we cannot hear the voice of the Spirit.
In Psalm 46:10 Let be and be still and know that I am God.
So often, we want to nag away at the problem. We want to, like a little fox terrier, snap at the heels of the problem. The book says, LET BE and be still. That’s the reason so often that we can’t BE STILL because we are not prepared to LET IT BE.
The Psalmist goes on to say, that if we can do that:-
I [God] will be exalted among the nations! I will be exalted in the earth!
Oh that that might be the experience in the church, that God would be high and lifted up, and then it will be like a contagion that will spread out into the nation round about. It is a condition [this being still and know that I am God] that is almost foreign to the church today.
1 Kings 19:11 And He said, Go out and stand on the Mount before the Lord. And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earth quake;
1 Kings 19:12 And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire [a sound of gentle stillness and] a still small voice.
We have to go come to that place again when we’re going to walk in the Spirit and live in the dimensions that God requires of us, that we’re able to hear that still small voice and not just the rush and the noise of the day and indeed of the programmes of the church. I don’t suggest for one minute that there must not be order in the church. Any church which tries to operate without the direction and guidance of both the Holy Spirit and God’s appointees surely looks for difficulties.
We have studied in depth that area of 1 Corinthians 14 and we have seen precisely the order that God requires in the church. To walk in the Spirit is an INWARD CONTROL not an outward programme.
Then, we’ve lost the consciousness of God because of the promotion of the church. There are so many different promotions of what will solve your problems, individually, for your business, for your home, your marriage, for your church, and all these promotions have been going on now for eons and yet none of them have worked. There is sacred dance, portrayed today as worship. There is presumption which is purveyed as faith, that SPEAK IT AND YOU CAN HAVE IT MENTALITY. That goes against the principles of the Word of God. There are church growth promotions cultivated in compromise because numbers are the criteria and not holiness. Churches can have great congregations, but God is not coming back for great congregations. He’s coming back for a church without spot or blemish.
Then there is enthusiasm disguised as anointing. All things contribute to the breakdown of the consciousness of God in the midst. The Bible gives us quite graphic expressions of these sorts of exercises.
2 Timothy 3:5 They have a form of godliness but deny the power thereof.
2 Peter 2:17 These men are springs without water and mists driven by a storm.
We have got to experience and express the reality of Jesus Christ to a nation that is looking for something to pin their hopes on, to stake their lives on and to see indeed a turnaround of the conditions that exist in this generation.
You see, publicity is no substitute for the power of the Holy Spirit. When we are walking in the Spirit however, it will be noised abroad. You can believe it. When it first comes to the place where the Spirit of God is embraced and where He is welcomed, that will be noised abroad, because it will be a church that owns Jesus as Lord, not just by name but by behaviour, not just by profession but by performance.
The church has had difficulty with personalities. Fortunately, we have been less afflicted with this problem in Australia than some of the overseas nations. But there are still many churches even in this nation that still revolve around a man instead of the person of Jesus Christ. This is why I am so grateful that God raises up the ministries, and for that no man can take any credit. You see, people are not taught or encouraged to stand and walk in the strength of the Lord for themselves, to become effective as ministers in their own right. God has called us to that.
Ephesians 4:11 And His gifts were varied. He appointed and gave men to us, some to be apostles and prophets, evangelists and pastors and teachers.
Ephesians 4:12 His intention was for the perfecting and full equipping of the saints, His consecrated people.
WHAT FOR?
Ephesians 4:13 That they should do the work of ministry toward building up Christ’s body.
No longer can we embrace the fact that there is a laity and a hierarchy in the church. We are all parts of the Body of Christ and if we, as individuals, begin to walk in the Spirit, there will be that union of the church that has never been known since the day of Pentecost. Do you want it?
Most of the above responsibilities we can off-load on to the other people. We can say “I just happen to be there. I’ve been affected by what’s going on”. But, if we are going to walk and live in the Holy Spirit, now is the time to stop passing the buck. We have to do it as individuals before God. I get so tired of folk who have it altogether so well that they can sit on the fence and throw stones on both sides. They lack the intestinal fortitude to put on the whole armour of Christ and expose themselves to the wars that are being conducted in and by the Holy Spirit. The Bible says “We wrestle not against flesh and blood by against principalities and powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places”, and God is looking for the man and the woman who will stand up and be counted, not content to snipe at each other but to put on the whole armour of Christ – to be equipped as we should be.
We need to forget the skirmishes in the mundane. We need to get out of the area of the mental. We need to get into that dimension where there is spiritual war. And when I am talking about spiritual war, I’m not talking about clapping the devil out of town or hissing him out of the church. That ‘spiritual warfare’ that has been going on in various areas for years now and has nothing to do with what God wants to do to defeat the enemy. He will do it by the operation of the power of the Spirit within us, not just by some process that the church gets involved in.
We get so involved in the pedantic and the semantics that those folk, and we qualify so often, are no longer a threat to the devil but in many cases, we are his assistants. You don’t need me to describe those sorts of people to you for they are very obvious. They lack credibility. One thing will happen however when we do walk in the Spirit. There will be less of this criticism because people will be cautious to contend with that which they see and know to be of God. In the book of Acts, it says that this company of people “dirst not join themselves” with God’s people. Why? Because they were reverberating with the throb and the thrust of the Spirit of God. They knew because they were quickened by the Spirit to understand and know the ways and the means of men.
God will allow men to succeed when that particular man has learned that success does not make him any dearer to God. He’s no more precious to God. It doesn’t make him any more valuable in the overall scheme of things. You see that’s where it differs to man’s values. We think that success comes because of great numbers, or because of missionary programmes or because of the volume of Bibles sent into some heathen nation. All these things whilst commendable, can be done without the help of the Holy Spirit. You’ve only got to go to some football match in Melbourne and you’ll see a crowd. It has to do with religious fervor but it has nothing to do with spiritual character. Any man can have success in religious circles today if he has a good personality and a shrewd knowledge of human nature. He can manipulate and produce a result that in men’s eyes seems to be a success.
The honour that God bestows upon a man who wills and wants to emulate the person of Jesus Christ, that‘s the man and woman that God is looking for in this fellowship, a person who will say “I will be what he wants me to be regardless of the cost” – and there will be a cost. It’s going to cause sharp divisions in the church of Jesus Christ in this day and generation, for although the doctrines proposed might be the same, the methods, and the objectives and the techniques will all be opposed to proper spiritual attitudes.
The man who walks in the Spirit, when we go to 1 Corinthians 2:15, it says of the spiritual man, ‘nobody understand him’. Spiritual men are not meant to be understood, just respected. (See 1 Thessalonians 4:12)
We have a problem in the evangelical realm. It’s not longer evangelistic, it’s evangel – astic. You can stretch the thing to suit the particular situation.
Evangelism today uses the methods of the world whereby Hollywood has more influence on the younger generation of today, than Jerusalem ever had on the people of that era. Young people admire the stars today and not the saints, and they use them for their example. So many of the stars have claimed to be born again Christians for one reason and one reason alone. It gives them another niche in the market. Anybody involved in the music scene will tell you that. In many cases, it is just a cheap representation of the reality of Jesus Christ. When we begin to walk and live in the Holy Spirit then our lives will reprove and convict them without speaking a word.
We’ve come so far in our pursuit of God, and so often we’ve built up the altars that have been broken down. I know that we can all identify with this because the Spirit of God has so often moved amongst us and we’ve come in repentance; we’ve come to be restored into right relationship with God. We’ve determined that I’m going to go through here and I’m not going to let anything interfere with me. And we’ve laid out the pieces upon the altar, but one thing has been lacking on every occasion and that’s the fire. The Bible tells me in
Matthew 3:11 I indeed baptize you in (with) water because of repentance – that is, because of your changing your minds for the better, heartily amending your ways with abhorrence of your past sins; but He Who is coming after me is mightier than I, Whose sandals I am not worthy or fit to take off or carry; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and WITH FIRE.
We’ve seen the baptism in the Holy Spirit, now we need to see the fire. Not the fire of zeal and fervor, but that fire of the Spirit that indeed overturns the ways and means and methods of men and brings the church alive in such a dimension that the whole nation is agog because God is in the midst of His people.
We don’t lack teachers today, the Bible says that we’ve to ten thousand teachers and very few fathers. (1 Corinthians 4:15) But the church proliferates with men who can expound the Word and the fundamentals of God with great oratory but they lack the fire. The apostle Paul had that attitude of heart which enabled him to walk and live in the Spirit when he declared his innermost ambitions when he penned the letter to the church at Philippi.
Philippians 3:10 [For my determined purpose is] that I may know Him – that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding [the wonders of His Person] more strongly and more clearly. And That I may in that same way come to know the power out flowing from His resurrection [which it exerts over believers]; and that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed [in spirit into His likeness even] to His death, [in the hope]
Philippians 3:11 That if possible I may attain to the [spiritual and moral] resurrection [that lifts me] out from among the dead [even while in the body].
This is Paul’s ambition. He’s saying that nothing is important to me any longer except that I want to know Christ. And if it means that I have to share in the fellowship of His sufferings and become like Him in His death, so be it.
So that “SOMEHOW” to attain to the resurrection of the dead. Paul is saying that there is no formula. There is no book of rules whereby I can say “This is step one, this is step two etc. He said SOMEHOW attain to the resurrection from the dead. He knew the route, “that I might know Him”.
This demands of us a different lifestyle. We have to make that renunciation of THINGS so that that perpetual communion with God is not jarred by the soulish part of us demanding attention and clamoring for recognition. We have to ascend into the realms of spiritual sensitivity. Now that dimension is not some spooky, ethereal, vague or vacuous state, and it certainly has nothing to do with the psyche. Let’s make sure that we don’t get into that area. When we ascend into realms of spiritual excellence, it has nothing to do with the psyche.
John when he penned his gospel wrote in
John 6:63 It is the Spirit Who gives life [He is the Life-giver]; the flesh conveys no benefit whatever [there is no profit in it]. The words (truths) that I have been speaking to you are spirit and life.
Ern Baxter, in the way that he can crystallize the thoughts of the Word of God so often says, “The flesh is the inclination in our nature to self-gratifying behavior.” It is the Spirit that gives life. That self-gratifying behavior contributes nothing. No longer can we be content with the shallow logic but we must be like the Psalmist who wrote
Psalm 42:1 As the hart pants and longs for the water brooks, so I pant and long for You, O God.
I wonder how often have you felt that panting in your Spirit? Have you found that the routes that you walk seem to be so barren and dry with no spiritual satisfaction. Certainly there’s plenty to satisfy the mind, the ego, but nothing satisfies like Jesus Christ in His fullness and totality. (Ecclesiastes 3:11) We need to crave the waters.
To walk in the Spirit is a rewarding experience. Not rewarding in temporal terms, but the satisfaction is in knowing God. The ambition for temporal gain is contrary to walking in the Spirit. That Adamic nature, that characteristic that came through the fall of man is evidenced when those personal pronouns of I, MY, ME and MINE are still very vigorous in our vocabulary. When MY and MINE keep coming up, these are verbal symptoms of a deep disease.
Matthew 16:24 Then Jesus said to His disciples, If anyone desires to be My disciple, let him deny himself [disregard, lose sight of, and forget himself and his own interests]
Deny himself can have two connotations.
- It can indicate that we no longer consider that we have any reputation of ourselves.
Many months ago we saw that WE CAN HAVE NO PREFERENCES. Jesus said in John 5v30 “I don’t do anything of myself but only as I get My orders. Matthew says, If a man is going to follow Jesus Christ, he must deny himself.
2 We must do away with all those selfish aspects of our nature, that which I want. We need to deny ourselves those things. Somebody said recently that the quickest way to kill a habit was to starve it to death. So often we battle and fight and wrestle with things that are inappropriate in our life. Starve it, deny yourself.
Matthew 16:24 and take up his cross and follow Me [cleave steadfastly to Me, conform wholly to My example in living and, if need be, in dying, also].
That’s walking and living in the Spirit, when we follow Him.
Matthew 16:25 For whoever is bent on saving his [temporal] life [his comfort and security here] shall lose it [eternal life]; and whoever loses his life [his comfort and security here] for My sake shall find it [life everlasting].
I want to close with just a quick reflection on the Tabernacle of old. It demonstrates so beautifully the route and journey of the soul from the paths of sin into the very presence of the Almighty. When we look at the old Tabernacle we see that that returning sinner must first enter into the outer court. There was the blood sacrifice carried out on the brazen altar in the outer area. After the sacrifice he moved past the laver and out of the laver he took the water, and he washed. We know that the Word of God is represented by the washing of the laver. After he’s passed by the laver he was then able to go through the veil into the Hoy Place. In that Holy place, no natural light was able to enter, but that area was illuminated by the golden candlestick. That golden candlestick represents Jesus Christ, the light of the world. And also in that Holy Place was the Shewbread to tell that Jesus is also the Bread of Life. There was also the Altar of incense. This was a figure of unceasing prayer, and I recall that the Word says that men ought always to pray and not to faint. Paul says “be unceasing in prayer”. That Altar of Incense represents that unceasing prayer. Unfortunately it is at this point that most of the church has sat down and relaxed. We have enjoyed that incredible provision God has made for us. But we have failed to see that there is another dimension into which we must enter.
That is into the presence of God.
Another veil separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place and when you went into that area, (once a year) there above the Mercy Seat dwelt the presence of God himself in awful and glorious manifestation and again, there was no illumination from any external source. No candlestick in the Holy of Holies.
Revelation 21:23 And the city has no need of the sun nor of the moon to give light to it, for the splendor and radiance (glory) of God illuminate it, and the Lamb is its lamp.
That is what illuminated the Holy of Holies. In that day and generation, only the high priest could go into the Holy of Holies, and that but once a year. With him, he had to take the blood of the sacrifice which was prepared for his sins and for the sins of the people and he went in fear and trembling because if he hadn’t fulfilled his obligations in the outer area then he paid with his life.
Christ gave up His life for you and I on Calvary, and the rending of that veil has enabled every worshipper in every denomination in every city in every nation to go in and come by this new and living way into the very presence of the Almighty, to recover the consciousness of God that the church has lost through many different causes. God’s will is that we should press in and push on into this presence, and not just to move in and taste it, but to live in it. It is to be known as a conscious experience and not just a doctrinal expression. It is a life that we need to live every moment of every day.
Paul wrote to the Hebrews and gave them a very succinct instruction. He said
Hebrews 13:13 Let us go forth therefore, unto Him without the camp, bearing the cost.
Meaning, let us get outside those restrictions which prevent us from being in communion with Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit.
oOo
Ross Smith 