“For G-d is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit…”
-From Romans 1:9-
“…whom I serve with my…spirit…”
I had never seen it in the same way before. This phrase spoke deeply to me this afternoon.
Don’t pass through Paul’s letter on the way to 3:10, 3-23, 6:23, and 10:9-10 and seek out the Romans Road, without taking some time to examine this little gem. Paul served the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit with his spirit, with his breath. This was not a soul service, but a spiritual service.
We have an opportunity. When we are born again, G-d breathed the breath of life, HIS breath, into us and we become living souls (from Genesis 2:7). And we can live from our souls, and that is a good thing, we can walk with spiritually-influenced minds, wills, and emotional reserves, and we can serve others on the horizontal plane, from our minds, wills, and emotions, which have been touch by G-d, and that is good.
But…
“The good can become the eternal enemy of the best.” -Arthur Burk-
Many believers already serve others–the L-rd and humanity–with their souls, but comparatively few of us, myself included, serve out of the rich deposit that is our spirit. The spirit that He has put into us is a life-giving wind and a river of artesian-clear water. It is a river that no force on earth or hell can stop or stifle, if we will properly fight and overcome the enemy who wishes to stop up that well with earthly pursuits at the expense of the Kingdom.
We frequently meet the physical needs, the felt needs, the practical needs, and even what we think is sometimes the greatest need, their salvation in that moment. Many times, evangelism carries, in the background of its outworking, a sense of guilt laid upon us by a visiting minister. “Prophesy or else you will have their blood on your hands”, the visiting minister sometimes tells us. And so we attempt to microwave redemption and force a decision for Jesus that is soulishly timed with little regard for Father’s timing. And after this activity, when we burn out and decide that evangelism is not for us, we wonder why few respond.
The above is but a small way to attempt to work the 2nd Commandment (love your neighbor-Matthew 22:39).
However, little gets done when only our souls are involved and we neglect the vastness and richness of our very breath given by Almighty G-d. This is small thinking that was antithetical to the very heart of the gospel (2 Corinthians 2:9).
Many of us never go beyond that realm of the soul and drive with the deeper tools that we have in our possession for the deeper reality in others: an affect on someone’s spirit, out of the flow of our spirit.
The Father has placed a rich deposit in each person, and He has sent His grace ahead of time and ahead of us, so that we may speak to that deposit and that deepest yearning in each man, woman, and child. And we may do so without regard for a hurried agenda.
The effects of our soulish working with others, while good, may preoccupy us away from the best.
We may get so caught up in our agenda of what a gospel presentation looks like in our agenda, that we neglect the Father’s agenda.
His agenda is to awaken in humanity something so deep and transformative that it shakes us with a revelation of His love and tenderness that no enemy can put to sleep. And that revelation of His tenderness, love, and kindness, is what leads us toward repentance.
Consider the following as evidence of that:
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith–that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of G-d.”
“Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen”
Ephesians 3:14-21
