A Sixth Sense

Well, good morning. Greetings to all of you. It is a privilege to be here again. It's been close to a year and a half since the last time we were here, so it's really special. We listen to most of the sermons that are preached here, so we get to see the speaker, we get to see the building. But it's very different to be here physically, and we're really grateful to be here.

I was just thinking about the circumstances under which I'm here. Often when there's a visiting preacher, he'll say something like, "I feel more freedom to say kind of whatever I want to say because I don't know you all, and I can just go home and slip away from whatever consequences there may be of what I say."

I don't feel like a visitor, but at the same time, I spend very little time here and live in a context that is quite different than the Cumberland Valley. And our experiences shape us, and God uses our experiences and our context to teach us things. And I admit I have this little niggling nervousness, and it's like, what if I have changed so much in the way that I think that what I have to share just feels strange or even wrong? But I trust that God, whatever is, is good and right, that God will make it land and bear seed.

Whatever is strange or wrong, that it would be forgotten.

The title of my message today is "A Sixth Sense." A Sixth Sense. And I just want to spend a little bit of time thinking about our senses. Our physical senses, traditionally we recognize five of them. Just curious, could you all help me list those five?

Touch.

Taste. Smell.

Hearing. And sight. Yeah, that's the five. I remember learning those in second grade or whatever it was. And supposedly that traditional list goes all the way back to Aristotle. He was the one that made those up. And scientists today recognize that there's a few more than that. They even identify a couple dozen more. There's what they call equilibrioception.

I'm saying that right? Yeah. Equilibrioception, which is a sense of balance and spatial orientation. We have proprioception, which is the sense of movement and body position. We have a sense of pain. We have a sense of hunger and thirst.

But traditionally we group them into those five senses. It's really interesting to think about those senses. Those senses are the connection between me and the world around me. Here I am inside my body, whether you want to call it my brain or my spirit, it's in there. And just the proximity to the reality around me isn't enough to bring me into awareness of it. I need to have those senses, and my hands are out there touching, and my nose is smelling, and my eyes are seeing. And it's through my senses that I experience the world around me, and I maintain my awareness of reality.

And if we want to verify the truth of something, we trust our senses to give us the information. Our senses, they shape our experience and even our values in really incredible ways. We see with our eyes, and there's some sights that we like, and there's some sights that we dislike. And now we have flower farms. We like those. And we build tall fences around the slaughterhouses because we don't like that. We have these sents that come in our noses. We smell that. We like some smells, and we dislike others. And boom, all of a sudden we have millions that people spend on candles every year, and the property values around the landfill go down.

Our senses shape our values. We hear with our ears. We like some sounds. We dislike others. And now we have classical music concerts, and they make these infrasonic crowd dispersal devices because there's some sounds that we hate, and some sounds bring people together. Others cause them to scatter.

So our senses, they give us an awareness of reality, and they shape our understanding. Whenever someone has a sense that doesn't work properly, we kind of mourn that. You have blind people or deaf people, and that's just 20% of the traditional five senses. But we call them handicapped.

Whether they can't hear or smell or feel, there's a range of reality that is imperceptible to them. And sometimes there's ways in which their other senses make up for it, and they become more aware. They say blind people, they become more perceptive with their sense of touch or more perceptive with their sense of hearing.

But even for all of us whose senses work well, there's still an enormous amount of what goes on in the world around us that we're unaware of. It's interesting to think about that sometimes. Some of them just listed a couple. We can't sense oxygen levels. Eventually we'll suffer the impacts of that, and we'll get lightheaded. And we can't sense radiation.

We can't sense the magnetic fields. And what else is out there that we don't know about? I read a comment one time. They're like, "We're aware of the range of the electromagnetic field because there's just this little bit that first became apparent to us through visible sight. And then we started pushing the limits of that. And we realized there was infrared and ultraviolet and microwaves and radio waves. And we became aware of that range because of the little bit we could perceive. But what ranges exist out there that we're completely unaware of because we just can't access it at all?"

Interesting to think about. Because of our extremely limited range of senses, there's been a lot of inventive effort that's been devoted to developing gadgets or technology that interpret things that we can't sense into a medium that we can take in. So we have Geiger counters for the radiation. All of a sudden, okay, now we can see and hear that there's something here that we need to get away from. We have carbon monoxide detectors in our houses. And okay, something's high here. We need to get out. We wouldn't know without that.

Electron scanning microscopes to really magnify things that aren't visible to our eyes. But there's a reality that so far man has been completely incapable of detecting with anything physical. We see results of it. We may feel it at times. And sometimes we call it a sixth sense when we just have this feeling about something that's going on. We can't see anything. We can't hear anything. But yet we have this sense. So there's a spiritual world that cannot be perceived by our senses.

And today I'm going to be talking about the Spirit of God. I started talking about senses because I've been thinking about the Spirit of God as a sixth sense, which gives us a perception and understanding of a reality which we have no other way of detecting.

It's not a perfect analogy because the Spirit of God is much when we compare it to one of the other five senses, the Spirit of God is much bigger than that. It's much more than that. But it's an analogy that's kind of helped me grasp it a little bit, and we'll come back to it a couple times today.

So this is not an all-encompassing study of the Spirit of God and all that it is and all that it can accomplish. And I feel a little bit, as I said, a little bit nervous about talking about this. We don't talk about it a lot. And I think that's partly because it's hard to perceive. And so we know a limited amount about it. And then we also see people who do really interesting things with it.

It just came up today about first things and second things. And there's groups of people that it feels like they pursue the second things, that is an outworking of the Spirit or what we call the gifts of the Spirit. And they really pursue after that, and they write books about it. And if you follow this methodology, maybe you can speak in tongues, or you can work miracles as well. And there's some abuse of that. And understandably, that makes us just a bit careful in how we approach it. But it is something that if you read through the New Testament, it's all through there, and even a good bit in the Old Testament. And so it's something that's worth our study.

As I said, it's not an all-encompassing study. We'll be touching not too much on the most common spirit topics, which Galatians 5, the fruit of the Spirit, which are the character outcomes of those who have the Spirit of God.

Also, 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, the gifts of the Spirit, the special abilities that God gives people to bless the church. I'm not going to be talking much about that. Rather, our focus is on the Spirit of God dwelling in humans. So what is it? How do we get it? What should we expect from it? And I would say most importantly, how do we cultivate the human Spirit of God connection? So we're going to be moving a bit from the conceptual, ending with the practical. What is it? How do we get it? What should we expect from it in us? And how do we cultivate the human Spirit of God connection?

So what is the Spirit of God?

As I said, I think one of the reasons we don't talk about it a whole lot is because it's a bit confusing. And it was really interesting. I picked up the songbook a few weeks ago and flipped to the section on the Spirit of God and just read down through the hymns. Some of them we sing. Some of them we don't. But the language that is used, there's a lot of breathing and blowing. There's a lot of hovering. There's a lot of comforting. There's a lot of anointing and pouring out. And I don't criticize that language because that's all borrowed from the Bible, and that's imagery and analogies that are used there.

But there's one of them that says, "Thou canst fill me, Holy Spirit, though I cannot tell thee how." Just an expression like, "We don't know all about this." So what is the Spirit of God?

I think from studying the Bible and from what we can understand about spirits, I'm defining the Spirit of God as that measure of Him, that measure of God that He calls us to dwell, that He calls us to inhabit those whom He chooses.

The Spirit of God which dwells in our bodies is not the entirety of God. And that's why we make a distinction. The Spirit of God is part of the Trinity, and we serve a singular God. But we make a distinction between the Spirit of God and Father God because the Spirit of God is not the entirety of God. There are characteristics of God. We can think of omnipresence. He's everywhere. Omnipotence. He can do anything. Perfect holiness. And those characteristics of God are incompatible with the limitations of the human body that is living in a corrupted world.

So the Spirit of God, which we're concerned with today, is the measure of God which inhabits the human body alongside the human spirit. And so that brings up the human spirit. Okay, what's that? I think of my spirit as this. First, it's my primary identity. A lot of us think about our bodies or our appearance, how we look to other people. We kind of cultivate that as our identity. But our physical bodies are a temporal thing. They're something that lives inside us that is going to go unexisting when this body dies and ceases to function. And so that spirit, that force and the intelligence that lives inside us and gives us awareness and gives our body life, that animates our body, is our primary identity.

Each human spirit is created by God, and it becomes affiliated with our bodies at some point in our creation. And it lives in that body until it dies, the body dies, and the spirit returns to God, as it says in Ecclesiastes.

So that's the human spirit. God's spirit can dwell in our body alongside that spirit. And there you have an interesting relationship. What does that look like? So there's this Spirit of God that wants to come in and inhabit our body alongside our human spirit.

But God does not force His Spirit on anybody. I think He makes it available to everybody, but He does not force it. There have been a couple cases in the Bible where we see that God imposed His Spirit on somebody to the point where they no longer could control their words and actions, but rather the Spirit of God in them. I think of some of the prophets, or there's the story of Saul just after he was anointed. He was returning from the anointing with Samuel. He encountered a group of prophets, and he entered right in with them. The Spirit of God fell upon him, and he prophesied. That was involuntary. Involuntary on Saul's part. The Spirit of God possessed him and animated him to the point where his human spirit was overcome.

I think that's pretty rare. For the most part, the Spirit of God cohabits the human body with the human spirit. It doesn't displace it. And so we have these two spirits living in our body. And that means that we have some control over which spirit we follow and which we allow to influence our actions. And we're going to be talking more about that later.

How do we get the Spirit of God?

I believe, from what the Bible teaches us, that the Spirit of God is given by God as part of our conversion, our commitment to following God and pursuing Him. The exact point at which we receive the Spirit, I don't think, is that important. Some people get tangled up in it. In the book of Acts, Luke tells us about the Spirit of God basically falling on people out of the blue. Think of the day of Pentecost. They were there gathered together in one place. All of a sudden, there was a rushing sound. The Spirit of God fell on them, and it changed them.

Some people received it upon baptism. We also see that recorded in the book of Acts. Also, people receiving it through the laying on of hands of others who were already filled with the Spirit. So obviously, it can happen in a few different ways.

While we certainly should see evidence of the Spirit's residence in us, we also must accept by faith that God is keeping His promise of giving His Spirit to those who repent and obey Him. We must believe this by faith because the Spirit is generally not detectable by the rest of our senses.

I recently read Philip Yancey's book, Reaching for the Invisible God. And he points out something interesting in there, quoting from him, "To search for the Spirit is like hunting for your eyeglasses while wearing them. The Spirit is what we perceive with rather than what we perceive, the one who opens our eyes to underlying spiritual realities."

End of quote. So we know that God gives His Spirit to those who love Him and keep His commandments. And that's something we can put our confidence in. We can't go out somewhere, find it sticking inside ourselves. It comes from God. And all who have surrendered their lives to God and are walking with Him can assume the Spirit of God has taken up residence in them.

I recognize that there's some people that kind of struggle, maybe with a bit of assurance of salvation or even the presence of the Spirit in their lives. And that's an interesting thing to consider, but I don't feel it's very helpful. It's not a very helpful question.

At the end, we're going to talk about cultivating the Spirit, pursuing the Spirit of God. And the reason I don't feel the question of whether we have the Spirit or not is very helpful is because pursuing the Spirit of God basically looks the same, whether we have it or whether we don't.

The things that you do, the obedience that you enter into, the commitments that you make, and the behavior that you pursue, whether you don't have the Spirit and you are looking to God to receive it, or whether you already have it and are looking to cultivate that relationship, you're going to follow a very similar path.

Moving on, what does the Spirit of God do? So I want to explore a bit from the Bible what we can learn. This is what can we expect from the Spirit living inside of us? And there's a couple things from the examples from the Old Testament and the New Testament where the Spirit of God filled humans. And we'll touch on just a few of those. And then we want to see what the New Testament teaches us about spirit-filled humans.

I have a variety of Bible references, Bible verses that I'm going to be reading here. Most of them are copied into my notes, so I'm not going to take the time to turn to most of them. So you can turn there if you like, or you can just sit and listen.

One of the first instances where we see the Spirit of God recorded how He entered somebody and gave him a supernatural knowledge and ability is recorded in Exodus 31. And this is where in Exodus 31, God is wrapping up talking to Moses regarding the instructions for the tabernacle. And He's like, "There's this man." He said, "His name is Bezalel." And then He named another man. And He said, "And all those that I've chosen with them," He said, "I have put my Spirit in them, and I've given them all knowledge and ability to make the tabernacle according to the way that I have instructed you to do it."

So that's really neat to think about. God tasked Moses with a construction project that was humanly impossible. Nothing like that had ever been done before. All these woven tapestries and maybe new construction methods. And if you read the account of it, people really struggle to understand how the tabernacle looked. And there's different artist conceptions of it for that reason. But God gave somewhat limited instructions to Moses. And then He said, "There's this group of men that I've filled with my Spirit, and they're going to be capable of making this thing that I've commanded you to do."

The prophets were another group of people, and each of them had their unique circumstances. But God took those men, and He filled them with His Spirit. And through that Spirit in them, they had an understanding of the past, the present, and the future that was humanly impossible. And God spoke through them, and He gave the children of Israel and us prophecies which came to pass. It wasn't humanly possible for them to know those things, but the Spirit of God revealed that to them, and they spoke out of that. We trust these prophecies not because they're sourced from the human spirit, but because they came from the Spirit of God. 2 Peter 1:20 and 21 say this, "Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation.

For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." I believe Peter there is referring to the prophets, Moses who wrote down the Pentateuch, David and others who wrote the Psalms and the books of wisdom.

And not just them, but also in the New Testament, we had the same dynamic. The Spirit of God reminded the apostles of the teachings of Jesus, enabling them to record His teaching for our benefit and to preach the Gospel accurately.

John 14:26, Jesus is speaking here to His disciples. He says, "The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things and bring to your mind, bring to your remembrance whatsoever I have said to you." So Jesus walked with His disciples, and He taught them for three or four years. And I'm sure they remembered the gist of what He said. But Jesus said, "After I leave, the Spirit of God is going to enter you, and that is going to enable you to record and to preach with accuracy the teachings that I have given you."

Similarly, the apostle Paul received the Gospel by revelation through the Spirit, not from men's teaching. Galatians 1:11 and 12, Paul says, "I certify you, brethren, that the Gospel which was preached of me is not after man, for I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." And this is really interesting. It was just kind of recently that I really thought about this. In Galatians 1, Paul is making an argument for the authenticity of his message to the churches in Galatia.

And as evidence of the authenticity, he said, "I didn't receive it from man. Jesus didn't teach it to me, at least not in person. The apostles, those that you recognize as apostles, it didn't come from them either. I received it from the Holy Ghost."

The Spirit of God taught the apostle Paul the message of the Gospel. And then he said, "After a few years, I went down to Jerusalem, and we compared the messages that they were teaching, and they coincided perfectly. They were exactly the same message." So we see the Spirit of God working in Paul to give him a supernatural understanding of the Gospel.

So that's just a few examples that we have recorded of ways which the Spirit of God filled people and gave them a sixth sense, knowledge and abilities that they had no other way of receiving.

Now I want to look at a few different verses from the New Testament which teach us about the function that the Spirit plays in our lives. And there's a range of them. I have six or seven different ones right here.

Firstly, the Spirit of God renews us and makes us new people. Titus 3:4 and 5 say this, "But after that, the kindness and love of God, our Savior, toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but according to His mercy, He saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost," or the Spirit of God. Very similarly, in John 3, Jesus speaks of this in His discourse to Nicodemus. He says this of those who are born of the Spirit, John 3:6, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit."

All of us as humans had a first birth. Jesus also speaks of that in John 3. Our first birth happened when the human spirit entered our bodies and we became alive. Before that, we would have been inanimate. But after there was a spirit that took up residence there, we became alive. Then there's a second birth. And that happens when the Spirit of God enters us and changes us and renews us. It gives us new life. So that is the first function of the Spirit of God. It renews and regenerates us.

The Spirit of God is a source of identity for all Christians. Galatians 3:28 says, "For there is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither bond nor free. There is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus."

People have a myriad of ways in dividing themselves into groups and identities, and they take those on and ascribe to them. If you read the New Testament, it divides the world into two groups of people, those who are living without the Spirit of God and those who are living with the Spirit of God in them. And for those who have the Spirit, it becomes their primary identifying characteristic. It's more important than social position. Galatians says, "Bond or free." Ethnicity, Jew or Greek, or even gender, it's neither male nor female. Those distinctions don't completely go away, but they are superseded by this new identity which we take on. We are God's. The Spirit of God is living in us, and that is our primary identity now.

It's not even the human spirit any longer. It's the Spirit of God in us. Similarly, the Spirit is a unifying entity which makes us one with the Father and the Son. And by extension, all who are united to God through the Spirit are also united to each other. If we read John 17, what we call the high priestly prayer, where Jesus prayed for the soon-to-be-established church, He said this.

This is verses 20 through 23, "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word, that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me. And the glory which Thou gavest me, I have given to them, that they may be one, even as we are one, I in them and Thou in me, that they may be made perfect and one, and that the world may know that Thou hast sent me and hast loved me, as Thou hast loved and hast loved them as Thou hast loved me."

So Jesus is speaking of a unity or a oneness. And this isn't a unity which it's not figurative speech, I believe. And it's not talking about people being united just through some common interest or shared goals. It's a unity that comes from everyone that Jesus mentions there, which is God Himself and the Christians who make up the church. They're all sharing the same Spirit. There's the same force and intelligence which is animating them and creating values in them and driving behavior. So the Spirit is a unifying entity which makes us one with the Father and the Son and all others who have the Spirit.

The Spirit reveals the mind of God to us. So this is kind of that sixth sense function again.

I'm going to read from 1 Corinthians 2.

1 Corinthians 2, starting at verse 10, "But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit." So that is the thoughts that Paul was talking about previously. "God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit. For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the Spirit of man which is in him. Even so, the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God, which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness unto him. Neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ."

I just love that passage, especially the end where Paul's like, "We have the mind of Christ."

The Spirit of man knows the Spirit of man. We can recognize that. Then there's the Spirit of God which we don't have any way the human spirit doesn't have any way of perceiving unless the mind of God enters in and unites with that human spirit.

The Spirit is the mind of God. And if we have the Spirit in us, we have this direct link to the mind of God, which gives us insight into spiritual matters which natural people, or meaning those without the Spirit, they can't access.

So this doesn't mean that we understand everything that God understands. Remember, I mentioned earlier about the limitations of the human body. So the Spirit of God in us is the measure of God's Spirit which He chooses to have dwell in us.

So the Spirit reveals everything about God's mind that we can handle or that we're interested in, because we have to pursue it and cultivate it as well. God's mind contains all knowledge. And through the Spirit, God sometimes gives access to knowledge which we have no other way of accessing. So the Spirit reveals the mind of God to us.

The Spirit gives wisdom and understanding. This is pretty closely linked to the last one, but I think of it as more of a practical application. So the Spirit of God reveals the mind of God to us. That gives us knowledge. The Spirit gives wisdom and understanding to know how to live out that mind of God.

It works in us to lead to good and right decisions and actions in our lives. Colossians 1:9 through 11 says, "For this calls we also, since the day we heard it," meaning your love in the Spirit, we heard of it, "we do not cease to pray for you and to desire that you might be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, that you might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with almight according to His glorious power unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness."

Such a beautiful prayer that Paul prays there in the beginning of Colossians. We should pray for each other more. But Paul's saying, "We're praying that you would be filled with the Spirit, and not just so you would be filled with the Spirit and be done there, but for the purpose that you would have wisdom and understanding to live out the will of God, being fruitful in every good work and continually increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with almight."

The Spirit leads us into holiness. Galatians 5:16 and 17, "This I say then, walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh. And these are contrary the one to the other, so that you cannot do the things that you would."

So this is very close to some of the themes that came up in Sunday school about, is it inward or outward, and where does the motivation come from? And there certainly has to be a personal motivation to do that. But there's also the Spirit of God that motivates us to do what is right and leads us into holiness. So the Spirit gives us understanding to know the right. And then it's the vehicle of the grace of God in us to choose and do the right.

The Spirit enables holiness, but it does not force it on me. I've got to choose the right and pursue it. And if there is ever a failure in this pursuit of holiness, it's because I either was not sensitive to the Spirit's direction or I failed to obey. It's never a failing of the Spirit. The Spirit leads us into holiness.

And finally, the Spirit of God gives special abilities for the edification of the church. And this is where the gifts of the Spirit that we read about in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 come in, prophecy, teaching, speaking in tongues, et cetera. The Spirit gives those for the edification of the church.

And finally, the last section here is cultivating the Spirit of God. Here's another quote from Philip Yancey. He says, "The visible world forces itself on me without invitation. I must consciously cultivate the invisible."

Cultivating the Spirit of God in him is one of the Christian's most important works. But it must be done for the right reason. I mentioned earlier how some people seem to abuse the pursuit of the Spirit of God. And they pursue the physical outworkings of it and say, "Well, see, I did this. And that's evidence that the Spirit of God is in me." And God is the judge on that. But I believe cultivating the Spirit of God must be done for the right reason. If we remember Simon the Sorcerer, I believe it's in Acts 8, he was reprimanded by the apostles because he was pursuing the Spirit's power for the wrong reasons.

Many people today appear to pursue the Spirit and its gifts for self-serving reasons. So we must cultivate the Spirit, but with pure motives. And the outcomes that we desire in this is personal growth in Godlikeness and the blessing and edification of the body of Christ.

So I have three points here on how to cultivate the Spirit of God. And I'm sure there's more. And I would be interested in hearing at the end if there's any that come to mind. But here's the three I have. The first one is obedience.

And again, this is where the similarity to our Sunday school discussion comes in. John 14, again, verses 15 through 17, Jesus says this, "If you love me, keep my commandments, and I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever, even the Spirit of truth."

So Jesus is saying, "If you love me, do the things that I've taught you to do, and then the Spirit of God can dwell in you." But elsewhere, we read about the Spirit leading us into holiness. So there seems to be this circular relationship between the Spirit of God in us and obedience to God.

The Spirit leads us in a life of obedience. But then we must live in obedience to God for the Spirit's presence to continue in us. And I believe walking in obedience is to the teachings of Jesus, the teachings of the Bible, is a way to cultivate the Spirit of God in us. As we study the Bible and as we live it out, we become more and more conformed to the will of God and receive a deeper and deeper understanding of that through the Spirit. And at the same time, in tandem, we receive a greater awareness and connection to the Spirit in us.

Galatians 5 teaches us to walk in the Spirit. That's where we read about the fruits of the Spirit. We must cultivate the good behaviors in which the Spirit encourages us, resulting in those fruits, and suppress the behaviors which come naturally to the human spirit, which result in the works of the flesh.

So that's the first cultivation method, obedience. The second one is focus on God. God almost never forces Himself on us. Therefore, if there's going to be a strong connection and if we desire that strong connection, we must pursue the relationship with Him and with His Spirit. He meets us there, but we've got to pursue it. So what does that look like? I think it's meditating on what is pure and holy, marveling at what we understand about the nature of God, spending time in worship. Read the Psalms. The other day, I was reading Psalm 145, I believe it is. And David says, "I'm going to meditate on the greatness of God and on His marvelous works."

So just going and reading about God and thinking about who He is and what He does and just His greatness and His majesty, that focus on God cultivates the presence of the Spirit in us. Thomas Merton, in one of his essays, says this. He says, "Every man becomes the image of the God he adores.

He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes a dead thing. He who loves corruption rots." And logically, he who adores God will grow more and more into the image of God. Brother Lawrence, who is well known for his little book on practicing the presence of God, he says this, "By the practice of the presence of God, by steadfastly gazing upon Him, the soul comes to a full and deep knowledge of God. It has unclouded vision. Its life is spent in unceasing acts of love and worship, contrition and simple trust, praise, prayer, and service. At times, life seems to be one long, unbroken practice of His divine presence." It's just an amazing testimony that that man had of his sense of the presence of God in him.

And if you read his book, he talks about how he's constantly he's like, "Sometimes my mind strays. But when I realize that it has, I just think back, refocus it, think about God." Focusing on God is a way to cultivate the Spirit of God and our connection with it. The last one I have is removing distractions. We live in a world that bombards our senses.

We can very easily be overwhelmed and distracted by just life. Some engagement with this distracting world is inevitable. But it's essential that we take time to remove ourselves from those distractions so the still small voice of the Spirit can be heard in us.

Here's two more quotes from Brother Lawrence. First, he says, "Remember that to attain this state," meaning the state of God's presence, "we must deny the senses. No soul which takes delight in worldly things can find full joy in the presence of God. To be with Him, we must leave behind the creature."

He also says, "It may be helpful sometimes, perhaps often, to abstain from some of the little innocent and lawful bodily pleasure. God will not permit a soul which desires to be devoted entirely to Him to also desire other pleasures than Him."

Brother Lawrence was a 17th-century monk. He lived in France. And he spent most of his life in a monastery, kind of sequestered away from the distracting world. For a while, he worked in the kitchen peeling potatoes. And then he transitioned to repairing shoes, I believe it was.

So his environment isolated him from many of the distractions that we deal with and gave him ample opportunity to do what he calls practicing the presence of God.

I don't think that the cloistered life it's definitely not for everybody. I'm not even sure it's really in line with the vision that God had for the world and His people when He created it. But there's still a value that we can learn from that. Brother Lawrence was able to spend so much of his mental energy focusing on God and cultivating the felt presence of God and God's Spirit in him because he intentionally removed himself from the distractions that the physical world brings to us.

Sensory overload is a real thing. Back to our senses again. There's so much information that's available to us. And it's coming in at us that our brain can't process at times all that the senses are feeling. Sometimes, we need to intentionally block out physical distractions so we can focus on the spiritual, so we can cultivate that sixth sense.

Jesus sought out quiet places to spend time in communion with the Father. He taught His disciples to fast, denying the physical to strengthen the spiritual. In a world which seems to be increasingly fast-paced and distracting, it takes great intentionality to make these quiet, intentional spaces where we can limit the distraction of the world and cultivate our connection with the Spirit of God.

God gives us His Spirit, intending it to be a transformative power in our minds and lives. He gives it. But we must faithfully cultivate its presence in order to be filled with wisdom and understanding, in order to perceive the mind of God, in order to fully realize all the promises that God has made regarding His Spirit in us.

That's what I have to share. Any addition, correction, anything.