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God is a Spirit
Jesus
said to the woman of
Samaria
, "God is a spirit, and they that
worship Him, must worship Him iii spirit and in truth." Man could not
worship God in spirit unless he himself was a spirit. It has been hard for us to
become spirit conscious, to realize that spiritual things are as real as
material things.
We
accept as a fact that God is a Spirit, but we never realized the implications
tied up in that fact.
A
spirit has personality, but not necessarily a physical body.
Angel
s are spirits; demons are spirits.
 | We cannot visualize spirit
beings.
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| We cannot see the spirit any
more than we can see the mind.
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| We cannot see the force that
lifts the tide, but we can see the results of it.
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God
is a Spirit, and, as a Spirit, He created material substance.
| We know that He is not only a
Spirit but He is
a love
Spirit.
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| We know that He is
a faith Spirit.
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| We know that He spoke the
Universe into being with a Word, and He rules the Universe by "the Word
of His power."
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| We know that man is a spirit,
that he belongs to God's kind of being, that he is eternal, that he can live
in a body. He is capable of partaking of the nature of God, and his highest
development comes in fellowship with God.
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| We know that he was to fill a
place in God's heart. God wanted him, loved him and desired to impart His
nature to him.
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| We know that spiritual things
are as real as material things.
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| We know since man is a spirit,
the greatest forces in him are spiritual. Love, hate, hope and faith are
spiritual forces. These forces are the forces that govern the world.
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| We know that when man fell in
the garden, it was a fall from the presence of God, and from spiritual
things to physical. When he left God's presence, he was utterly dependent
upon his Five Senses for his sustenance and protection. His body immediately
became the source of all his knowledge.
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This
knowledge is obtained by contacts with physical things, or things that affect
the senses, such as the food that he tastes, the fragrance of the flowers that
he smells, and the sounds that he hears.
He
protected himself, and fed and clothed himself, through the aid of these Senses.
The knowledge that he has today has come to him through these five channels of
contact with material things.
 We
know another fact: God cannot be found by the Senses or known by the Senses. He,
being a spirit, can only reveal Himself to spirits. He can reveal Himself to our
spirit through the Word. For instance, we hear someone read the Word of God. The
thing that is read is weighed and measured by our intellect, but in some way,
which is inexplicable to reason, it affects our spirit. It answers a need.
By
listening to the Word, it changes our spirit. This change is called the New
Birth. Before we were Born Again, our minds were in harmony with our
unregenerate spirit.
Now
that our spirit has been recreated, our minds become renewed by the Word.
Now the two, our spirit and our mind, are brought into harmony.
We
get to know the Father as really in our spirit as we get to know physical things
through our Senses. Faith in the Father and in spiritual things becomes as
strong and well defined as faith in natural things.
| We know that we can approach
our Father and meet Him; that He will hear our prayer as really as we know
that the sun will shine.
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| We know that His Word will
become absolutely true in our lives.
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Spiritual
things are as real as physical things.
Spiritual
hunger and spiritual thirst cannot be satisfied with philosophy or metaphysics.
They may charm the intellect, but the hour will come when the spirit will speak
out of its hunger.
One
of the things that we have learned in praying for the sick is that people are
sick in spirit as well as sick in body. The physical sickness will leave when we
can bring perfect healing to the spirit. We have found that fear and doubt are
spiritual diseases and their reactions upon the spirit are similar to the
reactions of cancer and T. B. and other deadly diseases on the body. We find
that as soon as we can bring perfect assurance that the disease was laid on
Christ, and the mind comes to agree with the spirit, healing is inevitable.
Some fact about the human
spirit
There
can be scientists in the realm of the spirit as well as in the realm of the
Senses. It has always been hard for Sense Knowledge men to accept spiritual
things. They tell you they cannot believe in miracles, they are unscientific.
This is because they live in the realm of their physical bodies.
| Sense Knowledge cannot find
God and would not know God if it found Him.
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| Sense Knowledge doesn't know
how creation came into being, doesn't know why it came into being. It does
not know the origin of life, light, motion, or of gravitation.
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The
spiritual scientist does not deal in theories. He deals in facts.
The
largest part of the progress of the Sense Knowledge scientist is in the realm of
speculation. Sometimes he is able to make his theories become realities.
The
spiritual scientist has proven there is a God.
| He knows it. He has found that
God, and knows Him.
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| He deals only with ascertained
facts.
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| He has found the Reason for
Creation,
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| He knows why Creation came
into being.
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| He knows the Reason for man.
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| He has solved that difficult
problem.
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| He has found the source of
life.
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| He has found that man is a
spirit being of the same kind as God,
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 | he is Eternal, he originally
had an eternal body
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| he was made to live with God
eternally
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| he has found that man is the
same kind of being as God, so created that he can receive into his spirit
the nature of God.
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It
is an unfortunate fact that the spirit of man has received so little attention.
We spend hundreds of millions of dollars and euros training men's bodies. We
have spent uncounted millions in educating our minds. But no chair in any
institution has ever been devoted to the culture and development of man's
spirit. Here are some facts about the human spirit:
| It is the source of love. Love
is not the child of reason, or of Sense Knowledge. Love is born in the
spirit of man. The thing that is often mistaken for love is mere sex
attraction. That is a physical attraction that has to do with the Five
Senses. But love is the child of the human spirit.
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| It is the seat, the source of
life. It is the part of man that receives Eternal Life from God.
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| It cannot be found in the
human body, but it is there. Originally the spirit dominated the physical
body and dominated the avenues through which the mind received its
knowledge. In the beginning the human spirit governed the human reasoning
faculties.
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| It is the fountain of wisdom.
Wisdom comes from the Human spirit. Reason has nothing but knowledge.
Knowledge is something that the senses gather from the material world around
them and the forces in this material world. The ability to use knowledge
wisely is a spiritual thing.
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| It is wisdom that comes from
the human spirit,
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| Faith is born of the human
spirit. Unbelief is largely the child of the Senses. That is very
suggestive. You cannot develop faith through the reasoning faculties, no
matter how much you try to do it.
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| Faith is born in the human
spirit. Fear and courage are both spiritual forces. They come from the
same source. Joy and peace are not mental attributes, They are spiritual.
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The
human spirit has given birth to the greatest forces in civilization.
Gal.
5:22
The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace.' That is the fruit of the
recreated spirit, not the fruit of the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit
does not bear fruit only as He bears it through the branches of the vine, the
body of Christ.
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