The Spiritual Forces

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Transcript

Continuing with our series, Made Easy. We looked previously at Ministry Made Easy and some other subjects, and now today I want to look at Spiritual Power Made Easy, a very important part of the spiritual life. I’m going to read a few scriptures that bring everything into focus.

I don’t normally like to read a lot of scriptures, but we’re going to cover a wide range of subjects here, so I’ve got a few scriptures I want to read right at the beginning.

First, Acts chapter 1 and verse 8.

<iBut you will hold dynamic power in your hands after the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Then 1 Thessalonians chapter 1 and verse 3.

Remembering continually your act of work originating from faith, and troublesome effort originating from agape love, and continual pressing through originating from hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the presence of God, who is also our Father.

Romans chapter 5 and reading from verse 3.

not only this, but we boast in pressures also, knowing that pressure produces endurance, and endurance approval, and approval hope. And hope does not bring shame or regret, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us.

And then finally Hebrews chapter 6, reading from verse 11.

And we want every one of you to continually manifest the same core desire right until the end, leading to the full assurance of what you are expecting, that you are not lazy, but followers of those who through faith and persistence are obtaining the promises.

We started our life outside of Christ. Although as children we are far more aware of the Lord, we eventually come to the place where we follow our own ways, and we follow the sin that’s resident within us.

And we tend to live very much in this natural realm, in this world. But when you became a believer, you entered a spiritual realm. Until then your spirit was dead towards God, and you were unable to make contact with God.

Everything you accomplished in life was done using your natural giftings and abilities. Now you did still have some natural spiritual abilities, because your spirit was still there, but you had no ability to contact God or to receive from Him. And then you were born again.

You came to the realization that you needed the Lord, and you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior. And the moment you were born again, your spirit was recreated and brought into contact now with God. And then the Holy Spirit also came to live inside of you.

Now you had God as a person available to you. And then following on from that, hopefully, you experienced what we call the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And this is when the Holy Spirit brings the full power of God and makes it available to you.

And since you had that experience, that power is now living also inside of you. That means you now have everything that Jesus had, and you can use that power to build the kind of life that God intends for you. Now, spirit is at the source of all of life.

God’s Spirit created this world out of nothing. So although we look at tangible material universe, in effect, it was made out of spiritual essence. And it is in the nature of spirit to carry power.

That is how God could use the power of His Spirit to form the creation. The power in your spirit provides everything that you’ll ever need. It keeps your body alive and in good health, because when your spirit leaves your body, you die.

It releases creative power to bring new things into your life. And we come to the Lord and ask Him for things. It’s the power of Spirit that goes out and creates those things for us.

And then your spirit also enables you to make contact with other believers at a much deeper level than just the physical and the psychological, because every believer is indwelled by the same Holy Spirit. Now, there are three forces, three manifestations of energy or power that come from the realm of the Spirit. You’ll see them mentioned frequently amongst Paul’s writings.

In one particular place, he actually lists them together. And they are faith, hope, and love. And one of the scriptures that we looked at today, you saw faith, hope, and love mentioned interacting together.

Now, these three forces are kind of like the three basic colors of light. Each one has a different ability in your life. When you combine them together, you produce the ultimate power of God.

Just like the three basic colors of light, when mixed together, they form the ultimate white light. Or we just consider the fullness of light. In the same way, these spiritual forces, although they are individual and separate, they have their greatest power when they are combined together, just as the light colors are.

Let’s look at each of these very quickly. What is faith? Now, faith is the main force that carries the power. And it usually comes as a revelation from God.

Faith brings the assurance that you know something without a doubt. And it comes when you hear the voice of God speaking deep inside you from your spirit. Faith is essential to the process of salvation.

But it’s also essential for receiving anything. From God. Hebrews 11 verse 6 says, but without faith, it is impossible to please him.

For he who comes to God to receive something for himself must know without a doubt that he does exist. And that he is the one who rewards those who are earnestly desiring to receive something from him. We have to come to God in faith before we can receive anything from his hands.

And then hope. Hope always has a future orientation. And it comes when faith is held in place.

Now, this is especially true when you are challenged by circumstances in your life. Faith always faces a time of testing and trial. Now, many scriptures would show this.

One of the clearest is 1 Peter chapter 1 and verse 7, which says, that the trial of your faith being much more precious than of gold that perishes, though it be tried with fire, might be found to praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. Now, I’ve taught elsewhere that there are two different Greek words which are translated as trial. The one is a trial, which is designed to expose your weaknesses.

You know, when they create a new product that has to withstand stress or pressure, they put it through very rigorous tests to see at what point it will break. And the idea is to find out where the weak parts are so we can fix it. But then there’s another kind of trial.

And that’s the trial where you sit down after a time of study and you write an examination. And the purpose of that examination is not to make you fail. It’s to make you qualify.

The idea is you are meant to have learned everything well enough that when you are tested, you know the principles and you get them right and you get a good pass mark on the examination, which makes you qualify. Now, that Greek word, dokimazo, is the word that was used in this about the trial of your faith. In other words, your faith is not being tested to find where its weak points are because there are no weak points in faith.

True faith either exists or it doesn’t. But God puts your faith to times of testing because he wants to promote you and qualify you and lift you up to a higher level. And the best way to do that is to get your faith to grow.

And we’ll be teaching on that in some detail later as we look at how to develop faith. Now, hope gives faith a direction and hope keeps faith active. Hope is produced by persevering under trial.

So when the trial comes, it not only strengthens your faith, it also begins to develop hope. Because when you make it through that time of testing, you have hope that you can face anything else in the future and go through it okay. And then we come to the third force, which is love.

And this is a very specific kind of love. It’s not based on emotions or feelings. This love is always sacrificial.

It always gives at a price. Now, only God can love like this. It’s never a natural thing because we as human beings are inherently selfish.

We don’t easily sacrifice and give when it costs us. So we need God to love like this. That’s why it comes from our spirit, which is inhabited by the spirit of God.

Now, love provides our motivation for everything that we do in life. You see, whatever you accomplish in this world and in this life, you need a why. Why are you doing this? Until you can establish why you are doing something, you’re never going to make the effort to follow it through.

See, why are you following a career? Why are you doing the work that you do? And when it comes to ministry, why do you want to do the work of the ministry? Well, the ultimate answer to that is, as Paul says, the love of God constrains me. The love of God pushes me and motivates me. It compels me to go forward and to minister to the needs of others.

If ministry is not self-sacrificial, it’s not really ministry. It’s just you using other people to meet your own needs. So love gives us the best possible why we do anything.

Stops us from being selfish. And that love comes from the spirit of God that is inside of us. Now, these three, although they are separate, they always work together.

You can have different light colors and they’re pretty, but if you want the full power of light, you need to combine all the three main colors together and get pure, bright, white light. And in the same way, these three forces need to work together to have the fullest power. Now, the best way to illustrate this that I like to use is the firing of a weapon.

Now, faith, if you like, is the bullet of the charge from which the power is coming. Hope is like the gun sights on your weapon that you use to aim. It gives direction to your shot.

And love, well, love is the trigger that pulls and releases that charge. See now, if you don’t have all three working together, nothing’s going to happen. You may have the most powerful bullet or charge loaded in your weapon, but if you don’t have a specific place to aim it to, you could walk around like this and just pull the trigger and see if you can shoot the moon.

Nobody ever does that with a rifle. You’ve got to point it at a specific target. And until you pull that trigger, again, nothing is happening.

So faith, hope, and love have to always work together to get results. Now, how do we release these powers? How do we release the power of faith, hope, and love? It’s actually very simple. And the whole emphasis of our teaching is made easy.

It’s simple. There’s two simple ways that you release these powers from your spirit. The first one is through words that you speak.

And the second one is through actions that you carry out. Words and actions together cause the release of those three spiritual forces. And they will bring results in your life.

And we’ll be looking in detail later at how to do all of these and the kind of results we can expect. Now, how do you receive these spiritual forces? Well, when you’re born again, the presence of God comes into your life. When you’re baptized in the Holy Spirit, the power of God comes into your life.

Now, both His presence and His power are now living and resident permanently inside of you. But are these forces ready to be used immediately? Or do we need to maybe build them up and make them stronger? Maybe charge them up? Okay. How do we develop these spiritual forces? Now, each spiritual force can be developed very much like a muscle is developed in the body.

You see, you are born with muscles. But nobody, even who is fully grown, can simply walk in and pick up a huge big heavy weight. Those muscles have never been trained to do it.

You can pick up a certain weight, enough weight to carry your body and do everyday things. But those muscles haven’t reached their full potential. And if you want to engage in some kind of activity like sports and competitive sports, you realize that your muscles actually they need a bit of developing for you to be better at that.

And so the muscles can be developed. They can be made to grow bigger, and they can be made to grow stronger. Now, this doesn’t come overnight.

It takes time and it takes effort. The exact same thing applies to developing your spiritual muscles, to developing the forces of faith and hope and love. You need a process by which you can cause them to develop and grow.

And it’s going to take a bit of time and a bit of effort to accomplish that. But it’s possible. Unfortunately, like physical exercise, you have this famous expression, no pain, no gain.

It’s going to take effort and it’s going to be painful and it’s going to cost you. Now, we’re going to be looking at that in a lot more detail in a study on its own. So I’m not going to go into it today.

I’m just letting you know that it is possible. So now, you receive these spiritual forces by being born again and by being filled with the spirit. Okay.

And once you’ve learned to develop them, now you must use them. And to use them, they’ve got to be released outwards from your spirit. Now, if you release them before they’re fully charged up, they’re not going to accomplish as much.

But when they are ready, you then release it through words and actions. And these always work together like the firing of that rifle. Although they are separate and they can be easily distinguished separately, you’ll seldom see the one without the others.

And also, when they are released, I know the firing of a gun is a good illustration, but it’s not actually an accurate illustration unless we’re talking about a very special kind of gun, one which is not freely available yet. But many years ago, when they created a famous movie series called Star Trek, I first saw the idea of a gun that fires a laser. And you can remember the guys there in Star Trek pulling out their laser gun and saying, charging up.

Got to charge it up first. Then they fired. When they fired it, out came this strong laser beam.

See now, the laser beam isn’t just a pop like a bullet. Laser beam is a bzzz, a continual force. And so, when we release these spiritual forces, we mustn’t think of it as a once of bam, bam, bam.

Think of it more like a laser that is fired and kept on the target until something happens. Can you see that? This is how they work. Now, the spiritual forces, they’re a source of God’s power that has been made available to us.

Everything we accomplish in our lives depends on how we use these three forces. We use them to overcome the enemy and the demon powers that attack us in our spiritual lives. We use them to maintain our lives, to stay alive and to prosper and to succeed.

We use them to build a life of abundance that Jesus promised us. Said, I came that you might have life and life in abundance. We also use them to activate spiritual gifts and what we call mantles of ministry.

And we will learn about that separately in other courses. And you’ll see that spiritual gifts and mantles of ministry, they require to be energized by an inner power, which I’ve called the mantle of power. Now, the mantle of power, in actual fact, is the combination of these three spiritual forces together, fully charged up like a powerful generator, which then supplies the power to the spiritual gifts and the mantles of ministry that enable them to operate and function.

So if you ever hope or plan to be used by the Lord in ministering his power, whether it be in bringing deliverance from demons or healing the sick or anything that requires the power of God to be manifested, you’re going to have to know how to tap into and charge up these three spiritual forces before you can energize the gifts of the spirit that you may have received. Everything that you accomplish in life, everything requires it. So this isn’t just an optional subject that’ll be, hey, that’s interesting to know.

It’s essential for you to know these things because we live through God’s presence and power in our lives. So now before you can accomplish any of these things, you need to learn the essentials. And they may sound like they’re very complicated at first, and that’s why our whole approach in this series is to make it easy for you.

So firstly, you need to identify the fact that you need these forces in your life because without them, you can accomplish nothing. And then you need to identify the source of these forces, where they’re coming from, and you need to learn how to tap into them when you need them. You need to learn how to develop them, and then you must learn how to release them to bring the results that you’re looking for.

Now you need to have a clear vision of what you’re going to do using these forces. Number one, as I already mentioned, is learn to identify your why. Why do you want these things in your life? Because you need the motivation to keep you going.

I’ll tell you why. Because for hope to be developed, we need persistence. We looked at a scripture that says that faith with persistence brings results.

See, it’s not enough to have one shot of the laser. Bam! Hey, that did some damage. It’s not enough.

You’re going to have to keep the laser trained until the job is done. And if you want to accomplish anything in life, we have an enemy who’s trying to stop you from accomplishing anything, and you need to keep that power trained until he’s overcome and flees. And if you want God to create things in your life, oh, Lord, please, Lord, will you? We bring him our prayer request.

Please, Lord, will you do this? And he says, sure. Why don’t you release the power I put in you and I’ll create it? See, it is spirit that creates out of nothing. So we need finances, Lord.

How are we going to create it? Well, in the natural, you went out and you worked hard, or you got a better job, or you did good business. See, we’re at the supernatural. We let God decide the way it’s going to happen.

All we do is we put our faith, hope, and love out, and we believe God for finances. And miraculously, money starts coming at us from all sides. If you’re battling with your health, well, we know we’ve got to run to the medical system and get some doctor to try and heal us.

And fortunately, the doctor’s going to tell you probably how sick you are and how serious it is and how you could die. The best he can do is supply you with something that will assist your body because your body heals itself, but it does it through the power of your spirit. Your spirit can heal your body, and it can only do it as you release those three spiritual forces outwards into your body.

How do you do that? It all comes with how to release the spiritual forces, which we will be covering in more detail. So identify your why, and then whatever you want to create, make a blueprint. What does it look like that you’re trying to make? You know, before God created the world, he had a very clear picture in his mind what it was going to look like.

And when it was finished, done, he looked and said, that’s good. That’s good. That’s exactly the way I wanted it to be.

And we come to the Lord and we say, oh Lord, we need money. How much money? Well, Lord, we’ll leave that for you to decide. The Lord says, okay, here’s a couple of dollars.

How can we survive on a couple of dollars? You said you wanted some money. Isn’t that money? What picture do you have in your mind? Oh, we have rent to pay. We have the car to pay.

We’ve got food to eat. We need to buy to eat. Make a list.

How much money do you need? See, then release your spiritual forces to go out and create that amount of money until it comes in. And if you’re desiring to be treated with favor by others, whether it be at your job or church or in this world, you want good relationships, it’s going to take the power of God to give you favor. And you know, God is full of grace.

And the word grace in the New Testament actually can be translated as favor. You already have favor with God that you didn’t deserve. Did you realize he can give you favor with people also? He can give you new friendships, new relationships.

He can even fix the ones you’re already in that are not doing so well. See, all of these are different aspects of living, of working, and of doing the work of the ministry. But they all require the same power of God.

And that same power of God is always manifested in these three main spiritual forces. Now, we’re going to be looking at these in a lot more detail in the rest of this course. And by the time we’ve finished, I hope that you’ll understand more clearly what’s involved.

Not only that, but you’ll see how simple it really is. You don’t have to overcomplicate it. Once you know how to do it, it’s three easy steps.

And God always does it. God always works. You know, God doesn’t wake up in the morning with a bad mood and decide he’s not going to bless you today.

God has laid out very clearly in his word what he requires. And he doesn’t change. He said, I’m the Lord, I change not.

So, all you need to do is to get into his word and learn how God works. Get yourself in line with it. And you can expect to see the kind of results that God promised you.

I believe by the time we finish this series, you’re going to have a very clear picture. You’re going to see how simple it is. And you’re going to be reaching out no matter what level of spirituality you’ve reached.

No matter if you’ve only been a believer for a short while or you’ve been in ministry for years, it doesn’t make any difference. The same principles apply. The same power applies.

And actually, there’s nothing complicated about it. Because he does all the work, not you. So, if you’ve been struggling in some of these areas of life, if you’ve been struggling to do the work of the ministry and wish you had more power, don’t think, well, I need to fast and pray for more power.

I need to beg the Lord for more power. No. Realize the power you already have.

Learn how to tap into that power. Learn how to charge it up. And then learn how to release it outwards into your life.

And before you know it, you’re going to be walking and living a life of victory and experiencing the power of God every day. Power made easy. You can do it.

Amen.