There is a huge interest in spirituality today, but what exactly has the believer in Jesus been called to? What does it truly mean to be rightly related to the Spirit of God in a world that often confuses spirituality and religion? In this six-day track Ben Stuart walks us through what it means to be spiritual and how you can know if your life is being guided by the very Spirit of Almighty God. Let’s get started.

There is a huge interest in spirituality today, but what exactly has the believer in Jesus been called to? What does it truly mean to be rightly related to the Spirit of God in a world that often confuses spirituality and religion? Let’s review the scriptures Ben Stuart led us through:

2 Corinthians 13:14- Paul encourages us to be able to commune with the Spirit of God.
Ephesians 5:15-18- We are to walk in wisdom and be filled with the Spirit.

But what is the story of the Holy Spirit?

Genesis 1:2- the Spirit hovered over the waters. He was present. All at once, God is separate from His creation, yet He’s intimately connected to it. He takes chaos and creates order.
Genesis 2:7- God breathed into us life. The Hebrew word “ruach” used here is the same for “Spirit, breath, wind. It represents life.

The Spirit of God is God’s intimate, animating presence in human life. He wants to be as close to us as our breath and breathe His life into us.

The Spirit is God’s intimate, animating presence that brings us into communion with Him.

Genesis 3 outlines our first break with God that came in the Garden. Adam and Eve believed the lie that in order to enjoy life truly they would have to break with the Author of life. The whole world became corrupted, and God told Adam that he would return to dust.

Remember in Genesis 2, we learned that we were dust, but God breathed life into us. The tragedy of Genesis 3 is that we are still dust, but the wind is gone. You see through the rest of the Old Testament that even though God gave laws to live by but the people could not do it. External laws cannot fix internal problems. God starts to whisper hope through His prophets, like Isaiah, promising a coming Savior. In Ezekiel 37, God tells Ezekiel to prophesy, and the Breath of God brought an army of dead bones back to life. Ezekiel 36 says God puts His Spirit in us and it brings us to life.

In the New Testament, John the Baptist says in Luke 1:36 that one who will baptize us with the Spirit is coming. When he baptizes Jesus, John knows that the Savior has come. Later, Nicodemus asks how to be born again, and Jesus answers him by saying he must be born of the Spirit. See John 3:5-8.

The same is true for us. The Spirit needs to come into us and make us alive again.

Jesus says He must leave so that the Helper can come. See John 16:7. The isolation we’ve experienced since the Garden; Jesus experienced on the Cross when He took on our sin. After He paid the debt for what separated us from God, the first thing He did was to breathe on the disciples to receive the Holy Spirit. (John 20:22)

Being saved isn’t just about having your sins forgiven…it is also so sin can be moved out of the way so His intimate animating Spirit of God can return.

When was the Church born? When the Spirit came, see Acts 2:2.

How do we get the Spirit? By putting our faith in Jesus. How does true spirituality begin? By putting your faith in the Son and being marked with the seal of the Spirit.

We have been adopted as sons and daughters. Because of what Jesus did, we have been pulled from slavery in sin to sonship, clothed in His righteousness. We conduct all our business in His Name as sons and heirs.

Often, we know we have a new identity, but we still feel broken. God didn’t just change our position, He changed our constitution. He didn’t just change us in His Son, He put His Son in us that cries out “Abba, Father.”

Luke 4:1-13, Matthew 4:1-11, and Mark 1:12-13 all record how after Jesus was baptized, The Spirit led him into the wilderness, and He returned in the power of the Spirit. He was directed and empowered by the Spirit. To be truly spiritual people, the Spirit of God will direct and empower us.

What does it look like to be directed by the Spirit?

1. He is consistent with the Scriptures. (see John 14:15-17). He is the Spirit of Truth and will teach us all things. (see John 14:26). Read the Bible until your thoughts match the flow of it. 2 Peter 1:21 says that the Spirit of God inspired the words of the men who wrote the Bible. This is the Holy Spirit’s breath on a page, and He loves to speak through it.
2. He is contrary to our flesh. (see Galatians 5:16-17). Paul also told the Colossians that part of our broken estate is that we’ve lost sensitivity to God and have been given over to our own sensuality, a numbing of the conscience. How do we know we are operating in the Spirit? We move from numbness and sensuality to the Spirit of God. Suddenly, you don’t like the sin that your Savior bled out for. It grieves the Spirit of God in me. He doesn’t like it, so I don’t like it.

You cannot walk in sin anymore; the Spirit of God has ruined that for you. He has changed you from the inside out, and you won’t know peace unless you walk with the Spirit of God.

We learned last session that you could know the Spirit of God is in you because He begins to uproot ways of thinking and living that don’t fit in a child of God’s life anymore. And He plants new ways of thinking and living in your life, He doesn’t just leave a void.

The Spirit pulls up what we do that’s contrary to Him and plants what is consistent with the Word. He gives us a desire to know Him through the Scripture.

Here are more ways to know the Spirit of God is in you.

The Spirit is community-centered. Therefore, so are we. Ephesians 2:18 talks about how we are in one Spirit before the Father. We’ve been knit together for His glory. He loves the community of the saints.

When people often say they are spiritual but not religious, they are trying to say that they want a dimension of spirituality in their life. They don’t want to be tied down to the obligation of serving a community. It’s the outworking of rampant individualism into a spiritual world.

In Ephesians, Paul goes on to say that when someone has the Spirit of God in them, they are diligent to preserve the unity of peace. It takes patience and tolerance to love a real human being in front of you. Paul says to the Corinthians that God poured out different gifts on each of us for the common good. Again, He loves the community.

You are Christ exalting. Beware of a spirituality that focuses so much on the Spirit. The Holy Spirit likes to put a spotlight on Jesus and bring all He’s done into focus. How do you know the Spirit is directing you? You want to make much of Jesus.

The Spirit is an intimate animating presence of God available to us. How can we position ourselves to experience the empowering of the Spirit of God? We have learned in the last two sessions how we can raise our sails, but how can we be empowered by Him?

Philippians 2:12-13 says work out your salvation with fear and trembling. In other words, let what’s happened in you work outside of you. God is at work in you both to will and to act according to His will. Our will is the inclination to do what is right, and He gives us the ability to do so as well.

Paul gives the Galatians the fruit of the Spirit. We can’t produce those things on our own. We have to go to the source, the Holy Spirit.

True spirituality is the recognition of dependence.

Be honest with God, but ask God to give you what you need. If you don’t want to be around certain people because of how they treat you, ask God to give you His love for them. As you walk in dependence, He’ll produce what you can’t on your own.

Robert Robinson penned the hymn, Come Thou Fount. Tragically, he gave himself over to his desires later in life and became a miserable man. He didn’t learn to depend on God.

Being spiritual means total dependence on God. Understanding the reality that we are debtors to the grace and kindness of God daily. We need Him to bind our hearts to Himself.

Galatians 5:25 says let us keep in step with the Spirit. Moment by moment. Every day, we need the Spirit to empower us to do what we cannot do on our own.

That’s the secret. You may have optimism and good technique, but you will still arrive at moments when your internal resources are insufficient.

We can position our lives to be consistent with Scripture, contrary to the flesh, driven by community, and exalting of Christ. We can do all these things and still need to be empowered.