 Kang, good morning, everyone. Welcome to BC 214, our course on developing the human spirit. And thank you for joining the class today. Let's take a moment to pray and we get started. Can somebody lead us in prayer, please? Somebody in the class. Let's pray. J. Heavenly Father, we come to you under the name of Jesus. Thank you for this day. We thank you for the beautiful class we are about to have. But I pray that we will open our heart and mind and we listen to every truth that is being taught to us, Jesus. I pray that we will understand the words, be with us and guide us, Lord, when we don't understand you, be our teacher and help us to understand the truth, Jesus, so that we can shine much more brighter for you, so that we can do greater things for your kingdom. I pray for all my classmates. I pray that God will give us good wife and connection throughout the session and you be with us and guide us throughout the session. Let everything that we do be done for your glory. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Thank you everyone. So we, let me go and share the PDF that we've been working through. So we've been talking about the five faculties of the human spirit. We talk about seeing. We talked about hearing, our ability to hear in the spiritual realm. Feeling, what we feel in our spirit and smelling and tasting. And so these are the faculties of our human spirit. And what we said is these five faculties are very important for us in us learning and receiving from God what God is speaking to us in our spirit. So it is in our spirit that we receive what God is saying to us. So the word of God, I mean I say the word of God, I mean what God is speaking. It comes through our five faculties and into our spirit. So we're now in lesson number 11 where our goal is to train our spiritual senses. How could we make our faculties more sensitive, more keen to hearing from God? So of course we're not trying to force God to speak. God is always speaking. He is automatically speaking to us. So God himself is a God who speaks. So it's not like we're trying to force God to speak. But what we're saying is how do we position ourselves, put ourselves in a better place so that we can hear when God is speaking. Or we can recognize or receive from him what he wants to communicate to us. So we're not forcing God. So God you have to speak, you tell me. We're not forcing God. God always is more than ready. He's our Heavenly Father. He's a God who desires to speak to us. But it is our responsibility to be in a place where we can hear him clearly and receive from him clearly. So we're referring to that as training our spiritual senses. How can we, especially these three main things, see, hear and feel, how do we make that more sensitive, more keen to God? Now this is an ongoing journey and I'm not saying this happens overnight. For us of course it's a challenge because we are living in a natural world. So we are always very used to engaging with our mind and body. And then suddenly for us to shift to, okay, I have to listen in my spirit. That is something we have to learn to do. It doesn't come automatically. It's not that it happens naturally for us. So we have to learn to be more sensitive to things in the spirit and to develop our spirit. So how do we train our spiritual senses? So in Hebrews 5, 13, 14, he's talking about those who are partaking of the Word of God, the solid food, the meat of the Word of God, who have come to a place of maturity. They come to a place of maturity, a full age. And he says, by reason of use, have their senses exercised. So that means they have put to use their practice, and we use the word practice, the reason of use. So they have trained, they have practiced, they are regularly used and constant use their senses are exercised. Senses are trained so they know good and evil. So we want to be these kinds of people. We want to be people who of course can enjoy solid food. That means we have become mature, we have grown up. So we are partaking of, we're not still drinking milk, but we have grown up, we are partaking of solid food. We are mature, but another important characteristic of people who are mature is that they have so used practice, constant practice, that they are able to, they have their organs of perception, their senses, their spiritual and inner man, the organs of the inner man, spiritual and emotional senses have been trained to know good and evil. They are trained, they know, they can recognize, oh, that's God, that's not God. God is speaking, I don't have to worry about that. They are spiritually trained to know that. So we want to become people like that. So how do we train it? Personally, if you ask me, I'm also on that journey. So God, I want to train more. I want to be more sensed, I want to train myself. So how do we do that? And this is where I just go back. I will just remind us of what we learned in lesson number three on how do we train, how do we develop the born-again spirit? These principles apply, the same principles apply. So we fellowship with God. So the more we fellowship with God through worship, prayer and the word, the more our human spirit is becoming keenly aware of God. So basically the voice of our human spirit should be more alert, more awake than our soul and our body. Of course, our soul and body also has to be awake. That is true. We are living in this natural world. We need to relate to this natural world. But the point I want to get is our spirit, we should be more conscious of our spirit and of the reality of God than the reality of the natural things that we are engaging with. Yes, we are touching these things and all this in nature. This is all real. I'm not saying it's not real. But our awareness of God and who he is should become more. So how do we do that? Number one is to fellowship. And the same principle applies. I'm just repeating it to kind of explain. This is how we're going to train our spirit. We need to keep growing in our fellowship with God through worship, prayer and the word. Just keep growing in our fellowship. So we, you and I will find in our own experience that the more we fellowship, the more sensitive we become. Or if I'm dropping in my fellowship, it's not that I've died or anything, but my sensitivity to God also goes down. We have found in our own experience, we can all say the same thing. So fellowship with God. Spend more time and more meaningful time in fellowship with God through worship, prayer and word. Like I said, it's got to be meaningful. It's not just a ritual. Some people will say, okay, I spent three hours, four hours. But then you ask, what did they do? They just went through a ritual. It wasn't a meaningful fellowship. So our fellowship with God should be meaningful. Really communing with God, worship, prayer and the word. Quietness and communion is very important because that's when we can actually be sensitive to God. If we are very disturbed, very distracted, there's a lot of noise around us, then it seems it makes it difficult for us to hear God. Then I say noise around us. I'm not just making physical sound, but I'm talking about mentally and emotionally. If you are very disturbed, and a lot of things going on in our mind, it makes it more difficult to listen to God. So that place of being, that place of quietness and communion is very important. Meditating in the word of God, like we saw in Hebrews 5, it really makes our spirit more keen to the word. Confession of the word of God is another practice to train our spirit, praying in tongues. The more we pray in tongues, the more our spirit is energized by the Holy Spirit. Then we practice, exercise, keep on exercising. Spiritual faculties and functions and keep ourselves in love, walking in love. And number 7 is also learning through others, receiving through others, being open, seeing how God works and other people. That also encourages us. So these seven practices are something we keep on doing, keep on doing, and keep making it stronger and better in your spiritual life. So that is the way we train our spirit. So what I want to emphasize is we have to use and exercise, use and exercise our spirit with the things of God, the constant use of the word, constant use of prayer, constant use of fellowship that we can exercise and train our spiritual senses to become more and more and more keen to God. So the first thing I want to put out is in training our spirit, we constantly work on these seven exercises that we talked about in chapter 3. We constantly engage in those seven ways to keep building up your spirit. Okay? You all with me? Okay. Then our big challenge as we are doing that is how do we differentiate what is from the spirit and what is from the soul, our own feelings? And this is especially true as we are trying to listen to God. What is God saying versus what is my own soul saying? Again here, we need to come to a place where we can, let me put it like this, we can come to a place where we know God is speaking, where the voice of God is so clear. But as we are making our journey to that place, there will be this learning process where I am trying to distinguish soul and spirit. I'm trying to separate out what is my own emotions to what is from the Holy Spirit. So this is also a learning process. So I put it here. This is a continuous learning process. And if we can reflect and learn from every experience, so that is something we must all try to do. I find very useful. When God has spoken and you have expressed it in some way, then you reflect on it. Oh, that moment I knew God was speaking to me and I communicated it like that. Maybe I released it through a word. Maybe I wrote it down. Maybe whatever way you express it. And you reflect on that. It's okay. So that was God speaking. That was God. So you reinforce that understanding. Okay, this is the voice of God. This is how God spoke to me. This is how the gifts of the Spirit were released through me. And so you are learning through every experience. And inside you become more and more clear. This is the voice of God. This is how God is speaking. And at that moment, how was my soul acting? Maybe my soul was quiet, very good. But maybe my soul also was telling me a lot of things. And how did I recognize this is God and this is my soul? Okay, this is how I recognize it. Okay. And so you're learning through that process. So this is a big challenge for us. But it is part of our training. It's part of our learning. And eventually we come to a place where we are more and more confident in knowing the voice of the Spirit and in learning to separate out the voice of our own soul. So the best way to do it, of course, is to keep doing it. It's like swimming. We can sit next to the pool and we can listen to the coach tell us all the nice things. How to swim, you know, do like this, do like that. Hold your breath and breathe in, all those things. You can tell us everything. But we will never learn to swim until we get into the water. So we get into the water. We make our mistakes. We almost feel like we are drowning. All those things are part of the experience. But only when you get into the water and start doing it, are we going to learn to swim? Same thing here in learning to listen to God and learning to listen to His voice. The only way we can really learn is by doing it. Say, God, I want to listen to you. And as we hear Him speak, we recognize His voice and we say, OK, that is God speaking. OK, that is the soul. Push that aside. Listen to God. And so like that we slowly develop in listening to the Holy Spirit. Let me just say a few practical things here. As far as listening to the Holy Spirit, one is to quiet our soul. And we mentioned this in chapter three as well. If our mind is troubled, it's disturbed by earthly things. It becomes difficult. So the Bible says, you know, be still and know. This is a very important part. Be still and know. So that's when you have to quiet our mind. And this for me is a big challenge because there are so many examples in the ministry itself. There are so many things happening. It's like my mind is working. So many things going on. So I have to like, OK, shut everything out. And OK, now I'm going to concentrate on God. I'm going to concentrate on worship. I'm going to concentrate on the word. Like I'm not going to think about all those hundred and one things that need to be done. So that's a big challenge for many of us because there's so many things happening in the natural world. We need to quiet the natural world and learn to listen to God. So being quiet is very important. Another important key is, which I find useful, is to know that the first voice is God's voice. Why do we say that? Because the moment God speaks, that is God speaking. He's telling you something. But what happens? Our mind kicks in. Mind begins to reason this and that and how can it be? And so all the other voices come. So a simple principle, at least that I have found useful is what was the first voice? That was God speaking. Only after God spoke, my mind is thinking about this and that and reason this and that and is trying to analyze and trying to reason out, reason away the voice of God. So the first voice, what did I hear in that? When God spoke, what was that first voice? Of course I have to process it, but the first voice is God's. What is God's? And I'll go with that. If I try to reason things in my mind and this and that and by the time I go through all that, I'll be fully confused. I won't pay attention to the first voice. I will many times discard it. That means I am missing out on what God was saying. So this is a simple, what we will call as a rule of thumb. I mean, just a pointer tip to helping us understand. First voice is God. When God said it, okay, you got it, fine. You process it, you understand it and then you act on it. Go forward with that before all the fear and the doubt and the unbelief can nullify what God has said. Third tip here in just becoming more sensitive to the directions of the Holy Spirit is we need to get out of our mind to flow with the Spirit. Now, what does that mean? I'm not saying we don't use our mind. What I'm trying to say is that many times the things that God is saying to us revealing to us may be beyond our ability to logically understand and reason or this God is moving us to do things that is beyond the mind because he is Spirit and he is seeing things from the spiritual world. And so the things he tells us to do, the things he may direct us to say is usually beyond our mind and you can't understand everything that God is saying or directing you to do logically with your mind. So we are willing to get out of our mind to flow with the Spirit. So this is where we are stepping in faith and we are ministering in faith. So, for example, when God gives a word of knowledge or even a word of wisdom that you're sharing with somebody and things like that, it is a step of faith. It's not like I understand everything. No, we don't understand everything, but we are stepping out of our mind in order to step into the Spirit or to step with and flow with the Holy Spirit. Don't try to understand everything. We won't understand it. Just learn to flow with the Spirit of God. So we need to be willing to get out of our mind to flow with the Spirit. Just one more tip here on as we train our spiritual senses to hear from God and to work with God. There will be times we are not 100% sure. Is this God? Is this not God? It's normal. Don't think every person knows exactly the God's book. No, many times we are not sure. Why? Because we are learning. We are making the journey to a place where we will come to a place where we will know clearly, but now we are making the journey and as we are making the journey, there will be times we are unsure. And so what do you do? Well, when you are not 100% sure, in all humility, we share and we validate. So we tell that person, you know, is it right? No, no. We are sharing it and we are willing to be correct. We are willing to let that person test it. So we say, okay, this is what I'm feeling. Is it correct? So we share and we validate. And that person says, yeah, it's correct. Or sometimes they may say, no, it's not correct. Okay, fine. Maybe I made a mistake there, but usually if you are hearing from God, then when it's from God, then definitely it will be right. It's only when we have unnecessarily picked up something from our soul, that part would be wrong. So share, when you're unsure, you share, you validate. And then it's also a learning experience. It's okay, yeah. That was God. God was speaking. But then by mistake, I added these things. And that is not right. I shouldn't be doing that. So even if you're unsure, you can learn from that by inhumility or sharing and you're willing for that person to correct what you're saying and you're learning through that process. And that's fine. So this is useful because it's a learning thing for us. So you say, hey, I feel like this. I feel the Lord is saying this. Is it right? Does it make sense? Is it, you know, how does it, what does it mean to you? I mean, they give you feedback, you know, either you heard from God or you're not heard from God. Okay. So one last point here on this is keep in mind that God can touch our soul and our body also. So we have been emphasizing the human spirit, the faculties of the spirit and how we should train our faculties to make them more sensitive to God so that God can speak to us, touch us, move us. But while God is dealing with the faculties of our spirit, he could even, and he made at times even touch our soul and our body. That means we can actually feel in our soul that emotions or we can actually feel even in our body, you know, the touch of God. For example, you've seen the Bible, Daniel, Ezekiel, John, others, when they encountered the presence of God, their body fell so weak. Ezekiel says, I fell as though I was dead. So our body also can react to the presence of God. May touch our body, we can feel things in our body sometimes, burning, tingling, pain, sensation. Sometimes it could be a pain in a certain part of body. They got to saying, I'm healing that kind of pain or so on so forth. So we are focusing on the human spirit, but God can touch our soul and our body and suddenly, for example, in our soul, we suddenly feel an overwhelming sense of joy or a strong feeling of compassion that just grips our emotion or can even have feeling in our body. And then we recognize that and then we say, okay, you know, we recognize that God can touch our soul and our body, but then we also test everything with what is happening through our spirit. Okay, so that brings us to the end of this chapter. What we have been emphasizing is simply this. There are five faculties of our spirit and these faculty, God uses these faculties to communicate with us in our spirit. And so we need to train our spiritual senses, train our spiritual faculties so that we can make them more sensitive to God. And we have outlined in an earlier lesson, chapter three, seven things we could do, our fellowship with God, quietness, feeding on the word, confession of the word, praying in tongues, exercising our faculties and receiving spirituality through others. We have outlined these seven practices we can do to train our spiritual senses. And the best way to grow, to develop our faculties is by using them, exercising them. And the more we exercise, the more sensitive we are going to become. Okay, so let me pause here. Any questions on this? So far? Okay, all clear? Okay, so we will stop here for today. Next week we're going to talk about the functions of the spirit. So in this course, we are talking about five faculties, five senses, faculties of spirit, and seven functions of the spirit. So this means this is what your spirit in you is capable of doing. Okay, so we'll talk about the seven functions. We'll spend a couple of lessons, lectures on the seven functions of the spirit and how to develop those. So we develop the faculties, develop the functions. So that's overall development of our spirit. Now, why is all of this important? Remember, we are spiritual beings. We relate to God in the spirit and we also serve God in the spirit. The stronger we are in the spirit, the more effective we can be as we serve God. Okay, all right, let's wrap up. Let's close in prayer. May I request somebody to please pray with us and be close? I know this was a short lesson, but I just wanted to encourage us in this area on training our spirit. Somebody could pray and let's close. We pray that we would continue to learn from you. We would continue to listen to your voice and we pray to God that we would be able to train our senses to understand your voice, your thoughts, that is for us. We pray to God that we would overcome the voice of our own soul, our own mind, but we would be trained to listen to you, God. We thank you for this time of learning. We give you praise. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day and we'll continue this. Thank you. We'll continue this next week as we talk about the functions. God bless.