Heaven's Men are Supernatural
Heavens Men are Supernatural
There’s an old adage that says the game is won and lost in the six inches between your ears. If that is true you crammed more info into your mind this weekend than you could process. You’ve had sensory overload so it’s no wonder that it may have just begun to sink in at the waning moments of mini-camp. You may learn a lot of new words this weekend but if you don’t connect the dots and understand it, to apply it on the football field what you’ve learned will be useless information. It can be the same way in your Christian growth.
Reading the Bible can be sensory overload and it isn’t until God’s spirit helps us connect the dots with what we’ve read, can we then live our life as Christ followers.
We’re going to be reading in 1 Corinthians this morning while you are turning there let me tell you what’s been going on at this particular time in the Bible. There was a dilemma in Corinth. The believers in the church at Corinth were attempting to live out their lives in Christ on man’s standards. The Corinthians’ were split on who to follow as a leader, some said Paul, some Apollos some said, “We simply follow Christ!” That last group was worst because they set to keep Christ all to themselves.
We too as believers today have a tendency to want to “do” and “be” God’s people on our own power. That’s what we want to address today how to be God’s people using God’s word combined with God’s spirit..
God tells us that when we committed our lives to his son Jesus Christ making Him our Lord and Savior he changed our nature. He placed in us His Spirit. We are the redeemed of Christ. When Christ died on a cross and rose again all who believed that he died for their sins, died and rose with Him. You are no longer subject to an eternal death. We are spiritual people living in a physical world.
Before we read I want you to keep this though in mind;
We are Heavens’ Men on Earth
Read, 1 Corinthians 2:12-16. Pray.
In this classic passage Paul explains why we need God’s Spirit to understand and apply God’s revealed word in our lives. Or to put it another way we can’t be supernatural if we are superhuman we need help to be God’s spiritual people.
Paul starts out in v. 14, “... a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God...”
Natural men live by mans’ wisdom
You are the cream of the crop. You have been able to do things that many of your counterparts were not able to do mostly because they didn’t have the skills to achieve what you’ve achieved. That’s why you are here now. Now that thinking may work well for football but there’s a more significant issue going on here. Your journey as a Christ follower cannot be described with the wisdom of the world. Your walk with the Lord is a spiritual journey. If you look at your life only in terms of the natural then you will get natural results. Natural men only require the basic necessities of life, food and shelter. They are sensory lead, when they’re hungry they eat when they’re cold they seek cover. They are subject to their appetites and their passions. They understand science, math, physics and football but the things of God, Paul says, “... are foolishness to him...”
Notice the two main traits of natural men and women. First, they don’t accept spiritual things. Unbelievers will go along with spiritual things only so far. They don’t want God’s truth to control their lives. The natural man will exhaust every conceivable option to maintain control in a disastrous situation before calling you to pray for them. You know how it goes, you have friends who not until they are met with a situation where it seems life is collapsing in on them do you hear them say, “Oh God, help”. You say, “Oh God” where’d that come from.
A second trait of natural men and women is that spiritual things seem like foolishness to them. They can’t grasp the truth of God. That is, they do not have the capacity to interact with spiritual things. They live in a, “I’ll believe it when I see it” world. Unsaved people don’t welcome the things of God because they don’t know what to do with them. They don’t know how to take the things of the Spirit and make sense of them.
Therefore, issues like spiritual death and spiritual truth are not very important to natural folk. Proverbs 14:12 has a sobering truth for the man who lives by man’s wisdom, “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” The natural man can understand science and mathematics and other disciplines, but he can’t understand and he doesn’t appreciate this spiritual reality of death and life.
There’s a story of a man who was at his friends house watching television when a great movie came on. The friend had a small TV so the man said to himself, “hmm, I want to see this movie on my new big-screen television I just bought.
So the man races home and turns on his new big screen television. The man however cannot find the movie he wants to see. He starts channel surfing. The picture is sharp the screen is big but he can’t find the movie. Well you’ve probably figured it out yes the man didn’t have cable like his friend did. The man had a bigger and better television but he couldn’t receive the signal because he wasn’t connected to cable.
That’s how we were when we were non-believers living as natural men. No matter how big or fast we were or how sharp. No matter how exclusive our equipment is, how much power or prestige we have, we get no access to God unless we are connected to God’s Spirit.
Many non-believer’s have a lot to show of this world’s stuff, but they can’t get the spiritual picture because they don’t have Holy Spirit connection.
Paul says in verse 15-16, “...he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one...we have the mind of Christ.”
Spiritual men live by God’s wisdom
Paul is saying that when we are spiritually alive we have access to everything that God is doing. So what difference does it make when man judges you when you have a direct connection to God? He can communicate His will, His purpose, and His desires for us when our ears are tuned into what God is saying. We do that by turning off the distractions in our life and picking up the Bible reading his spiritual words combining them with spiritual thoughts of the Holy Spirit. Unless we invest in Him he cannot deposit in us his Spirit.
When we begin to continually choose to identify ourselves as spiritual people we will do things that spiritual people do. We choose to praise when others choose to party. When we choose to heed God’s Spirit our desire to be lead by our appetites and passions becomes muffled because the Spirit now has more of us. And as believers, we can hear the voice of God because “we have the mind of Christ” (v. 16).
When God’s Spirit communicates with our human spirit, it will register in our mind. God then begins to shift and adjust our thinking so that His thoughts become our thoughts, and we begin to think like Jesus Christ.
A heavens man on earth operates in this natural world but is led by the Spirit of God understanding who he is from reading God’s word being taught by God’s Spirit. When you begin to “connect the dots” with your football ability and your understanding of the offense or defense you’ll become a useful commodity here. When you begin to adjust your eye’s and ear’s to the Holy Spirit’s leading you’ll become useful in the kingdom of God. God wants to use the Christ in you, that will only happen when you begin to put your superhuman traits to the side so that he can fill you with His Spirit, transforming you into heaven’s men on earth.
Everyone here is made up of mind, body and soul. The very essence of who you are lies in your soul. Your soul houses your human spirit and God’s spirit. The natural man never exercises the muscle of God’s spirit within him relying solely on his human spirit. Without responding to God’s Spirit he begins to atrophy in that area and before long it’s paralyzed from neglect. That’s why you have people who are so hardened, life’s circumstances have crushed their human spirit and they have no place to go for hope. The spiritual man spends time with the language of God; his word. The spiritual man processes what he hears and sees through the filter of what he’s read and is lead as he pursues the spirit’s thoughts, receiving spiritual understanding because he has the mind of Christ. John 15:15 tells us that everything that Jesus learned from his Father he has made known to us. The spiritual man has hope in the impossibilities of life because the mind of Christ thinks from heaven’s frame of reference. Nothing in this life seems so bad when you realize, “when things don’t work out here I’m headed to a much better place!
A heavens man on earth knows that he is being led by God. A heavens man on earth knows that when he gets to a crossroads in life that the wisdom of man is insufficient for understanding what really matters in life. God has sent his Spirit to guide us helping us to understand his will that we might lead lives that experience the supernatural work of God on earth through you!
Here’s what I want you to know;
God has given believers the Holy Spirit to interpret the written Word. We’re prone to grasp a single verse or teaching, and try to make it fit our way of thinking. We’re apt to use the Bible to try to prove our point of view, or to disprove another’s. But Paul teaches us to study the Scripture so we can learn to abandon our own points of view, and submit ourselves instead to God’s.
Here’s what I want you to do;
Search the Word, don’t skim over it; be guided by the Spirit to learn God’s way of thinking His wisdom not man’s, and gradually you’ll learn to evaluate all things from His unique perspective. Discipline yourselves and get into the practice of “Trust(ing) in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:5)
Here’s why this is so valuable today; we need unity in the church not a spirit of competition over who should be this or that. The only way to achieve unity is to be led by the Spirit of God having the mind of Christ. When that happens it doesn’t matter what city you’re from what language you speak or what style you have. When as believers we are connected to the big picture of needing the Spirit’s connection we can be lead as a whole church not a splintered body. My prayer is that we would be Heaven’s men lead by God’s spirit on earth.
Amen.