Faith starts with choosing to believe the truth
The discovery that I described in my last post opened the door. Faith is choosing to believe the truth, choosing to believe what the bible says is true, regardless if it feels true, lines up with my experience or contradicts it. If God says it, I can choose to believe it and act upon it. Period. This is what it means to have faith, to exercise faith. I simply trust God that what He says is true and go by it. And if I do, I experience the truth of it after I have believed...
What if it doesn't feel true?
But how can you do that and keep your sanity? Isn't that hypocritical? For example, how can I rejoice in the Lord always (Philippians 4:4) when I feel sad and discouraged? How can I not worry when my bank account is in the red and I don't know how to pay my bills? ... These are the common objections of the natural mind, aren't they? Does faith mean, you ignore the physical reality and pretend it isn't there? Is faith just faking it? - That's where the world view comes into play. If I operate from the purely natural world view, then the physical reality is the only reality. And faith feels like hypocrisy. Many biblical commands seem totally impractical and we need complicated theologies to twist them and to tell us that they don't really mean what they say. "Paul could not have possibly meant it literally that we can rejoice always, because that would not be real..." - such an objection makes sense if the physical reality is the only reality.
Unfelt and unseen reality
However, the biblical world view says that although the physical world is real, it is not the only reality. In fact, it is a secondary reality. God is Spirit. There is a whole spiritual world that is very real, it always exists, it permeates and penetrates the physical reality. Right now as I am writing this, I am connected with God in the Spirit. There is at least one angel in my room, probably many more, there is the Holy Spirit inside of me and Jesus lives in my heart. And I am seated with Christ in the Heavenly realms. These are true statements. The spiritual world is real. And it is the parent force. God created the physical reality out of the spiritual world. But the spiritual reality is not accessible to us through our five senses. We cannot see it, we cannot feel it, we cannot touch it. That's why it is very easy for us to ignore it. But it is very real. I am absolutely convinced that what I just wrote is true. How do I know it? Have I ever seen an angel? Nope. Have I ever seen the Holy Spirit? Nope. Have I ever seen God? Nope. So how can I be so sure that they exist and that they are here in me and in my room? - Because I believe the Word of God.
The Bible as a mirror of spiritual reality
The bible is like a window into the spiritual world. It tells us what is true in the Spirit realm and how we can connect with God in the Spirit. The bible is like a mirror. Did you ever stop to think that nobody has ever seen his or her face? We cannot see our faces. All we can see is a reflection of our faces, a representation, or a picture, a video... But it is impossible for us to look at our own faces directly. We need a mirror. That's a good analogy for the spirit world. We cannot see it with our senses. The bible is the mirror that tells us what it's like in the spiritual realm. Once I had understood and accepted that, faith started to make sense. Faith is not denying the physical reality, it is simply choosing to focus on the spiritual reality and go by it.
Made alive in the spirit
The Bible says that in the unregenerate state we are spiritually dead. (Ephesians 2:1) That does not mean that we don't have a spirit when we are not born again. Every human being on the face of this earth has a body, a soul and a spirit. But our spirit, the part that connects with God, who is Spirit, is dead through sin. The biblical definition of death is separation. It is not ceasing to exist. When we die physically, our body is separated from our soul and spirit. We don't cease to exist. The same is true of spiritual death. It simply means we are separated from God. When we are born again through faith in Jesus, our spirit gets reconnected with God and created anew. We become a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). Something that was not there before is created deep inside of us. That is our spirit-man. Now we can have a relationship of love with God, because we are connected with him in the Spirit. However, this is a spiritual reality. And as such it is not directly accessible to our physical senses. We have to believe it.
You have the choice
As people who are born again and connected to God in the spirit we now have a genuine choice. We can either focus on our old identity and the reality of this world, or we can focus on the new identity, who we are in the spirit, and go by it. The consequences of that choice are enormous. Paul says in Romans 8 that to focus our minds on the flesh (live by the physical reality) is death, but to focus our minds on the Spirit (live by the spiritual reality) is life and peace. (Romans 8:6)
To illustrate this choice I have put in the old woman/young lady illusion. When you look at the picture below, what do you see? Some see an old hag with a huge nose, some see a young and attractive lady. Those of you who are familiar with this picture can easily see both and switch between them as you wish. Others, who have never seen it before, will probably first see only one face. It takes a while to see the other. But both are in that picture.
You have the choice to focus on the old woman or the young lady, once you have discovered them both in the picture. In our daily life we are presented with a similar choice. Every day of our life as Christians we can choose to live from our new identity as sons and daughters of the living God, or we can choose to live from our old carnal self, that is just like all the unsaved people who do not know God. We can focus our thoughts on the things above or on earthly things (Colossians 3:1)
Renewing the mind
The key is the mind. In our minds we make these choices. That's why Paul stresses the importance of renewing our minds in Romans 12, 1-2. We need to align our thinking with the reality of God's spiritual world. That makes all the difference in the world.
Once I understood that, revival came to me. I didn't need to beg and plead with God to pour out His Spirit and make himself real to me and change me. He had already done all that. It was my thinking and my perspective that needed to change. While I was pleading with God and begging him to send revival, He was trying to get me to live by faith. Man, that was an awesome liberation when that dawned on me. I had to simply focus in my mind on what was already true in the Spirit. But for that I had to believe that the Bible is actually true, that it means what it says and that it is trustworthy.
This is the foundation. To be able to live the victorious life that the Bible is describing in the New Testament, we have to accept the biblical world view. We must accept that what God says about reality in the bible is actually true. And we must not mix it with other world views. That will lead to wrong paradigms and frustration.
Unfortunately, many Christians (including myself, as I have had to admit) often don't let the Bible get in the way of what they believe. Our upbringing, denominational traditions, theological schools of thought and our own experience often shape our beliefs far more than the actual word of God. And I was amazed and ashamed at myself when God showed me, how easily I was willing to discard what the word of God says, or explain it away, just because it didn't line up with my experience, or the way I was taught. I had to repent, turn around and go back to believing the Holy Scripture in its entirety. That was a major step, and I never want to get back to where I was.
The next paradigm shift that made a huge difference for me was my new identity in Christ. Am I a sinner or a saint? Or both, as Martin Luther insisted? This will be the topic next week. Until next week everybody! And don't forget, God loves you all very much. As we are celebrating the coming of God into the world through the birth of Jesus, some amazing features of the spiritual world surface in the Christmas Story. God the Son was able to squeeze himself into a tiny little baby and dwell in a human body for over 30 years in history. That is mind boggling and absolutely awesome. God bless you all! Happy Christmas to all my readers!
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