The Key to the Christian Life
I want to share with you what I truly believe is the most important thing I have ever learned in the Christian life. If I were talking to a non-Christian, I would want to share salvation with them. But for a Christian, this is the most important thing I feel like I could ever share with anybody. It took me years to get what I am going to share with you in a few moments.
My Story and the Common Struggle
I have to confess, I have always been serious about God. I have always been a thinker, a reader, an explorer, a questioner. I have always been interested in the Christian life that actually works and not pretending and dealing with problems in my life or the lives of others. Yet let me describe really quickly my story, and see if you can relate to that because I think many of you can.
For myself, I grew up in a Christian home, taken to church every week, amazing parents who love each other and love God, all the great things. And yet, for me, it never actually occurred to me that any of this is actually real until the age of 14 when I was born again. I was born again through an experience. It was at a Billy Graham crusade, but it actually was not Billy Graham’s preaching. I had an encounter with the Holy Spirit before Billy Graham ever got up to preach, and I suddenly realized this is all real. I mean, it is real, real, not religion, real, not logically on the bounds of probability. I think there might be a God who created the universe and it was not Pascal’s bet. I met the person of Jesus that day.
Probably like many of you, I could look back at my Christian life, and there were moments like my salvation, other moments in my life when I had dramatic experiences with God, and I knew it was real. You could not have taught me out of that. I knew there was a spiritual relationship I had with God that was real. I was not trying to pretend it was not there. I was not imagining an invisible monkey called Jesus. I had a real relationship with Him.
And yet so much of my Christian life, if I am honest, I felt separated from Him. I felt distant. I felt as if He was not real, He was not there. I struggled with sin, same things everybody else would. I did not know how to get healed. I did not know how to receive that joy, that victory we spoke about. And yet I knew it was real. I knew at times there were times when I had experienced Him, but it seemed, if I am honest, that 98, 99 percent of my Christian life was me muddling along, doing what all the other Christians did. And then just occasionally with these little glimpses of divine life, of spiritual life.
I would read about all these amazing saints and wonder how it was they had these things and how it was I did not seem to have these things. Now, different Christian streams, backgrounds, theologies deal with that problem in different ways. Some frankly just ignore the problem and pretend it is not there. Some coat it with a layer of religiosity. And if we put the right clothes on and say the right words, I am great, you are great, we are all great. It is really just religious pretense.
So often what evangelicals do is they say, yes, all of that amazing life in God is real, but you only get it after you die. We are here on this earth and we have got to trudge through the mud and the snow, so to speak, and yet one day that life is accessible there. I think many have sort of thought, well, that amazing spiritual life is attainable, but we need to suffer, or we need to fast, and we need to seek God on top of a mountain, pay a great price to get it.
I think there are other branches of Christianity that say, well, no, we need deliverance. We need inner healing. We need this ministry, that ministry, all sorts of weird wacky and wonderful different ministries. And when we have got through those problems, then we will experience the life of God. And, you know, sometimes in my stream, that charismatic Pentecostal stream, we would say, well, that life, revival, glorious life of God is available, but we need to cry out, and maybe in the last days, God is going to pour out more of His Spirit than He did previously.
And I will be honest, none of those answers ever satisfied me. None of those answers ever seemed biblical. I just could not see them in the Bible. It did not seem what Jesus was teaching and the apostles taught in the epistles or lived in the book of Acts. And lastly, when I got around all of those different streams of people, it did not work, it did not actually work for them. Of course, they could pull out testimonies to match, to validate their teaching, but I had testimonies. The problem with the testimonies is they were selective moments in my life or their life that were used to prop up an unbiblical teaching.
I probably got to the place in my life where I just assumed, kind of, this is all there is. You know, well, I know God is real and we sort of struggle through the Christian life day by day. And yet several years ago, I began to see the light. I began to get around some teaching. And in a way, there was not one person who gave me at least this teaching, not criticizing anybody. I saw different pieces of it in some very different streams of Christianity. I began seeing it in people like Hudson Taylor, the Keswick movement. In people like Watchman Nee, I really encourage you to read his book, The Normal Christian Life. I saw it in people like E.W. Kenyon. I saw the same teaching in the faith movement. Kenneth Hagin taught about this, Kenneth Copeland. I probably actually at the moment think if you want to get around teaching like this, listening to the teaching of somebody like Andrew Wommack is probably the best and most accessible way of doing that.
But let me just sum up that teaching here, because I think a lot of the body of Christ have not heard this and pause. I think a lot of people in my stream of Christianity think they have heard this and yet they have not. The way you know if you really know something is that you live it, you put it into practice, and I meet many people in, frankly, my churches, my stream of Christianity who, if I say to them what I am going to say to you, they will go, amen, hallelujah. I believe that. And yet, whenever they get in a situation that contradicts this, coming back to this teaching is not the first second, third, fourth or fifth thought. And in a way, it is like this is just some idea somewhere, not a lifestyle, not something they have embraced, not the first port of call, and the last port of call, because Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega.
And I tell you, what I am about to share with you is the absolute truth of the Bible, and it really, really works.
As it is written in 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NKJV): “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”
The Triune Nature and Our Recreation
I could come at this in different ways, but let me come at it in the way Watchman Nee taught about this and Andrew Wommack did. Really by quoting the verse in 1 Thessalonians 5:23. It says, may the God of shalom, the God of peace, sanctify you wholly, that is wholly with a W-H-O-L-L-Y, not H-O-L-Y, completely entirely wholly, may sanctify you, your spirit, your soul, and your body. And I will go through that really quickly, and again, many of you have heard this, but we have not integrated it. We have not made it our foundation of how we relate to God.
You have been brought into a relationship with the triune God, the Trinity, if you will, the Father, Son, the Spirit you want. And yet we were created body, soul, and spirit. Now in Adam, the Lord said to Adam, the day you eat of the tree, you will surely die. Adam in a sense was, was he still a spiritual being? Yes, in a sense, but he was a dead spiritual being, he was cut off from God. And all the way through the Old Testament, you see people really functioning as bodies and souls and spiritually they are dead, they are relating to God through traditions through customs and not having spiritual encounters. Anytime God spoke to somebody in the Old Testament, you know, God would speak, an angel would break into space and time, right on the wall, speak in an audible voice they could hear, it was spiritually dead people.
And of course, in Christ, we are made new creation. 2 Corinthians 5:17. If any man be in Christ Jesus, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away, all things have been made new. Now, again, let me go back to my testimony as a Christian, and I want to suggest to you yours is probably exactly like mine. We go, yes, I am a new creation, but most of us, if we are honest, we live in that verse in Romans 7 where it says like, I am a new creation, but part of me is a new creation, the things I do not want to do, I do, and the things I do want to do I do not seem to be able to do, and it is like, I am a new creation, but I am dragging around Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I have got this dark passenger. There is a part of me that is new and a part of me that is not new.
And I want to say to you at a practical level and your lived experience, that is actually true. And here is the key that we need to understand. When you were born again, your body was not born again. The Bible says the outward man perishes. Come on, every year, another wrinkle, more gray hair, we are getting older. The outward man is perishing. You have a body that was not born again. And here is what we begin to misunderstand a little bit. Your soul is not born again. Your soul is your mind, your will, your emotions, your soul, if you will, is like the software running on the inside of you, and your soul is not actually who you really are. Your soul is the part of you that chooses things. Your soul is a part of you that thinks things and your soul is the part of you that feels things.
If you actually went back earlier when I was talking about my Christian life, I said, I felt God was not real. I felt He was not there. I felt this. I felt that. And for most of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, what we feel is so real. What we feel is intrinsically how we see ourselves. We think what we feel is our true identity. And yet, here is the real key to understanding this. Now, please do not check out if you think, yes, Graham, I know that. If you are not experiencing joy, victory, peace, health, blessing, guidance, victory, all of these kind of things, then you do not know it, you know it and you do not know it.
Here is the key. When you were born again, your spirit was made anew. You were recreated, you were born literally born and new in the spirit, not in the soul, not in the body. Your spirit is joined one with Jesus. Your spirit is placed in Christ Jesus, and you have the 100 percent righteousness of Jesus. You have His victory, you have His nature, you have His peace, you have His joy. You know everything He knows. You have His provision, you have His life. Everything He gave up at Calvary. He gave it up that you might have it now back in the spirit, and you are not going to get it one day when you die. You already have it.
Now, for most of us, we live our Christian lives, begging, longing, pleading, asking others to pray for us, going through all sorts of weird, wacky, and wonderful ministries, trying to get in our soul what we already have in our spirit. Can you imagine a life, if you could live and walk in perfect righteousness, perfect holiness, perfect joy, perfect peace? Hallelujah. Can you imagine what life would look like if we could live in that way? And I want to tell you and suggest to you, that is actually the message of the New Testament. We can. It is not that God is going to give you those things. It is that God has already given you those things. You have them already in the spirit, not in the soul and not in the body. And our role, our job, and it is a job, a role, a work, a journey, a progression, is to learn in our soul who we already are in our spirit.
It says in Philemon verse 6, the sharing, the experiencing of your faith is made effective by the constant acknowledging of every good thing that you already have in Christ Jesus.
As it is written in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 (NKJV): “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Living from the Spirit
So let me break this down and I will get practical with this. You see, here is how we do this. Most of us, we walk around, they are not bodying our soul, and we get tripped up by sin. We get tripped up by temptation, we get tripped up by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. We all do. There are things your eyes see. Ooh, that looks good. That looks tasty. He looks tasty, she looks tasty, whatever that might be, the lust of your flesh, the things that, you know, your flesh wants and the pride, especially the pride, the identity, the core identity. We want to build an identity outside of God. And all of us, we go around and we end up sinning, we end up feeling guilty, feeling shame, we end up feeling emotionally separated from God, and yet we try to get victory. We try and manage ourselves. We try. God is not into sin management.
Here is how you walk in righteousness. You every day wake up and you look, as James said, in the mirror of God’s Word, which declares you are righteous. And then you have got to learn to sit in that word. You have got to learn to abide in that word, not to try to become through your own efforts who God has already said you are, but to sit in what God has said you are. Lord, I am righteous, I am as righteous as Jesus is righteous. It is the gift of righteousness, Romans 5:17. And if every day you will practice waking up, awake to righteousness, and you will not sin, 1 Corinthians 15:34 says. If every day you would wake up and you will clothe yourself in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, Ephesians 4:23. Put off the old man and put on the new man, created after Him in righteousness and true holiness by being renewed in the spirit of your mind. That is what the Bible says.
So if every day we will wake up, we say, Lord, I am righteous, I am completely righteous. I am perfect in You. Lord, I am holy in You, Lord, I have Your desires. I am Your nature. Lord, I have Your joy. If we will align ourselves with who God says we are. If we will sit in it, if we will think on it, if we will allow our godly imagination to go wild with it. If we will dwell. Jesus said, if a man will love Me and love My word, My Father and I will come through the Holy Spirit, and we will manifest ourselves to him.
Come on, the angel Gabriel in Luke 1 brought a word to Mary that made no logical sense to her mind, her knowledge of biology. It was not a rational word, and Mary’s response was be it unto me according to your word. And the angel said, because you have received with meekness the ingrafted word, the power of the Almighty will overshadow you. If you will, you Mary, you receive the word, the Holy Spirit will birth in you the experience, the word will produce in your life. It is not my job to produce an experience of righteousness, victory, holiness, peace, joy, all of these things. My job is to hold His word in me, and let that word do its work, it will grow. It will produce life in you if you will plant it and not dig it up a day or two later and throw it away, saying it is not working.
And that is the key to the Christian life. It is to believe that it is already done. It is to acknowledge that it is already done. It is rather than asking God, will You please do this? It is to move into thanksgiving and say, Lord, thank You. I am who You said I am.
As it is written in Romans 5:17 (NKJV): “For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.”
This is the foundation of a Spirit-filled life that truly works, where we stop striving in the soul and learn to rest in what has already been accomplished in the spirit. It transforms everything, from how we handle temptation to how we experience God’s presence day by day. Hallelujah.
Selah.
Scriptures for Further Study: 2 Corinthians 5:17, 1 Thessalonians 5:23, Romans 5:17, Romans 7:15-25, Ephesians 4:22-24, 1 Corinthians 15:34, Philemon 1:6, Romans 6:6, Colossians 3:3, Galatians 2:20, 2 Corinthians 5:21, John 4:14, Ephesians 2:6, 1 John 4:17, Romans 8:1, Hebrews 10:14, 2 Peter 1:3-4, Colossians 2:9-10, John 17:21-23, Galatians 5:22-23, Romans 8:37, 1 Corinthians 6:17, Philippians 3:9, Hebrews 4:16, John 14:20.
10 Questions for Reflection:
- In what ways have I felt distant from God despite knowing He is real?
- How have I tried to manage sin or struggles in my own strength?
- What does it mean to me that my spirit is already made new in Christ?
- How can I begin to align my soul with the truth of who I am in the spirit?
- What biblical truths about my identity do I need to meditate on daily?
- In what areas of my life am I begging God for what He has already given?
- How might acknowledging every good thing in Christ change my daily experience?
- What role does thanksgiving play in experiencing spiritual victory?
- How have religious traditions or streams influenced my view of the Christian life?
- What would my life look like if I lived fully from my spirit identity?
