Saturday, May 11, 2024
INTRODUCTION - WHAT ARE SPIRITUAL HABITS?
Spiritual habits are fundamental in shaping how others perceive us, serving as both a reflection of our identity and a means to connect with like-minded individuals. These habits are not only crucial in transmitting our cultural and spiritual values to future generations but also in forming our personalities and aligning our lives with our deepest desires. They act as a strategic playbook, guiding us to turn our spiritual desires into tangible realities. By grounding ourselves in spiritual practices, we set the foundation for our physical experiences, prioritizing spiritual goals over external expectations. This alignment allows us to collaborate with God in every stage of life, ensuring that our spiritual growth is seamlessly integrated with our daily activities.
SPIRITUAL HABIT OF GRATEFULNESS
Gratefulness is a powerful spiritual habit. The last blog post emphasized the difference between a turtle and a giraffe. If you practice gratitude, you become like a giraffe. You are able to better connect to Heaven and stretch your abilities to grow instead of stiffening your neck and only eating from the ground, like the turtle. A giraffe is able to not only eat quickly and finish its meal, but also see far enough to know where the next meal will come from. So with every Christian when they practice gratitude. When you connect with Heaven, you will gain God’s thoughts and strategy not only to understand what to do with what you have now, but also to see what’s coming next. The giraffe runs fast, and does not get tired (able to run and not grow weary). How God responds to gratefulness is, we stand confidently, upheld by God's belief in our potential, which brings additional responsibilities and gifts to fuel our passion without imposing burdens or deficiencies. This divine trust does not weigh us down but rather enhances our capacity to thrive and serve passionately.
YOU ARE A DISRUPTOR
In the New Testament, there is a theme of disruption. Jesus disrupted the enemy’s plans to take him from the earth. Jesus disrupted the Pharisees’ ideas of God and ideas of religion. Jesus disrupted people’s common lives. He also disrupted deficiency, healing multitudes. The temptation for all humans is to secure and protect any deficiency, wherever you’re hurt, so you don’t get hurt again. But in doing so, that deficiency only produces more problems. For example, if you have a hurt leg and you never use that leg, it becomes crippled, and you won’t be able to use it. One crippled leg can cripple the whole body. In the same way, one small deficiency in any area of our lives can cripple the whole plan of God. If we don’t take our deficiencies and allow God to heal it, to make us new, those areas of our lives lose their power. What happens is, we end up relying too much on the aspects of our lives that are not deficient, causing imbalance.
SELF-PROTECTION MECHANISM
To deal with the deficiency, we start putting parameters and walls, setting up systems around it. We end up putting importance and emphasis around the thing that’s not working, trying to protect ourselves from getting hurt. We find every way around any reminder of the hurt, and don’t want to even go near the thought. This process ends up producing anger as a defense mechanism. It comes out of a spirit of fear, the fear of getting hurt again. The spirit of fear is really defined as deficiency, or lack. The way to reverse the spirit of fear is to think outside of the lack, to pay less attention to it and more attention to provision and God’s promises. Think outside of the box, outside of the parameters you’ve put. The goal is to get back to a fulfilled life. The question is, how do we live out of fulfillment instead of self-protection?
DEFICIENCY VS GRATEFULNESS
The answer lies in the opposite of deficiency/lack, which is gratefulness. The reason to be grateful lies in what is in us, or, to be clear, WHO is in us. Peter and John in the New Testament were grateful because they knew what they carried would heal someone’s deficiency. When you’re grateful, you help others, you go the extra mile to heal somebody. When you focus on deficiency, you recoil into yourself, causing a spirit of fear which puts up the walls of anger, bitterness, and blame. Remember, when you focus on deficiency, you’re only protecting your hurt. When you focus on healing and gratefulness, you protect the power of God within yourself. Hurt delays God’s promises over your life, but gratefulness fasts forward the promises, bringing them quicker.
THE POWER OF GRATEFULNESS
Gratefulness serves as a safeguard for the power and gifts of God, empowering us to use these gifts to assist others. It dissolves fear, shifting our perspective from apprehension of harm to a focus on helping those around us. This transformative power of gratefulness not only fosters personal growth but also elevates us, allowing us to stand taller than before—a beacon for others to see and emulate. As adults, not infants, we attain maturity through the practice of gratefulness, ascending to higher planes of spiritual and emotional development. Gratefulness is more than a virtue; it is a dynamic force. By practicing gratitude, we connect deeply with God's gifts, discover our true selves, and communicate with God in our unique language, rather than imitating the traits of others. This connection cultivates our identity and fulfills our divine purpose.
PASSION
One powerful gift that gratefulness births is passion. Why is passion important? If you're not excited about something, people won't understand what you're trying to say. When you become passionate about your activities on this earth, you begin attracting people to your vision. Passion comes through how God made you, and what He made you for. When you are passionate, you are able to describe it well to others, which makes others experience your same enthusiasm. To either find your passion or protect it, use gratitude.
MINDFULNESS VS GRATEFULNESS
Another concept coming against gratefulness is mindfulness. Mindfulness in new age terms is gratefulness in Biblical terms. The difference lies in the practice of the idea. In new age, they use mindfulness to empty themselves, whereas Christians use gratefulness to fill themselves with Christ. Without Jesus, you’re destroyed and live out of darkness. Darkness in mindfulness is destroying what’s been given to you, rather than fostering and protecting it, as in gratefulness. If you misjudge your gifts and try to empty yourself, thinking it’s a benefit, you end up opening the doors for demons. But when you fill yourself up with Christ, you meet Heaven. To put it another way, new age people live out of ignorance, out of emptiness, without knowledge. Unless the Lord heals you there, you go to places it’s difficult to come out of. Christians live out of the knowledge of Christ, which gives victory. In other words, mindfulness lives out of pain, but gratefulness lives out of ownership. If you see what’s been given to you as a burden, you won’t get rid of that hurt. But if you receive the knowledge of what’s been given to you with gratitude, you can use that gift against the enemy.
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
Instead of emptying ourselves, gratefulness allows us to become a temple for the Holy Spirit. Gratefulness fosters the presence of God within us, transforming us into vessels of His divine essence for others. This profound connection is rooted in embodying the mind of Christ, which is intrinsically tied to a spirit of gratefulness. As our minds align with Christ’s, they command our bodies to become His temple, an embodiment of sanctity and devotion. In this state, we are not merely mortal beings but reflections of the immortal, living as tangible manifestations of Christ’s temple. This transformation leads to an overflow of God’s character through us, radiating His grace, compassion, and truth to the world around us. Such a life is not just about personal sanctification but about becoming a conduit of God's overwhelming presence to others.
HOMEWORK
This homework assignment reflects the transformative power of redefining gratefulness as a direct manifestation of God's presence, which we are called to share with others.
Your first challenge is to seek a new expression, another word, for gratefulness. Gratefulness has lost its name, but we must restore it and renew the term, trashing the plans of the enemy.
Your second task is to ask God for a random thought. While such thoughts may appear random to us, they are intentional from God's perspective. These thoughts are deposited into a trusted vessel; gratefulness aids in selecting what we should focus our thoughts on. Ravi experiences divine communication through thoughts, particularly during sleep, like the biblical story of God creating Eve from Adam. He wants you to also experience this blessing.
Additionally, self-reflect on personal levels of gratefulness and passion, understanding that our professional roles are a form of divine trust.
Finally, do not dwell on negative thoughts, but instead replace such ruminations with gratefulness to protect your passion and maintain a spiritual focus.
This blog post is birthed out of the Nurturing Wisdom Group.
Ravi Kandal
Strategy for 1 Million Souls
If you have a loved one that is in need of divine intervention, then this is for you. Learn more about God's design and redemption in their life. In this process expect to gain your own growth, healing and spiritual awakening.