How to walk in the spirit and not in the flesh using prayer

Welcome to episode 295.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I'm going to continue to talk about how to walk in the spirit and not in the flesh. I want to combine Ezekiel's wheel with walking in the spirit, and we've touched on this, but I want to specifically talk about the four areas. We've talked about the face of the man. I believe the face of the man, it begins and ends with Jesus. Now Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith, and in order to walk in the Spirit, we need to walk by faith. The justified, the just shall live by faith. That's what Paul said. That's really started in Habakkuk, I think it was 2:4, not really sure. I'll put it up on the YouTubes. But when we walk in the Spirit, we are walking by faith and not by sight. Because when we walk by sight, we're using our 5 senses. And that don't mean that we drive by faith. That don't mean that we read by faith. That means we walk in the spirit realm. When we're learning to walk by the spirit, the words that I speak to you, they are spirit and they are life. That's what Jesus said. So we need to learn to walk by the spirit, and that is in the word of God. And this is the soapbox moment. You need to be in the Word of God. Again, if you are here, I know you're a fanatic, but one of the things that we have to do with fanatics, it's a follower of Jesus, we are action takers. Now, the N is for now in fanatic. It, we take action now. And then the affirmation is the second A. We affirm, we give gratitude. We know it's God. There is only one God and he is Father God. He sent Jesus and the Holy Spirit. We know this because we are followers of Jesus. The T is for together. We can't do this by ourselves. That's why you and I are locking arms. You're listening, I'm talking, but we can't— if we ever got together sitting over a cup of coffee or over lunch or dinner, the Bible says iron sharpens iron. My vision or my dream is to have a community of believers, like-minded fanatics, to where we can come together either online or offline where we can share what God's doing in our lives. Then I've got to finish up with the fanatic, the I and the C. The I is invincible. We are never defeated. Christ has never lost a battle. And so when we have died to self, we have become invincible. We do not lose. Now you and I probably do, We probably have a self-defeating or a negative mindset. And the C is conqueror. We are more than conquerors. So the fanatic, we just spelled that out. If this is your first time to be here, we are Jesus Fanatics. I believe our job is to give God glory. We're to build God's kingdom. And it's not our kingdom. It's not my word. I, the Bible, I didn't write any word in it. All I do is I just read the Bible. And then I come here on my podcast a couple of times a week. And I just tell you what's going on in my pea brain. But this is important to me. I think this should be important to you, is learning how to walk in the Spirit and not by the flesh. We've got to do it with faith. And now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. And it's right now faith. It is the faith that you use today that's the most important faith, because we don't need yesterday's faith. It don't do us any good for yesterday's faith. We are given today. We're not promised tomorrow. So let's use our faith today. And I just want to give you an idea of what that looks like. It's easy to talk about and we start getting into this kind of woo-woo stuff. But when we actually apply this, we take the word of God. I am planting 2 Timothy 1:7 and have been planting that for a long time. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. And the one thing we all have in common is that fear is just running rampant. You know, if you watch anything on YouTube or any kind of news article or any kind of anything going on, you're going to hear about supply side issues, you're going to hear about the drought, you're going to hear about high gas prices, you're going to hear about there's a food shortage coming. All of these things are just piling on, on and on to us, and we are supposed to deal with that. And if you continually just just think about and look at that, you'll get all wrapped around the axle and there will be no way out. But what you need to do is you need to take one seed. And, and when we talk about planting the seed, the incorruptible seed is the Word of God. We need to find one seed, and I do that by reading the Word of God. And when one of the scriptures— I call it jumping out at me— when one of the things as I'm reading the Word it stops me, for lack of a better way to explain it. It just stops me, and I say, whoa, wait a minute, why am I fearful? If God has not given me a spirit of fear but of power and love and a sound mind, why would I be fearful? And I believe it's because we do not know the word of God. The spirit of fear comes from the punk. He is a punk. We hate him. We try to kick his teeth out every chance we get, But if we fight evil with our world system, we are gonna get our butts kicked. And I think that's what's happening in the church today. We're fighting evil with evil, or we're fighting all of this lack with worldly or human resources, and we're not calling on the power that's in the Word of God. And I just believe, and I think that this word is the truth. God says that we shall know the truth and the truth shall make us free. We have got to get inside of this word and we have got to ask the Holy Spirit for help. And that's the other part of walking in the spirit, is we have got to understand who we are in Christ, that we are a new creature, that old things have been passed away. Behold, all things are new. You are a new creature in Christ and we die to self every day. On Romans 12:1, I die daily. I present my body a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is my reasonable service. And so then I walk through this life dead to self. And again, it's not perfect. I don't do it perfectly, but I can honestly tell you that I am not fearful of tomorrow. I am not fearful of today. Now, you can call me an idiot, or you can call me blinded, or you can call me any kind of name you want to call me, but you can't say that I'm fearful. You cannot say that I go through life and I'm afraid to take my next step. I'm going to be here next Tuesday, good Lord willing, and I'm going to be here next Thursday. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I'm going to have an episode and I'm gonna be here, and I just wanna encourage, empower, and inspire you. And the only way to do that is through his word. And so the next face I want you to see is this lion's face. And that's my next step because every morning I pray. And it's easy for me because I believe I have the face of a lion. I do believe that my biggest strength is prayer. And that does not mean that I am a wonderful person of prayer. But I am not scared of prayer. I do not back down when someone says, hey, I need someone to pray. I just pray. If you tell me you need prayer, you're going to get a prayer. And you're not going to get some praying emoji either. You're going to get— probably if you know me personally, you're going to get a phone call from me and I'm going to speak it out loud. And I believe if you are called to pray, if you are a lion, the face of a lion, if you are belong in a lion's den, God has anointed you for prayer. And all that is is communication. All that is is taking the word of God and praying it out loud and having the power behind you and really calling on the Holy Spirit to help answer. Jesus said in 17, I believe John 17, and maybe it was 16, I don't know, it kind of all runs together. But he said he's going to his Father. And before you asked nothing of the Father, but now you ask the Father in my name and it will be done. And I know I just chopped that all up. Jesus instructed his disciples that they were to ask the Father. The Father is who created everything. Everything was made by the Father through the Word of God with the Holy Spirit. There's three parts of this. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all three were involved in creation, but it was Father God who created everything. And it's Father God who is looking out for us and who has given us this plan of salvation and who sent Jesus and who sent the Holy Spirit. Probably because I have some daddy issues back in my past is I have a harder time relating to Father God because my father was semi-absent in my life. Now, I had a wonderful stepdad who was there, and my dad is wonderful, but he was just absent. He was young when he had me, my mom was young, and you know, it just— life just takes you on turns. And I'm not blaming him, I'm blaming the punk, but I'm just telling you I had some issues in my life, probably still do But Father God to me was just always just a little bit out of reach. And so I always just kind of stayed an arm's length away from Father God. But not anymore. It says that I can walk into the throne of grace. So I walk in, but I don't bust through grace's door, and I don't tell God, here I am, look at me. No, I come before him humbly. I come before Father God thankful and I come fearful and not afraid, but reverent. I love walking into the throne of grace. For most of my time in front of Father God, I am just being thankful. I'm just telling Father God, thank you for everything. Thank you for my family. When I pray, I pray to God, and most of it is just thanksgiving, and I just thank him and I give him the honor and the glory as best I can. The face of the lion is power, and it is prayer. And we have to have all four of these things to walk in the spirit. We have to learn to be in the word of God. We have to learn to be in the power of prayer. We have to learn to worship and praise God, and we have to learn to love one another. Those are the four, I think, pillars of this walking in the spirit. We've talked about the face of the man. We've talked kind of about this lion, the power of prayer. We're going to get into the face of the eagle in the next episode. But as we walk in the spirit, there are four different pillars, and it's all about Ezekiel's wheel. It is how we've separated the spirit out of the physical realm, and the spokes is our mind, will, and emotion. The spokes that connect the spirit to the physical is our soul. And we're going to get all in the middle of this, but I just want to— I just want to close real quick. I looked up and I saw that I had gone on. I'm trying to get these things down so they can be more contained, and I know I've rambled a little bit, but the power of prayer is an important step to walking in the spirit. If you don't know how to pray, or if you refuse to pray, or if you can't pray, you need to ask the Holy Spirit how Can I be more like Jesus? Jesus taught his disciples how to pray. In Jesus' life, he modeled prayer. He would separate himself from his disciples. He would go off by himself and he would spend time speaking to Father God. And I think you and I need to take our time. We need to speak to Father God. This is not a sprint. Life is not a sprint. This is a marathon., and we need to plant seeds. The kingdom of God is seedtime and harvest. We need to plant seeds. The best seed you can plant is the word of God. Well, let's pray. God, I thank you for everything you've done in my life. God, I thank you for the word. I thank you for the ability to pray. Lord, you know that I enjoy praying to you, not so much out loud in front of everybody, but just you and I when we're speaking. I love praying to you. I love listening to you. Holy Spirit, continue to lead and guide and direct us. Keep us safe and watch over us. God, we thank you. We love you. We ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.