My grandpa once said that he could remember a time in the Kentucky mountains when their were no roads–only train tracks and dirt paths. I can remember walking with him up to a mountain spring off of the road and gathering fresh water. He is a true survivalist and is able to live completely on his own resourcefulness out in the woods. He is probably one of the cleverest and most naturally intelligent people I know.
In 2004, I went to study at Oxford University in Great Britain. I can remember looking with amazement at signs written in Latin above the doors. I was surrounded by world-famous Oxford dons and students dressed in tuxedos–people popping champagne bottles and croquet out on the lawn.
I grew up thinking people were defined by the world they came from. And–for a long time– I felt like the world that I was from disqualified me from being a true Christian. I had seen and lived through darkness–and it was too much.
Last year I realized that it’s not about living in the right place or being around the right people as much as allowing the Spirit of God to overtake you and change the way you think. God desires to give us a new mind that isn’t confined by anything in our past.
But what if there’s more beyond that? What if we discovered that we could touch the spiritual world of God here and now? What if we could receive His love tangibly? How would we deal with it if His world collided with ours suddenly, or even violently? Would we be comfortable with a God that showed up like he did for Jesus–where the sick got healed?
No matter how you slice it, Jesus challenges us not to live from the physical world around us, but rather from the spiritual. When the multitude of 5,000 was hungry and there wasn’t anything to eat, the disciples were pretty much at a dead end–“We have no food,” they said. But it wasn’t so for Jesus: He knew that He had full access to the Father. Later, when he told them to “Beware the yeast of the Pharisees,” the disciples thought that He was talking about physical bread, and they were confused. Their minds were trained to the physical, not the spiritual. Why was Jesus able to multiply food, and why did he say we could do all of the same stuff he did?
The following came from a journal:
John 12: 38 – “Even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not believe in Him. This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the prophet: “Lord, who has believed our message? To whom has the saving power of the Lord been revealed?”
When God reveals Himself to us, it unlocks our potential to live in the spiritual and we gain power over all physical circumstances. We are no longer depressed, no longer downtrodden by events in our lives, suddenly able to love one another. Why? Because the spiritual world becomes stronger and realer than the physical. Eventually, as the spiritual grows stronger and stronger in us, it begins to manifest itself physically. This is ‘saving power’ of God. We call these events miracles. And they are within reach for anyone who believes. (Jn 14:12)
