The Final Evolution For Humanity

As we have discussed a number of times, humans are spirit, soul and body (1 Thessalonians 5:23).  Your spirit is the real you, the eternal you.  It can’t be seen but it is your true life.  Your spirit lives in a body, your flesh, and this flesh is temporal and will die.  Finally, you have a soul.  Your soul is your mind, will and emotions.  Your soul fundamentally emanates from your brain, but it also creates the bridge between your spirit and your flesh. 

Many people only think about their flesh and their soul (again, mind, will and emotions).  They don’t think we have any eternal spiritual reality, or they don’t worry about it very much. However, one of the master keys to the highest expression of the human existence, indeed, the highest expression of your personal human experience, is in embracing your spiritual reality. 

Last time I talked about our new reality in Christ, and I highly encourage you to listen to that podcast or read that post.  Understanding how God remakes us after we receive Christ, and our union with God, is vital to growing and expanding for God in this life.  Here below are links to that last teaching.

blog post - http://www.exploitsforgod.com/2021/05/your-reality.html

podcast - https://soundcloud.com/byronhowellministries/your-new-reality

Your spirit is a truly wonderful, amazing creation.  Your spirit, if you are a Christian, was born from God directly.  Your spirit is righteous with God’s righteousness.  Your spirit is bonded to, and united with, God’s Spirit.  Out of that union you have access to all of God’s wisdom and all of God’s power.  Furthermore, you have received the blessing, and you are blessed with every blessing God has.  You, my Christian brother or sister, are totally and completely empowered to succeed in every area of this life.  This is your reality now.

Another interesting point is that most of what I’m saying here is actually taught in the modern Christian church.  Churches have classes about your identity in Christ.  There are lots of books on the new birth and what happens when we get saved.  There are many Christians that have a basic understanding in this area.  Maybe you hadn’t heard a lot of this before my last teaching.  That’s ok too.  What’s important is that you study those verses for yourself and get a basic understanding of your new reality. 

When you first hear teachings like this, a number of wonderful things happen.  First of all, they open your mind to your new realities and identity.  Second, even if only on some very basic level, you start considering what life would be like if you allowed all of those truths to dictate your physical life.  And I think, at least the first time we hear these truths, the vast majority of us think the same things.  We either think, if all this is true, shouldn’t my life be different?  Or we might rather think, with this new reality, I can have a very different life.  Both of those thoughts are good and fine and accurate.

If you truly considered your spiritual reality in everything you do, if you lived from that place, what would your life be like?  What would your job be like?  What would your home life be like?  You would start succeeding financially and getting people saved at work.  You would come into a greater place of unity and love with your spouse, creating a loving home beginning to work together for God’s Kingdom.  You would have solid friendships of integrity, love and respect, where your spiritual reality is also a part of the friendship, and you support each other for the Kingdom.  You would go through life operating from the Kingdom of God, having adventures for God and feeling harmony with yourself and what God puts into your life. 

I would like to briefly mention that I have other blog posts and podcasts on lots of the other ideas I’m mentioning today, including the idea of having adventures with God.  If these points are jumping out to you, please check out our other posts as I know you will get blessed.  Really I think that in many ways we have been building to what we are discussing today.

Here is a question that, honestly, I have been asking myself for probably 15 years.  What if we allowed our Christian reality to influence every aspect of our lives?  I know that some of you do that in various ways.  On one level most devout Christians allow their spirituality to influence their integrity and truthfulness, and that’s great.  Many Christians even follow their spiritual reality into certain practices like church service, helping others, Bible reading, and other Christian activities.  Those are part of what I am talking about today, but not all of it. 

Today I’m talking about the final frontier of the human experience, the human reality that we can have in this life.  Just so we are clear, I’m not talking about the final frontier of humanity after the return of Christ, that’s another matter entirely.  But another question I ask myself is how far can we go now?  What can life look like now?  When we consider all that God has done for us and all that happens to us when we get born again, how should we be living now?  What if we take it all the way?

If you have listened to me over the past few months, and again you can always go back, you would understand that point pretty well.  God has an amazing life planned for us.  God has blessings for us, relationships, finances, situations, love, you name it.  He has woven together an amazing tapestry of reality with each of us specifically in mind, and at any time we can step into His awesome plan for our lives.  It’s highly spiritual.  It’s not automatic.  It will take effort.  But God has only good things for us.  We know we can trust Him.  We know it’s the right thing to do.  So, understanding these things as we do, I ask myself this question, what if we take it all the way.

The final frontier of our existence, the greatest expression of the human life, is a complete integration of your natural and spiritual realities.  In this moment, you have both natural realities and spiritual realities.  I have taught you about your spiritual realities, if you are a Christian.  Your natural realities are what they are.  There is probably some overlap in some areas, you go to church, you pray, you read your Bible.  But there might be a wide chasm between natural and spiritual in other areas.  Perhaps you struggle in your health, in your finances, in your relationships.  Perhaps you don’t go through life with Kingdom of God purpose and good works fueling your excitement and fulfillment.  But what if we completely integrated our spiritual reality into our daily life, into our natural reality?  What would happen?

In fact, our natural and spiritual realities were never meant to be separated.  They were never meant to be two separate subjects.  Humans were always meant to have completely unified natural and spiritual realities, creating one life where our spiritual reality dictated and guided our lives to such a degree that we wouldn’t even think in these terms.  Our entire existence would flow out of our spiritual reality.  That’s where we must go.

I touched on these ideas before in my teachings on inner peace.  In those teachings I was really dealing with having agreement between your spirit, soul and body.  When you bring your spirit, soul and body into alignment you are really positioned to succeed in every area of life and do all that God wants you to do.  However, today I’m talking about a different but related subject, the complete integration of your natural and spiritual realities.

We don’t know what Adam and Eve looked like physically, but they had a natural reality.  In Genesis chapters 1 and 2 we see Adam was formed from dust and then Eve was formed from Adam’s rib.  They had a job of keeping the garden and ruling the world.  They had to eat and they were supposed to have children.  They had a natural, physical reality.  But, at that time before the fall, they were also spiritually alive and spiritually perfect just like Christians are.  They had perfect fellowship with God, they were filled with God’s Spirit, and they had God’s blessings as we do.  They were completely unified, spirit and flesh. 

When Adam sinned, Adam died spiritually.  Adam and Eve, in the great fall, immediately experienced a complete spiritual death, and a tremendous inner rift between their natural and spiritual realities.  Notice that after the fall they immediately perceive they are naked.  Genesis 2:25 tells us they were always naked, it just didn’t bother them.  But after the fall their entire perception of their physical reality immediately changed.  And they immediately shifted their focus to their new perception of their natural reality.  After the fall they may have been physically alive, but they were spiritually dead, and they were cut off from the Holy Spirit and true spiritual access to God.  This is now how every human being is born because of original sin.

So before we move on let me make a quick point, while today I say we are talking about the next evolution for humanity, really this evolution is a return to God’s original intentions for humanity.  This return is possible now because of our new spiritual reality in Christ.  We are going back to the Garden, so to speak.  That is actually God’s desire for every area of our lives, by the way, back to His original plans for humanity.  What I’m talking about today is the kind of life God always intended for humans.  It was lost in the fall.  We see a number of Biblical figures living this way, or at least living this way to a significant degree.  And now we can understand how our spiritual reality is just as real as our physical reality.  God wants us to simultaneously live in both, as the spiritually alive children of His Kingdom.  Now we are truly alive.  But now we must allow our spiritual reality to take control.

Now to get a picture of an integrated natural and spiritual reality it’s difficult to look at Adam and Eve, because we really don’t get a lot of details from their life.  However, by looking at Jesus, we see another human with completely integrated natural and spiritual realities.  We also see a human allowing His spiritual reality to dominate His entire existence.

Let me briefly point out that Jesus Christ was and is fully God at all times.  He also was and is fully man at all times, or at least from the moment of His being placed into Mary by the Holy Spirit.  I’m not sure but it doesn’t matter for this discussion.  My point here is that every single thing Jesus did, we can do.  Every single way that Jesus lived, we can live.  When Jesus walked the earth, He did so without any aspect of His Divinity that we, as born again Christians, don’t have.  He laid all of that down.  When we see Jesus do miracles, we can do those miracles (John 14:12).  When we see Jesus communicate with God, we can communicate with God.  We have identical access to God, God’s wisdom, and God’s power (John 14:17, Colossians 2:3, Acts 1:8).  This is true for a lot of reasons, but primarily it’s true because our entire relationship with God is through Jesus Christ.  In Christ, we have access to the same life that Jesus lives, as a human. 

Now we could say a lot more on that and it is the subject of much debate, but just take my word for it today.  When you study Jesus’ life in the Bible, you should study it as though you are learning how to live.  We can live exactly as Jesus lived on the earth, in virtually all respects.  Yes, you are studying the life of your Lord, Savior and King.  But you are also seeing a spiritual life modeled for you. 

There are some aspects of this that are modified a little bit in the Word of God and I want to mention those just to keep us clear.  Jesus became sick and was beaten so we can be healed.  Jesus was made poor so we can be rich.  Jesus died for our sins so we can live.  These aspects of Jesus’ life, the really negative ones, He did for us.  He did these for us so we can live in the full manifestations of the blessings that God always intended for humanity.  Jesus did not redeem us from persecution from people, that is, unfortunately, just part of the deal.  But for today remember that Jesus became sin, became cursed, so that we can be righteous and blessed.  And we should live out of that righteousness and blessing, as we see Jesus live.

I’m digressing a little bit but as I present for you Jesus’ life as the model we must follow, and as the model of the integrated natural and spiritual life, we have to set it up correctly with that underpinning.  Again, we are supposed to emulate the vast majority of Jesus’ life.  You need to study how He lived and then work with the Holy Spirit to follow Him. 

First of all, Jesus was totally aware of God’s presence in His life.  He knew He was God’s child, that God loved Him, and that God had a plan for His life.  This was the foundation and guiding light of His existence on earth.  We should have the same foundation and guiding light for our existence.  Those truths are major parts of your spiritual reality, and they should guide all of your reality.  You are God’s child.  God loves you.  God has a plan for your life.

Jesus was open at all times to the leading of the Holy Spirit.  Where did the Spirit lead Him?  What did the Spirit tell Him to do?  What did the Spirit reveal to Him?  The Holy Spirit led Jesus to people, places, and works.  The Holy Spirit led Him to pray sometimes.  The Holy Spirit guided His life.  The Holy Spirit was the source of Divine power in His life, enabling Jesus to use His faith for miracles in both the spiritual and natural realms. 

You, my friend, can live this way too.  In fact, God wants all of us to live this way.  You probably have a family, a job, a home to care for, and a variety of other physical needs based in your natural reality.  I get that.  I have all the same things. 

We know that Jesus also had a natural life.  He ate.  He slept.  He wore clothes.  For some years He was a carpenter.  He walked around (He didn’t fly or teleport).  In many ways His life looked like our lives, from a natural perspective.  However, Jesus stayed constantly tuned in to God’s Spirit and went through life doing all God’s Spirit led Him to do.  In every situation, we see Jesus living first a spiritual life and second a natural life.  Jesus thought spirit first. 

Jesus understood that His spiritual reality was the higher reality and could dictate His entire natural existence.  Jesus needed food, He used the blessing and divine power to multiply food.  He needed money, He used His faith to get money from a fish.  He encountered people possessed by demons, He took authority over them and cast them out.  Sick people came to Jesus, He healed them. 

What if we had a special pair of glasses that we wore all the time, and those glasses showed us the spiritual reality of every situation.  From that perception, we would know how to operate spiritually.  We could know the right thing to do.  We could do as God wanted no matter what we encountered.  We actually have those glasses the same way Jesus did, for we both have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, whose job it is to guide us through this life according to the perfect will and knowledge of God. 

Jesus never operated from separated spiritual and natural realities.  He only had one reality, a life in fellowship with, and led by, God’s Spirit, and that dictated every aspect of His existence.  We should live in the same way. 

So how can we start living like Jesus lived?  How can we allow our spiritual reality to guide and dictate every aspect of our lives?

First of all, your identification of self, the foundation of your mental life, should be that you God’s child.  You are one of God’s children and, through the presence of the Holy Spirit, God is always with you.  You will never be separated from God’s love.  He loves you as He loves Jesus.  You are righteous with God’s righteousness.  His wisdom and power are completely available to you.  You are open to Him and He is leading you.  With God, all things are possible.  Nothing can stand against you.  In the Name of Jesus, you have complete authority over the Kingdom of Darkness.  You are an ambassador for the Kingdom of God.  We use the term “second nature,” but all of these are actually your nature now.  You just need to get them woven into your constant mental framework.

Now we pray that God will guide us, lead us, show us what to do.  We pray that His will be done, and we ask for His help in doing our part for His will.  We also do our part to keep our minds tuned into His Spirit.  We pray, we worship, we study God’s Word.  We stay tuned into God’s frequency.  We pay attention to God’s Biblical communication methods.  God wants to work through us.  God wants to show His love to the world through us.  God wants to preach the Gospel through us.  He will show us what to do.

Maybe today you were far from these ideas.  It’s not always easy to think this way, especially as we are inundated with all manner of input.  That’s ok.  Start tomorrow.  If this was your mindset, how would you live?

Imagine it’s morning and your child is having a tough day.  Before we get angry, we consult the Holy Spirit.  Maybe your kid just needs a hug.  Maybe you need to indulge him or her for a moment and listen to the problem.  God reminds you about His love for your child.  Certainly discipline is warranted sometimes, but it comes from a place of God’s love now, not your anger or frustration.

Maybe your spouse doesn’t feel great.  Maybe the doctor’s office is the right place, but you don’t think that way first.  First you take authority over the symptom, the cough, the headache, the whatever.  “Cough, GET OFF my spouse in the Name of Jesus.”  “Spouse, BE HEALED in Jesus’ Name.” 

You are starting to think spiritually.  You are starting to open up.  Now you are at work and a coworker is complaining about a personal problem.  You have heard it a thousand times before and this is hurting your productivity on a busy day.  But now you open to the Spirit’s leading.  Have you invited this person to church?  Who cares what they think, just invite them.  Do you think of a Bible verse or two that could help them?  Should you offer to pray for them?  What does the Spirit lead you to do in that moment?  Remember, now that you have submitted to God’s will, He is going to supercharge your productivity and everything will get done. 

Maybe in the evening you pay some bills and you start feeling that old poverty spirit, that old fear of lack coming on you.  You get frustrated.  You see wasted food or other excess and it annoys you.  Maybe even the devil tries to hit you with ideas that you are failing as a good steward with what God has given you.  Do you let it get you down?  Or do you remind yourself what the Bible says.  “God supplies all I need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.”  “That includes everything my spouse needs, everything my children needs, everything.”  “I sow bountifully and I reap bountifully.”  “Satan, in Jesus’ Name I command you away from my finances.” 

Maybe that night as you read the Bible God reminds you of a friend you haven’t spoken to.  Now you are open.  You text and set up a coffee.  At the coffee you encourage your friend in his or her spiritual growth.  You send them a good Christian book for whatever they are dealing with.  Maybe it’s not a friend, but a service opportunity at church, a mission trip you’ve been thinking about.

These are examples, and you probably won’t have all of these things in one day.  But you get the idea.  We have a natural reality.  We all have natural situations.  Adam did, Jesus did, and so do we.  But how do we deal with them?  Are we spirit first, then flesh?  Do we allow the Holy Spirit to guide every area of our lives?  Isn’t that what Jesus did?

What would happen if we yielded control to God’s Spirit in every situation of our lives?   Awesome things would happen, that’s what.  Everything would change.  Everything would become supernatural.  Everything would be touched by the power and love of God.  Your life would come into line with God’s perfect will for your life.  Every moment, every situation, every interaction, they would all start resembling God’s best.  They would all start leading you to that place of spiritual excitement and fulfillment that only God can give you.

My friends, I realize that we are all in different places on this journey with God.  But there is an amazing and supernatural existence that is available to us all.  Jesus came that we might have an abundant life (John 10:10).  The abundant, supernatural life that God has for us is so amazing, so wonderful, it’s far beyond what most of us ever realized, especially as we first accepted Jesus.  It’s out there for you.  It’s uniquely designed just for you, with all that God created you to be.  Every gift, every talent, every aspect of you, perfectly woven together with a lifetime of relationships, works, situations and adventures for you, God, and those God brings into your life to all enjoy together.  All of it brings Him glory, and all of it flows together in those pure and perfect relationship we should have with our Creator, our Heavenly Father.

When you identify by your spiritual reality first and foremost, and when you submit the rest of your existence to the leadings and dictates of your spiritual reality, you are beginning the integration process between your natural and spiritual lives.  You are supposed to walk in the same wisdom, power and purpose that Jesus walked in.  You are an amazing and beautiful creation, birthed directly by God, and empowered to change the world one good work at a time.  Surrender to your spiritual reality.  Surrender to the leading of God’s Spirit.  Give yourself wholly to God and His Word.  You will never regret it.  There you will find your abundant life.  There you will find all you can become and all you could do, not just by yourself, but with God with you every step of the way.