"...These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also."
- Acts 17:6
The truth that every one of us need to settle in our hearts, is the fact that we live in a natural world but we are far from being simply natural beings. If you remember, Jesus told Nicodemus, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). All throughout the New Testament, we find scripture after scripture that tells us that man is a spirit being, that he has a soul, and he lives in a body. In fact, Peter wrote in his second epistle, saying, "Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance" (2 Pet. 1:13). Here he is speaking of his body as the tabernacle that housed his spirit. He went on to talk about putting off his tabernacle. In other words, putting off the body, so that his spirit would depart and enter into that unseen, eternal realm.
The more accustom we become to our being a spirit being the more effective we will come to being able to separate things that are spiritual from things that are natural. God deals with each one of us through our spirit. He doesn't communicate with us through our body or through our mind. He communicates with us through our spirit. As we grow more and more aware of our true nature, which is spirit, the more conscious we will become of spiritual things. As long as we remain influenced by only the natural realm it will be very difficult, almost impossible, to enter into a spiritual walk where we can experience the supernatural realm.
This is what stops so many Christians from a supernatural lifestyle. They live so close to their senses that they fail to detect spiritual realities. This is why Paul said, "We walk by faith and not by sight" (2 Cor. 5:7). Literally, he could have said, "We walk by faith (which is spiritual), and not by our senses (which is natural)." The more tied we are to natural things the harder it is to live by faith. Or should I say, the harder it is to live a spiritual life. See, faith is spiritual. It isn't tied to this world. It's tied to the supernatural. It lives by what it sees inwardly and not outwardly. If we focus all our attention on natural things our faith will never work like it is suppose to! This is where so many get tripped up. They try to take God at his Word, but then consult their senses to determine what is their reality.
That kind of approach actually cancels out faith. You cannot walk in faith and consult your flesh anymore than you can meditate on a menu and expect the pictures of food to nourish your body. You have to be a partaker of the realm in which faith works if you expect it to benefit you at all. Faith works in the unseen realm, and when you become conscious of that unseen realm to where it becomes your reality then you can bypass your senses and experience another dimension to life.
What we determine to be our reality actually forms the level to our liberty. Jesus said, "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). In other words, if our reality is based upon what our senses are telling us then we create our own containment field, but if we base it upon the Word of God, then we lift the limits off of what God's truth can do in us and through us. If all we do is consult our senses to determine our reality then we lock ourselves out of the true riches of the reality of things unseen. Take for instance, healing. The Bible says, "by his stripes we "WERE" healed" (1 Pet. 2:24). If we were, then our reality should never be to seek to be healed. If we were, then we have to look back at our healing as a past tense reality. We have to focus on healing as already ours by means of the atonement. See, that takes healing out of the realm of the senses, because we are not determining our promise by what we feel. We are basing it on what we know as a truth already established in the realm of the spirit. That's where our faith takes hold and begins to draw out of that realm what we know is true, and then it brings into manifestation a supernatural impartation of life and healing that could never have been achieved by the senses.
See, living a supernatural life occurs when we are able to focus our reality on what we believe above what we see or feel. And as we learn how to trust what we know inwardly over and above what we see or feel outwardly, we will step up to a level of faith that can bring us into an extraordinary lifestyle.
