Adopting a Supernatural Mindset

As you know, we have been reflecting on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and we have been basing our reflections on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 12. We have been working our way through it, and the general context is that of the Spirit-filled life, the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church, and how we, as children of God and servants of the Lord, are called to move in the gifts of the Spirit and to live the Christian life on a supernatural plane.

But again, many of us Christians come into the Gospel and receive the Lord Jesus; we begin attending church and even take Sunday school classes and do many other things, but it never dawns on us that the Christian life must be lived on a plane different from the natural plane; that we are eternal beings; that we carry within us the very presence of God; and that this presence of God, this presence of the Holy Spirit moving within us, is the life of God with all its power, all its potential, and all its ability to address any situation life may present to us, any challenge. And we, as children of God, are called to become conscious of that fact: that we must live life using the energy God has placed within us. The Christian life is a life of power.

Paul says in one of his passages that he is not ashamed of the Gospel. Why? Because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. And throughout his entire ministry, the Apostle Paul was deeply intent on having his listeners, the churches he planted, and the people he ministered to and discipled over the years make use of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and adopt a supernatural mindset.

I like to speak of a supernatural mindset—in English one would say, “a supernatural outlook”—a supernatural posture toward life. That means understanding, as the prophet, the Old Testament writer, also says—I believe it is Jeremiah—that it is not by the sword, it is not by an army, but by what? By my Spirit, says the Lord.

In other words, the Christian life—the problems, matters, and challenges of life—is not confronted with merely natural energies, nor is it even confronted with a merely religious attitude, but from a supernatural posture.

In other words, we are endowed with the power of God, that power of God moves within us, and we can turn to it and make use of that power whenever we find ourselves in any situation in life. And it is important that we understand that when we speak in the context of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

You will remember the passage we are discussing, but I am going to change course a little because today’s context, as I listened to the musicians, led me in another direction, I believe in order to do justice to what we have witnessed and participated in. But do remember that the Apostle Paul speaks of different gifts. He says:

“...but to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good, for to one is given through the Spirit a word of wisdom; to another, a word of knowledge according to the same Spirit; to another, faith by the same Spirit; and to another, gifts of healings by the same Spirit; to another, the working of miracles; to another, prophecy; to another, discernment of spirits; to another, various kinds of tongues; and to another, the interpretation of tongues. But all these things are done by one and the same Spirit, distributing to each one individually as He wills....”

When the Apostle Paul speaks here of nine gifts, he is not being exhaustive in the list he provides. He is simply giving examples of the different gifts that can operate in the life of the church. And as you will recall, I have even said on occasion that the gifts of counseling should operate in the church. At this point in history, humanity needs people who are supernaturally gifted in the area of counseling. God needs teachers; God needs people who have an attitude of service, and the Apostle also records those gifts in the Epistle to the Romans, chapter 12. God needs people with gifts of leadership, gifts for finance, gifts for planning and strategic thinking, and even gifts, I would say, for politics and everything related to government. Our countries need Christians with wisdom for the development of our societies.

In Africa, for example, the Gospel is spreading in an extraordinary way. Many people are being converted to the Lord, but I believe there is still a need there for believers endowed with a special gifting that enables those men and women to venture into, to enter, the areas of government, development, governmental planning, and the economy—people with, I would say, the gift of knowledge, for example, specifically the gift of knowledge, endowed with a structural mind capable of thinking in terms of development and of thinking in organized ways about how to develop societies.

I believe that at this time the church needs people with the gift of organization, of thinking organizationally, because the challenges facing the church in the twenty-first century are challenges of organization, challenges of addressing a society that is tremendously developed rationally, intellectually, governmentally, and structurally. The world out there has been able to develop in an extraordinary way, and God does not want His church to lag behind. Quite the contrary, I believe that God gives His children the power, the authority, and the endowment of power that enable them to do things at a much higher level than the world can.

How many say amen to that? As I watched these young people here developing their gifts, I said, “Wow, the quality of this music is no less than what you see out there in the secular world.” And our brother Adlan certainly exemplifies that in an extraordinary way, because God gives gifts to His church, brothers and sisters.

The problem is that the church of Jesus Christ often languishes in its capacity to believe God and to open itself like a sponge to receive the gifts of the Spirit. I believe that if there were more dreamers and visionaries in the church who believed God and began to yearn for them...

The Word says that we should earnestly desire the best gifts, doesn’t it? That we should desire the best gifts. I believe the problem with the church is that there are not enough people who yearn for the gifts of God. Of course, sometimes we desire gifts in a general way: “Oh, I would like to be a teacher,” or “I would like to be this.” But there are very few people who agonize before God and pay the price of seeking God’s supernatural endowment so that God may fill them with supernatural power and they may move on the supernatural plane.

If we did it more often, if from childhood, if from our youth, we began to cry out to the Lord, if we dedicated our talents to the Lord, our loaves and fishes to the Lord, and said, “Father, I have something here, and it is like a seed; it is merely an embryo, but I bring it to You and dedicate it to You. Bathe me in Your light; bathe me in Your endowment of power. I open myself to the manifestation of Your Spirit in my life. I will move in Your power, and I dedicate this to You, and I will serve You here and use it for Your glory. I will not allow anything to contaminate my gift, and I will do everything possible to develop it. I will nurture it and add wood to it as wood is added to a fire, and the more wood I add, the greater, more powerful, more far-reaching, and more blazing my gift will become. And I will always do it to give You the glory.”

When a person begins to live that way, brother, God begins to do powerful things in the life of the church. I believe God has gifts here that you do not even know you have yet. God has capacities and endowments of power here that many of you have within you simply like a baby you do not know is inside you, an embryo; and if you begin to seek the Lord and understand that the Christian life is a life that moves on the supernatural plane, God can do whatever He wants with any one of you.

He brought David out of obscurity, from among the sheepfolds far away, where he was tending sheep—a young man who apparently had nothing supernatural to commend him, nothing extraordinary. But the Lord saw his heart, brought him out, and gave him gifts of government, gifts of prophecy, musical gifts, gifts for design and instruments, and literary gifts. He wrote many of the psalms because David believed God and moved on the supernatural plane.

I believe that is important. At this moment, as I listened to the brothers here play, I thought of Daniel. So that you may see how—I am not going to address today the third gift spoken of in First Corinthians, which is the gift of faith—but I want you to see Daniel’s gift, how, when Daniel dedicated his life to the Lord, God endowed him with a special ability that could be used in an extraordinary way.

There in the first chapter of the book of Daniel, we see Daniel taken to Babylon as a young man. We do not know how old he was; perhaps he was 19 or 20. And the king of Babylon, who was very wise and very shrewd, takes these captives and chooses from among them.... He knew that the Jewish people had been endowed with a special ability, that they were an outstanding people, and the king of Babylon very shrewdly sought to choose from among those captives some of the most accomplished and promising and train them in his academy to help govern his country. And he decided to place them in special positions.

Today, in the same way, the church needs to recognize the latent talents among the people, and we must ask the Lord to give us discernment so that we can enter into the innermost parts of people and recognize their gifts before they are manifested, because if we do not recognize them beforehand, they will not be manifested. We must ask the Lord, “Lord, help us discover where the special endowments are, where those young people are whom You can use in the future to do great things in the midst of Your church, and where the people are whom You can use to respond to the challenges of the twenty-first century.”

The king of Babylon chooses a number of young men, and among them are Daniel and several of his closest friends. And the Word says here in verse 8 of Daniel 1, “...that Daniel purposed in his heart not to defile himself with the portion of the king’s food or with the wine that he drank, and therefore asked the chief of the eunuchs not to force him to defile himself....”

The first thing we see here is that Daniel has passion for God; Daniel is a young man who takes his faith seriously. Daniel has a very clear understanding of the reality of God in his life. And if you want the gift of God to manifest itself powerfully in your life and God to do great things in your life, you must be passionate about God. Above all, you must be very zealous for the glory of God. You must know that God shares His love with no one, that God is very jealous. When He gives a gift and chooses a vessel, He wants that vessel to be used for His glory and His honor.

And Daniel knew that the food served in the king’s halls was food that had previously been consecrated to idols, and in his conscience Daniel did not feel comfortable eating that food because he felt that his life would be defiled by the king’s food.

And I believe there are many men and women whom God would like to use in the church today in extraordinary ways, but because we are very lax and lack that supernatural awareness of the presence of God—of a jealous God, a God who is exacting in His dealings with us—the gift of God is diluted; the gift of God lies dormant. It cannot manifest itself with all the power it desires.

But when we consecrate our lives to the Lord—and I believe God is speaking to our church, telling us that we must consecrate ourselves to the Lord at this time—God wants to use our congregation even more to bless the nations. God wants to develop the gifts of our youth and our adults, but He needs us to understand that we must be a people set apart for God; we must honor the Lord in an extraordinary way through our consecration to Him.

Daniel purposed not to defile himself with the king’s food or with the wine drunk in the king’s hall, and he asks the man in charge of these young men, who has been assigned to watch over them—their health, their education, and their well-being—not to make him eat that food, but simply to allow him to eat vegetables, a purely vegetarian diet. And the chief of the eunuchs becomes afraid because if these young men look emaciated after a time, he will suffer the consequences, since they will think he is not caring for them properly.

But Daniel insists and says to him, “Look, let us make an agreement for a certain number of days. If at the end of that number of days we do not look healthy, then all right; but if we are well, then allow us to continue.” And they make the agreement that way.

Daniel was a man of faith. Daniel—again, this is what... moving on the supernatural plane means, brothers and sisters—that you know that the sum of things in God, the sum total, is greater than the number of elements that make it up.

In other words, if you put forth human effort to do something, to accomplish something, you obtain a certain amount of results. The child of God knows that, in the Spirit of God, the same amount of effort produces even greater results, because the Spirit of God makes things yield more.

That is what lies behind tithing, what lies behind living by faith; it is all based on the idea that, with God, everything you do is doubled, multiplied, and yields a hundredfold, sixtyfold, and a thousandfold. So Daniel knew that, if God was with him, whatever he ate would benefit him much more, and he would be blessed because he was doing it in the Lord. And that is the gift of faith.

And that is what we must aspire to when, for example, young people are in school. If one were to believe—and I think it is according to the measure of faith one has—and say, ‘Lord, I know that I am going to delve into these studies not merely with my own energy, not with my own intelligence, but in the power of the Holy Spirit.’

And if you take heart in faith, do your part, exert yourself, study, do your part, trust in the Lord, dedicate your intellect to the Lord, persevere, and believe that God is endowing you with wisdom to succeed, you will discover that nutrients will enter your life that will enable you to do a much better job than if you did it solely in the flesh. That is the problem with many of us: we undertake the tasks of life—in our jobs, our businesses, our marriages, and the situations of life—with a fainthearted attitude, I would say. We simply are not sufficiently aware that what I am doing, I am doing in the name of the Lord and with the power of the Holy Spirit behind me.

Do you remember the story of Peter, when the Lord tells him, ‘Peter, cast your net for a catch,’ and Peter says to him, ‘Lord, we were fishing all night under ideal conditions and did not catch a single fish.’ But what was happening? The difference was that Peter was now casting the net in the name of the Lord. And when Peter casts the net in the name of the Lord, what happens? The net fills with fish.

When you embark upon your life, when you undertake any task in your life, undertake it in the name of the Lord; undertake it in the power of the Holy Spirit. Say, in the name of Jesus, I am going to launch into this in the power of God, and I believe that God will bless me and God will open a way for me.

Ever since I was a child, I have always had that faith that God would bless my studies and that God would see me through at all times. And throughout all my studies, even though I often did not live exactly as God wanted me to live, God gave me faith to believe that he could bless me intellectually; and always, through the glory of the Lord manifested in my life, for his glory, he always saw me through and always allowed me to be blessed in my studies. And since childhood I have believed that God endows his children with a special gift. God has given each one of us an aptitude which, if we move in the power of the Holy Spirit and with faith—a belief that what I have is not mine, but God’s, and that if it is God’s it must be absolutely excellent—and if we move with that attitude, it draws the gift and power of God into our lives.

So we see here that Daniel says, I am going to do things in the Spirit, I am going to pay the price, and I am going to take risks. And what was the result? It says in verse 17—let us go to verse 15 first, because there was an immediate result—it says:

“.... at the end of ten days their faces appeared better and healthier than those of the other young men who ate the portion of the king’s food....”

Because Daniel believed God, was willing to pay the price, took risks, and publicly testified to his faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God honored him; God blessed him.

Brothers and sisters, as children of God we must live our lives that way. When we continually live our lives by offering them to the Lord, offering our gifts and our lives to the Lord, God begins to enrich us; God begins to bless us. It is as though you are continually taking vitamins, and a deposit of God’s power begins to build up in your life, and what you do gains more traction and has a greater impact. You do not understand how, but your interventions, your conversations, your contributions at work, your human relationships, the challenges you face, your family life, and your emotional life—all these things begin to experience an enrichment, and you do not know where it comes from.

Do you know where it comes from? It comes from that secret pipeline that has been connected to your life, through which the water of the Spirit flows with its nutrients; it is refreshing water that strengthens you..... Try always to live your life at the level at which Daniel lived his: at a level of surrender to the Lord, at a level of challenging the world if necessary, because Daniel challenged the Babylonian system. But know militantly that you are a child of God; be proud to belong to the Kingdom of God; feel that you belong to a special lineage in the Kingdom of God.

God gave the Hebrew people—and still has given them—a special endowment, because where God’s blessing is, there is a wealth of every kind of talent. How has a people as tiny as the Jewish people had an impact on human culture that is statistically far, far, far beyond their numbers? Moreover, they are a people who have always had to exercise their gifts at a disadvantage—persecuted, discriminated against, and at times killed en masse—and yet, wherever they are, many of humanity’s great scientists, great musicians and writers, and many of the great economists and bankers come from the Jewish people.

Secular man has been unable to understand this and has always tried to explain it in terms of a Jewish conspiracy to possess the world and sinister schemes on the part of the Jews. But what they have is simply the blessing of God. Despite their unbelief, the covenant God made with Abraham, their father, still follows them; God’s blessing follows them, and that is why they prosper wherever they go.

Do you know what? You and I belong to the new Israel; we belong to the church of Jesus Christ. And if the first covenant was a covenant of excellence, how much more so is the second covenant, the new covenant in Christ Jesus. If the blood of those goats and those animals could secure such an extraordinary blessing for the Hebrews throughout history, how much more can the blood of Jesus, which flows spiritually in our lives, ensure that we are a people of excellence and greatness.

Brothers and sisters, if we are not, it is because of our own foolishness, not because God has shortened his arm or weakened his hand. God has placed in you all the nutrients needed to build a community of excellence. I am convinced of that. And if we remain in the life of God and your families remain in the ways of the Lord, your children will be greatly blessed, our youth will be successful, and our family, our finances, our health, and our emotions will be blessed, because God gives his gifts to his people, and over the years one sees the upward curve of the people of God.

And finally it says that God gave Daniel—it says that God gave these four young men knowledge and intelligence in all literature and sciences, and Daniel had understanding of every kind of vision and dream.

And in verse 20 it says: “... in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king consulted them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers who were in his entire kingdom....”

There you have the gift of knowledge and the gift of wisdom expressed. You see, Daniel paid the price; Daniel dared to believe God. Daniel could have been a successful young man; he could have earned his MBA, his Master of Business Administration, and held a fairly good position in the Babylonian administration. But because he consecrated his life to the Lord and his gift to God, God told him, ‘You know what? I am going to give you more. I am going to give you intelligence and professional skill such as I will not give to any of the others. And I am not only going to give you the bonus; I am going to give you wisdom in dreams, visions, and revelations....’

Because when God gives, brothers and sisters, God gives abundantly. That is the difference. The Word says that the natural man can function only on the natural plane, but the spiritual man can function on the spiritual plane and on the natural plane. That is the difference. When God’s gift is in you, God’s gift has a depth, an intensity, and a capacity to reach much farther than when the gift simply operates on the purely natural plane. That is the difference.

So in your life, you want to dedicate your gift to the Lord. If you are a musician, you say to him, ‘Lord, my music is for you, for your glory, for your honor, so that when I play, beyond the superficial notes people may hear, there may be spiritual content between the notes that penetrates the soul, penetrates the heart, and awakens in people a desire to seek you, a spiritual yearning.’

That is it: when David played, Saul’s inflamed and demonized heart was calmed; the demons submitted to the music that flowed from David’s hands. When the child of God gives counsel, there is a presence of God implicit in his word that reaches people’s hearts. People do not know why, but they receive peace and healing.

When you give counsel, do not counsel through mere human wisdom. Instead, ask the Lord, ‘Father, may my words be like projectiles aimed at this person’s spirit; may I discern the secrets of their heart and speak even to the things they have not revealed and do not even know are hidden in their soul.’

And when you work in anything—administration or counseling in the field of social services—ask the Lord to use you at that deep level and to give your interventions the power to part the sea and bring solutions that do not occur to others on the merely supernatural plane. That is the level at which God’s gift is to be used. Amen.

So let us stand this afternoon. Let us ask the Lord to unleash in us that supernatural awareness, that supernatural posture, and let us dedicate our gifts to the Lord and our lives to the Lord, so that everything we live, we may live on the supernatural plane, and let us ask God to give us wisdom to discern things in the Spirit.

If you have any need in your life, if there is some problem or some situation challenging you in your life, let us ask the Lord to unleash his gift within you to address that specific need in your life, to give you wisdom, and to give you knowledge to get to the root of things. And let us live believing that God has something for my life, that God has entrusted a gift to me, and that he wants me to use it for his glory.

Father, in the name of Jesus, we ask you to give us that capacity to believe which Daniel had, that capacity to take risks, that faith within him which enabled him to venture into your hands and believe that you were powerful enough to nourish him supernaturally and give him supernatural energy and wisdom.

In the same way, Lord, we ask that in the affairs of life, in the challenges of life, and in the things we want to do and accomplish in this world, your energy and your power may be at work, Lord, and that your gifts may be multiplied in us. Father, we want to be a people of power; we want to be a people with a supernatural mind, a mind that moves in the dimension of the Spirit, of the eternal, of the supernatural, Lord.

Remove the veil from us; remove the veil of everyday life that covers us, and make us people who are passionate about the things of the Spirit, Lord. May we move with the armor of the Spirit upon us, with that posture of watchfulness, Lord, always looking to see from where your glory will come into our lives.

Thank you for today; thank you for everything we have heard, lived, witnessed, and taken part in. We consecrate it all to you, Lord, and to you alone we give glory and honor, in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen.

I bless you, my brothers and sisters, in the name of Christ. May the grace and peace of the Lord be with each one of you.