Author: Hal Hollister Ministry

“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” John 3:8

Last night God told me to create a narrative dealing with the subject “Walk in the Spirit as I am in the Spirit”. 

Jesus told me that He is analogous with the Holy Spirit and this is how you can interact directly with Him. 

Jesus lives in Heaven. He is not approachable to you in person.

If you want a relationship with the Living Christ you have to be born of the Spirit. The Spirit lives in all believers and gives you the ability to live with Jesus.

The wind (Holy Spirit) blows where it wishes and you can hear the sound of it but cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. You are like a boat floating in the sea under the control of the wind and the waves. 

As a believer you are sealed with the Holy Spirit and He will take you where He desires. The Holy Spirit compares spiritual life to the spiritual reality of Christ. 

The deception of Christianity is the belief you must find Jesus through religion. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You are born again when you make a declaration to live for Jesus above all else. This causes you to be born of the Spirit and Water.

The Spirit begins the work of transforming you into a new creature in Christ Jesus and the Water makes you clean in the eyes of Jesus.

The Holy Spirit is the gateway to living with Jesus. Invite the Holy Spirit to have authority over your life and you will see Jesus every day of your life. 

“The Father and I are one” John 10:30

The passion of Jesus is to live in perfect oneness and obedience to His Father.

The character of Jesus is built on unconditional love. He is motivated to save souls and set believers free from the bondage of sin.

He is an intercessor for the Body of Christ. The work of the Cross is eternal and never ending.

Jesus is engaged in a war between light and darkness. This war is ongoing and will not end until Jesus comes back to claim His church. 

Jesus conducts this warfare through powerful angels and the Holy Spirit laboring through Christ followers. The goal is to bring down strongholds and set believers free to live with God.

The passion of Jesus is for believers to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. Jesus wants you to worship Him in Spirit and Truth. 

Jesus wants all of you and is not willing to share you with other gods or idols. 

Jesus asks you to listen for His voice and respond with obedience to His instructions.

Jesus requires you to walk by faith believing in His promises.

To love in a manner like Jesus you must treat others with respect and esteem them above yourself.

The passion of Christ for you today is to commit your works to God and pray for His thoughts to be established within you. 

Jesus desires for you to invite the Holy Spirit to have authority over your thoughts and decision making. 

Jesus lives in you and desires to share His supernatural attributes with you. Ask Jesus to fill you with strength, wisdom, protection and the joy of the Lord. 

The Christ follower is a fountain of Living Water touching those living in darkness.

“Till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” Ephesians 4:13

The role of Christ is to build a church where we all are united by faith in the promises of God. 

We do not live by what we see with our eyes but by what God is doing in the invisible.

The Holy Spirit teaches believers the knowledge of God and how to walk in oneness with Jesus. 

The gift of salvation is the work of God to transform you into the perfect likeness of Jesus. 

We are an imperfect people operating with the perfect stature of Christ. We are measured by Jesus against His standards of virtue.

The goal is to be spiritually mature believers rooted in the truths of God. We do not accept any doctrine contrary to the Word of God or attempts to distort the truth through deceit and lies.

We stand firm on the Word of Christ sharing the Living Water with the love of Christ.

We grow up united in Christ in all things and walk with Him by faith. 

Jesus is the head over all and we are His emissaries to those living in darkness. 

“Not my will but Yours be done” Luke 22:42

Walking with Jesus is life changing. You cannot stay in your comfort zone. 

Salvation is the work of God to transform you into the likeness of Jesus. Change is inevitable and never ending.

The world you and I live in is depraved, filled with temptations and false teaching abounds in the Body of Christ. 

The challenge today is to ask Jesus what He wants to change in your life. It might be something small like drink less coffee or it might be about letting go of something you cherish.

Make the transaction with Jesus by yielding your will to His will.

Leave your emotions out of the conversation. They will betray you and cause you to eventually slip back into what God wants to change in your life. 

God knows you better than you know yourself. He is omniscient and sees every detail of your future. So when God asks you to change it is for your protection and well being.

God wants you to respond with obedience to His voice. This is how He measures you and separates the wheat from the chaff.

“How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me” Psalm 13:1

King David had a powerful anointing over his life but at times he felt totally closed down and distant from God.

There will be times in your spiritual journey when God will be silent and seem aloof.

Jesus is teaching you that He does not want you to interact with Him by divine inspiration. This is an attempt to worship (or seek) a transfigured life with Jesus.

There will be transfigured moments in your life but they are few and far between and are determined by God.

The goal is to live in oneness with Jesus by faith. 

Your salvation is about integrating God into the ordinary moments of life.

We live with Jesus by prayer, meditating on His Word and listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit. Then we have to let God be God and go about life with the confidence He lives inside us.

Don’t live for supernatural experiences with God. They are the exception not the normal in dealing with God.

The Holy Spirit teaches you the values of Christ in every day life. This is where you will find Jesus today!

David found God while hiding in a cave terrified he was going to be killed.

You have to live with God by faith not through your emotions or spiritual experiences. 

Today commit your works to God and invite the Holy Spirit to have authority over all of your actions. Then you can walk confidently with God even if He seems distant.

If you take a misstep the Holy Spirit will correct you. He lives in you!

Dwelling with the Living Christ is built on the spiritual principle it is not what you see with your eyes but what you cannot see.

Jesus lives so you can live!

“Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Romans 8:26

This narrative is about the travailing (or laboring) of God to create new life. 

If you are a believer, God is laboring inside you like a mother groans and suffers prior to childbirth.

As a believer, you are in a state of transition changing from a natural condition of corruption into the glorious liberty of a new creature in Christ Jesus.

The travailing work of God for humanity was initiated through Jesus who suffered and died on the Cross for your salvation. The work of the Cross was an act of obedience by Jesus. He was willing to become an intercessor to set you free from sin and give you the gift of eternal life.

At this very moment, the Holy Spirit is laboring deep within your soul to transform you into the likeness of Jesus. The groans of the Holy Spirit cannot be uttered and are impossible to understand. They are the work of God to prepare you for heaven.

The Holy Spirit also labors within you through intercession to bring down strongholds and set people free from the bondage of sin to receive the gift of salvation. 

The whole creation groans with anguish for the glory and magnificence of God. We are living in a depraved world but our spirit and soul are crying out to live in the perfect creation of God.

This is about returning to a world like the Garden of Eden where every living creature and all the trees, flowers, rivers, and mountains praise God. 

The gift of salvation begins inside you as God touches your heart, personality and soul with His Spirit. Then gradually your salvation becomes integrated into your thoughts, words and actions.

The challenge is learning how you and I can participate in the travailing work of Jesus. 

You must accept the reality of God about prayer. As believers, we don’t know how to pray effectively and according to the will of God. We tend to pray guided by our emotions and natural sympathy for others. This will never bring down strongholds or set people free from the bondage of sin.

Ask the Holy Spirit to show you how to pray and who or what to pray for. 

Come before God in prayer without an agenda and have an open mind to listen and learn.

Give the Holy Spirit the freedom to teach you how to pray. 

Be patient and let God bring up what is important on His mind and then show you how to pray according to His will. The Holy Spirit will lead you into perfectly designed prayers. 

The travailing (or intercession) work of God can be exhaustive and draining because you are in the middle of a battle between light and darkness.

The Holy Spirit gives you the ability to actually pray like Jesus and attain powerful results.

“For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” Philippians 2:13

God woke me up today with the topic and Bible verse for this narrative. 

At this very moment God is at work to shape your will to be in accord with His purposes for your life. 

This gravitational pull of God is designed to draw you into oneness with Jesus.

The disposition of God is motivated by unconditional love to cause you to accept and live out the gift of salvation. 

God works to refine you into His nature so you can fulfill His purposes.

God works through His Word to teach you His values.

God teaches you the importance of living by faith and trusting in the promises of Jesus. Without faith you cannot please God. 

God gives you dreams and visions. 

God speaks to you. 

God convicts you of sin and makes you look at your destitute nature without Him.

God orchestrates circumstances in your life to draw you into His will.

God works through your prayers to show you His priorities for your life.

The gravitational pull of God is designed to cause you to die to self and live for Christ.

The gravitational pull keeps you centered in Christ and operating with pure motives.

The gravitational pull is nurtured through the Holy Spirit. He is the life of Christ and abides inside you. Listen and obey the Holy Spirit. He speaks for Christ. 

“After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” John 13:5

I would like to start off by asking you to pray these words. “I pray Jesus you would pour your blood over me and cleanse me of all my sins. Create within me a clean heart and purify my motives. Search me and correct me of anything not pleasing to you.”

The miracle of salvation is after this prayer you can stand blameless before Jesus and look Him in the eyes without any guilt or condemnation. 

This is a daily ritual you must perform and sometimes repeat during the course of a day.

The question is how long can you stand blameless before God until you relapse into sin?

For most believers it may be for a few minutes, a couple of hours or maybe a handful of days. 

We all have to face the conflict between walking in the Spirit and living through our natural desires.

God has judged you and found you guilty. He has sentenced you to eternal doom. 

God is holy and will not allow you to come close to Him because you are unclean.

Thankfully, God has provided an appellate court presided by Jesus. It cost Jesus his life but He has purchased all of your sins with His blood. Jesus has forgiven you and restored you to God.

Find your refuge in the blood of Jesus and your strength in the resurrected power of the Cross.

Christ crucified gives you the freedom to do the will of God on earth as it is done in heaven.

The Christ follower is an imperfect person living in an upside down world. 

The gift of salvation gives you the ability to walk in oneness with Jesus through the efficacy of the Holy Spirit. 

This is possible because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

“So all Israel shall hear and fear, and not again do such wickedness as this among you.” Deuteronomy 13:11

God spoke to me again about the widespread action of vilifying the Word of God. 

It is very easy to be deceived and led astray by the leaders in the Body of Christ. This is because many are not born of the Spirit. They are a product of religion with twisted motives.

God is at work today exposing corruption and punishing many of the leaders in the Body of Christ.  Many more leaders and churches will fall in the days ahead. 

You can identify false teaching by anyone who relaxes the Word of God to accommodate our changing culture.

Another sign is substituting works for faith and making believers feel guilty for not living up to the requirements of religion.

The biggest tragedy in the leadership of the Body of Christ is rejecting the Holy Spirit or minimizing the importance to a believer. The leaders tend to discount or manipulate the Holy Spirit to accomplish their own goals. 

How can you deal with this deceit as a Christ follower?

First, you have to trust God who is at work to clean up this mess.

The only hope for a Christ follower is to be deeply anchored in the Holy Spirit. He is the life of Christ and will always bring glory to God. He will teach you the values of Christ and dispel the lies of religion.

Do not accept every word you hear from a teacher concerning the gospel. Take every word captive to the obedience of Christ Jesus. The Spirit will confirm the truths of God and expose the whitewashing of religion.

The other outrageous action taking place in the Body of Christ is false prophesy. This tends to take place in a pentecostal setting. You have leaders pretending they are speaking for God when in fact they are speaking to bring glory to themselves. This has been very damaging to many innocent believers. 

Your safety net is living in the Word of God anchored to the Holy Spirit. 

God is the same yesterday, today and forever!

The Holy Spirit added this postscript: “Do not become a victim of ideology. It does not exist in the kingdom of God and will corrupt your soul!”

This is not just about your final destination; it is about what you will face in life interacting with God. And, this narrative relates to both Christ followers and non believers. 

God warned me last night about the prejudicial (detrimental) outcome of those who deny Jesus and live for self.

You can have some short lived moments of success without acknowledging God but you are on an eventual path leading to destruction and death.

The act of committing treason against God is the worship of false gods and idols. This makes God very angry and is a road to disaster. 

Subterfuge is attempting to hide your actions from God. This is impossible because God knows you better than you know yourself. 

Last Sunday I saw many Christ followers in church praising God with raised hands. The question is what will they do when they wake up today.

The hypocrisy of religion is putting on a show for God in public but living privately like there is no fear of God.

What are the rules of life for a Christ follower?

Make a decision to seek the will of God in your life above all else.

Walk by faith believing in the promises of Christ.

Listen to the voice of God and respond with obedience.

Give God permission to do with you as He pleases.

Pray vigilantly and meditate on His Word.

Invite the Holy Spirit to have authority over your life.

If you are a believer you belong to God. He has etched your name in the Book of Life. 

Salvation is living moment by moment with the Living Christ every day of your existence on earth. 

Let the Spirit of Christ engulf your life today with a plethora of love, wisdom, joy, protection and the goodness of God. 

Jesus is faithful to those who worship Him in Spirit and Truth.

He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him out.

There is no supposition about Christ. He is the reality of God and He keeps His word.

The proof of Jesus is not what you read in the Bible; it is the power of God working in your life.