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Growing In God with Gary Hargrave


Jul 5, 2023

Web Description: God is not human, and we in our human state cannot relate to Him because we broke our covenant with Him through disobedience. Christ came to reconcile us to the Father, but our communion with Him cannot be done through fleshly means or carnal ways of thinking or communicating. Only through seeking Him, meditating on Him, learning to draw from Him in the Holy Spirit can we truly have the mind of Christ. It is something that we must give ourselves to and learn to do.

 

Show Notes: Meditation is a term that we do not really use much in the Church. I think that is partially because it has a connotation of being from Eastern religions and people want to stay away from it. But we really do need to understand meditation and waiting on the Lord if we are going to walk with God. We need to come to the place where we know how to commune with God and receive from Him all that He has made available to us.

 

In our flesh, just by being human, all our awareness comes from our physical senses. They draw us to the natural world because they do not sense the world of spirit that God lives in. However, through Christ we have been born into the spirit realm as children, and we must grow in the spiritual capacities that God has provided. We will not know what God is doing, what He is saying, and how He is trying to lead us by living with our minds and senses set on the natural world. We must set our minds on the Spirit and have our senses retrained by the Holy Spirit to understand the things of God.

 

Paul wrote, “We have the mind of Christ.” Peter wrote, “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him.” That means those things are available for us to appropriate and make our reality on a day-to-day basis so that they manifest in our lives as they manifested in the life of Christ. When He was on the earth, He did that as a man. Therefore the door is open for us in our human life to learn to walk in the Spirit of God.

 

Key Verses:

 

       John 5:19. “The Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing.”

       Isaiah 55:8. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways.”

       Jeremiah 29:13. “You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”

       Romans 8:14. “All who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.”

       John 3:7. “Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.”

       Matthew 18:20. “Where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.”

       1 Corinthians 2:12. “We have received … the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God.”

       1 Corinthians 2:16. “We have the mind of Christ.”

       1 Corinthians 12:8. “To one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, and to another the word of knowledge.”

       John 8:28. “I speak these things as the Father taught Me.”

       Philippians 2:13. “It is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”

       Romans 12:1–2. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

       2 Peter 1:2–4. “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him.”

       1 Timothy 4:7–8. “Godliness … holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.”

       Colossians 3:1–3. “Set your mind on the things above.”

       Psalm 34:8. “Taste and see that the LORD is good.”

       Philippians 3:20–21. “Our citizenship is in heaven.”

       Romans 8:2–9. “The mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace.”

       Joshua 1:8–9. “You shall meditate on it day and night.”

       Psalm 1:1–3. “In His law he meditates day and night.”

       Psalm 19:14. “Let the … meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight.”

       Psalm 63:6. “I meditate on You in the night watches.”

 

Quotes:

 

       “We've got to seek God in order to be able to communicate and commune with Him and to receive from Him. And if we don't, we are stuck in this place where His thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways.”

       “We are able to come into the knowledge of Him and to connect with Him and draw and appropriate all that He is and all that He has because He's granted it to us. He's not holding Himself back from us.”

       “By our meditation we lock into God and we download all that He's provided for us.”

 

Takeaways:

 

1.    He has provided all things for life and godliness. But do we know how to download those provisions? I don't think we do yet, but we will. And I have faith that we will learn and that we will seek Him with all our hearts until we are able to hear His voice and know His will and walk in His ways.

2.    We tend to take the great provisions of God and put them off into heaven or into the future and that is not the way it works. There is a way in this life that we can become a spiritual people, knowing the Spirit, understanding by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, and being able to download and appropriate all the precious promises and provisions of God.

3.    In Christ we have the renewal of our mind whereby we can change our focus away from this world and reach into the knowledge of Him. So the potential is absolutely there for us, but there is a discipline in our meditation and waiting on the Lord where we learn how to enter into the spirit realm and draw and appropriate all that He has for us.