Blog In Audio:
Greetings,
Today I am in England. I have had a great weekend here in Clay Cross and in Shirebrook. It is wonderful to see hungry people desiring to be empowered to live as sons and daughters of God. I am looking forward to this next week in Wales and England with old friends and new ones. God is surely good!
How do we cultivate our desire to know God? How do we position ourselves to experience God in our lives? What is the secret to seeking for and finding God in a greater fullness in our lives?
In the past few years, I have been growing in knowing God in a deeper and more intimate way. I am growing in knowing God’s presence resting in my life, and thus I find myself resting in God in a greater way. I used to approach God as the supernatural One who reveals His power in us, through us, and to us in life. When we approach God as a power, we often miss God as a person. When we look to Him as our Savior, our Healer, our Deliverer, our Promiser, or any other attribute of His power, we tend to miss discovering Him in a more intimate way. Without realizing it, we exchange a relationship with Him for a relationship with what He can do.
God is not a power. His power simply testifies of Him. God is a person. He is our Father, He revealed His love to us through His only begotten Son, and He comes to us by His ever-present Holy Spirit. God is a trinity, but He is revealed to us through three distinct persons in His being. To know the fullness of who He is in His trinity requires us to embrace Him fully in His individual uniqueness of identity.
Without Jesus, we cannot fully know God as our Father, because it is only through the embodiment of a son that we can grow in knowing God as our Father. Without Holy Spirit, we cannot know the Father or the Son, because no one can come to God but by the Spirit of God. To be spiritual people we must embrace a relationship with God as the Spirit, God as the Son, and God as our Father. To know Jesus the Son, we must also embrace knowing God our Father. To know God our Father we must embrace knowing Jesus the Son. To Know God the Son and God the Father, we must know God the Holy Spirit.
Our fellowship with one another in and as the body of Christ is empowered by our fellowship with God. It is a fellowship of the Spirit (Phil. 2:1). Holy Spirit is God and He has been sent to us by God our Father in the name of Jesus, God’s Son. To fellowship with Holy Spirit is a fellowship with the Son. What Jesus told His disciples is true for us today. Even though Jesus had walked with His disciples in human form for more than three years, there true intimacy with Him could only come to them after His resurrection from the dead and their joining to Him by the Holy Spirit in them.
John 14:16 And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever— 17 the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. 18 I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.
Holy Spirit is not merely a power of God. Holy Spirit is God. Our daily fellowship with Holy Spirit increases our daily connection with Jesus the Son. Our internal connection to Holy Spirit empowers our spirits to know that we are God’s sons and daughters. To develop that relationship, we must practice responding to Holy Spirit within us.
John 7:37 On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. 38 He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” 39 But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
If we seek to know God as Holy Spirit joined to our spirits from within, we must also partner with Holy Spirit to allow rivers of living (life-giving) water to flow from within us to our world. It is not a matter of releasing power. It is a matter of living in an intimate fellowship with Holy Spirit, and this is manifested through the fruit of life that comes to us and through us for the sake of our world. It is a testimony of love by being loved by God from within.
Blessings,
Ted J. Hanson
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House of Bread Ministry
3210 Meridian St.
Bellingham, WA 98225-1728
