15: Maturity & Walking in the Spirit

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 3, episode 15. Today we are continuing our conversation about listening to the Holy Spirit.

Hello, Father.

[00:08] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:10] Stephanie: Good to be with you.

[00:11] Marcus: It’s good to be back and relatively healthy.

[00:14] Stephanie: Yes, we’re both a little bit recovering right now from being sick.

[00:18] Marcus: Yeah, it’s that time of year. Hit us both.

[00:22] Stephanie: But hey, we’re well enough to be here and that is a blessing. Thank you, Lord.

Today we’re gonna keep moving down the funnel. Last week we talked about a theology of the Holy Spirit. And this week I want to talk more about, what does it look like to walk in the Spirit? Is this a one size fits all kind of solution here, or could it look different for different people? Spoiler – it does! And also next week we’ll get into some discernment and things like that.

So this week, yeah, excited to dig in. You said that the Christian life can be summed up as walking in the Spirit. What does that mean to you?

[01:14] Marcus: Well, I start with John 15:1 and the idea that Jesus is the vine, we’re the branches, Father’s the gardener, and that the core analogy, if you will, is this idea of abiding in Christ, and that apart from abiding in Christ, you can’t do anything. And so that feels like a pretty strong statement for abiding in Christ is the key to the Christian life.

Well, walking in the Spirit, abiding in Christ are essentially the same thing. And so the idea is that the life of the Spirit represents that life of the vine that has to flow into us. And so whether it’s abiding in Christ or whether it’s walking in the Spirit, the result is the same. And that is, there is a spiritual relationship happening that is allowing the life of the Spirit to flow in and through me so that God’s fruit can be created. That’s kind of the foundation of it.

[02:09] Stephanie: Oh, good. I know Paul used to drive you crazy with this.

[02:13] Marcus: Yes, I know. I used to say all the time that I would look up passages on walking in the Spirit and Paul, kind of assuming he would then go on to explain, “Well, this is what it is and this is what it looks like.” And no, it was just a statement, “So I say, walk in the Spirit.” And I’m like, “Like everybody knows what that is, Paul? What are we talking about here?”

Especially early on, that really was frustrating to me. And I thought, “Well, how do you explain what walking in the Spirit is? What does that mean?” Especially as there got to be more and more debates about it because there were some people who were like, “Well, walking in the spirit means you speak in tongues”

And other people like, “Well, walking in the spirit means that you’re operating in signs and wonders.”

And other people were like, “Well, walking in the spirit means you just have a close, intimate walk with God.” And, you know, what’s he talking about? And what assumptions is he making when he writes about this? And so it was all confusing to me because I had heard it explained a lot of different ways.

[03:17] Stephanie: So how did it start clicking together for you?

[03:21] Marcus: I heard this guy in the early 90s named Bill Gillum. And in the early 90s, he was already older in that he was still wearing the classic 70s jumpsuit with the afro hairstyle, and it was kind of interesting. But he was funny and he was insightful.

He was telling his story of how he went from being an incredibly sarcastic person who just destroyed his wife verbally and emotionally in their marriage, usually in the name of the Bible and how God got a hold of him and turned his life around, largely through teaching him what it looked like to walk in the spirit. This is the first person I heard explain it in a way that I could connect to and go, “Okay, that makes sense to me.”

I’ll tell you one story that kind of summed it up for me. He calls it the closet door story. The idea is, his wife and he would have a fight over closet doors. Similar to, like, making the bed. He’d say, “Why make your bed? You’re just going to get back into it later. But for some reason, she likes the bed made. Same reason,” he’s like, “Just leave the closet door open. It’s more efficient. You get in and out. For some reason, she likes the closet doors closed.”

So there they are, one spring, he goes to the closet, opens the door, gets on his spring coat, leaves the room with the closet door open. As he’s walking down the hall, he has this thought in his head. It’s almost like a voice, and it just says,  “The door.” And at first he’s like, ah, you know, ignore that. But then he hears it again, “The door.” And at that moment he realized, this must be the Holy Spirit.

And his rationale went something like this. He goes, “Let’s face it, it’s not the power of sin tempting me to go back and close the closet door for my wife,” he said at that moment, he was at what he called a mini cross moment in his life. That is, “I had to decide, am I going to live a crucified life right now or not? Because I’m pretty sure I know what God wants me to do. The Holy Spirit said ‘the door’ pretty clear. He wants me to go close the door.”

But he was in this full on battle in the hallway because he had grown up in a home where he had a dominating mother, and he had made a vow that he was never going to let a woman dominate him.

And so giving in on something as simple as closing doors felt like she won and he lost so this was a much bigger event than it sounded like. And he’s having a fight with God over, “No, I don’t want to go close the closet door. That means she wins. And after all, doesn’t the Bible say, I’m the head of the home?”

And so you’re going back and forth, and this raises an interesting question: sometimes you can actually have competing biblical principles guiding you on what you ought to be doing in a particular situation. And if you don’t know how to recognize the Holy Spirit’s voice and the Holy Spirit’s prompting, you’re not always sure which biblical principle to apply. And so in this case, he finally surrendered. He said, “Fine, I will surrender to you and I will go close the closet door.” And I’m thinking that was a huge victory for him.

It made sense for me because it was like, okay, this walk of the Spirit idea is that I need to learn to pay attention to the idea that not every thought that enters my head is mine. Some thoughts are coming from the devil, and some thoughts are coming from the Holy Spirit, some are just my own. But if a thought is from the Holy Spirit and I do what that thought is leading me to do, it’s going to produce the fruit of the Spirit.

And so by Bill listening to “the door” in his head, it led to love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and all these things that are – and even self control – which are all fruit of the spirit. And so that was really, I think, the beginning for me of understanding and getting it. Like, okay, it’s thoughts in my head that I’m paying attention to and particularly learning to discern between the thoughts in my head that lead to the fruit of the Spirit and the ones that don’t.

[07:43] Stephanie: Hmm. It’s a really concrete example. I love it.  I’m curious. Back in our Exodus series, and our talking about Moses and Joshua and all that, we talked about your acrostic SLOW, and this model for walking with the Spirit and listening to the Spirit. When did you start developing that?

[08:09] Marcus: In the early 2000s, I was still looking for a simple way to explain what walking in the Spirit was and I came across the story of Joshua. I was teaching through the book of Joshua and one of the things that stood out was that every time that Joshua sought the Lord, the Lord spoke to him, he was able to listen to what God wanted, and then he could obey and do things God’s way. But the two times that Joshua got himself in trouble, both with Achan in that event, and with the Gibeonites who deceived him into thinking they were from a distant country, in both cases, what he did not do was he did not stop and seek the Lord to listen to what he was supposed to do and those were the two times he got in trouble.

It sort of jumped out at me: Stop, Listen, or Seek and Listen, then Obey and Watch what God does, and realized that that’s the pattern of Joshua. And so then I started looking through the rest of scripture and realizing that’s a pretty good pattern. It helps that it spells SLOW, because I can remember it.

[09:24] Stephanie: Slow down.

[09:25] Marcus: Yes, slow down. Seek the Lord. Stop what you’re doing. Seek the Lord. Listen to his voice. It was also reinforced to me by a pastor who had a reputation for hearing from God. I asked him one time, I said, “What do you mean when you say you hear God’s voice? Because I’m not sure I’ve ever heard God’s voice.”

I was still in my early 30s at this point, and my idea of walking in the Spirit growing up was just do your best to be good.  He was the first one to actually use the term stop and listen. Citing 1 Corinthians 10:13, he said, “The next time that you’re tempted, there will be a still small voice showing you the way of escape. That’s the Holy Spirit. Train yourself to listen to that voice.”

And that led to the idea of, next time you’re tempted, stop and listen, and then obey what you’re hearing and watch what happens. And so all of those things factored together developed into, SLOW seems to be God’s way of helping us learn what it means to walk in the Spirit.

[10:33] Stephanie: Yes, it’s super practical. I love we’ve got little keychains for  Trailblazers and such have that saying, SLOW, on it. It’s just a really great reminder every day.

[10:47] Marcus: And let me say too, the other thing I learned from Bill Gillum was that walking in the Spirit is not a substitute for perfectionism. He puts it this way,  “You can cook the eggs in the flesh or cook the eggs in the Spirit. Either way, you might burn the eggs. You’re following the Holy Spirit’s leading to cook the eggs doesn’t mean you aren’t going to burn them now and then because this is not a recipe for never making a mistake. It’s not a recipe for never getting anything wrong.”

And I point that out because people can get perfectionistic about listening to God and they can start to feel fear, like, “If I don’t get this right, if I don’t do this perfectly, God’s going to be mad at me. And now I’ve got one more burden to carry in my life, that is that if I don’t listen to God perfectly, and hear him exactly right, and execute this exactly right, there’s just one more thing for him to be upset with me about.”

That’s not what walking in the Spirit’s about.

[11:47] Stephanie: Or on the flip side of it, being so sure that you heard that it justifies things.

[11:54] Marcus: You can flip it on the other way too, and that is, that you get so confident that what you’re hearing is that it now is on par with Scripture, and that is not okay either. You don’t want to get to the point where you say, “I am so confident in what I’m hearing from God, I’ll put it up there against what the Bible says.” That’s, that’s going to a level that I don’t think God ever intended.

[12:16] Stephanie: But we just want walking with God as a way of syncing our thoughts with God, listening to the Spirit, and a lot of what we’re putting our attention on here in terms of listening to the Spirit is in syncing our thoughts with God. And again, we’re going to get more into discernment next episode.

I wanted us to look at maturity and listening to the Spirit, and maturity can be in terms of emotional maturity, it can also be in terms of experience. You know, just like straight up, “Hey, I’m a new Christian. I’ve never done this before.”

Could you kind of walk us through so many solutions? It’s not a one size fits all solution.

[13:06] Marcus: Yes, there are many things that could be said here. For example, I was at a church one time where I did a presentation and afterwards they did an altar call. I got to pray with a young lady to receive Christ. As she’s praying through the sinner’s prayer, basically to receive Jesus, I felt prompted to have her go ahead and ask Jesus, “Is there anything in my life you would like to heal right now? Is there anybody I need to forgive?”

And sure enough, God brought to her mind somebody she needed to forgive. She chose to forgive that person. We invited Jesus to heal a memory there. Jesus showed up in the memory and healed it. So in her same conversion prayer, she started practicing listening prayer right there as she’s doing her conversion prayer, which I thought was important because it helped to set the idea that this is her actual relationship. God is somebody that you can talk to about everything that’s going on.

And so you could say even at the infant level, she was going through that, but because she was an infant, I was spoon feeding her what to do. I was like, “Okay, repeat after me, just ask God, is there a memory that I have, do I have somebody I need to forgive?” And so at the infant level of maturity, somebody has to kind of spoon feed you what you’re doing. At the infant level, there’s two ways that this happens. One is somebody else is just praying for you because you can’t do it, or two, they are spoon feeding you what to do and they’re just like, repeat after me kind of praying. That’s perfectly legitimate. When somebody’s at the infant level and you’re just getting started.

Then you get into the child level and you take it up a notch. Now I have perhaps spoon fed them what to do often enough. I will say, “You run with it and you let me know when you get stuck and I’ll be here to help you if you need a little guidance.” And now they’re starting to do it for themselves with a little bit of coaching or a little bit of guidance along the way.

And then when you get to the adult level, you are routinely doing this for yourself. You have a confidence now that you can practice listening prayer on your own with God and hear from Him. You get to the parent level and now you’re the one who is helping a new person, somebody new, learn what they should pray, how to walk through the process and what that needs to do. That’s now at a parent level.

Then you get to the elder level, and I think at that level you’re listening just for deeper things from God. That is, he’s talking to you about things that maybe aren’t just about you or just about the situation you’re in, but he’s talking about other things. I know Dawn Whitestone, who’s the director of School of Ministry, has a wonderful breakdown of some of the differences here. She talks about Level 5 listening in this sense of something that happens at the elder level where God just starts talking to you about something you don’t even know about.

And we have stories of people like this who wake up in the middle of the night and God’s just talking to them about something happening on the other side of the world and going, “I need you to pray into this right now.” And they find out later that as they prayed into this thing they didn’t even know they should be praying about, God used that prayer to unlock some door for somebody on the other side of the world.

And later on they would find out about it. So again, you’re looking at maturity and where you saw that’s not an infant level prayer. That’s not something you expect children to be doing in their prayer life. But that is something that pops up more and more as we grow in the maturity of the way that we pray.

[16:59] Stephanie: Dawn’s book is called Strategic Business Prayer. It’s really good. And she walks through a whole lot of what she sees as five levels of prayer and the maturity levels as well. So highly recommended.

So, Father, what about just briefly, we could go into this a long time, but what about people in Breakthrough you call them the spiritual NICU babies?

[17:37] Marcus: Yeah, just realizing my ignorance. I’ve actually had a baby in natal intensive care and I can’t remember if it’s Niku or NICU or how you pronounce that. Anyway, yes, there are people who have been so traumatized spiritually that you can’t just treat them like they’re more mature than they are. In fact, what happens is if I’ve been through a lot of spiritual trauma, the Bible can be booby trapped for me. And so I need not only somebody to spoon feed me through things, but I need somebody to defuse what I’m going through for me.

For example, I met with people before who were abused by their fathers. Could not use the word father to talk in their prayer with God. And so like Alaine Pakkala taught us well, try good shepherd. Because, she said, relatively few people have been abused by shepherds. So she’s like, try that. And said, let’s just pray, Good Shepherd, I ask you to this or ask you to that.

And so I would look at that as there are some people who need a level of repair that is even lower than the normal maturity level that they would be at in other areas. But because of abuse and because of trauma, you have to help them with things that you otherwise normally wouldn’t expect to have to help them with, but it’s because it’s trauma based.

[19:09] Stephanie: So can you give us some practical examples? Let’s say a pastor’s listening to this right now and it’s like, “Okay, how do I lead a congregation that’s full of a whole big mix of all these kinds of these levels?” What does it look like to have this maturity level appropriate walking in the spirit?

[19:34] Marcus: So we talk about five levels based on the five levels of maturity that do look different. And so what I found is that a lot of discipleship programs are either really good with infants but not so good with adults, or they’re really good with adults but not so good with infants. And, you know, everything in between. And so what pastors, I think, need to kind of be aware of what is being designed for who.

When you teach on prayer, you can’t always just do a one size fits all statement on prayer, say, “Well, I’m going to teach them SLOW. And that is seek, listen, obey and watch. And I’m done.” Because seeking God and listening to God isn’t going at the infant level. You don’t want to do it by yourself. You want somebody else doing this with you. You want somebody else walking you through it. That’s the infant stage.

At the child stage, you’re beginning to do it for yourself, but you’ve still got somebody else actively involved in this to make sure that you are doing this correctly and that you’re not getting into the weeds. And then you get to the adult level. And so some of this is just the way you teach it and just the way that you explain it.

That is, when you’re first starting off, you need more help, then along the way you get practice, which is kind of what Hebrews is talking about when it says through practice we grow in holiness and we grow in our sanctification. And this is part of it. And that doesn’t just mean individual practice. That means I’ve had people helping me along the way.

Then I transitioned from, I need people helping me to I can have confidence doing this on my own, toward I’m now the one helping people develop the skill. And it’s at that point I’m transitioning into a parent level. And so that’s kind of just something we gotta keep in mind as we’re teaching it and not make the assumption that everybody just needs the model.

[21:35] Stephanie: Well, if you are reading along with us in the book Breakthrough, we’re in chapter nine.

And I also wanted to take a brief moment to highlight, coming up in mid March, March 15th, we have. Oh, no. Yes. Beware of the Ides of March. Yeah. Oh, derailed. So March 15th is our online marriage conference, and my own father here is going to be presenting, and it is a name your own price online event. So you are welcome to come and bring friends and maybe host a watch party at your church or something.

[22:26] Marcus: That’s everything I’ve wanted to tell your mother, but, you know, I need to be like, hey, this is what we’re supposed to do.

[22:32] Stephanie: For those who are concerned, this is where he usually says, “I thought I didn’t have any issues until I got married. And then I realized I need to work on myself.”

[22:46] Marcus: Yes. She’s heard most of this once or twice. One of the things we realized early in our existence as a ministry, we had three core courses that we taught. There was the Foundations of Identity and Spiritual Warfare. There was Advanced Issues related to emotional trauma and things like that. And there was one on marriage and family. We stopped teaching the marriage and family course as a regular part of what we did, but it’s always been part of our DNA to help couples with their marriages and to give them tools to help. And so I joke about this because, obviously, Brenda and I have needed these tools on numerous occasions in our marriage, and we have benefited from them significantly.

So what we’re doing here is looking at two sides of the coin. And the first side of the coin is how do I repair these things that are broken in the marriage? And the other side of the coin is how do I build the positives in that are going to help me live with more joy in this marriage? And so the second part is from the book the Four Habits of Joy Filled Marriages. And the first part of it comes from the book The Spirit-Filled Home. And so this is going to be an overview of those and the lessons that come from them.

[24:08] Stephanie: Awesome. Looking forward to it. And I am single.

Final thoughts on this episode?

[24:19] Marcus: You know, walking in the Spirit really is kind of a good summary of what this is all about. Whenever you’re talking about the Spirit, you’re talking about the unseen realm a little bit and so it’s why it’s such a good practice to stay anchored in Scripture as you’re going through all of this. Because when you’re dealing with the unseen constantly, it’s important to have that visible foundation and have the concreteness of the scripture. That’s why it says in Timothy that the Bible is useful for rebuking and correcting. Because the idea here is that I can get off if I’m just listening to the voices in my own head and that’s all I’m listening to all the time.

I have to have some things to bring me back, which means I need other people and I need the Scriptures and I need those things on a regular basis to help me stay in touch with, “Okay. Yeah. These really are thoughts from the Holy Spirit that I need to be listening to.”

[25:24] Stephanie: Very good.

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