Nobility by Walking in the Spirit

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I have pointed out in earlier posts that Nobility is anchored in our creation. Nobility is attached to things based on their birth or some other special quality. There is no more special origin and quality than to be made in the image of Almighty God. We are Imago Dei – made in the image of God.

Thus we are spirit beings, with profound spiritual significance. Our destiny is to express all that God is by our actions and lifestyle. We are to be like God, who is holy, loving, creative, totally faithful, responsible, forgiving, just, and so on. We must also recognize that we are created by a moral God and placed in a moral universe. We are therefore moral beings, accountable to God for what we do with our lives.

At the same time we are ‘flesh’. This means we are made of natural senses that empower us to engage with the natural world in which we have been placed. Those senses can, of themselves, provide us with delight, in taste, touch, sight, sound and so on. Humans, then, can choose to pursue the delight that human senses provide. When they do that they are now living out of their natural, sensual being, rather than their spiritual qualities.

Since nobility is based on our special-ness, when we live out of our spiritual value we have unparalleled nobility. When we live out of our natural senses we lower ourselves to the level of an animal in pursuit of natural experiences.

So, mankind’s nobility is tested by the fact that he is ‘also flesh’, as God described us in Genesis 6:3. Man is not to look out for opportunities to indulge the flesh but is to live by God’s spiritual destiny on his life.

The Apostle Paul put it this way, “do not use freedom as an opportunity to indulge the flesh, but serve one another out of love”, Galatians 5:13 (author’s paraphrase).

The challenge for humans, however, is that their natural senses can become quite obsessed with gratification. This is especially so if those senses have been awakened and indulged.

When the Israelites were fed supernaturally in the wilderness for 40 years they were fed a substance that sustained their bodies, but which did not indulge their appetites. The miracle ‘manna’ would form on the ground each morning and be collected for their sustenance. They made bread and other food from it. The food was physical but its essential quality was spiritual.

The Bible described the manna as “angels food” (Psalm 78:25). Angelic food would be sufficient to feed a spirit being, since angels are spirit beings. It was able to sustain natural bodies because people can be sustained and kept alive by having their spirit fed. Yet spiritual food would do nothing to pander to human appetite, even though it miraculously sustained human life.

As a consequence the people loathed the food, which they called ‘light bread’, and they lusted for meat, onions and other things their taste buds craved (Numbers 11:4-6,21:5). They said “our soul loathes this light bread”. While their body was sustained by manna, their appetites were unsatisfied with it. It did nothing to appease their natural cravings for strong flavours and tickled taste-buds.

The historical experience is metaphorical of the way humanity despises living for spiritual values. In order to walk in the Spirit and live out of our spiritual realities we have to put our flesh to death, dying to natural appetites.

The issue is not staying alive or sustenance, but the human pleasure derived from the natural senses. And therein is the nobility challenge for all humanity. When we turn our focus from the divine to the natural we are the ones who abuse our own nobility and degrade our own existence, selling out our true potential for such temporary and meaningless experiences as the gratification of our human appetites.

Let me put it another way. We are made in the image of God, imago dei. So we have divinity stamped in our being. This is the basis of our highest nobility. Yet we are made with natural senses that can feed appetites of lust and self-gratification. When we bring out body under control, and die to our fleshly appetites, living to fulfill spiritual destiny, we achieve our highest nobility. When we abandon spiritual focus and seek gratification of our appetites we degrade ourselves and can totally destroy any self-worth within us.

The Bible truth of our special creation by a loving God to whom we are accountable, is a solid basis for appreciating our nobility. The lie of evolution, baseless in science, defying proof or even a workable theoretical base, yet pushed as essential dogma for acceptance into many corners of western society, strips humanity of its nobility.

I call you to rise to your true nobility. I call you out of the trough, where the pigs wallow. You are created for much higher destiny and nobility than the pub brawl, seedy back alleys, hollow halls of human vanity, vain and baseless ambitions of self importance, and so on. You are created for the throne room, where your mentor, the Living God, waits to tutor you in eternal authority and global significance.

Fellow noblemen, please stand. Stand in the presence of God. Stand in your created destiny. Stand in your nobility. Stand against evil. Stand in freedom from human appetites. Stand in the glorious liberty of the children of God. Stand, because He has called you to stand for His glory.

The Lost Taste of Sex

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I’ve talked a bit about how we lose the taste for things, so now I’ll turn your attention to sex. (I smile at this, since some people already have their mind turned too far in that direction.) I have pointed out how people end up unable to enjoy the natural flavours of life and of God’s glory, because they have become addicts to sensual stimulation.

One of our problems is that we adapt to the stimuli, so anything that is tantalising becomes normal as we continue to experience it. We can find ourselves adding more sugar, more salt or more spice, because we keep adapting to the flavour sensation we have created.

Another problem is that we must avoid crossing moral boundaries. We are moral beings and many of the things our body craves must be kept within moral bounds as well. If we indulge a human appetite we become a slave to their thing. Our body then makes demands of us and will not be satisfied unless we indulge it. We are in a moral bind. What was supposed to simply be a delightful additional experience becomes a slavery and an acid hole in our being.

In our sensualised western culture we are constantly prompted to indulge our appetites. In so doing we begin destroying our taste for those things and we come under the power of the sensuality. We find that we are spoiled for the ordinary, not because we have transcended the ordinary, but because we have damaged our taste buds and can no longer taste the flavours God created for us.

So, how does this apply to sex?

Most westerners do not know how to enjoy sex that is not sensualised. Sex has been so immersed in pop-culture sensuality that many people think their sexual experience is a failure if it just ordinary.

Sex is packaged for us in song, books, movies and TV programs as a highly sensualised experience. Pornographic or sensualised images, eroticised stories, voyeuristic entertainments and immoral lifestyles have so swamped our appreciation for sex that most westerners are permanently damaged goods.

In my Straight Talk on Sex seminars I point out that sex is often fused with adrenalin in the experienced of sensualised people. Those people don’t want sex without the accompanying adrenalin rush as well. The taste of sex has been lost to them.

I recall talking with a new Christian who had recently dealt with his pornography problem. He had begun to use pornography to give himself a sexual excitement. However, the consequence was that he found himself unable to enter into natural sexual relations with his wife. He finally resorted to keeping pornography beside his bed and using that to get himself worked up enough to be able to have intimacy with his wife.

The wife in that situation felt horrible demeaned. She felt that she was so deficient as a woman as to be incapable of attracting her husband’s sexual interest. The problem, however, was not with the woman but with the man. He was spoiled for the ordinary. He could no longer enjoy the natural and sweet intimacy God gave him in his marriage. What he had indulged in, in order to give himself an upgrade in his sexual excitement, actually did the very opposite. It ate holes in his sexuality.

Thankfully, through becoming a Christian, this man dealt with his sin and addiction.

The devil’s deal just never gets any better. He keeps promising the earth and delivering mud. He promises excitement while he is stealing your ability to taste anything at all.

If you have been damaged in the ways I describe in these posts, I encourage you to deal with the issue. You are welcome to use the Steps to Release which are my main ministry tool in helping people. I have already posted on the topic, giving a summary of those steps, so look for the post titled Steps to Release.

Nobility Challenge

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In an earlier post (Nobility – Imago Dei) I introduced you to the notion of our true nobility being anchored in our unique created status. Since we are made in the image of God, imago dei, we have remarkable nobility built in to who and what we are.

Our nobility is challenged, however, by our tendency to live below our created status. Instead of living as God’s children, made in God’s image, we are tempted to live like animals, bent on the indulgence of animal instincts.

This post on our nobility challenge seeks to focus your attention on the choices you make the impact those choices have on your nobility.

As humans we have two dimensions. We have a spiritual dimension based on our being made in God’s image, as moral beings accountable to a moral God in a moral universe. We also have a natural dimension. Our natural dimension is based on our natural environment and the physiological make-up which enables us to engage with that world. Our five senses enable us to enjoy this life, but can be elevated to the place of our main purpose for life. When we choose to live out of our natural senses we effectively abandon our spiritual dimension, in order to indulge our natural dimension.

The measure of our nobility is the degree to which we live for spiritual realities versus our fleshly interests. This does not mean that people become dead to their five senses, but they put to death the self-serving lusts that spring from those senses. The body has bodily appetites but is not synonymous with bodily appetites. It is more than the sum of our bodily appetites. It is possible to be dead to human appetites and to simply enjoy the pleasures of taste, touch, sight, etc, without being sold out to those things. It is also possible to be highly disciplined and to deny bodily pleasure yet to be internally preoccupied and distracted with gratification. An absence of sensual engagement does not mean that a person is living out of their spiritual dimension. They may simply be highly disciplined in their flesh.

The nobility challenge is to live as the image of God, imago dei, rather than as a craven animal distracted by natural experiences. When you step away from your divine origins and calling you trash your nobility. Every addiction to your senses and sensual experience is evidence of your lost nobility. True nobility involves freedom from the demands of your natural, flesh self.

I pray that God give you the grace to walk into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, out of the quagmire of darkness, slavery and oppression that devours your nobility and mocks your existence.

Losing the Taste of Life

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I wrote in The Lost Taste of Glory how people today are incapable of enjoying the life God gave them because they are addicted to the idea of spicing up their life. Our sensualised culture has so distorted our taste for life that we react to and even choke on things that are just as God made them. We have lost our taste for glory.

We have been given life abundant in Christ Jesus. He gives us life that is far more wonderful than anything we have known. But what Christ gives us is based on the real taste of life. Some people will reject the very blessings they are offered because they have lost their taste for what is tasty.

I mentioned before how that our addiction to sensual delight so spoils us that things that are delightful no longer delight us. Things that are sweet are no longer sweet enough. Things that are lovely no longer appeal to us. It is not that we are spoiled for the ordinary, but that we are ruined and can no longer enjoy that which has real flavour and value. We are not ‘above’ those things; we are outside the enjoyment of real things. We have not transcended, but been submerged in mire. Such people chase the new and exotic experience, finding less pleasure in it than unspoiled people find in the plain things the addict spurns.

Two examples of people needing to spice up their natural life in order to feel the thrill of living come from my younger years. One of my teenage friends had a friend who made his life exciting through sleep deprivation. The young man found it exciting to be living in a state of total exhaustion. Everything he did demanded his utmost concentration, especially driving a car. This was a great source of excitement for him, that at any moment he could succumb to sleep and kill himself in an accident. I failed to see the merit in his risk-reward equation.

Another friend who had been saved from a life of sin and was now working in the red-light area of Sydney pointed out a couple of young people to me. They were dressed in outlandish garb that made them look ridiculous and completely misfit for normal society. Since he had come from that same background he asked me why I thought those young people dressed that way. I had no real idea. He told me they were looking to be rejected. They wanted the pain of being stared at and avoided by people, as a personal experience that gave them the feeling of standing out and being able to make an impression. Rather than doing so by fitting in with normal life, they felt driven to feed on the rejection and contempt which they attracted.

Whatever a person’s ‘spice’, most westerners today are addicted to something they have given themselves to, or have used to add new dimension to their life. Some don’t know what they are looking for but they feel an inner drive to get that ‘something extra’ to give them an ‘over the top’ experience.

The result is they have lost the taste for normal. They have also lost the taste for glory. Many people reject the offers they have for a normal and rewarding life, because they are addicted to fame, success, sensual delight, freedom, independence, making their own mark, being recognised, proving themselves, keeping up appearances, and so on. Even if they don’t know what it is they are seeking they will spurn anything that seems ‘ordinary’ because it couldn’t possibly supply what they feel a desperate need for.

Being a housewife is an ordinary experience and the women who pursue it find to be wonderfully rewarding and meaningful. Yet it is a despised option. It is the un-tasty option that many women reject today because they have a taste for something else. It is too ‘ordinary’ for people who desire greatness or significance, wealth, power, fame, etc.

People are lured away from home, their study, their job, their family, slow moving predictable paths, etc, in the hope of the quick win, hasty upgrade, opportunistic breakthrough, and so on. Many of these people are conned out of their money, damage their relationships, lose their friends, trash their career, waste their potential and trip up their whole life, because they hanker for the added spice and exciting opportunity.

I assume that just about all westerners have been damaged by this phenomenon. So let me ask you, Can you enjoy the simple things God has given you? Do you enjoy your family, your marriage, reading the Bible, prayer, service, doing your work, blessing others and trusting God? If you can’t enjoy spending your life in God’s service, doing what He wants you to do on His time frame and His way, then you are probably damaged goods. You probably have had your taste-buds damaged by the world’s sensuality. So call out to God for some divine healing of your being. Get your taste for life restored, and then live your life for God’s glory.

The Lost Taste of Glory

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People no longer have any idea of the flavour of glory in their lives, since they have lived so long without any awareness of it. Like Asians who have only eaten heavily spiced food and who do not know the taste of unseasoned vegetables, many people do not know the flavour of some key human experiences.

My American contacts are so accustomed to adding sauces and toppings to things that it seems they don’t know how to enjoy the natural fruit and food flavours. On my first trip to the USA I called my family to look inside the fridge of our hosts. The fridge door was jam packed with different bottles, each containing a special seasoning for some food or other. And instead of one variety of sauce (ketchup as they call it) they had to have half a dozen varieties to suit their particular taste-bud penchant from time to time. Our hosts were surprised that we did not need to douse our food with sauces to be able to eat and enjoy it.

The problem with seasonings and sauces is that we adjust to them. Our physiology no longer responds to the added flavour, but adjusts to it and then requires it as normal. A child raised on sugary cordial finds it hard to enjoy a natural fruit juice. A person who puts plenty of salt on their food finds unsalted food too bland. A person who is used to eating tomato sauce on all their meat will find the natural meat flavours deficient.

I recall being a student at Faith Bible College in New Zealand in 1978. A couple from the USA prepared dessert one weekend. It was ice-cream doused in all the available toppings at the same time. Chocolate, strawberry and caramel ran together, with chopped nuts on a mixture of ice-cream flavours. I reacted to it for several reasons. I preferred chocolate above the other flavours and if I had to have an extravagant dessert I would have preferred the flavour of my choice. I also knew that the Bible College ran on a thin budget and that all the local students would have been just as happy with any one of the toppings, saving the others for use at another time. But what shocked me most was that these fellow students thought it normal to throw every possible flavour together as if that was the only way to enjoy themselves. It seemed that they had lost the enjoyment of vanilla ice-cream or the simpler pleasures which their parents would have thought perfectly delightful. Indulgence had pushed them, and I suspected their culture, to the point where lovely things were no longer lovely. Sweet things were no longer sweet enough. Delights were no longer delightful. Only a new and exotic experience pushing the bounds of past treats would suffice.

Extending that principle to other life experiences it seems that many people who have their palate tantalised by modern ‘seasonings’ have forgotten how to enjoy the natural flavours of life. People raised on a diet of late release movies, happy endings, explosive dramas and sexy sensuality find that real life seems to be missing something.

The problem is at least two-fold. One problem, mentioned already, is that we are adaptation devices. We quickly become accustomed to things that were at first tantalising or too strong for us. Once we have adapted to something our very physiology robs us of continued tantalisation. We no longer feel as thrilled by the new taste or experience as we did the first time. So we need to add an extra spoonful of sugar, another dose of spice, or some other element of excitement to make the experience as enjoyable as it was the first time.

This is the situation with drug addiction. The addict may enjoy their early drug experiments, but they find that the experience becomes more normal all the time and so a higher dose or more potent drug is sought. The whole process is self-defeating, leading the addict down a path of increased addiction and slavery.

The second problem is that our fleshly appetites have the ability to enslave us. Indulgence is more than a physiological issue. It is a spiritual issue. Mankind was created in God’s image to reflect who God is and to live by His holiness. When we deviate from that we are stepping into moral quicksand and the domain of moral slavery. Indulging human appetite for selfish ends brings us into slavery to that very appetite. We are then drawn back to it, again and again, not in order to achieve some new level of reward and satisfaction, but simply to resolve the inner pressure of a deficit which we feel.

Here is the Biblical basis for what I have been explaining.

“Don’t you know that to whom you yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants you are to whom you obey; whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness?” The Apostle Paul, Romans 6:16.

“Jesus answered them, Truly, truly, I tell you, Whoever commits sin is the servant of sin.” Jesus Christ, John 8:34

In all this, the physiological adaptation and the personal slavery that comes with our moral failures, people become spoiled for that which is natural. The taste of normal life, the quiet life, peace and joy, is rejected because it is not sensational enough.

I think this is a major issue in western lives today. It is not a new problem, but it is a real problem for today’s generation. We have a culture addicted to sensual pleasure and unable to enjoy what God has given them. So I’ll toss this subject around some more and give you another dose when I get back to it.