Joy, in the Spirit of God

The Spirit of God changes all concept of ‘life’ because God is Spirit.  It means that life is alive, in that, it is full of life and hope and good, that there is fundamental goodness about life.

It means that we, as we think and feel and know, exist as we truly do, nothing is unreal, and all has meaning.  Worshipping in spirit and in truth, this is joy, just as it is joy that God brings us (to) this reality.  Joy in the Spirit of God is the representation of heaven on earth.

How fundamentally GREAT is God?
This is meant to overwhelm and humble us.
When it does, we KNOW we are alive.
He, in fact, has brought us to life.

When we are tempted to think and feel and know life in all manner of worldly ways, we kick against the goads of the evil of the days (Ephesians 5:16).  Being sucked INTO this world takes us absolutely nowhere in the knowledge of God or in the power of life.  The knowledge of God is fundamental joy, it is power for this life, and it is always a little removed from this life.  And THIS is life—not being overly connected to the evil of the days.

Life is in the Spirit, and once we face this truth, we will no longer be satisfied with languishing where there is no life and no joy.  Life in the Spirit is a life abundant even in the grips of loss that sends us to the hell of grief—indeed, often because of it.  That is, loss.

Who can understand it other 
than the living Lord, Himself?

Our role at the time of trial is to take stock 
of the enormity of what we do not know.

The transcendent thing in the time of trial is we 
get a taste of the enormity of what we do not know.

There is JOY deeper down below what we know.
There is a deeper joy available beyond suffering.

~

DEEPER JOYS HIDDEN IN HEARTACHE

Some things in life need to be experienced to be believed.  Those of us who have been to a higher heaven through the hell of our days have been shown a thing that humbled us to a life welling up to eternal life itself.  Jesus spoke of this to the woman at Jacob’s well (John 4:13-14):

Jesus answered [the woman], 
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 
but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. 
Indeed, the water I give them will become in them 
a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Truly there are greater things to know through experience than many of us presently know. 

By faith, at our depths, 
when nobody can understand, 
there is ONE who understands.

The ONE who understands 
helps us understand and accept
what we cannot understand.

The ONE who understands will take us there.

The key is to remain hopeful that 
the mystery will be unlocked to us.

In time it will... in the meantime 
we express humility accepting 
what we cannot change, 
and this leads to JOY.

The things of life that were meant to bring death, through Jesus’ resurrection, are the very portals to spiritual life on this physical earth.  See, death has been overcome!

Nobody wishes the hell of loss to visit them and pledge its permanency.  Nobody.  God knows that none of us desire that land, just as all of us enter a spiritual battle once we set foot on grief’s shores.

And yet, in the Spirit of God we are given to transcend this locale of death in the life of Jesus, even as we LIVE His death (2 Corinthians 4:10) which only draws us closer still to His eternal life. 

Do you sense the deeper joys about to be bestowed?

Do you FEEL the undergirding of the wind 
beneath your wings as you fly through uncertainty?

These are not mere fancies of the imagination.
These are spiritual actualities possible amid grief.

The Spirit of God, which is joy unrelenting, holds us even as we traverse what seems to be a living hell, for what we are shown that we never knew.

ACCESS TO DEEPER GRACE

Faith amid life experience at the depths 
will take us to deeper graces 
than we have ever been to.

The Spirit takes us deeper into Him who sent the Spirit to the physical lands of creation.  The Spirit and He are ONE.  The Spirit takes us to deeper graces than we can ever contemplate or imagine.

These graces are meant to level us in awe, 
to humble us in the courts of God’s power, 
to compel us to worship with our all.

This amongst it all is our purpose and our life.

Lostness to grief is merely the gateway to a deeper humbler life, which in and of itself takes us to mysteries that leave us utterly disinterested in all manner of petty things we get concerned about in this world.  None of our concerns warrant the distractions they make of themselves.  And yet, an empathy is taught in the process that understands and accepts that these distractions are the temptations of life.

See how the worst of things opens 
the way to the best of things?

And this, of course, is joy.
True, indefatigable joy.

Through the doorway 
into the first rooms of grace 
is but access to a mansion of joy.

When this life ceases to give us the pleasures it once did, we go searching in different places to find what is discoverable.  We stumble across grace.  And in that place of spirit, we find joys we never knew about, and then we begin to comprehend Jesus’s words (John 4:32):

“I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”

Those who have been to this deeper grace know about these spiritual joys.  It does not make them superior.  On the contrary, it simply makes them more alive.  Their joy is the “Joy of the Lord, which [has become their] strength” (Nehemiah 8:10).

Such a strength, such deeper access to grace, 
transcends all weakness in a way 
that the enemy of God cannot contend with.

Those in the Spirit of God cannot be overcome!

This is joy in the Spirit of God.