10: FISH: Living in the Spirit (Part 4)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father- daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Welcome to episode ten. In the fourth part of our FISH series, we’re looking at the “S” of our FISH acrostic – Spirit.

Hello, my father.

[00:30] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. It’s good to be back together.

[00:34] Stephanie: Always, I love seeing your smiling face.

[00:36] Marcus: Yeah, this is one of those rare episodes where we’re in the same room. This is pretty nice indeed.

[00:40] Stephanie: Indeed. It’s also tickling me for whatever reason, that you’re holding a glass of water and we’re talking about the spirit. I’m just thinking about living water and spirit.

[00:46] Marcus: There you go, streams of living water. Yes.

[00:50] Stephanie: Goes right back to our “well” discussion from maybe episode one, whenever it was.

[00:56] Marcus: Yeah we did talk about the well. I think it was episode one of this series.

[01:01] Stephanie: Oh, yes true. I should talk in parts not episodes that could get confusing for people. But anyway, this episode living in the Spirit, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, is a topic that we could spend many, many episodes on. For today, we are going to look at some key principles and practices for what it looks like to walk in the spirit. You’ve said, ”Trying to live the christian life in the flesh is a bit like a Jedi, going into a fight and deciding not to use the force.” I mean, right?

[01:30] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, forget the force, I’m just going to beat this guy with my fist. Right.

[01:37] Stephanie: While that’s an apt analogy, we also want to be very clear that the Holy Spirit is not just “some force.”

[01:42] Marcus: He’s not “the force”, it’s not a synonym.

[01:44] Stephanie: He is a person, he is God. We can have an intimate relationship with him that’s not just power related. And one of the keys to our walk with God is seeking and relying on his wisdom. I’m excited to look today at one of my favorite of your acrostics, S.L.O.W.  At Deeper Walk we have a fabulous community we call Trailblazers, who have committed to donate monthly $25.00 dollars or more to support the ministry of Deeper Walk. And I bring this up because something we do for new Trailblazers, (that’s my impression that we are still doing that),  we’ll send them a keychain. On one side of the key it says S.L.O.W, stop, listen, obey or watch. Do you want to explain what this acrostic is, or give a story.

[02:33] Marcus: Oh, sure. So the reason that SLOW is out there, but I need to back up here. I’ll just say what SLOW is and then I’ll give the story. So S.L.O.W stands for Seek, Listen, Obey, Watch. So S.L.O.W, seek, listen, obey, watch. Sometimes I use stop instead of seek, this idea of stop and seek. So this acrostic was developed because I was looking for a way to explain what it looked like to walk in the spirit instead of the flesh. So I would go to Paul’s writings where he says,”So I tell you, walk in the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.”

And I’m like, “Great, so this next paragraph is going to explain how to do that, right?” And it would just go on to another topic. And I was starting to get frustrated with Paul honestly.  I’m like, “Hey, why don’t you explain this for those of us who don’t intuitively know what it means to walk in the spirit?” He said it like everybody knew what he was talking about. So you gotta backfill from there, what is he talking about walking in the spirit? So having spent a lot of my time in the Old Testament, one of the things you notice in the Old Testament is that those people who are wise, are often described as being filled with the spirit of God.

Now sometimes it’s the spirit of the Elohim in Hebrews, or “spirit of the gods” is sometimes how it’s translated. But I think the idea is that the spirit of God inside someone tends to refer to the idea of wisdom. Thus we have Bezaleel and Aholiab, who are the architect engineers of the tabernacle, it says they were filled with the spirit of God. Daniel was filled with the spirit of God, and so he was able to give wisdom about what they should do. Joseph was filled with the spirit of God, so he had wisdom about how to handle the upcoming famine and that sort of thing.

So we see this routinely in the Old Testament that when it wants to emphasize the idea of being filled, it is talking about now having wisdom from God about what to do. But we see the same thing in the New Testament. Peter being filled with the Holy Spirit proclaims on the day of Pentecost the explanation of what everybody is seeing. I began to think well, let’s look for continuity between the Old and the New Testament and not try to pit them against one another. And if you’re looking for continuity, you understand that what the New Testament calls walking in the spirit, the Old Testament calls wisdom, right? And those two things are essentially synonymous.

The other thing I noticed in the Old Testament was that when they used the expression, “That the Spirit came upon someone”, that was usually for power. So when the spirit came upon Samson for example, Samson didn’t suddenly become wise, right? He became powerful and he was able to defeat his enemies. And we see this routinely in the book of judges, that the spirit of God comes upon someone and then power is the result. And throughout the Old Testament it’s a routine reference.

Now, I don’t think it’s 100% but it’s pretty close, right? It’s like almost always those are the distinctions between them. In the same way when the spirit is coming upon someone, Jesus says to the apostles, “Wait for the spirit to come upon you, then you will receive power”. So we see both of those things happening.

So my basic gist here is that wisdom is primarily the relational element of this. And that is when I’m walking with God relationally, in that relationship he grants me wisdom to know which way I should go. As the Old Testament says, “You’ll hear a voice behind you saying, this is the way, walk it.” Whereas when I am walking in the spirit I am much more likely to see the power of the Spirit flow. And I think that the power of the Spirit tends to flow primarily in the area of our giftedness.

So for me that tends to be more in teaching. I regularly find myself when I’m teaching, saying things I wasn’t planning to say and going, “That feels like a God thought.” And sometimes when I’m teaching I will find myself talking to myself like, “You know, you need to listen to what you’re saying right now.” And that’s sort of this God thought where the power of what’s happening is happening through your gift.

And so some people have a gifting that is more oriented towards healing, or more oriented towards the miraculous and things like that. Thus they’ll tend to see that power in those contexts more regularly. So that was a long answer to SLOW, right?

[06:58] Stephanie: I was even thinking as you were talking, I just kept hearing “with.” That wisdom is doing things “with” God.

[07:07] Marcus: It is and that would be the other Old Testament word that you hear a lot. In fact when I was in seminary I heard a sermon called “The Withness of God.” And it’s this idea that throughout scripture how often did God say, “I am with you.” And that him being “with” us was the key to all of it. Well, through the Holy Spirit living in us God is with us all of the time. And so those two ideas are definitely connected.

[07:31] Stephanie: Huzzah. How can we know that what we are hearing is God? How can we recognize our wisdom versus God’s wisdom, versus. “Oh, my father’s pretty wise and he’s telling me something, is that from God?”

[07:52] Marcus: Yeah. No, that is a tricky thing. I know a lot of people whose lives have been derailed because they thought they were hearing from God. In fact if you go to most psych wards, you’re gonna hear a lot of people who are convinced they’re hearing from God. And I know people who have ended their marriages because a pastor told them, “God told me you’re supposed to divorce your husband.”  I mean, yeah, there’s a need for discernment.

And so when we’re talking about wisdom, it might help to define it from an Old testament perspective. Wisdom starts with discernment. And discernment is the ability to distinguish what is good for me and what’s bad for me. And so as a parent we want to teach our kids discernment, “Don’t touch that stove, that would be bad for you.” You know, “Don’t eat that, that would be bad for you.” And so our goal is we want good things for people. You have to learn discernment about what’s going to lead to good and what’s going to lead to bad.

Well, the problem of course is that life is so complicated that we can’t possibly know everything, and no one person can have all of the wisdom that they need for life. And so God does that on purpose I think, because he wants us relationally to connect with him to get his wisdom and his guidance. Now the frustrating thing about that is that he often doesn’t do it the way we want him to. So if I’m saying, “Should I marry this person, should I go to this school?” “What is the will of God for me, am I supposed to do this or do that?” I find that he often doesn’t answer those directly, and part of that is because he wants me to walk through the process with him. In the end he’ll get me where I need to be.

But sometimes there’s just a process to it and my problem is impatience, I want it now.

I want it immediately and I want the instant gratification of being able to stop and hear God right now, and know exactly what I’m supposed to do. And for a lot of us I think the reason that’s a problem is that we’re doing it out of fear. If I don’t hear from God then I’m going to get this wrong and then everything’s going to fall apart. And we’re trying to use walking in the spirit as a way to be perfect. I have found that I can walk in the spirit and still make mistakes. And that is, this is not a recipe for how to be perfect and get everything right all of the time.

I heard Bill Gillam years ago, he wrote Lifetime Guarantee, and he had some good exchange life teaching. And he said, “It was possible to walk in the spirit and still burn the eggs.”  You might hear the spirit say, “Yeah, make breakfast for your family this morning.”  Well you can still mess that up even though you heard from God correctly. I think we need to have the freedom to realize that we’re not talking about an expectation of perfection. That if you get this part of Christianity right you’ll never make a mistake again. So I think it’s important to understand that too.

[10:46] Stephanie:  I feel like you used to teach SLOW more as stop, listen and obey, and you have started teaching it more as seek, listen, and obey. And I think some of that comes from what context you’re in. So stop would be more in a moment of temptation, that you would stop and listen, versus seeking being more of a lifestyle. .

[11:08] Marcus: Yeah, that came from my own experience. I grew up in a church that could be described as, “Father, Son and Holy Bible.”  It was that kind of church, I certainly didn’t grow up in the charismatic world. And the idea that God wanted to speak to me, honestly in my theology as a teenager and even early in my twenties, was that I didn’t ever expect to hear from God in my entire life. And that if I did, it may be once or twice about something really important.

But this idea that I should have a conversational walk with God, a listening walk with God, wasn’t on the radar. My picture of wisdom was study the Bible and the Bible will fill you, and that will make you wise. And there is some truth to that. Because the Holy Spirit did author the scriptures, and it does give us a worldview that helps us discern things, and recognize what’s going on.

And I think that in our next session, we’re going to be talking about the role of scripture in helping us walk in the spirit. But the problem is that when you’re only using the scripture, and you don’t have the Holy Spirit involved, then it’s like a plane that’s only got one wing. You’re just going to go in circles a lot. I think the original question was, how do you know the difference?

[12:28] Stephanie: Yeah.

[12:28] Marcus: Right.

[12:29] Stephanie: Yeah, discernment, testing, all that.

[12:32] Marcus: So there’s a couple of things on discernment. The first one I point to is that you can discern whether or not the Holy Spirit is leading you, because it will always lead you to the fruit of the spirit. So if you sense God is telling you to do something but it’s directly contrary to the fruit of the spirit, then you know that’s not God. So if he’s saying, “Be impatient and yell at this person.” Right. That’s not coming from God. If it is, “ Don’t show self control, just indulge yourself.” That’s not coming from God. If it’s something that’s leading you to not be loving or if there is no peace in it.

And when we say peace, I want to be careful about this. Because there’s a lot of counterfeit things in the new ways you can give people peace. It can give people euphoria, that can give people a feeling of ecstasy, like, “Oh, this has to be God because I feel so good.” What we’re talking about more is that I have a peace that this is the sort of thing that God would want me to do. And part of the way I know that is that I know scripture. But also part of the way that I recognize it is, that there’s this prompting that I’m getting. Yeah, you can kind of tell this is the right thing to do, and there’s a peace about it. Like, this is the right thing to do.

So we start with simple ones. I was very upset with your mother, I know you’ve never seen us upset with each other.  When I get upset I tend to shut down, in this case I got in the car and I was running an errand. In my mind I’m just like, chewing her out, I’m so upset. And I’m feeling very justified in my anger and very justified in where I’m at. And all of a sudden there’s this random other thought that comes into my head, which was, “You’re just having a pity party.” Well, you know that didn’t fit the narrative that was going on in there. And I took it as a Holy Spirit thought because I’m like, well, what would happen if I follow that line of thinking?

So I’m like, all right. And it stopped me in my tracks because it was kind of a surprising thought. And I realized, yeah what I’m doing is I’m feeding my flesh. And it’s pretty clear in a situation like this which one’s the spirit and which one’s the flesh. Because you’re talking about which path is going to make God happier, and which one is clearly a more loving thing to do. And I find that most of the stuff that we’re talking about when it comes to walking in the flesh, walking spirit, is that sort of thing. This path is clearly more in line with what God would want for our lives.

[15:13] Stephanie: I would also jump in there and say I think that there is a tone to God’s voice. That he says things gently or he might say something very hard nosed, or that it could be said with a condemning tone. But in my experience when he has convicted me of something, it hasn’t been a”eww” kind of feeling. You know, even if it’s something that makes me go, “Oh, man yeah, I need to change this.” I know it’s God who’s convicting me of it because I feel peace about the fact that I’m being convicted about it.

[15:53] Marcus: There’s no question about it. I would say that most of the time when I know it’s God it’s corrective. Right. That’s one of the ways I know it’s God because I’m in my flesh, and I’m going down this road and I get this random thought that is not in sync. And so it startles me into wait a second, I need correction here. But every time that I’ve felt that correction, even though it’s been a healthy shame message, I have left feeling like you will be happier with yourself, if you do it this way.

[16:25] Stephanie: Yes it’s not a toxic shame message. It’s not like if you have one bird on your shoulder feeding your angsty thoughts, it’s not another bird coming and saying, “How dare you have these bad thoughts, or you’re just having a pity party.” In that way it’s not a toxic shame, it’s a healthy correction.

[16:41] Marcus: Yeah. And that’s what happened in that case too. So by the time I got back from that errand I was in a much better place. And I was able to have a very different conversation than I would have had. And the evening turned out a whole lot better too. So all those things help. So that’s one way that we know it’s the spirit, it will lead to the fruit of the spirit, that’s my first test.

If you got to take it to the next level there’s some things that are just purely not scriptural. And like, you know, you need to divorce your wife and marry this other person in the church. That’s clearly not God, that’s not scriptural. And then there’s also direct testing, especially when it gets into spiritual experiences. Because almost everything the Holy Spirit does the devil can counterfeit, so because of that we have to test experiences.

I’ll give you an example of this, I got an email one time from a missionary. There were nine teenage kids in this church who were all slain in the spirit at the front of their church, and simultaneously had exactly the same vision. Now on the surface that would sound like, “Well, if that’s not the Holy Spirit, what is?” Right? The Holy Spirit gives them a dramatic experience in a church, with a special evangelist there, whose gift is having people experience the Holy Spirit, and they have the exact same vision. So how can that not be the Holy Spirit? Well, that’s fine until you hear the vision.

And the vision was essentially teaching pure legalism. And what they did is they visited heaven and they visited hell. What they saw was, for example, Christians who enjoyed christian rock music were burning in hell. The Christians who danced were burning in hell.  It was just going through straight legalism. So I sent back a message to the missionary, and I said, “Can you think of a better way to start a cult, than to give somebody a supernatural experience like this that nobody questions?”

And now they say, “Well, we all know what God wants now, we all know the right thing.” Cults are characterized by believing that there’s one person who’s got a special connection with God, that nobody else has. And we all have to submit to what that one person hears from God. Well, that’s really dangerous, you know? And even Jesus left twelve apostles, not just one. And one of the reasons I think there’s twelve apostles and not just one, is that there was no one voice that said, “Everybody submit to this one person.”

[19:08] Stephanie: Well, we even see in the scriptures Peter and Paul having corrective conversations.

[19:14] Marcus: Yeah, we do and I think that’s for our edification and our benefit. Once you start getting this idea that only one voice is the final arbiter of all things that are true, you’re starting to go down this slippery slope to something very cult-like. So we do test the spirits and other ways that we test the spirits are sometimes with direct tests. And a direct test would be somebody who’s had a supernatural experience and wants to test it to see if it was legit. You just say something like what we call an “If” prayer.

Like, “If” this is the Holy Spirit, then I thank you for the experience, and I ask you God that it will bear great fruit in my life”. But “if” I have been deceived and that was not the Holy Spirit, it was a counterfeit, then I renounced that experience in Jesus’ name. And I command that spirit to leave.

Well, I’ve done this probably 30 to 50 times with people in my life. And I’d say right now it’s about 50/50, with how many of them are the Holy Spirit, that it really is the Holy Spirit. And how many times they were actually deceived by something and it was a counterfeit religious experience. And I say that because the Holy Spirit is not offended by that test. The Holy Spirit has never said, ”How dare you think that I might be a demon? No, you did what the Bible told you to do, you tested the spirits. This is me, we’re all good.” And everything went forward and that person was bearing fruit in their lives.

But we have had people who’ve had counterfeit tongues. They’ve had counterfeit miracles. They’ve had counterfeit religious visions, they’ve had counterfeit all kinds of things, even psychic abilities. You know they’re claiming to be prophets but they’re actually not. They were actually getting things from a demonic spirit. So we do test these things because some people have never heard that they can be counterfeited. And so they just assume that because it’s happening in a church, it must be God, it must be the Holy Spirit. So it’s one of the reasons why we blend the spiritual warfare training with our walking in the spirit training, to try to bring balance to this and make sure that we don’t get deceived.

[21:20] Stephanie: That’s really good. And wow, I can’t believe we’re already at the top of our time here. Like I said at the beginning of the episode, we could have many, many episodes just on doctrine of the Holy Spirit and such.

[21:32] Marcus: There’s no question about it. Yeah.

[21:34] Stephanie: I encourage you to get the book A Deeper Walk and read more about this. But for now Father, do you have any other things that you wanted to make sure you touched on in this episode?

[21:48] Marcus: Well, yeah. The main thing as I started to say earlier, is that I did not grow up in a church that taught this stuff. One of the reasons that this fluctuates between stop, listen and obey, to watch, seek, listen, and obey, is that I learned the process as stop, listen, obey, in a temptation context. And that is when you’re tempted, you stop and listen. Right. There’ll be a still, small voice inside. That was the advice a pastor gave me.

And so that’s how I started my journey and I realized that it worked, that I often got surprising thoughts. Now there have been times when I was tempted I stopped and listened, but I didn’t hear anything. But usually if I stopped long enough I knew what it was that God wanted me to do, even though I didn’t hear anything. There was like this “knowing”, I know he doesn’t want me to go do this stuff.

Which brings us to two kinds of listening and I’ll just wrap up with this. And that is what we call  right brain listening and left brain listening. Left brain is what most of us expect. And that is that I’m going to get a clear distinct thought in my mind that is obviously the Holy Spirit. Or I’m going to actually have an audible voice or a vision or a dream, or something that’s going to tell me what to do. Well, that’s more left brain hearing. It’s where God interrupts us and just makes it clear this is what’s going on.

Most of the time I think that our listening is right brain. So just like right now you and I can look into each other’s eyes, and then we can read each other’s body language. And I can kind of tell it’s like, it’s time to wrap up right now. But also this is good. I don’t want to cut it off. There’s a lot you can read just from body language, right? And I’m looking at this like most of our communication is nonverbal.

Well, I would call the right brain listening that “nonverbal communication” with God. We don’t hear something per se, but we know what it is God wants us to do. And there’s more of a sense of knowing or a sense of peace that I’m on the right track. I just need to keep going where I’m going. And so I would just encourage people that there’s more ways to hear God than just having him interrupt your life, with some sort of a vision or a clear word, or something like that. More of our daily walk with God is that right brain kind of connecting with God. Where we begin to intuit what we sense he’s leading us to do.

[24:00] Stephanie: That’s awesome. I also feel led to just give a plug to Dawn Whitestone’s book, Strategic Business Prayer. It is good for more than just business, so look it up.

[24:12] Marcus: Well, yeah, the Strategic Business Prayer book she wrote first teaches you how to do listening prayer and then it applies it to business. So if you’re just interested in how to do listening prayer, it’s still one of the better resources out there on how to do it.

[24:25] Stephanie: Yeah, very good.

[24:26] Marcus: Very good.

[24:27] Stephanie: Thank you, Dad. And thank you for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends. You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again, we’ll see you back next week.