Spiritcode

A PREGNANT SILENCE

A PREGNANT SILENCE
Many times, God has spoken after long periods of silence. There were 400 years of silence after the prophet Malachi spoke in the last book of the Old Testament, and then John the Baptist and Jesus were supernaturally born into the earth. there were also 400 years of silence during the time of Israel’s slavery in Egypt under Pharoah until God spoke to Moses to set his people free and prepare to journey into the promised land. The number 400 in the Bible speaks of these seasons of Pregnant Silence, which can be described as a time of silence when all communication is suspended and that time feels both empty and yet strangely full, filled with anticipation that something important is about to be spoken or revealed.

For about four thousand years after Adam when Jesus was born the earth had suffered under the weight of its brokenness. Humanity was lost, unable to heal itself. Suspicion and hostility toward Father God, sown by Lucifer, had led to a distorted view of God in the earth, and many saw Him as distant and judgmental, and even Judaism opposed itself from within through doctrines of legalism and hypocrisy and pride. This distancing of Israel from the love and grace of God caused Jesus to tell them at that time that they had ‘missed their day of visitation’ (Luk 19:44). 
Galilee of the Gentiles was the battlefield of good against evil and of light against darkness, as Isaiah had prophesied concerning the birth of Jesus as the light out of darkness and the new birth of life out of death.
In Galilee of the Gentiles the people who walked in darkness Have seen a great light.
Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined. (Isaiah 9:1-2. 
God had a greater answer—not a set of rituals or rules, but Himself. Jesus, as God and man, would bridge the gap between heaven and earth. He would step out of eternity and into time, exchanging pure Spirit existence for divine/human existence as the first New Creation Being in the earth. In this great mission, the Holy Spirit played an essential role. The Holy Spirit partnered with Jesus, sharing every moment of His earthly life. This partnership ensured that the Holy Spirit too would intimately experience human existence. After Jesus completed His mission, the Holy Spirit would continue the work of revealing God’s love - and drawing humanity into communion with the Divine so that we too could become a New Creation in Christ.

To begin this new chapter, God sent a divine Spiritual seed into the earth, choosing Mary, a young and humble woman, to receive it. The angel Gabriel appeared to her, announcing that she had been chosen to become pregnant and bear the God-child Jesus, and he reassured her that this was God’s will. Although Mary was initially confused, having never been with a man, Gabriel explained that the Holy Spirit would overshadow her, and she would conceive a child by divine power, and Mary, in faith and humility, responded, “Let it be done unto me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

Mary was betrothed to a man called Joseph and in the cultural context of Mary and Joseph, betrothal was a formal, legal agreement between families, often formalized with a written contract (ketubah) and the couple was considered legally married, but if there was a breach of honour to that contract, either party could initiate divorce proceedings. 

When Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant with child, he was deeply troubled, but he resolved to act with compassion, planning to quietly divorce her (Matthew 1:19). However, the angel Gabrielle also appeared to him in a dream, telling him that Mary’s child was conceived by the Holy Spirit and would save His people from their sins. Joseph obeyed the angel’s command, and he took Mary as his wife.

Six months earlier a priestly prophet named Zechariah was told by the same angel Gabrielle that his wife Elizabeth who was beyond the age of childbearing, would also supernaturally give birth to a child and the child would be called John. 
Luke 1:17-20 … a child who would go before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, and to make ready for the Lord a people prepared. 
However, Zechariah could not believe this, so the angel said I am Gabriel, I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time. 
This was another supernatural pregnancy and from this moment a supernatural pregnant silence occurred as the priestly prophet was struck dumb until the pregnancy was over and the baby John was born. Zecharia the priestly prophet being struck mute for a season of time was symbolic of Israel, who had not heard a prophetic voice since the prophecy of Malachi, the last prophet to speak until both John the Baptist and Jesus came to proclaim the supernatural birth of the Kingdom of God in the earth. 

Following Gabriel’s announcement to Zechariah and Mary and Joseph, Mary journeyed to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who had been with child for six months, the baby John, who would prepare the way for Jesus. And the baby leaped in Elizabeth’s womb as the two sisters shared the wonder of their supernatural pregnancies. Elizabeth finally gave birth to her son, and it was assumed the child would be named Zechariah, after his father. However, Elizabeth insisted he be named John, and when questioned, Zechariah, who had been struck mute for doubting Gabriel’s prophecy, wrote the name John on a clay tablet and immediately, his voice returned, and he praised God. The silence was broken for all the world to hear God and have his presence amongst them. When John the Baptist began his ministry of preparing the way for Jesus, many in Israel believed that he was Elijah whom Malachi had prophesied about.
The final words of Malachi’s prophesy came from the last verse of the last chapter of the last book of the Old Testament, and they declared that God would send the prophet Elijah before the coming of the Messiah and that he would turn the hearts of the children to their fathers and the hearts of the fathers to their children. 
 and even Jesus said that John had come in the spirit of Elijah - This is the one about whom it is written: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you. (Matthew 11)

And today, we find ourselves in a similar season of pregnant silence from Heaven upon a world that is rife with uncertainty, division, and spiritual disconnection. Many voices in this global culture clamour for attention yet rarely do they bring clarity or wisdom. But in the midst of this time of empty-but-full silence, God’s people wait with expectant hope as God is stirring the hearts of His people to hear his voice and to awaken others and turn their hearts back to him. Just as John’s mission was to prepare the way for Jesus, the Holy Spirit is working in us who believe, to bring light and hope to the world. 

This preparation doesn’t rely on loud proclamations or dramatic gestures but on God’s people hearing his voice and responding with consistent acts of love and faith as he moves through our everyday lives inspiring us to reflect God’s mercy and truth in our daily interactions.
Zechariah’s regained voice reminds us that God’s word always comes at the appointed time. As we await a fresh movement of the Spirit, we can take comfort in knowing that God is never silent without purpose. Our silence can also be purposeful, and our waiting can be with hope and faith that God is at work in the world of the unseen on our behalf. The Bible says
Whatsoever is born of God overcomes the world and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. (1John 5:4)
We wait in silence, but that silence is pregnant with the faith of bringing to birth God’s will in our lives and in the Church. When His voice breaks through, it will be with clarity, cutting through the confusion of the world. We wait to hear and God waits to speak.
Isaiah 30:18 Therefore the LORD will wait, that He may be gracious to you;
                                                                                                                                                                                                              
Malachi prophesied before the 400 years of silence that God would turn the hearts of the children to their fathers and the hearts of the fathers to their children before his return – in the days his first coming to Israel - and in the days of his second coming into the world. Today this means that there will be a grace upon families that will become reunited in the love of God and one another. This promise remains true for us today. In the midst of the darkness of today’s world of chaos, the light of God’s love is beginning to shine. As we choose to live in that love and its light, we will witness the hand of God bringing order out of chaos and bringing unity, hope, and peace to people in our own personal world. Amen

Paul O’Sullivan – pauloss@me.com

 

 

THE BATTLE IS NOT YOURS BUT GOD'S

THE BATTLE IS NOT YOURS BUT GOD'S

The Bible gives the account of God speaking to King Jehoshaphat, who was a faithful king – the fourth king of Judah, and he was about to go into battle against the enemy, which was an ungodly alliance (I’m using that term from time to time today) of the armies of Ammon and Moab and Mt.Seir. 2Chronicles 20:17. You will not need to fight in this battle for the battle is not yours, but God's. Position yourselves, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord. Do not be afraid nor be dismayed; for the Lord your God is with you.”

In that battle of Jehoshaphat’s, that army was about to attack Israel to prevent them from entering into their inheritance of the promised Land. Earlier on, Israel were told not to attack these three nations when they first came out of Egypt. However God always steps in at critical times when God’s people are ready to come into the fullness of what God has prepared for them from the beginning. The people of Israel were in fear and terror and Jehoshaphat cried out to God ‘O our God, will you not execute judgment on them? For we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

The Bible goes on to say ‘And when they began to sing and praise, the Lord set an ambush (âra? - to lie in wait and destroy) against the men of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, who had come against Judah, so that they were destroyed.  God set the divided kingdoms of the enemy against one another (ungodly alliances turn against one another).
For the men of Ammon and Moab rose against the inhabitants of Mount Seir, and destroyed them first, and when they had made an end of the inhabitants of Seir, they all helped to destroy one another.’
So by the time Israel appeared on the scene ready for battle there were dead bodies everywhere and the fight was all over, and it took Israel three days to gather up all the spoil from the treasuries of the opposing armies. 
I believe we are living in a time such as this for the Church as the rebellion of ungodly alliances of darkness against the light of God’s people has also begun to reach its peak.
In ancient times, and up to the time of Jesus people worshipped a multitude of different gods and therefore could never agree on anything. There were no athiests. Today there are atheists but people have invented their own gods, or their own images or ideologies of what they believe will give them everything they want in life.

Over the last decade or more a cultural slogan called DEI or diversity, equity and inclusion has become a rule for social and sometimes educational and political and corporate life. If done in a godly way this slogan has a lot of merit, as diversity is an accepted fact of life, and equity means an appropriate sharing of privilege (it doesn’t mean equality), and inclusion means inclusion. Nothing wrong with that.
But when done in an ungodly selfish way, individuals or groups of people compete to be more diverse or different than anything ever seen or heard of before and demand to be applauded for their choices it can put a strain on the fragile cultural window of tolerance and confusion and resentment starts happening everywhere. Equity then becomes I/we want to be more equal than most other people and want to enjoy every privilege that other people have without responsibly earning or paying for or deserving. 

The ungodly nature of the DEI slogan is because it was based on an unspoken agreement in our culture to reject traditional Western values of Christianity which stood for a creator God with authority over human affairs through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Traditional values such as family order, freedom of speech, and obedience to the Commandments have been despised and rejected. This has caused ungodly alliances to form, and become set against one another, just as with King Jehosophat where God set the divided kingdoms of the enemy against one another (ungodly alliances turn against one another). DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion then devolves over a short time into division, inequity, and exclusion (DIE). Identity groups compete for priority of privilege and within what looked like a united front of many identity groups fragments into different splinter groups cancelling one other out and leaving more conflict and hostility in society than there was in the first place. 
We might think that what is happening today is something new, but it isn’t, as we have seen with King Jehoshaphat, and Paul sums up the rebellious attitude of today’s culture when he wrote over two thousand years ago in Romans.
Romans 1:19-28 (Message Bible)
By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what normal eyesight can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap statuettes you can buy at any roadside stall.
So God said, in effect, “If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.” It wasn’t long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth inside and out. And all this because they traded the true God for a fake god and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them—the God we bless, the God who blesses us.
Worse followed. Refusing to know God, they soon didn’t know how to be human either—women didn’t know how to be women, men didn’t know how to be men. Sexually confused, they abused and defiled one another, women with women, men with men—all lust, no love. And then they paid for it, oh, how they paid for it—emptied of God and love, godless and loveless.
Since they didn’t bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives and they ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, cruel, cold-blooded. And it’s not as if they don’t know better. They know perfectly well they’re spitting in God’s face. And they don’t care—worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best!

The basis for Christian unity, a Godly Alliance, is found in Ephesians 4:1 walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.
Paul sums up the Church’s confidence in our unity of trust in God’s power on our behalf.
1 Corinthians 8:4 we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as there are many gods and many lords), yet for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we live. However, there is not in everyone that knowledge;

Israel did physical warfare – we do spiritual warfare. We can receive peace from God, knowing that he alone can subdue all things to himself (Philippians 3.x) including the hearts of people, and that he is the creator God who alone can bring order out of chaos, and who speaks light into darkness. And as Paul explains in Ephesians 6:10 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the times of evil, and having done all, to stand. We do not fight against people but against dark spirits called principalities, which are social demographic regions where the culture of states and cities is expressed. We also wrestle against powers that buffet our personal souls. We wrestle against the rulers of the darkness of this age, that means the darkness that is influencing the collective mindsets and ideologies and attitudes of the global atmosphere that exists in this time of worldwide crisis. 
 
Paul writes about our strategic spiritual defensive pieces of armour such as a ‘helmet of salvation’ protecting the mind and thoughts, and he talks about a spiritual breastplate over the heart that protects us from fear. The head and the heart are the two most vulnerable parts of the body in warfare, and in spiritual terms the mind is the stronghold to where darkness directs his primary attack. We are directed in the Scriptures to bring our thoughts captive to the present moment that contains the ever-present presence of God with us through the indwelling Holy Spirit who reveals the reality of the power of Jesus to reorder our lives.This is being renewed in the spirit of our minds. We magnify the reality of God’s supernatural activity above the unreality of our anxious imaginations about everything that might go wrong. 
 
The other vulnerable area is our heart. That is where either fear or faith can dwell. Darkness fires darts of doubt and fear into this stronghold of our relationship with God, and we are given a shield of faith to protect ourselves from this kind of attack. The very areas that satan seeks to attack you are the areas of your strength as you enter this new season - and because you have paid a price and kept going, God is giving you access to the next step in your destiny - a short climb to the next place of rest and refreshment, where God will bring healing to the wounds the enemy may have inflicted you with.
Paul also mentions spiritual weapons, like the sword, which speaks of the word of God. 

The people under Jehoshaphat were told to ‘Position yourselves, stand still, and see, and to fear not.’ We Position ourselves – Our position is as partners together with God. We are partakers of his Divine nature - Joint Heirs together with Jesus. We do not earn this – it is a gift of God’s grace. But we dare not neglect it.
We stand still – We come into a place of readiness and alertness in our spirit, not passively but actively - mindful of the now moment of God’s ever-present presence with us. We See - That is seeing God at work by faith in the world of the unseen, as opposed to seeing things happen the way Israel did at the ambushing of the enemies in Jehoshaphat’s battle. Our outward ‘seing’ will come if we have been inwardly ‘seeing’ by faith. That lifts us into a present moment assurance of the greatness and goodness of God, and we magnify God’s greatness above our own weakness – ‘For The Lord your God is with you’. Amen

PRESENCE PRAYER AND MINDFULNESS

PRESENCE PRAYER AND MINDFULNESS
Mindfulness can be described as the practice of paying attention, with an intention, and in the present moment. So mindfulness is a key aspect of Presence Prayer.
God Is mindful towards us and that is where the original concept of mindfulness came from. 
Hebrews 2:6 What is man, that you are mindful of him (mnaomai), or the son of man, that you care for him? This Scripture is quoting David in Psalm 8:4-6 and is speaking of the Father being mindful of Jesus but it is ultimately speaking of God being mindful of all of humanity. 

People in our Western culture use mindfulness as a practice for sharpening their focus of attention in the present moment for doing productive things or for engaging in leisure or creative skills, and also as a form of emotional therapy for staying calm in times of stress. It has generally become a psychological discipline that is useful for finding some order in a busy and agitated world. That is well and good and helpful, but it does not reach the highest goal of conscious mindfulness that God has prepared for us. 
Our mindfulness of God does more than just help us to pay attention to the inner space of what is meaningful in our life, it puts us in touch with the source of all meaning in our life, God himself. David also wrote of God’s initiative in this mindfulness. 
How precious are your thoughts (rêa – intentions, purposes) towards me, O God! How great is the sum of them! (Psalm139:17)

It was God who invented the practice of mindfulness and we can see that he is focussing his full attention upon us with an intention of seeing us becoming the person we were created to be from eternity, and in the eternal now present moment. And he wants us to get to know him and also to know that we are known by him – so it is a two-way thing -  God starts the process of mindfulness towards us and invites us to respond. When we complete the loving circle of mindfulness back to God it delights his heart, which yearns for that intimate connection (James 4:5 - The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously. And right there begins a divine process of inner wholeness and transformation for us. (Romans 12:2 - being transformed by the renewing of the mind). So What becomes transformed is more than just our behaviour - it is the consciousness of who we really are in union with God through Jesus. When this consciousness is front and centre in our mind we become actively guided by his attentive gaze, I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will guide you with My eye. (Psalm 32:8). We also read in Jeremiah 29:11 ‘For I know the thoughts I have towards you, thoughts of good and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.’

God wants us to know that we are known. God wants to help us locate our known self within himself – and that is our inner source of power and love- the treasure in the earthen vessel. That is the wellspring, the fountain of living water. We can’t find it on our own, we are taken there by the Holy Spirit. 
John 16:14 he takes of what Jesus has said and of who Jesus is and reveals it to us. 

He takes us on this journey of mindful focus and intention. The Holy Spirit hears the cry of our heart which says; I want to know someone who really knows me and can help me find who I really am and who understands how I feel so that I can be who I really should be. That is powerful – and that is why David exclaimed ‘What IS man that you are mindful of him – are you that interested and focussed in me? – in us?
Our life as part of the human race, created to be part of God’s family is about knowing God and becoming KNOWN! – Known of God; Galatians 4.9. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world? 

When a person really feels heard they are tremendously grateful. They feel like saying – ‘how wonderful to know that someone is beginning to understand what it is like to be me’. And God says; ‘how wonderful that someone is beginning to want to know me and to be KNOWN by me’. And he then says My presence will go with you and I will give you rest, for you have found grace in my sight and I know you by name. (Exodus 33:14) and also Behold, I have written your name on the palms of my hands; (Isaiah 49:16). 
We have to know we are being heard by a merciful God without being judged, condemned, or rejected for imperfect performance. This is because he knows we are serious about knowing Him. When we begin to understand this and believe this that we are known like this we enter into the healing  light of his lovingkindness where our darkness can be conquered. ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you to me.’ (Jeremiah 31:3)

We develop in the growth of mindfulness with God through the challenges of life. We each have different personal situations to contend with; relational, financial, self-worth, and general fears and anxieties. But the greatest challenge is not what the actual external situation is but the fear on the inside that needs to be faced and met with faith. Our state of mindful faith in these situations determines the quality of peace and stability in our personal lives. Otherwise, life becomes a series of reactions because we are not in that settled place of mindful faith within ourselves and this affects the quality of our wisdom in decision making and the ability to recover from the consequences of our mistakes and from the mishaps that happen unexpectedly. ‘be anxious for nothing, but talk to me about what your needs are, with hope and thanksgiving in your heart. And the peace of God which surpasses understanding will guard your hearts and minds…’ Philippians 4:6

When we are flowing in mindfulness with God we can not only find a place of peace within ourselves but a place of empowered faith in God that makes us more aware of his compassion for the pain and suffering for others that we know, so that we can touch his compassion and be more effective in providing help and care and prayer. In this way we can come together in many places as groups and gatherings of faith and love and care, being mindful of one another that we are all going through different things at different times at different levels, and being aware of a ‘faith safety net’ of common goodwill and care in the group. In this year of my own grief and loss and other difficulties I have felt that safety net of your intercessory prayer for me in this way.

In the Book of Joshua when Joshua prepared to take Isreal across the Jordan River and into the Promised Land, he told the company of twelve priests (representing the twelve tribes) to carry the ark upon their shoulders across the flooding river (Joshua 3:8 – shoulders speak of representative authority and bearing burdens). The ark contained the presence of God, and the people were to follow this company at a distance of 2000 cubits. The priests were commanded to stand at the edge of the Jordan River and God said he would do a great miracle and drive out all their enemies before them. The people were told ‘When the priests who are carrying the Ark touch the water with their feet, the river will stop flowing as though held back by a dam and will pile up as though against an invisible wall all the way back to Adam!’ This was the work of God, not the work of the priests; all they had to do was to carry the ark, the presence of God, but they had to have faith that God would do the mighty miracle work in the world of the unseen. Their natural minds would have said ‘We are going to drown in there’, but they would have had no doubt that they were bearing the presence of God on behalf of all the people.

Then all the people crossed at a spot where the river was close to the city of Jericho, and the priests who were carrying the Ark stood on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan and waited as all the people passed by.
The people would never have entered into the Promised Land or entered into a new life under God where they could give thanks to have his spiritual blessings and his provision of fields and crops and houses. They had become used to struggling and straggling in the wilderness without hope or confidence – and now their time had come. But it required that the priests stood in the gap. Those priests who were 2000 cubits in front of the rest were a prophetic picture of Jesus as our High Priest overcoming darkness and death for us almost 2000 years ago on the cross so that we could enter into the fulness of the Promise of God in Jesus and could be included in his life, and his baptism in the Jordan river was a picture of his death and resurrection

Today we can be like those priests that stand in the gap for others, carrying the presence of God in our hearts for his supernatural working in the world of the unseen not only in our lives, but also in the challenging situations of those people in our world that we stand in the gap for. Everything about this battle is about celebrating victory rather than fearfully anticipating the dreadful sense of failure or helplessness – no, we expect the supportive and authoritative burden carrying power that God has given to each one of us, as Paul wrote in Galatians 6:2 Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ. So enter into the simplicity of this, it not complicated, and don’t expect to have to have some ecstatic feeling or experience of the presence of God – no it is by faith. You’ve heard all the Scriptures today, look them up. Know that this is the purposeful intention of God and know that he gave those priests a commandment to carry his presence for themselves and for the other people. At these times you may not feel very confident but you don’t need to have confidence in your own strength – it’s not you, it is simply knowing that God has placed the burden and the authority upon your shoulders but he is doing the supernatural work in his way and in his time, and we just give God thanks that he has included us in his loving mighty work. Thankyou Lord for this privilege, Amen.

Paul OSullivan – pauloss@me.com

 

THE HEALING OF THE SOUL AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WITH SCOTT KARDASH

 

 

SCOTT KARDASH AT NBCC

Working with Paul over the last few years has been a real privilege for me, a real pleasure. And as you know, a lot of you have been with Paul for many, many years. And it's very rare to find somebody with a depth of wisdom and understanding of the Scriptures that Paul has. He has a real detailed recall and is able to connect dots across Scriptures in a way that I've never seen anyone else do it.

Paul approached me and said, you know, we were talking about just other things. And he said, "Oh, well, you'd really like to get something going with some podcasts to get some of these messaging out." I said, "Oh, yeah, I'd love to help you." And so we've put out two series to date, hopefully many more to come: Our Ten Commandments and The Healing of the Soul and the Life-Giving Spirit. And so today I wanted to put some of that in context. Actually, they are related. It's all on a very similar theme. And the theme is all around the Spirit who heals us and reshapes us.

But before I do, I might just mention briefly that for those that don't know, I did speak to Paul during the week. And he's recovering well from the operation. I think he's been home for a few days now. On Friday, he got home. And so he said things could be going as well as could be expected. That's really good news. I have a lot of faith for Paul's situation. I know we're all praying for him.

An Ancient Look at the Ten Commandments

In preparation for this, I did listen to Peter Carblis last week. You all here for that? Did you all hear Peter Carblis? I was very impressed with his ancient Greek. So I decided to one-up him and use an ancient manuscript. He used like modern Greek. He had lowercase. There's no lowercase of the original manuscripts. And I also decided to go for the Hebrew, not the Greek. So this is even older than the manuscripts he was relying on.

Now, would anybody like to give it a crack? Because I can't read it. No? Does anybody know what that might be? No. I didn't know either. I had to look it up. So it's the Ten Commandments. And this is probably the earliest manuscript we have of the Ten Commandments. And it was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And you can see they've got a numbering system, which is a bit mysterious until you realise that it's quite simple. 4, Q, 4, 1. 4 is the cave they found this scroll in. Q means Qumran, which is where the caves were. And 41 was the number that they registered the scroll. So there's nothing magical about the 41. It's just the one. They got two in that sequence.

And you can see that with these ancient manuscripts, they're actually quite different to the modern languages that we have. There's no punctuation. They have the same in the Greek. There's no punctuation. There are no spaces between words. They all run together. There's no chapters or verses. There's no vowels or accents. They call it the Tetragrammaton, which is Yahweh. It's always written out in full. In the New Testament, they contracted Jesus Christ, and they put a line above it. But in our Bibles, the Yahweh is always written as capital L-O-R-D, Lord. So in the Old Testament, you'll see where it's written Lord, capital letters, it's in the original, it's Yahweh. And they had very strict rules about how they created these scrolls, parchment and kosher animals. And of course, in Hebrew, it's right to left, not left to right. If you start on left and try to go to the right, you'd be in real trouble.

But maybe it's better that we deal with the English today. I know I find this a lot easier. The Old Testament law, and God was forming a new nation. And so they needed a set of commandments. And it was part of a covenant that God had with this new nation. He formed them out of nothing. This nation didn't exist. It was a miracle, really, where God spoke to Abraham. And from Abraham, he said, "I will bless through you all the families of the earth, all the nations."

He started with these commandments. He wrote them. He wrote them on two tablets of stone. He wrote them with his finger and gave them to Moses. Remember what happened then? Moses came down the mountain. And what were the Israelites doing? They were already rebellious and worshipping a calf that they'd made out of the gold. And so what Moses did, he smashed the Ten Commandments. They had to go back up and get a new set. The fact that they're on tablets of stone is quite important because where is the law written now? On our hearts.

And Jesus came to fulfill that. He came to fulfill the law. And he helped us understand that there are two commandments that actually summarize everything. Love the Lord your God and love your neighbour. And then he said, "On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets." That's a phrase which actually means the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures. He wasn't just talking about the Ten Commandments, he was talking about the entirety of the Scriptures. And in the New Testament, when you see the word Scriptures, it's referring to what we now call the Old Testament. So they're referring to the Old Testament. They were always talking about the Old Testament when they talked about Scriptures. And Jesus came to fulfill everything in that Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Purpose of the Law

So there's a purpose to the law, and the purpose is still around today. So you can see since the law comes, it produces a knowledge of sin. Have you seen those YouTube videos of Ray Comfort running around and interviewing? Has anybody seen him? And he convicts people through the law. He says, "Have you ever told a lie? Have you ever stolen anything? Even something small?" And he's using the Ten Commandments because most people think they're good people. And they need to have something which exposes sin and to make them realize they need a Savior.

Paul tells us later on in Galatians, the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

And then Paul again says,

But God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do, by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin. He condemned sin and the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

So there's an uplifting of the law, and that's what Jesus came to do.

From the Law of Stone to the Law of the Spirit

And then Jesus ascended. It always surprises me that the disciples spend their time in the Holy Spirit, and they walk in the Holy Spirit. They spend all this time with Jesus face to face, had no clue who he really was for most of that time. And even when he died, they all went back to fishing and they thought, what was that all about? And it wasn't until they saw him resurrected that they realized actually who he is and he's still alive today.

Jesus did ascend and there was a prophecy in Joel, which was fulfilled in Acts.

I will pour out my spirit on all flesh...

And I will give you a new heart. This is Ezekiel now.

And a new spirit I will put within you and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and to be careful to obey my rules.

We're seeing a transition here from outer to inner. And then this is a key passage here, and Paul actually talks about this a lot in the healing of the soul.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father. And he will give you another helper.

Who's the helper? The Holy Spirit.

...to be with you forever, even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.

And the disciples, they were terrified that Jesus is going to ascend and leave them all alone again. "No, no, no. Go back to Jerusalem and wait and I will send the Holy Spirit."

And then one of the most startling verses I think in the Bible,

...he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.

For me, that's amazing that we are joined with our Creator through the Spirit and through our spirit, actually.

The Spirit of the Law: A New Perspective

So that now opens up a whole different view of the Ten Commandments. And this is where Paul has really made some interesting insights. And you can see the letter of the law is phrased in a very negative, "thou shalt not." Most of it's negative, but the spirit of the law in the New Testament enhancement of that is rephrased and uplifted in positive terms.

Take a few examples, "don't murder." The New Testament spirit of the law really is to say, is addressing the root of anger and unforgiveness to become an agent of reconciliation and peace. We're moved from avoiding murder to fostering life. And you see that the whole thing is flipped on its head.

Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labour, that he might have something to give.

So we're moving from a taker to a productive giver.

"Don't tell lies, don't bear false witness." Speaking words of life that fill others' hearts. Not just avoiding literal falsehoods. So we're moving from avoiding deception to speaking truth in love. So can you see this transformation?

The other thing Paul has noticed is that each of these commandments are linked. They're not just a laundry list of commands. One actually leads to the other, and ten actually goes back to one. But if you go the other way, you have a diagnostic tool. So say you're having a problem with honouring your parents. You go back one, and it will help you. And there's probably an issue there that's resulting in a symptom in the next one. I won't go into any more depth than that. If you'd like to find out more, go to YouTube and just search on "uncreated ten commandments." And there's a playlist there of all of them. It goes into much more detail there.

Sanctification: The Process of Being Renewed

Now, we're moving to a Greek text. Can anyone read this? I'm not even sure whether Pete can, but that's all right. Well, I was going to whisper to Carlos when you need him. He would love to get into this. I bet he'd struggle with this one, mate. This is actually Ephesians, chapter 4, verse 23 to 24.

The truth is in Jesus to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life, and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God, in true righteousness and holiness.

The new self is created in the likeness of God. Does anybody know what process this is describing? Think of justification, sanctification, glorification. This one here is a process, so justification, glorification, less of a process. This is talking about sanctification. That's the technical word for it.

Our Threefold Salvation: Spirit, Soul, and Body

There's a number of scriptures which talk about that. And the reason I'm bringing that up is because you will have heard Paul talk about, the three stages of being saved. In the past, our spirit has been saved—this is our justification. We can look at it this way with the spirit. And the soul is being saved, or sanctified. This is the process, which is a lifelong transformation process. And in the future, our bodies will be saved, or glorified.

Very tempting for us to separate these into three discrete entities, body, soul, and spirit. But in reality, that's very Greek thinking. Greeks used to like to separate everything into their parts. Hebrews liked to keep everything together as one entity, and they looked at different aspects of that one body.

This is a key verse that Paul has really lent on heavily for the healing of the soul. And it provides a lot of meaning around sanctification.

For you're receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation, or healing, of your soul.

So, the Greek word for salvation can be translated as healing. Most of our modern Bibles just call it salvation. But some of the earlier English Bibles really did translate it as healing or health. That's 1 Peter 1.9. But in reality, we are one person. And so, we have three aspects that work together to keep us whole.

How Spirit, Soul, and Body Work Together (Clip 1 with Paul O'Sullivan)

And so, I just wanted to now move on to having Paul tell us a little bit more about this. To answer the question, how do our spirit, soul, and body work together to shape our lives?

Paul O'Sullivan: Well, we've spoken about the spirit, and the soul, and the body. And there's three parts there. So, our whole being is tripartite, if you like, Paul. And it's interesting that God is a trinity, a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three in one making unity. And you said that the soul is both part of our inner life and part of our outer life. So, could you illustrate how the spirit, soul, and body work in harmony to shape our lives?

Well, if you draw three concentric circles, and you can see the diagram there, we can see that the body in the outer circle sends information to our souls from the outer circle of our outer world. There's a world out there, a sense world, a material world. And our spirit sends information from the innermost circle of our spirit into our souls. And our spirit is made up of our heart and our mind. So, there you've got parts. And there are divisions of working parts all working together. That's functional, but it's a design.

And all of that information from the spirit coming in from the deeper parts of the spirit and then coming outwards from the body inwards to the soul can be either helpful or harmful, whatever direction, whether it's coming from the spirit or coming out from the body. It can be good information or bad information. I mean, good things can come from the outside. Bad things can come too from what the body experiences and sees and feels. There can be traumas, all kinds of things.

And our spirit also sends information from the innermost circle on that diagram. And as I said, that's made up of the heart and the mind. And so the information from the spirit and from the body can be helpful or harmful, good or bad, true or false. And that can have a damaging effect upon the soul, that expresses everything that it receives from the body and the spirit. It doesn't say, "Oh, look, I'll just decide to accept certain types of information." What it can do is after it has received certain types of information that it realizes it doesn't like, it can learn a lesson and say, "I don't want to receive that anymore." But at first, if you're a young child, you're not discernible. You're not understanding what authority that information's coming from. I mean, that's just the way things are. We need to know that. There's naivety and vulnerability.

Scott Kardash: Well, Paul, you're moving into an area now that we need to elaborate on quite a lot in the upcoming episodes because we've laid out a foundation, I think, for the series in this particular session. We talked about the different parts of the body, how they interact and how they function together as an overall person. But we're going to start to unravel this now and talk about the healing of the soul, aren't we? So we're going to drill into this in quite a bit of detail because it's important for people to understand. And there's going to be little keys to unlocking different applications within people's lives that I don't think they would have even realized were there. They didn't even realize there was a lock there to unlock. And I think that's where a lot of the value of this series is going to come.

Paul O'Sullivan: Yeah, that's good, Scott. Yeah. And we're going to go right back to the beginning, the beginning of humanity, creation.

Scott Kardash: Excellent. Yeah, thanks, Scott.

Through my interactions with Paul, there are many things that I've disagreed with him on, actually. I know it doesn't come through in the podcast, but after spending time with him, I've realized he's right on just about everything. And some of them are quite big things, you know. Well, one of them was this. And I think there's a lot of confusion. Many people may not agree with this. He said, "Our spirit is made up of our heart and mind." So the heart and mind are in the spirit. Actually, I thought it was in the soul. So I was a bit confused about that.

A Profound Question: Who Forms the Soul? (Clip 2 with Paul O'Sullivan)

The answer to that question relates to the answer to this question. Who created our body, spirit, and soul? Quite a profound question. And this is one of the keys that Paul's unlocked as part of this series. And again, I'm just going to play some of that to look at the answer to that question.

Paul O'Sullivan: Okay, remember, we're body, soul, and spirit.

...God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

A Hebrew word there, ruach, the spirit of life. So Adam has an inner spiritual life now. He'd already become an outer physical body. He had two God-created parts. As we all do. But then it goes on to say in that verse, and this is the pivotal turning point,

...and man became a living soul.

That's the third part. The astonishing statement made here is not that God instantly created a living soul like he did with the body and the spirit. It says man became a living soul. So that begs a question. If God didn't form that living soul and man became a living soul, then who forms the living soul?

Scott Kardash: All right, Paul. So this is a concept which was a bit of a revelation here. So would you say that this understanding sparked this series?

Paul O'Sullivan: Yeah, that was the trigger. The startling question of who formed the soul. Because we'veseen God create man in his spirit and body, and suddenly the body and spirit become something. They became something, a living soul.

So the startling conclusion that I've come to, I'll put it to you now, we'll look at it in the scripture, is that the first living human soul was ready to be formed by the created spirit and body of man himself. So man formed the human soul from the God-created body and spirit that it already had. So we're going to look at that scripture a little more closely. I want to say here that God made provision for that soul. That's part of his creation for us. But he left it to us to form its nature.

First of all, the human spirit is breathed into the body by God. Then the soul and its inner life is formed throughout each person's life out of the activity of the two God-created parts. The inner part, the spirit. The outer part, the body. We form or generate our own souls. That's what I'm saying.

Scott Kardash: Alright, and it says that in Genesis.

Paul O'Sullivan: Well, all it says in Genesis is that man became a living soul. Now I've pondered that. What does that word became mean? It does not state God created. It said man became. So where does the Bible say that we are forming or generating the soul?

Well, that's another journey. I had to start searching for that and in the New Testament I found the place where Paul, writing in Corinthians, describes what it means to become a living soul. He knew about this. The same English word, became, that's used in Genesis in Hebrew. That's the English word. And that was a breakthrough. I was looking for something that humanity could generate and perhaps have a responsibility for, like a stakeholder with accountability. The formation of character within us and how the soul operates and how we participate in that. And that was all in that scripture that Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15.

1 Corinthians 15, 45, where he says,

So it is written, The first man, Adam, became a living soul.

And Paul is using the same English word that's used in Genesis. Same English word, right? But Paul, who was a Greek and Hebrew scholar, knew the deeper meaning of that Hebrew word became. He uses a Greek word in the New Testament. And the Greek word is which means "to generate." Now that's not apparent in the Old Testament, became. But here it is in the New Testament. To generate, to cause to be, to become, to come into being, to have a self. It's all there. You can read it in the concordance.

So humanity generated a living soul. And that scripture is pointedly clear. Man became a living soul. It has to come into being and become the responsibility of the person who generates that soul over the period of a lifetime. So God is not forming or generating the nature of that soul. We are. There is something waiting to become the expression of our spirit and our body. The angels didn't have one. The soul didn't exist. God designed the means whereby the living spirit and the body of man could generate a soul for the first time ever. And our whole life is the expression of that becoming of a living soul.

Scott Kardash: So God designed humanity to have a soul and he gives us the responsibility to form and shape that soul with all the decisions and choices we make in life, both the good and the bad, Paul.

Paul O'Sullivan: Exactly.

That's profound. And I hope you all caught that because I don't know anybody else who's noticed that in the scripture. I've heard nobody else teach about the soul that way. And I think he's absolutely spot on. And that opened up a whole set of discoveries all based on the scriptures about how our souls get damaged and how healing can occur within the souls.

And if you want to know more, just go to YouTube and there's a whole series on there. The channel is called Uncreated and the series is Healing of the Soul and the Life-Giving Spirit. It goes into much more depth later on about helper parts and how these helper parts are created in our souls and originally for good reasons, but we carry them throughout life and their purpose is no longer serving us anymore. In fact, it can be detrimental to us. Paul talks about how that can happen.

Summary: Salvation as Healing

So just to summarize, salvation can be translated as healing.

You're receiving the end result of your faith. The salvation or healing of your souls.

Our soul is shaped by choices and experiences. In a fallen world, our soul becomes damaged and disordered. It needs healing and renewal.

The Holy Spirit is our healer. Salvation is not just a one-time event. It's an ongoing, effective process.

We all are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

Salvation is the process of being reshaped into the perfect image of God, the risen Christ. We are being saved. Sometimes we might look back and say, "I was saved on that date." Well, you probably realized on that date you were justified, but we are being saved. More than rescue from sin, it's healing, transformation, union with God.

It is to be conformed to the image of His Son,

...to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

And the ultimate goal is to restore us to the purpose for which we were created, full communion with God,

...that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us.

That's our ultimate objective.

Application: Presence Prayer

And then how do we apply these principles? Well, you would have heard Paul talking about presence prayer. So he's done a couple of weeks here, I think, on presence prayer. And we will be doing a podcast to talk more about presence prayer and how to apply the healing of the soul. All right.

Closing Prayer

So why don't we just bow our heads in prayer and thank the Lord.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for gathering us together and for the truth of your word that reveals your heart for us. Lord, we invite the Holy Spirit to continue the work of transformation within us. Heal the places in our souls that are wounded and need reordering. Renew our minds so that we may walk in your ways. Unite us as one body filled with your Spirit, Lord, so that we may reflect your love and bring glory to your name. We pray all this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

 

LOVE - THE BIG PICTURE

LOVE – THE BIG PICTURE
In this passage of Scripture from 1 Corinthians 13 Peter Carblis speaks about the absolute concrete reality of God’s sacrificial love, agape, that reflects the very nature of God, as the Bible clearly says ‘God is love’ (1John 4:16). Peter takes each facet of this diamond of love and explains the various aspects of the nature of God’s love as they relate to our relationships with Him and with one another.

THE FORMER AND THE LATTER RAIN

THE FORMER AND THE LATER RAIN

Hosea was a prophet to the northern kingdom of Israel (also called Ephraim) during the 8th century B.C.  God commands Hosea to marry Gomer, a harlot, to symbolize Israel’s unfaithfulness to Him. Hosea is the same Hebrew word as Joshua and Jesus. Hosea was the Old Testament prophet with the message for God’s People to inherit the land of promise, and Joshua succeeded Moses as the deliverer of Israel and took them across the Jordan into the land of promise. And Jesus takes humanity into a spiritual land of promise, not earthly territory but the soil of the heart.
God refers to Israel as his bride (Isaiah 62:5, Isaiah 54) and he also calls her unfaithful, as a harlot (Jeremiah 3:1). In Ephesians 5 Paul calls the Church the bride of Christ and he fears for the church going astray by being beguiled from the simplicity that is in Christ. 
For I have divine jealousy for you. Betrothing you to one husband, that I may present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ (2 Corinthians 11)
So we have this story of both Israel and the Church as being God’s beloved bride and who go through times of unfaithfulness to God and being made desolate - and finally turning back to God in their time of affliction to be revived and restored. 
God says to Israel after they have been stubbornly going astray that he is going to leave them to themselves to go their own way and that he will go and return to his place (Heaven) - and that In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me. And that is what is happening in the earth and in the church today

Hosea 5:15 God says, I will return again to My place till they acknowledge their offense.
Then they will seek My face; In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me. And then they will say "Come, let us return to the LORD. He has torn us but he will heal us; he has afflicted us but he will bind up our wounds. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence. Let us know, let us pursue the knowledge of the LORD. His going from us is established as the morning, and He will come to us like the rain, like the former and latter rain to the earth.

There is no mention that Israel was ever revived and restored after two days during the prophecy of Hosea – It was a prophecy of future hope. He prophesied for 30 to 40 years and Israel never repented and at the end of his prophecy Israel were defeated by the Assyrians. So what does this mean that ‘after two days I will revive you’, and in the third day you will live in my presence? It means that we have to see these two days as prophetic periods of time that the Apostle Peter later writes about. 
Israel failed in their allegiance to the provisions and promises of God and still now the promise of full possession of their Promised Land awaits them. That promise is one of occupying their earthly territory in the Middle East. But the promise to the Church is to spiritually inherit and occupy the fullness of the spiritual blessings we have in Christ. 
Let us look at the interpretation of this prophetic period of time spoken of by Peter.

2Peter 3:8 But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish (waste their lives), but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away (lyo – moved aside) with a roar, and the heavenly bodies (elemental particles) will be burned up and dissolved (a purifying fire), and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.

If one day can be counted as a thousand years then 6 days would be six thousand years. The genealogies of the Bible show that it is now about six thousand years from the time of Adam. In fact I read in an archeological journal recently that civilisation in cities can only be traced back four thousand years, around the area of ancient Ur in the Chaldees, where Abraham lived and from where he was called to go out and prepare for the Hebrew people to possess the Land of Promise. That occurred in around 2000 years BC.
Christ appeared on the earth about 2000 years later. And now we are about 2000 years later at around 6000 years from Adam, according to Biblical genealogy. 
(Notice I used the word ‘about’ a few times – no exactness’ – how many people were in the upper room at Pentecost? The bible says about 120!)
And what does ‘living in His presence in the third day’ mean? That would describe the next one thousand years after the 6000 which would mean the seventh day - the one thousand years of rest – Six days of of work and one day of rest God at work redeeming humanity then a day of rest – the millennium

So if we apply the saying ‘I will go and return to my place and after 2 days I will return’ it echoes the words of Jesus 2000 years ago when he spoke to his disciples, because the last time that God said to his people that he would return and go to his place was when Jesus spoke to his disciples before his ascension into Heaven. 
John 14:2 I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also… the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.
 
When God left Israel and returned to his place (Heaven) he was giving Israel time to consider their ways in their afflictions and to seek his face and return to him. And in due course in the latter days Israel will be revived and live in his presence. They will receive the healing of their souls from the former and latter rains of revival from the Holy Spirit. 
In Israel they had both the spiritual and the agricultural seasons of year. The agricultural season after Pentecost brought the dry months – empty years - and towards the end of that period would come the former rain softening the earth and then the latte rain bringing the harvest. For us spiritually today the former rain is the softening of the hearts of humanity with the water of God’s word along with being broken and churned up and softened through afflictions. That prepares us for the latter rains of spiritual revival for us to become the people that we really are.

The great and awesome day of the Lord is always getting closer no matter when we make our best-guess estimates – there is no exactness - but we're living in days when there are worse things happening in the world than ever before. We will see not only more darkness and tribulation in the earth than ever before, but I have an expectation to see more spiritual activity of the Holy Spirit than we have seen before, as in the past visitations of God since Pentecost, and I believe we're in the beginnings of that right now. Too many good words have been spoken and have fallen on deaf ears and hard hearts. But good seed has been sown and the grace of God and the works of God are going to become more manifest and that will open people’s eyes and give them ears that are ready to hear in these present times. And while the double portion of healing rains is softening the wounded hearts and ripening the seeds the fruit of the Spirit will speedily become evident in transformed hearts and minds.
The Bible says that Workers will still be harvesting when it is time to plough the fields again. They will still be trampling the grapes when it is time for a new crop. Sweet wine will drip from the mountains and pour from the hills (Amos 9:13).
As you walk your steady path of grace and truth and love you can expect God to overtake you and go ahead of you. We are living in the day of the former and the latter rains.

 

 

 

 

 

PRESENCE PRAYER - PRAYER CHANGES US

PRESENCE PRAYER - PRAYER CHANGES US 
Paul teaches us the lifechanging prayer of the transformation of our mind and heart. Philippians 4:6-7 which says ‘Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.’
 
The wonderful promise of this Prayer of Change is that God will guard and protect our hearts and minds through Jesus Christ in everything that is happening in our lives. That is what overcomes the anxiety of a busy mind and a fretful heart that burdens our souls, and that is what allows us to pray the prayer of faith with thanksgiving in any situation.
The Greek word for anxious is merimna?? which means to be overly troubled by too many concerns and needs at the one time (or all the time), whether these concerns are our own or for others we care for.

This Scripture is a gracious appeal from God’s Spirit to our spirit – and our spirit is made up of our mind and our heart. But to get through to our spirit God has to get past our soul, and it is our souls that get overcrowded with too many soulish thoughts of the mind and feelings of the heart that fight for priority to get attention. 
In Hebrews 4:12 The Bible speaks about the word (logos) of God’s creative design and purpose and that word (logos) is said to be like a sword that is able to divide between the soul and the spirit. And we need that logos word so that we can understand what is happening in our soul and in our spirit, because the anxiety is in the soul but the prayer of faith is in the spirit. 

Our communion of our spirit to God’s indwelling Spirit opens the way for God to speak truth into our minds and renew our minds in our spirit. The truth that comes from the spiritual renewal of our mind informs our heart with a faith that believes and trusts in God and in his good will and purpose for us in our prayer for our needs. 
What our mind receives is what our heart believes – that is a fridge hanging statement to keep us focussed on what God wants us to know and what he wants us to believe. 

That Scripture also gives us an example of that sword word piercing between joints and marrow. The outside of a joint bone is like the soul and the marrow on the inside is like spirit - the real life-giving substance of the bone. Prayer is not just about trying to fix the outside problems that we see about us but about how God reorders us on the inside for us to see his will and for us to receive what he is faithfully putting in place for us. 
Good marrow means strong bones – but even if a bone gets broken it will heal well if the marrow is good. 

Our souls can become overwhelmed by the outer chaos and disorder that we see around us in this world, but our spirit joined to God’s Spirit is strengthened by the truth and order and promise of the good things of God that he has in store for us. That Scripture ends by saying that that sword word is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart, so it helps us to know what is going on in our disturbed soul so that we can exercise faith in our spirit that can assure us that Jesus is dealing with these needs for us in a way that only he can, and in that way our souls can be at rest and rise above the anxiety. 
He tells us to bring these things to him with thanksgiving – thanksgiving for what? Thanksgiving that Jesus will intercede with the Father on our behalf according to God’s will for our lives. So that means he is reordering our prayer. God is at work to reorder our lives for the best outcome for our lives – his outcome – not what our stressed or demanding souls would force into action if we could have things our way and not his. That is the peace of being in agreement with God that surpasses all understanding.

PRESENCE PRAYER THE VEIL

PRESENCE PRAYER THE VEIL
 
What is the veil? 
The veil represents the mindset of separation from God in the soul.
Before Adam and Eve were tempted by the serpent to disobey God they lived in the presence of God and were not conscious of any separation between themselves and God within their souls. But after they disobeyed God and listened to darkness, their souls were plunged into a mindset of separation from Him. 
 
Their once innocent and blameless souls became self-serving and willful, hiding in the shadows of shame and guilt from God. Devising strategies to cover up and blame others for their disobedience. This became the separated soul life of humanity from that time on. The veil

The first time this veil is spoken of in the Bible is when Moses went into the presence of the Lord when he received the commandments on Mt Sinai. The Israelites were afraid to look at him or come near him because being in God’s presence caused his face to shine so brightly that he had to cover it with a veil.
 
Exodus 34:29 When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, and the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him…

The temple also had a veil of separation which separated people from Gods presence. No one was allowed to go through that temple veil, except for the high priest once a year on the day of atonement - they would actually sturck dead if they did. Atonement was celebrated last Sunday and today the Feast of Tabernacles is celebrated sukkot (John 7:37 living water)

Hebrews 9:7 into the second chamber (behind the veil) the high priest went alone once a year, with the blood of sacrifice, which he offered for himself and for the people’s sins committed in ignorance; the Holy Spirit indicating this, that the way into the Holiest of All was not yet a reality while the first tabernacle was still standing…
11. But Christ came as High Priest of the good things to come, with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is, not of this creation. Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. 

Paul called the Old Covenant of the Ten Commandments given through Moses the “ministry of death, carved in letters on stone” and he contrasts this with the New Covenant given through Christ, where the Commandments are written in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. When Jesus died for us on the cross, he went through the veil of separation for all of humanity, making the way for us to pass through the veil also and to live a life with the mindset of non-separation between us and God. 

Matthew 27:50 And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.
And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.
This was an incredible physical representation orchestrated by God to show us this Old Covenant was over. The veil was physically torn. The whole earth shook. Just imagine that.
Interestingly, that was the end of blood sacrifices for sin for Israel. The veil was torn e through his flesh and blood sacrifice on the cross for all of us, for eternity. 

The Old Covenant’s glory was torn and replaced by a New Covenant- a glory that is eternal and internal—Christ in us, the hope of glory (Ephesians 3:4). 
No one in the Old Covenant had an inner life of the Holy Spirit within them..

What is the Veil? The veil is the flesh. What is the flesh?

The flesh is our self-made soul where we build an inner self life that is a very poor reflection of how our original spirit self was uniquely created by God to be like him as his child. But the self of the flesh puts the false ‘shadow of us’ on display.

This ‘flesh’ becomes the veil of separation until we realise that we can have direct, unveiled face to face intimacy with God through the Spirit, transforming us from the inside out. He comes into our vulnerability and weakness and shines through with his strength. 

The Bible says that Jesus came in the flesh (John 1:14) but he went through life with a totally innocent and blameless soul and with a totally unveiled face.
His soul was tempted in all points such as we are, but he did not sin (Hebrews 4:15 hamartia – miss the mark). Jesus did not have to create his own shadow me-self in his soul- which is the flesh. There was no veil of a mindset of separation from his Father.  And when He died for us on the cross, Jesus went through the veil of separation for all of humanity, making the way for us to pass through the veil also and to live a life with the mindset of non-separation between us and God. 

Hebrews 10:19 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the veil, that is, through his flesh.

The Bible says the whole world is under darkness – under the influence of evil 1 John 5:19 describing a world separated from God with a veil over their face that turns them inward towards their soul self instead of towards the face of God. Just like adam and eve did We can get pulled by our soul’s problems to turn inwards into our shadow life or we can get drawn by the Holy Spirit to turn to the Lord, just as the sunlight draws a sunflower to turn to the sun so that it can grow and get life

Paul spoke about Israel in the Old Covenant compared to us in the New Covenant
But their minds were blinded. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains between them and God’s glorious presence, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory. (2Corinthians 3:18)
The turning can be gradual, like walking up a hill carrying the burdens of our soul till we get to the top and enter the presence of God, the tabernacle, the holy place where God is, the room spoken about in Matthew 6:6 when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.
That turning is actually our repentance – turning from self to God. And when you walk up that hill Jesus is helping you carry the burdens, and while you are in the room Jesus helps you give the burdens to the Father. When you come back down the hill the Father rewards you openly – that is, he will supernaturally show you in some outward way that he has heard you and that he has brought things together for good in such a coincidental way that you know it could only have been God that has done it.

The Old Testament brought harsh judgement and condemnation. But it highlights that with Gods Glory behind a veil, they were always missing the mark by trying to put God on display in their own lives in their own strength rather than trusting Him and putting Him on display. That was to show us that we can't live without God With-in us. But even though we now live a life without the veil, we often act as if it is still there. 
When people say repent from your sins, (repent meaning turning from and turning to) and sin meaning to miss the mark- all that is asking you to do is to turn from yourself towards God to help you with why you are missing the mark. That's all sin does, it stops you from living with Him and for Him. In the New Testament the Spirit brings life, forgiveness, mercy, transformation, and freedom (2 Cor. 3:6, 17).

In Presence prayer we come to know God for who he is and what he says and what he does. We know we are loved and mercifully accepted for who we are as our new ‘God with us’ self. Our hearts desire becomes to please him. The veil of separation has been torn down by Jesus. The Father and Jesus and Holy Spirit have come to make their home in us and we delight to do our housecleaning like never before – to sparkle. When people come to the house of our heart, they can feel welcomed and blessed as God can now be on display and not just us.
Paul unveils this wonderful mystery in Colossians.
Col. 1:26 This mystery was kept secret for ages and generations past, but now it has been revealed to God’s people who desire to live with him and for him. For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for all of humanity (Gentiles). And this is the mystery - Christ lives in you, giving you assurance of sharing his glory (His life on display though you).

Simply turning to God as Father Son and Holy Spirit in our minds and hearts as often as we can brings us closer to the reality of God’s life within us and makes way for his life to shine through us. We have this treasure in earthen vessels so let us treasure our treasure and the turning takes the veil of separation away and allows our own and other people’s lives to be enriched. The present moment is always the most significant time in history - living with God.                            Paul OSullivan – pauloss@me.com

PRESENCE PRAYER SOUL AND SPIRIT

PRESENCE PRAYER SOUL AND SPIRIT 
  
The journey of our lives as human beings with a spirit and a soul involves the reordering of the psychikos or soulish self of separation back into alignment with our true spiritual self in Christ through the Spirit of God. We can become transformed from psychikos or soulish to pneumatikos or spiritual. Paul wrote about this to the church in Corinth.
 
And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit because they are `spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:13)
 
Adam and Eve started that journey by creating a limited human soul.  
The first man Adam became (ginomai) a living soul (psychikos) the last Adam (Jesus) became a life-giving spirit (pneumatikos). But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural psychikos), and then the spiritual.  (1Corinthians 15:45)
 
God had created Adam’s body from the dust of the earth and then breathed his spirit into that body. Adam now had a created body and a created spirit but then the Bible says a really interesting thing - that ‘man became a living soul’.
That word ‘became ‘in the Greek is ginomai, and it means to cause to come into being, to make or create. God did not form a ready-made soul in us, but he created the capacity for us to shape a soul as a personal entity that was to become the expression of who we are in our inner being. That’s becomes the face of us. Our soul expresses the mind and heart of our unique God created spirit through the journey of our life, embodied by a physical body.
  
Adam and Eve walked in the garden of Eden with God, and they created blameless or innocent souls. Innocence means to not be harmed or hurt – not feeling forsaken. But harm and hurt and forsakenness came into Adam and Eve’s lives through the lie of the serpent. Satan in the form of the serpent deceived them into believing that God had deprived them of the Divine wisdom that they could have if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve then created souls that separated their true blameless selves from God’s presence. Harm and hurt came into their lives and they became harmful and hurtful people and turned their harmless souls into harmful souls by creating protective helper parts in their souls to avoid feeling forsaken again. These soulish parts created a mindset and a heart-set of separation between them and God. This process became the universal human journey of the soul throughout its life.
 
Our souls are the expression of our spiritual self but our souls have created an inferior version of OUR spiritual self because of the psychikos soul’s self-serving needs. It has created parts to it that helped us to get over the problems, to deal with rejection, to advance itself, to be able to establish a reputation, to feel a victim or to be successful. It has become the me-self version of what the God with us self was created to be – God with us – Emmanuel.
When we were very young we made immature decisions in our souls to protect us from having to suffer from these early traumas again. Don’t condemn yourself for doing that as you had no option. You were there as a me-self person not knowing that God was there with you. and you didn't say ‘Lord come and help me here’. We tried to work out a way to work through these things - and we created strategies that ended up not having the wisdom to actually work. We created ‘helper parts’ in our souls. We may have gotten our own way but look what those helper parts have done to our relationships, self worth - our lives. This has resulted in our spirits becoming ‘orphaned’. Jesus said he would not leave us as orphans but that he would send us ‘Another Helper’ the Holy Spirit. (John 14:16-18)
 
The individual uniqueness of every person mirrors the fact that we have each been created with a unique spiritual DNA. That spiritual DNA is contained in the spiritual seed of life of the Word (the Logos) that has spoken our spiritual life into being in eternity. That seed word was destined to be expressed from our spirit into and through our soul and embodied by us as a whole person, spirit soul and body. The journey is about our soul being reordered, not deleted.
James 1:21… receive with meekness the implanted word (logos seed), which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural (genesis) face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.
 
Genesis in the Greek means original. So our Genesis self is the original unique spiritual self, designed and created by God’s word (LOGOS) before the foundation of the world. (Ephesians 1:4). We discover in the mirror of the Word our true unique spiritual self then we walk away and forget that and get drawn back into expressing our psychikos soulish self again with all its unresolved helper parts.
 
That unique spirit is waiting to be expressed in a saved and healed soul, saved from what we have plunged our souls into because of a mindset of separation from God. That is why we are looking at presence prayer as a pathway of hope and faith and love back into what our souls could truly express as we draw near to God and ask for the Holy Spirit, our New Helpe,r to reveal to us what Jesus is saying to us and what our Father is doing for us.
Jesus is that LOGOS, the seed of life that encompasses the true DNA of everything created, every instinctive response of every living thing designed and upheld by LOGOS (Hebrews 1:3) and his logos seed has been sown into our unique spirit to make us one in Spirit with the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. (1Peter 1:23)
 
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made
The Greek logos was seen as the universal rational principle of creativity and design by philosophers like Heraclitus and the Stoics. and they revered this concept. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius saw logos as the intelligent omnipotent and omnipresent Divine force that structured and guided all of existence.  But for the Jews the WORD only meant Torah and their relationship to the Word was the fulfillment of the Law.
 
So John in his Gospel would have deeply offended and insulted the Greeks and the Romans by declaring that Jesus, a bearded Galilean, was the one and only LOGOS. And for the Jews calling him the Word (their Torah) claim meant that he was the fulfillment of the law. so they all despised Jesus. And today the world despises Jesus. 
The Bible says that we have been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word (Logos) of God which lives and abides forever (1Peter 1:23). This is not only Jesus as the logos seed of eternal life but also as the Word of God as Scripture. *
 
 
Today the world believes that the Word, both as Jesus and as Scripture doesn’t mean anything. There exists a cultural spirituality where the word Universe is used as if it was the source of creative design and blessing – The Universe be with you.
Spiritual does not just mean mystical as opposed to material. Cultural spirituality can include reverencing created things and concepts and reading as many books or doing as many rituals possible to heal our souls. In the same way it also includes the religious and legalistic Christianity practiced today- and this mindset is soulish rather than spiritual. But for many people this kind of soulish spirituality has been a pathway to ultimately being drawn into true spirituality. True spirituality is the things of the Spirit of God in Christ (1Corinthians 2). This is the reality of the Creator God as the Father sending his Son Jesus into the world as human. In doing this God joined Divinity to humanity in one person, Jesus, whose death and resurrection and ascension led to the formation of a New Creation born of both human and Divine seed (logos). *Paul even put the church in Corinth in the category of cultural spirituality and his admonishment still applies to the church today. 
We began today with the words of Paul to the Corinthians in (1 Corinthians 2:13).The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. 
Paul was addressing the people of the Corinthian church, not just worldly religious spirituality. Paul was dismayed at the lack of true spirituality amongst them. He said they were psychikos- soulish, not pneumatikos – spiritual. He admitted that they had all knowledge and were upfront in spiritual gifts(1 Corinthians 1:7) but he finally said to them 
I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal (sarkikos –that is worse than psychikos!), as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal?
 
 
God has sent us the Holy Spirit through Jesus, the second Adam, for the healing and salvation of the soul in God’s presence. We can choose to become spiritual (pneumatikos ) people or remain soulish (psychikos) people. The simplest way to experience being transformed from soulish to spiritual is to give ourselves to the work of  the Holy Spirit in times of presence prayer to reveal to us Jesus as the Logos Word who speaks his Word to us in a multitude of ways, both in Scripture and in other ways that only the Holy Spirit can teach us and not other people’s opinions (1John 2:27).
We set aside time in presence prayer to contemplate the love and mercy and power of God in this way, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit reveal to us the will of the Father. The more we consciously do this practice the more our true genesis spiritual self becomes renewed in our minds and in our hearts. The veil of separation that blinds our minds and hearts is taken away and our souls become transformed.
 
 Paul OSullivan  -  pauloss@me.com
 
 
 
 
 

PRESENCE PRAYER SOUL AND SPIRIT 
  
The journey of our lives as human beings with a spirit and a soul involves the reordering of the psychikos or soulish self of separation back into alignment with our true spiritual self in Christ through the Spirit of God. We can become transformed from psychikos or soulish to pneumatikos or spiritual. Paul wrote about this to the church in Corinth.
 
And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit because they are `spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:13)
 
Adam and Eve started that journey by creating a limited human soul.  
The first man Adam became (ginomai) a living soul (psychikos) the last Adam (Jesus) became a life-giving spirit (pneumatikos). But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural psychikos), and then the spiritual.  (1Corinthians 15:45)
 
God had created Adam’s body from the dust of the earth and then breathed his spirit into that body. Adam now had a created body and a created spirit but then the Bible says a really interesting thing - that ‘man became a living soul’.
That word ‘became ‘in the Greek is ginomai, and it means to cause to come into being, to make or create. God did not form a ready-made soul in us, but he created the capacity for us to shape a soul as a personal entity that was to become the expression of who we are in our inner being. That’s becomes the face of us. Our soul expresses the mind and heart of our unique God created spirit through the journey of our life, embodied by a physical body.
  
Adam and Eve walked in the garden of Eden with God, and they created blameless or innocent souls. Innocence means to not be harmed or hurt – not feeling forsaken. But harm and hurt and forsakenness came into Adam and Eve’s lives through the lie of the serpent. Satan in the form of the serpent deceived them into believing that God had deprived them of the Divine wisdom that they could have if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve then created souls that separated their true blameless selves from God’s presence. Harm and hurt came into their lives and they became harmful and hurtful people and turned their harmless souls into harmful souls by creating protective helper parts in their souls to avoid feeling forsaken again. These soulish parts created a mindset and a heart-set of separation between them and God. This process became the universal human journey of the soul throughout its life.
 
Our souls are the expression of our spiritual self but our souls have created an inferior version of OUR spiritual self because of the psychikos soul’s self-serving needs. It has created parts to it that helped us to get over the problems, to deal with rejection, to advance itself, to be able to establish a reputation, to feel a victim or to be successful. It has become the me-self version of what the God with us self was created to be – God with us – Emmanuel.
When we were very young we made immature decisions in our souls to protect us from having to suffer from these early traumas again. Don’t condemn yourself for doing that as you had no option. You were there as a me-self person not knowing that God was there with you. and you didn't say ‘Lord come and help me here’. We tried to work out a way to work through these things - and we created strategies that ended up not having the wisdom to actually work. We created ‘helper parts’ in our souls. We may have gotten our own way but look what those helper parts have done to our relationships, self worth - our lives. This has resulted in our spirits becoming ‘orphaned’. Jesus said he would not leave us as orphans but that he would send us ‘Another Helper’ the Holy Spirit. (John 14:16-18)
 
The individual uniqueness of every person mirrors the fact that we have each been created with a unique spiritual DNA. That spiritual DNA is contained in the spiritual seed of life of the Word (the Logos) that has spoken our spiritual life into being in eternity. That seed word was destined to be expressed from our spirit into and through our soul and embodied by us as a whole person, spirit soul and body. The journey is about our soul being reordered, not deleted.
James 1:21… receive with meekness the implanted word (logos seed), which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural (genesis) face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.
 
Genesis in the Greek means original. So our Genesis self is the original unique spiritual self, designed and created by God’s word (LOGOS) before the foundation of the world. (Ephesians 1:4). We discover in the mirror of the Word our true unique spiritual self then we walk away and forget that and get drawn back into expressing our psychikos soulish self again with all its unresolved helper parts.
 
That unique spirit is waiting to be expressed in a saved and healed soul, saved from what we have plunged our souls into because of a mindset of separation from God. That is why we are looking at presence prayer as a pathway of hope and faith and love back into what our souls could truly express as we draw near to God and ask for the Holy Spirit, our New Helpe,r to reveal to us what Jesus is saying to us and what our Father is doing for us.
Jesus is that LOGOS, the seed of life that encompasses the true DNA of everything created, every instinctive response of every living thing designed and upheld by LOGOS (Hebrews 1:3) and his logos seed has been sown into our unique spirit to make us one in Spirit with the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. (1Peter 1:23)
 
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made
The Greek logos was seen as the universal rational principle of creativity and design by philosophers like Heraclitus and the Stoics. and they revered this concept. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius saw logos as the intelligent omnipotent and omnipresent Divine force that structured and guided all of existence.  But for the Jews the WORD only meant Torah and their relationship to the Word was the fulfillment of the Law.
 
So John in his Gospel would have deeply offended and insulted the Greeks and the Romans by declaring that Jesus, a bearded Galilean, was the one and only LOGOS. And for the Jews calling him the Word (their Torah) claim meant that he was the fulfillment of the law. so they all despised Jesus. And today the world despises Jesus. 
The Bible says that we have been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word (Logos) of God which lives and abides forever (1Peter 1:23). This is not only Jesus as the logos seed of eternal life but also as the Word of God as Scripture. *
 
 
Today the world believes that the Word, both as Jesus and as Scripture doesn’t mean anything. There exists a cultural spirituality where the word Universe is used as if it was the source of creative design and blessing – The Universe be with you.
Spiritual does not just mean mystical as opposed to material. Cultural spirituality can include reverencing created things and concepts and reading as many books or doing as many rituals possible to heal our souls. In the same way it also includes the religious and legalistic Christianity practiced today- and this mindset is soulish rather than spiritual. But for many people this kind of soulish spirituality has been a pathway to ultimately being drawn into true spirituality. True spirituality is the things of the Spirit of God in Christ (1Corinthians 2). This is the reality of the Creator God as the Father sending his Son Jesus into the world as human. In doing this God joined Divinity to humanity in one person, Jesus, whose death and resurrection and ascension led to the formation of a New Creation born of both human and Divine seed (logos). *Paul even put the church in Corinth in the category of cultural spirituality and his admonishment still applies to the church today. 
We began today with the words of Paul to the Corinthians in (1 Corinthians 2:13).The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. 
Paul was addressing the people of the Corinthian church, not just worldly religious spirituality. Paul was dismayed at the lack of true spirituality amongst them. He said they were psychikos- soulish, not pneumatikos – spiritual. He admitted that they had all knowledge and were upfront in spiritual gifts(1 Corinthians 1:7) but he finally said to them 
I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal (sarkikos –that is worse than psychikos!), as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal?
 
 
God has sent us the Holy Spirit through Jesus, the second Adam, for the healing and salvation of the soul in God’s presence. We can choose to become spiritual (pneumatikos ) people or remain soulish (psychikos) people. The simplest way to experience being transformed from soulish to spiritual is to give ourselves to the work of  the Holy Spirit in times of presence prayer to reveal to us Jesus as the Logos Word who speaks his Word to us in a multitude of ways, both in Scripture and in other ways that only the Holy Spirit can teach us and not other people’s opinions (1John 2:27).
We set aside time in presence prayer to contemplate the love and mercy and power of God in this way, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit reveal to us the will of the Father. The more we consciously do this practice the more our true genesis spiritual self becomes renewed in our minds and in our hearts. The veil of separation that blinds our minds and hearts is taken away and our souls become transformed.
 
 Paul OSullivan  -  pauloss@me.com
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

PRESENCE PRAYER SOUL AND SPIRIT 
  
The journey of our lives as human beings with a spirit and a soul involves the reordering of the psychikos or soulish self of separation back into alignment with our true spiritual self in Christ through the Spirit of God. We can become transformed from psychikos or soulish to pneumatikos or spiritual. Paul wrote about this to the church in Corinth.
 
And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit because they are `spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:13)
 
Adam and Eve started that journey by creating a limited human soul.  
The first man Adam became (ginomai) a living soul (psychikos) the last Adam (Jesus) became a life-giving spirit (pneumatikos). But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural psychikos), and then the spiritual.  (1Corinthians 15:45)
 
God had created Adam’s body from the dust of the earth and then breathed his spirit into that body. Adam now had a created body and a created spirit but then the Bible says a really interesting thing - that ‘man became a living soul’.
That word ‘became ‘in the Greek is ginomai, and it means to cause to come into being, to make or create. God did not form a ready-made soul in us, but he created the capacity for us to shape a soul as a personal entity that was to become the expression of who we are in our inner being. That’s becomes the face of us. Our soul expresses the mind and heart of our unique God created spirit through the journey of our life, embodied by a physical body.
  
Adam and Eve walked in the garden of Eden with God, and they created blameless or innocent souls. Innocence means to not be harmed or hurt – not feeling forsaken. But harm and hurt and forsakenness came into Adam and Eve’s lives through the lie of the serpent. Satan in the form of the serpent deceived them into believing that God had deprived them of the Divine wisdom that they could have if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve then created souls that separated their true blameless selves from God’s presence. Harm and hurt came into their lives and they became harmful and hurtful people and turned their harmless souls into harmful souls by creating protective helper parts in their souls to avoid feeling forsaken again. These soulish parts created a mindset and a heart-set of separation between them and God. This process became the universal human journey of the soul throughout its life.
 
Our souls are the expression of our spiritual self but our souls have created an inferior version of OUR spiritual self because of the psychikos soul’s self-serving needs. It has created parts to it that helped us to get over the problems, to deal with rejection, to advance itself, to be able to establish a reputation, to feel a victim or to be successful. It has become the me-self version of what the God with us self was created to be – God with us – Emmanuel.
When we were very young we made immature decisions in our souls to protect us from having to suffer from these early traumas again. Don’t condemn yourself for doing that as you had no option. You were there as a me-self person not knowing that God was there with you. and you didn't say ‘Lord come and help me here’. We tried to work out a way to work through these things - and we created strategies that ended up not having the wisdom to actually work. We created ‘helper parts’ in our souls. We may have gotten our own way but look what those helper parts have done to our relationships, self worth - our lives. This has resulted in our spirits becoming ‘orphaned’. Jesus said he would not leave us as orphans but that he would send us ‘Another Helper’ the Holy Spirit. (John 14:16-18)
 
The individual uniqueness of every person mirrors the fact that we have each been created with a unique spiritual DNA. That spiritual DNA is contained in the spiritual seed of life of the Word (the Logos) that has spoken our spiritual life into being in eternity. That seed word was destined to be expressed from our spirit into and through our soul and embodied by us as a whole person, spirit soul and body. The journey is about our soul being reordered, not deleted.
James 1:21… receive with meekness the implanted word (logos seed), which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural (genesis) face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.
 
Genesis in the Greek means original. So our Genesis self is the original unique spiritual self, designed and created by God’s word (LOGOS) before the foundation of the world. (Ephesians 1:4). We discover in the mirror of the Word our true unique spiritual self then we walk away and forget that and get drawn back into expressing our psychikos soulish self again with all its unresolved helper parts.
 
That unique spirit is waiting to be expressed in a saved and healed soul, saved from what we have plunged our souls into because of a mindset of separation from God. That is why we are looking at presence prayer as a pathway of hope and faith and love back into what our souls could truly express as we draw near to God and ask for the Holy Spirit, our New Helpe,r to reveal to us what Jesus is saying to us and what our Father is doing for us.
Jesus is that LOGOS, the seed of life that encompasses the true DNA of everything created, every instinctive response of every living thing designed and upheld by LOGOS (Hebrews 1:3) and his logos seed has been sown into our unique spirit to make us one in Spirit with the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. (1Peter 1:23)
 
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made
The Greek logos was seen as the universal rational principle of creativity and design by philosophers like Heraclitus and the Stoics. and they revered this concept. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius saw logos as the intelligent omnipotent and omnipresent Divine force that structured and guided all of existence.  But for the Jews the WORD only meant Torah and their relationship to the Word was the fulfillment of the Law.
 
So John in his Gospel would have deeply offended and insulted the Greeks and the Romans by declaring that Jesus, a bearded Galilean, was the one and only LOGOS. And for the Jews calling him the Word (their Torah) claim meant that he was the fulfillment of the law. so they all despised Jesus. And today the world despises Jesus. 
The Bible says that we have been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word (Logos) of God which lives and abides forever (1Peter 1:23). This is not only Jesus as the logos seed of eternal life but also as the Word of God as Scripture. *
 
 
Today the world believes that the Word, both as Jesus and as Scripture doesn’t mean anything. There exists a cultural spirituality where the word Universe is used as if it was the source of creative design and blessing – The Universe be with you.
Spiritual does not just mean mystical as opposed to material. Cultural spirituality can include reverencing created things and concepts and reading as many books or doing as many rituals possible to heal our souls. In the same way it also includes the religious and legalistic Christianity practiced today- and this mindset is soulish rather than spiritual. But for many people this kind of soulish spirituality has been a pathway to ultimately being drawn into true spirituality. True spirituality is the things of the Spirit of God in Christ (1Corinthians 2). This is the reality of the Creator God as the Father sending his Son Jesus into the world as human. In doing this God joined Divinity to humanity in one person, Jesus, whose death and resurrection and ascension led to the formation of a New Creation born of both human and Divine seed (logos). *Paul even put the church in Corinth in the category of cultural spirituality and his admonishment still applies to the church today. 
We began today with the words of Paul to the Corinthians in (1 Corinthians 2:13).The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. 
Paul was addressing the people of the Corinthian church, not just worldly religious spirituality. Paul was dismayed at the lack of true spirituality amongst them. He said they were psychikos- soulish, not pneumatikos – spiritual. He admitted that they had all knowledge and were upfront in spiritual gifts(1 Corinthians 1:7) but he finally said to them 
I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal (sarkikos –that is worse than psychikos!), as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal?
 
 
God has sent us the Holy Spirit through Jesus, the second Adam, for the healing and salvation of the soul in God’s presence. We can choose to become spiritual (pneumatikos ) people or remain soulish (psychikos) people. The simplest way to experience being transformed from soulish to spiritual is to give ourselves to the work of  the Holy Spirit in times of presence prayer to reveal to us Jesus as the Logos Word who speaks his Word to us in a multitude of ways, both in Scripture and in other ways that only the Holy Spirit can teach us and not other people’s opinions (1John 2:27).
We set aside time in presence prayer to contemplate the love and mercy and power of God in this way, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit reveal to us the will of the Father. The more we consciously do this practice the more our true genesis spiritual self becomes renewed in our minds and in our hearts. The veil of separation that blinds our minds and hearts is taken away and our souls become transformed.
 
 Paul OSullivan  -  pauloss@me.com
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

PRESENCE PRAYER SOUL AND SPIRIT 
  
The journey of our lives as human beings with a spirit and a soul involves the reordering of the psychikos or soulish self of separation back into alignment with our true spiritual self in Christ through the Spirit of God. We can become transformed from psychikos or soulish to pneumatikos or spiritual. Paul wrote about this to the church in Corinth.
 
And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit because they are `spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:13)
 
Adam and Eve started that journey by creating a limited human soul.  
The first man Adam became (ginomai) a living soul (psychikos) the last Adam (Jesus) became a life-giving spirit (pneumatikos). But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural psychikos), and then the spiritual.  (1Corinthians 15:45)
 
God had created Adam’s body from the dust of the earth and then breathed his spirit into that body. Adam now had a created body and a created spirit but then the Bible says a really interesting thing - that ‘man became a living soul’.
That word ‘became ‘in the Greek is ginomai, and it means to cause to come into being, to make or create. God did not form a ready-made soul in us, but he created the capacity for us to shape a soul as a personal entity that was to become the expression of who we are in our inner being. That’s becomes the face of us. Our soul expresses the mind and heart of our unique God created spirit through the journey of our life, embodied by a physical body.
  
Adam and Eve walked in the garden of Eden with God, and they created blameless or innocent souls. Innocence means to not be harmed or hurt – not feeling forsaken. But harm and hurt and forsakenness came into Adam and Eve’s lives through the lie of the serpent. Satan in the form of the serpent deceived them into believing that God had deprived them of the Divine wisdom that they could have if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve then created souls that separated their true blameless selves from God’s presence. Harm and hurt came into their lives and they became harmful and hurtful people and turned their harmless souls into harmful souls by creating protective helper parts in their souls to avoid feeling forsaken again. These soulish parts created a mindset and a heart-set of separation between them and God. This process became the universal human journey of the soul throughout its life.
 
Our souls are the expression of our spiritual self but our souls have created an inferior version of OUR spiritual self because of the psychikos soul’s self-serving needs. It has created parts to it that helped us to get over the problems, to deal with rejection, to advance itself, to be able to establish a reputation, to feel a victim or to be successful. It has become the me-self version of what the God with us self was created to be – God with us – Emmanuel.
When we were very young we made immature decisions in our souls to protect us from having to suffer from these early traumas again. Don’t condemn yourself for doing that as you had no option. You were there as a me-self person not knowing that God was there with you. and you didn't say ‘Lord come and help me here’. We tried to work out a way to work through these things - and we created strategies that ended up not having the wisdom to actually work. We created ‘helper parts’ in our souls. We may have gotten our own way but look what those helper parts have done to our relationships, self worth - our lives. This has resulted in our spirits becoming ‘orphaned’. Jesus said he would not leave us as orphans but that he would send us ‘Another Helper’ the Holy Spirit. (John 14:16-18)
 
The individual uniqueness of every person mirrors the fact that we have each been created with a unique spiritual DNA. That spiritual DNA is contained in the spiritual seed of life of the Word (the Logos) that has spoken our spiritual life into being in eternity. That seed word was destined to be expressed from our spirit into and through our soul and embodied by us as a whole person, spirit soul and body. The journey is about our soul being reordered, not deleted.
James 1:21… receive with meekness the implanted word (logos seed), which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural (genesis) face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.
 
Genesis in the Greek means original. So our Genesis self is the original unique spiritual self, designed and created by God’s word (LOGOS) before the foundation of the world. (Ephesians 1:4). We discover in the mirror of the Word our true unique spiritual self then we walk away and forget that and get drawn back into expressing our psychikos soulish self again with all its unresolved helper parts.
 
That unique spirit is waiting to be expressed in a saved and healed soul, saved from what we have plunged our souls into because of a mindset of separation from God. That is why we are looking at presence prayer as a pathway of hope and faith and love back into what our souls could truly express as we draw near to God and ask for the Holy Spirit, our New Helpe,r to reveal to us what Jesus is saying to us and what our Father is doing for us.
Jesus is that LOGOS, the seed of life that encompasses the true DNA of everything created, every instinctive response of every living thing designed and upheld by LOGOS (Hebrews 1:3) and his logos seed has been sown into our unique spirit to make us one in Spirit with the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. (1Peter 1:23)
 
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made
The Greek logos was seen as the universal rational principle of creativity and design by philosophers like Heraclitus and the Stoics. and they revered this concept. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius saw logos as the intelligent omnipotent and omnipresent Divine force that structured and guided all of existence.  But for the Jews the WORD only meant Torah and their relationship to the Word was the fulfillment of the Law.
 
So John in his Gospel would have deeply offended and insulted the Greeks and the Romans by declaring that Jesus, a bearded Galilean, was the one and only LOGOS. And for the Jews calling him the Word (their Torah) claim meant that he was the fulfillment of the law. so they all despised Jesus. And today the world despises Jesus. 
The Bible says that we have been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word (Logos) of God which lives and abides forever (1Peter 1:23). This is not only Jesus as the logos seed of eternal life but also as the Word of God as Scripture. *
 
 
Today the world believes that the Word, both as Jesus and as Scripture doesn’t mean anything. There exists a cultural spirituality where the word Universe is used as if it was the source of creative design and blessing – The Universe be with you.
Spiritual does not just mean mystical as opposed to material. Cultural spirituality can include reverencing created things and concepts and reading as many books or doing as many rituals possible to heal our souls. In the same way it also includes the religious and legalistic Christianity practiced today- and this mindset is soulish rather than spiritual. But for many people this kind of soulish spirituality has been a pathway to ultimately being drawn into true spirituality. True spirituality is the things of the Spirit of God in Christ (1Corinthians 2). This is the reality of the Creator God as the Father sending his Son Jesus into the world as human. In doing this God joined Divinity to humanity in one person, Jesus, whose death and resurrection and ascension led to the formation of a New Creation born of both human and Divine seed (logos). *Paul even put the church in Corinth in the category of cultural spirituality and his admonishment still applies to the church today. 
We began today with the words of Paul to the Corinthians in (1 Corinthians 2:13).The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. 
Paul was addressing the people of the Corinthian church, not just worldly religious spirituality. Paul was dismayed at the lack of true spirituality amongst them. He said they were psychikos- soulish, not pneumatikos – spiritual. He admitted that they had all knowledge and were upfront in spiritual gifts(1 Corinthians 1:7) but he finally said to them 
I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal (sarkikos –that is worse than psychikos!), as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal?
 
 
God has sent us the Holy Spirit through Jesus, the second Adam, for the healing and salvation of the soul in God’s presence. We can choose to become spiritual (pneumatikos ) people or remain soulish (psychikos) people. The simplest way to experience being transformed from soulish to spiritual is to give ourselves to the work of  the Holy Spirit in times of presence prayer to reveal to us Jesus as the Logos Word who speaks his Word to us in a multitude of ways, both in Scripture and in other ways that only the Holy Spirit can teach us and not other people’s opinions (1John 2:27).
We set aside time in presence prayer to contemplate the love and mercy and power of God in this way, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit reveal to us the will of the Father. The more we consciously do this practice the more our true genesis spiritual self becomes renewed in our minds and in our hearts. The veil of separation that blinds our minds and hearts is taken away and our souls become transformed.
 
 Paul OSullivan  -  pauloss@me.com
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

PRESENCE PRAYER AT HOME WITH GOD

 

PRESENCE PRAYER AT HOME WITH GOD 

We discussed last week that Jesus said in my Father’s house there are many mansions (mone – at home with God). I go to prepare a place for you. (John 14:2). There is a unique individual mone for every person ever born – no two people build the same house for God. And remember the mansions were not only prepared for Heaven but for here on earth as we become the dwelling (mone) for God here. Jesus said My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make our home (mansion – mone) with him. (John 14:23). The more we dwell with the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit – at home with God here on earth the more they unveil who they are to us, whether we are here on earth or in Heaven, because faith and hope and love are eternal and will remain from age to age for people to come to know and love God more and more.

How do we travel that journey of living a life at home with God in all the difficulties and problems? Paul tells us that staying connected to God is the key. He said pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:16).
Praying without ceasing would seem to be an impossible task but what is meant here is that we can maintain a mindset of connection with God at all times so that what we do and how we feel whether positively or negatively is a ‘God with us’ conversation.

And the Holy Spirit is praying for us without ceasing! John 16:7  – Jesus said he would be sent into the world to convince everybody that they have missed the mark of being aligned with his purpose for their lives – that’s your next door neighbour as well as people going to church. - He is also wanting us all to know that he has overcome the power of darkness that they have been slaves to in their fears and anxieties. 

The process of becoming still is a prayer that Paul teaches us in our sufferings and problems. 

Romans 8:26 Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called (those invited) to live according to His purpose. 
Those who are the called according to is purpose are those who desire to live according to his purpose and to respond to that invitation.

And we know that all things work together for good - in other words but I know  you do it Father the way you always do, and we only find out how great you are when you show us what you’ve done according to your Will - Because we dont see that but we dont know it at the time… this is our walk all the time growing in faith and promise.    to those who love God, to those who are the called (those invited) to live according to His purpose.

As we learn to become actively connected and still with God, we can grow in the practice of being at peace, trusting that he is always working behind the scenes on our behalf.

Job complained about his affliction and sufferings to God (Job 30:20) and God said he accepted Job’s prayer, but he rebuked Job’s friends. Job had come to know God in his suffering, but his friends only found judgement in their hearts for Job (Job 42:8). 
I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me. You have turned cruel to me; with the might of your hand you persecute me. You lift me up on the wind; you make me ride on it, and you toss me about in the roar of the storm. For I know that you will bring me to deathand to the house appointed for all living. House- MANSIONS!  and God said he accepted Job, but he rebuked Job’s friends. 

But God wasn’t angry with Job because he complained. God was pleased with him for simply having a conversation. Even through the most awful trials, and countless sufferings.   
But God said to Job’s friend Eliphaz “My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. (Job 42:7).
Jesus also spoke to God in the midst of his suffering in the Garden of gethsemane and asked if the cu of suffering could be taken from  him, and was there another way but then said – nevertheless not my will but thine be done.

As we learn to become actively connected and still with God, we can grow in the practice of being at peace, trusting that he is always working behind the scenes on our behalf, being still and knowing God As an act of faith and thanksgiving.
So the Holy Spirit is also praying unceasingly FOR us! And we Maintain a connection/conversation whether it is positive and faithful or even when it is negative and perplexed. We learn t believe and say ‘God you re aways right but not so with me And being connected it brings the blessing of peace, or agreement with God..
Phil 4.6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Even when it doesn't feel like it. In times of trials we might say Lord, this is a bit beyond me… but I’m going to accept it. I know you're there with me. Why didn't I get that job, or why are my relationships struggling.  We don't get to see what God is doing in the here and now, but if we are open to receiving what God has to show us, we will be surprised by how things get reordered in an incredible way you could have never imagined. Have faith that God is always working behind the scenes in the supernatural, working all things together for good for those who respond to the invitation to be living in His purpose. That's what Paul meant by praying without ceasing. And that's God's will for you. People are always saying what is God's will!? It's as simple as that. Staying connected - that is praying without ceasing. Not letting your own stuff get in the way all the time. What you think you know better about or can do or understand better. Expect that He sees everything we need, and He wants to provide it for us as a father does. We can now stay connected in a presence prayer with God

1 Thessalonians 5:18 pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
This becomes the practice of Presence Prayer which we will be discussing furher as we go on. -you're in His Will. You have been found in him, you're praying without ceasing, and He refines your faith into constantly saying thank you no matter what is happening.  Paul OSullivan  - pauloss@me.com