Spiritual Awareness

I received an email back from my friend in China after he read the lesson titled, “What Happens at the Fork.” I asked my friend, as I have asked others along the way, to speak to God and ask him to show my friend in some way that God existed and that these lessons contain truth. He wrote and said, “What are you suggesting me to do now, please? How can I do it?” The great difficulty at this point is to understand that salvation is not a choice, as my friend thinks, between “material satisfaction and spiritual satisfaction”, but is totally related to the surrender of one’s will. It is difficult for many of us to understand and accept the fact that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Let’s keep this thought in mind and work on a lesson for my friend.

What follows is the lesson I will send to my friend.

[Name], in answer to your email from the lesson “What Happens at the Fork” I want to quote what Jesus said to a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Jesus said, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must all be born from above’” (John 3:5 – 7 NET). Paul tells us that we are “not [to] be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may test and approve what is the will of God—what is good and well-pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:2 NET). We renew our mind by putting truth from the word of God into it. Jesus is truth, he is the Word of God so as we put truth in our minds we develop the “mind of Christ” in us (1 Corinthians 2:16). This “mind of Christ” cannot exist in a body only of flesh. It requires spiritual life. Being born of the Spirit means we are a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17). Being born again creates a spiritual creature with the mind of Christ which can mature as we feed it with truth from the Word of God. It is with this mind that we can understand spiritual things contained in the Bible that lead to making wise decisions while on earth and preparations for eternal life with God.

[Name], what I am asking you to do is to begin a conversation with God, called prayer, asking him to give you understanding about the things I wrote about above. Are you able to begin to humble yourself before him, explaining to him that you don’t understand spiritual things and that you want him to begin to give you spiritual insight. This is not about a decision between material satisfaction and spiritual satisfaction, it is about a willingness to see a need you have and seek help from God. That need is about spiritual awareness and asking God to reveal it to you. In previous lessons I have been trying to construct a case for the uniqueness of Christ and why we can trust him to take us through death into eternal life.

The Fork in the pathway is where spiritual life happens. It is not where we simply make a decision in the physical realm. It is where we become overwhelmed with the need to accept the gift of eternal life from Jesus Christ. That is what I am asking you to have conversation with God about.