FAITH MAKES NO EARTHLY SENSE

Maybe three decades ago, I wrote a book; The Holy Spirit Makes No Earthly Sense.  The meaning of the title is that one will never learn of the Spirit of God using earthly measurements.  No, these would need to be spiritually evaluated.  The title alone caused a stir within the church.  Some were irritated by the sheer fact that I believed the Holy Spirit works in our lives.  And, then, others were upset as they thought that I was saying that the Spirit made no sense in any realm.

So today I still say that the Spirit does not fit the 1 + 1 = 2 mindset of human efforts as if such  equals a basic formula for kingdom living.  What is required is a very unique territory known as faith.  Otherwise we are simply a batch of humanistic minds trying to make church work from earthage rather than from the heavenlies.  Our bodies will one day succumb to injury or disease or age.  Our spirits are the eternal portion of each of us.  Thus, we give attention to such a key element of....our us-ness.

The spirit world is in each of us, among each of us, and very much to be involved with all of us.  What is to be expected, then, in this zone which is the spirit side of us?

For one thing, we need to be aware that our flesh will strive to be boss of our spirit.  It will try to weigh godly Truth from the mindset of what would be regarded as normal and obvious thinking.  Faith, though, is not normal.  Faith believes that what isn't can still become.  Faith sees into the invisibles which blows the mind of the flesh.  As a matter of fact, the flesh can't tolerate this paragraph.  The flesh-mind resents what the spirit-mind strives to believe.

One's spirit, then, engages poles apart from the flesh.  The flesh is willing to attend church; but it doesn't want to pray.  You can't make it pray.  It doesn't want to learn new landscapes and regions of the Word and it most certainly does not want to be uncomfortable.  Ultimately, it is terrified of dying to self that others might be blessed.

The flesh is self-ish while the spirit is self-giving.  The flesh fights to preserve self at the very center.  Yet, the spirit goes to school in order to learn how to give itself away for the needs of others.

The spirit wants to spend time in prayer, learn how to love enemies, become enthusiastic over giving of our money, and finally it wants to grow in freedom to reach to the world around us without being so paralyzingly self-critical.  There is no enemy to our spirit as large and monstrous as our fleshly approach to thinking which tends to hold us captive.

We incarcerate ourselves all the while complaining as if someone else did the arresting.  Others are never our main trouble.  Our interiors--the mind of the flesh or the mind of the spirit--set the course for our every day.  The former is captivity while the latter if freedom.  We.  Get.  To.  Choose.

Faith makes no earthly sense.  It makes much heavenly sense.  As the grave being empty still creates doubt in the flesh-minds who just can't believe it, that empty grave sets a believer's heart on fire for God because we operate more from the Spirit of God than our own lower-life thinking.