Living above the Line Who We Are Manuscript
Living above the Line
A Celebration of Who We Are In Christ
Rev Greg Byrd
Faith Temple Baptist Church
Poetry Texas
Living Above the Line - Who Are We
“Our Mind and the Pendulum”
Do you ever feel as though your life is like the old proverbial pendulum; one day one extreme the next the other extreme. Those of us who have two year olds know it is not even day to day but moment by moment swings. Well I have found that the Christian walk is this way for many. On one side of the pendulum we find ourselves living out the thoughts and feelings of the old self, and on the other side our new LIFE IN CHRIST.
We discover that within us, we can be two places: on the one hand against God and the other responding to God. And the question is how. Because it is obvious what living out these old thoughts and feelings will do to us.
Look at Hebrews 4:9, So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.
This is where far too many Christians are; in their works, still doing the old self thing. .. Are You? …Are you still doing for God? Do you think that you do this and that and God will always bless you? Do these things and God will give you nice, warm feelings?
Then you are like I was for way to long. Not knowing union with Christ Jesus. If we have entered into God’s rest we cease from our own works, as God did from His. Look at verse 12, For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, …Now this verse may not speak to you if you do not understand the “of joints and of marrow,” part, unless you a doctor, and what else “and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Let’s look at this, when the Spirit of God spoke to us, through the Word, our spirit caught it. See, our thoughts and intentions are two different things. In one area of our soul are our thoughts and emotions, which we still experience as Christians; in another part of our Soul is another place, our spirit.
We had this mind before we became Christian; we have a new spirit but the same mind. Now I knew that since I was saved my mind was now fixed on God and the intent of my mind was for God. Even as my life continued to peak and valley my intent was on the things of God. But I found that I still had thoughts and feelings that were different from the intent of my mind.
It was when I began to understand this that I came to the conclusion that I was experiencing the reality of spirit. I had a consciousness that made a difference in my life.
Now after years of living life IN CHRIST myself, IN THE Spirit that is, I have come to a conclusion; very few Christians know the difference between their Soul and their spirit. Why do I say this; because so many Christians are confused. They think who they are is who they think and feel they are. They base their reality on thoughts and feelings. But who we are is who we are in spirit.
And the reason this is such a problem is that our thoughts and feelings are much LOUDER than the intentions of our mind. They have not experienced the Living Word of GOD to separate the mind from the spirit. The Living Word of God that the Spirit speaks into our mind is sharp, like a sword, and it divides, making a sharp distinction between mind and spirit. We are not just feelings and thoughts. We are spirit beings. God is the Father of our spirit, John 3:6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Hebrews 12:9 Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?
Our spirit is one with Him, 1 Cor. 6:17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Our spirit lives in union with Him. But that union of spirit is so quiet that it does not cause the same uproar within us that our thoughts and feelings do. If we do not know the nature of spirit, the outburst of our minds can confuse us. Then we begin to think, that must be the real me. Those thoughts and feelings must be the true me.
Then we start thinking we have two natures. We have these thoughts and feelings that we do not like, and our conclusion is that part of us must still be bad.
I have these thoughts and feelings off and on all day long. Don’t you? …Our thoughts and feelings can be all over the place on any given day. So what do we do? We start battling the ones we don’t like, trying to get rid of them. And the harder we try the more power they have over us.
To experience union with Christ, the Holy Spirit has to give us revelation of two absolute truths.
First, we have to have a revelation that we died in Christ that we are dead to sin, dead to the law, and dead to ourselves as our point of reference.
Second, we have to have a revelation on the difference between mind and spirit and how to manage them.
Until these two truths become fixed in our spiritual consciousness, we are never truly going to live out our union. The devil will keep on telling us, the old you is not really dead. What you think and feel is the real you. You should be ashamed to be such a dirty rotten sinner and to have such dirty rotten thoughts.
We have a body, it contains a soul. That soul is to us what air is in the atmosphere. It fills up all our inner being. It contains a mind and a spirit. But our spirit, at least in the Christian is that which is born from above John 3:6, it is our true identity. The condition of our spirit defines who we are to God. The mind is changeable, the spirit is fixed.
For a Christian the spirit is joined to Gods Spirit in Union. It is secure. It is safe. Why because our spirit, once joined in union with God’s Spirit operates in the unseen, eternal realm above the line where things simply are. It does not change, there are no variables. It is in union with God and God does not change!
Most of the time we pay little attention to our spirit. And in a since we can do the same with God. Not because we become complacent, but because we know we can always depend on Him. He is secure, He will not let go, He will never turn loose, we belong to Him, and we are His possession, for whom He gladly gave His life.
Now, the mind, which includes our thoughts and emotions, and our body, which includes our 5 senses, which are our physical aspects; exists only in the seen and temporary realm below the line. Unlike the realm of the spirit, the mind is not unchanging or fixed to anything. It changes every second. Just as soon as a new thought or feeling pops into our head. Anything beyond the union of God’s Spirit and our spirit belongs to the natural order and is external to the spirit reality.
So why not just get rid of the mind. …Because the mind has a purpose. It was designed to communicate with God. God is Spirit. He does not talk, He communicates Spiritually.
But the mind fluctuates between thoughts and feelings we like a lot and thoughts and feelings we don’t like at all. And we do not like these fluctuations. If we do not know spirit all we know are the wild fluctuations in our mind. Most Christians do not know God’s rest, the full grace of God, and how to live out our union, so we try to stop the mind. Because what is happening in our mind is unpleasant and it seems as if God wants us to stop it. We think that our maturity as a Christian is how well we control these fluctuations in our minds. So we try to make the mind concentrate on the things of God.
But that is impossible. Why, because no matter where we concentrate our minds it is still below the line. It is below the place from which Christ flows, because it is not above the line, from our union of our spirit with God’s Spirit.
Oh we might find a way to concentrate our minds on good, but good might not be God. Let me put it in Old Testament language. It is like trying to still eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, when we have been given the Tree of Life, which is Christ Jesus. We are trying to eat from the good side of that tree, trying to always maintain good thoughts, and good feelings, and most certainly good behavior.
But let me tell you. Whether you are eating from the good or the bad side of that tree, your still eating from the wrong tree. You are still operating out of your own effort, which no way no how, will it ever produce God’s LIFE. Self effort, all of it originates from below the line, not from the union of our spirit with God’s Spirit. And it does not flow from the life of Christ. It is below the line, from our mind, operating independently and trying to make us, “good” Christians.
Hear me, as long as your point of reference is your own mind, then your point of reference is still you. You will vacillate between thinking and feeling good and thinking and feeling bad. You are trying to stop that vacillation, because you think God wants you to stop it. That He wants you to stop all those bad feelings and thoughts. So we try with all our might to make them all good.
But you are never going to make it stop, because… it was God that put it into motion. God created us with a mind on purpose. He wanted us to be able to be capable that is, of feeling and thinking things that ARE contrary to spiritual reality. WHY? Because that is the only way you can learn to live by faith out of who you really are and who He really is, rather than by what things appear to be. God uses the operation of the mind to push us into life in the spirit, above the line where we are joined to Him.
And IM not saying that where our minds are focused is irrelevant; what IM referring to is the endless stream of thoughts and feelings that come across our minds and emotions, that when they appear have so much control over us.
God put our humanity into motion with His own eternal purposes in mind, making it capable of all kinds of feelings and thoughts. So, if we try and stop it, we are doomed to failure. So how are we going to stop what God started?.. We can’t. But we have the delusion that we can. We call it crucifying the self. And some of us are pretty good at it we go days, weeks, months controlling our minds. We get the whole thought and feeling process under control, or …we take a pill and mellow out, or drink and get drunk, or drug and get high. We think yes, I learned the secret. Just about that time we turn around and wham, here comes a thought or emotion and pow, it kicks us right in the behind. And then we feel guilty all over again.
Why? Because our point of reference is still our self, our mind, rather than Christ In Us. We are trying to stop something about which God is saying, It is Okay! It is Okay, I made you that way. You are not supposed to get that stopped. We are going to try and stop these thoughts and emotions until we see that it is what God meant to happen. Once we can see that God has put it into operation we will not have to feel condemned anymore.
But as long as our own humanity is our point of reference, we do not know we died and we can not know union with Christ. We simply can not know it. Oh, we can talk about it, read Bible verses about it. But we will never have experiential knowledge of it.
But when we experience the reality of Union with Christ, we are no longer a mind-based person. We are no longer a person who sees themselves as their point of reference. We have moved to another place. We have moved above the line.
Then and only then will we begin to see our minds activity not as a negative in our life, but as a positive. When our mind isn’t our point of reference anymore, but rather our spirit, joined with God’s Spirit, then our attention is taken off our mind and directed toward Him. When we see who we really are in Christ, then we can say, “This pendulum is necessary in God’s scheme of things, because how can the principle of faith operate in me without fluctuations in my mind? How can faith operate in me if I can not be tempted to have un-belief?
The deepest level of our being is the level where we and God are one. As we begin to live from there, we are no longer validating either God or our self from our mind. So our mind ceases to be a real problem area for us. As long as you are living below the line your mind and body will be problem areas for you. You will validate God when you’re well and not sick. You will validate God when your mind activity is good. But when you are living from spirit, you will not have to validate God from your mind or body. You validate God from your spirit.
Now the Spirit of God, in union with our spirit, doesn’t make any noise. What makes noise are our minds; our feelings and our thoughts. I wish I could get them to be quite. Don’t you? But we can’t, because we are not meant to. We are meant, we are built to live in the midst of noise. But we live from, we draw our power from a place of stillness, and quietness, where all simply is, where we know we know. When God has revealed to us true spirit union, we make our decisions from Him, and they are based on an inner knowing. No one else may see or understand that knowing, but we still know it.
And the Spirit of God is never going to make a bunch of noise in your life. He says to us, you better know Me, or you will miss Me. Because My starting point is not going to be what you feel. My starting point is not going to be what you know. That does not mean I will not come through your thoughts or emotions, but that is not where I begin. I begin in your spirit. I am One with your spirit.
And our spirit does not know by analysis but by revelation. We know God by revelation. By revelation we know that we and God are one. By revelation we know that He uses the below the line activates of our life to express His life by means our life. Once we know that, the pendulum of our minds are no longer a source of self-condemnation. What used to be a problem area for us becomes the area of God’s activity, to bring us into a life of faith. Then others see the LIFE of God coming through us.
Let me give you another Old Testament Illustration. Remember old Elijah, when he killed all of Queen Jezebel’s prophets. She got mad and wanted to kill him so he ran of to hide in a cave. He said God you better help me, IM all you got left.
Fear is an emotion of the mind. Like so many of us Elijah was motivated by his mind activity. He was living just like any other person, living out of the deepest thing he understood about himself, which were his own thoughts and feelings. Jezebel threatened him, he ran, and it was the only decision he could make, based on the level within him at which he was functioning. We can not blame him, its what most Christians do. But if Elijah had been operating at the deepest level of himself, the spirit level, he would not have needed the lesson God was about to give him.
In the cave God asked what are you doing here. Elijah answered the queen is going to kill me. God said are you all I have left, poor me, well I will tell you something Elijah there are 7000 just like you.
God said, Elijah go over to the mouth of the cave and IM going to perform a little outdoor drama for you, IM going to pass by you. God passed by in the form of an earthquake, a mighty wind, and fire, all great destructive forces. And Elijah was overwhelmed by all three of these experiences. Just like our feelings and thoughts overwhelm us. Isn’t that what your mind does. The mind makes loud noises and it gets you attention. It diverts you. And if you think that is the deepest thing in you, you will live according to it.
There is a great paradox in the drama that God staged for Elijah, however. God had said, IM going to pass by you, but after every one of these events the Bible says, But God was not in it. Three times God said, I’m going to pass by you, but God was not in it.
Why did God stage this great drama with such powerful forces, only to be absent from them? What the Lord was saying to Elijah was, everything in your life is ultimately of ME, Elijah. I have set the whole thing in motion and it is me that put the pendulum in motion. Nothing happens that I AM not active in, including you feelings and thoughts. I take the messes that you and the devil make in your life and change them into discipline or some other blessing. So I AM part of these outer things in your life, including your minds fluctuations. But I AM not in them, not in the deepest sense. I use them, but they are not Me. They are not the deepest understanding of ME you can have. You are going to completely miss Me Elijah, if that is the deepest you can go.
What this means is you don’t have to grab hold of that pendulum and stop it. We do not have to say I should not have this feeling, or I should not have this thought. We do not have to play the game anymore. We do not have to go around denying us. We can accept the minds fluctuations as something God is involved in and that God intends. BUT, God says, If you judge reality by what is happening at the mind level, what you see and think and feel, you are going to completely miss ME.
The Bible says Elijah heard the sound of a low whisper. He immediately knew he was in the presence of God, and took his cloak and put it over his face. God was saying, this is how I talk Elijah. I do not talk amongst all that noise in your life. I speak to your spirit in silence. That low whisper was not making any noise compared to the great disturbances. But in the stillness, in the silence, Elijah knew immediately he was in the presence of God. That is how it is my friends when spirit meets Spirit.
May Gods Holy Spirit show us the difference between the noise of our minds and the quietness our spirit. May He show us what it means to know spirit, so we are not confused and controlled by our feelings and our thoughts, but instead live in the rest that He promised us?