From chapter 2 (“To Have the Perceptions of God”) from Shawn Bolz’s new book, Encounter.
Solomon was the first to cry out for something that God had always intended. It was how we were all made to be, connected and divinely intelligent so that we could live the greater life, the one that would be supernatural and super empowered, the John 10:10 life that Jesus declared when He said that Satan has come to steal, kill and destroy but I have come to give you life that is so abundantly more than any you have seen.
Paul lays it out the clearest in 1 Corinthians 2:10:
But God now unveils these profound realities to us by the Spirit. Yes, he has revealed to us his inmost heart and deepest mysteries through the Holy Spirit, who constantly explores all things. After all, who can really see into a person’s heart and know his hidden impulses except for that person’s spirit? So, it is with God. His thoughts and secrets are only fully understood by his Spirit, the Spirit of God.
For we did not receive the spirit of this world system but the Spirit of God, so that we might come to understand and experience all that grace has lavished upon us. And we articulate these realities with the words imparted to us by the Spirit and not with the words taught by human wisdom. We join together Spirit-revealed truths with Spirit-revealed words. Someone living on an entirely human level rejects the revelations of God’s Spirit, for they make no sense to him. He can’t understand the revelations of the Spirit because they are only discovered by the illumination of the Spirit. Those who live in the Spirit are able to carefully evaluate all things, and they are subject to the scrutiny of no one but God. For Who has ever intimately known the mind of the Lord Yahweh well enough to become his counselor? Christ has, and we possess Christ’s perceptions.
We were created to share Christ’s perceptions over everything He has created and to co labor to work and govern his creation. Not externally from him as power brokers of a resource, but internally with him where the joy of the experience comes from doing it with him not for him.
This is clearly laid out by Jesus in the New Testament passage that addresses how the connection Jesus prophesied to the disciples in John 14, 15, and 16 would work. He said that He was leaving but one would come called His Spirit or the Spirit of God who would relate the Father’s will to us.
Let’s look at those exact passages to get a feel for this process, because this way of communing with God is exactly what we are entitled to and will change everything.
John 14:15 “Loving me empowers you to obey my commands. 16–17 And I will ask the Father and he will give you another Savior, the Holy Spirit of Truth, who will be to you a friend just like me—and he will never leave you. The world won’t receive him because they can’t see him or know him. But you know him intimately because he remains with you and will live inside you.
John 15:26 “And I will send you the Divine Encourager from the very presence of my Father. He will come to you, the Spirit of Truth, emanating from the Father, and he will speak to you about me. 27— “And you will tell everyone the truth about me, for you have walked with me from the start.”
John 16:12 “There is so much more I would like to say to you, but it’s more than you can grasp at this moment. But when the truth-giving Spirit comes, he will unveil the reality of every truth within you. He won’t speak on his own, but only what he hears from the Father, and he will reveal prophetically to you what is to come. He will glorify me on the earth, for he will receive from me what is mine and reveal it to you. Everything that belongs to the father belongs to me—that’s why I say that the Divine Encourager will receive what is mine and reveal it to you. Soon you won’t see me any longer, but then, after a little while, you will see me in a new way.”
Through the promises of Jesus that we will have His Spirit abide in us to connect us to God, He was developing a heart of not only obedience and love so that we could all be like the messianic version of Solomon or Joseph, Daniel or Esther. He was creating a context of faith for how we are built from the Father to share His mind and heart and affections. We would come and do in the natural world what they did but empowered by this inner connection to God.
Solomon asked for what God had always intended and when he received it, it caused Israel’s transformation. It changed city structure, it caused governmental alignment in the nations all around Israel, it brought social and economic justice and prosperity.
Solomon, even with being touched with a life of wisdom and experience inherited from his father, King David, would have never had the ability to build what he did without a continuous connection to God’s mind. I think many of us thought he was just infused with the power of wisdom, but even he wrote in the book of Proverbs the persona of wisdom because he was relating that the kind of wisdom that comes from God is part of the entity of who God is. It comes out of connection to Him, not just an infusion that is then detached from Him.
In Isaiah 11 God’s Spirit that will rest on the Messiah is personified in seven ways because these are atmosphere and inner culture that God carries and when we are around Him, connected to Him, these get empowered within our own Spirit. Our Spirit could be seen as a plug, and we are plugging into the power source of His nature. These are what were prophesied by Isaiah:
Isaiah 11:2
The Spirit of Yahweh will rest upon him, the Spirit of Extraordinary Wisdom, the Spirit of Perfect Understanding the Spirit of Wise Strategy, the Spirit of Mighty Power, the Spirit of Revelation, and the Spirit of the Fear of Yahweh.
The Spirit of the LORD
The Spirit of wisdom
The Spirit of understanding
The Spirit of counsel
The Spirit of strength
The Spirit of knowledge
The Spirit of the fear of the LORD
Jesus then prophesied to us that we will have this same Spirit operating in us to bring this connection to us. I don’t think that most Christians are consumed with bringing the Spirit of wise strategy into situations or the Spirit of mighty power but that is exactly what the world is crying out for. The world is looking for people who are other than normal. They are looking for a relationship with God to add a value that NOTHING else can add. That is exactly what Isaiah was prophesying in Isaiah 11 over the Messiah and we watched Jesus walk out an Earthly life of bringing connection and solutions, disruptions and counsel to the world around Him in ways that were not only unexpected, they were unbelievable.
Solomon was one of the first messianic prototypes of building God’s kingdom on Earth with God’s wisdom. When Jesus came, He didn’t build this on His own in the natural but came to deliver us the keys so that we could build the kingdom with and through Him. His job was to reconnect us and re-empower us, and now our job is to manifest the wisdom of God in every quadrant of society and over everything that man has dominion over.
Even if this sounds radical on this side of eternity, after His return this WILL BE our reality. God designed us to manifest His love in our relationship with him in ways that shape the world around us. Not just through evangelism but by populating the Earth with God’s original intention and strategy.
To learn more about Encounter, check out CharismaHouse.com. {eoa}
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