Spiritual prompting guides us in life (2)
Awakening the spiritual part of us
We may go through life without much awareness of the spiritual dimension. And then we feel a kind of nudge to do something differently, or talk to someone, and coincidences happen. We are all created by God, who is Spirit, to be spiritual as well as emotional and physical. We awaken the spiritual part of us by turning from ourselves to God — it doesn't have to be a moment of great need and it doesn't have to be in church — and a connection begins to be made.
“And so that we would know that we are His true children, God released the Spirit of Sonship into our hearts — moving us to cry out intimately, “My Father! My true Father!” Galatians 4:6 TPT
This verse was written to believers in Jesus Christ in the first decades of there being something called church — believers in fellowship together. We can think we can get away with being religious and remote with God, but Jesus is much more up close and personal. We cannot escape the fact that Jesus came to make a way for us to know God — He definitively said: "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life — no one comes to the Father except through Me." John 14:6.
Followers of the Way
The early believers were known as Followers of the Way. They had discovered the way to have a relationship with God. Formerly disqualified (like all of us) by sin, the manner and the injustice of Jesus' death, which He knew was His unique mission, made the Way for these first believers to be excused of their crippling burden of having lived independent from God, and to discover that All-holy Almighty God could be known as "My Father! My true Father!"
God is in heaven and Jesus, having ascended, rules and reigns from heaven. But there is no distance in the spiritual realm. We, although human, can know God as Father and Jesus as the Lord and Saviour who journeys with us through the temptations and tests of life, all of which he experienced. That is a spiritual relationship.
That spiritual relationship is how we understand how "God released the Spirit of Sonship into our hearts" and why this releases us and moves us to express our response to His love — as the verse puts it, to "cry out intimately".
The Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, responds to our invitation by breathing His life into our human spirit. As we turn to God, and take hold of the immensity of Jesus' sacrifice for us, a transformation is set in progress. This is the work of the Holy Spirit in us. He guides us, teaches us, reminds us and coaches us — and He reveals to us the things of God that are discerned spiritually. We can only get so far with intellectual understanding.
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