Groaning in the Spirit
Some of you have already had these sadness manifestations from the Holy Spirit. This is where God will manifest His sadness, not your sadness, on a particular issue that you may be dealing with. Again, the way that you know that it is His sadness and not your sadness, is that His sadness is much deeper and much more intense than your own natural sadness. After you receive a few of these sadness manifestations, you can usually become quite adept in discerning when the manifestations are coming in from the Lord and when they are just coming in from your own natural emotions. Again, these sadness manifestations can be rated on a scale of 1-10 as far as their intensity levels. Far those of you who have received this type of manifestation, God will always keep within your own personal limits as to how strong He will manifest this particular emotion to you on a particular issue. These sadness manifestations can be handled by each of you. I have never found God to overwhelm anyone with His sadness to a point where they could not take it. However, this next manifestation - groaning in the Spirit - is not as easy to handle. In this manifestation, you are not only feeling God's sadness on a particular situation - but also His pain. This pain is so intense - that you can actually feel a groaning within the actual manifestation itself. This manifestation is definitely not for everyone. When this manifestation comes in on you with any kind of intensity - it will flatten you. What happens is that when your human body comes into physical contact with God's manifestation of pain, it seems to overwhelm the circuits in your body. Your energy levels will immediately decrease and your ability to focus or concentrate will be impaired. If you are lying down when it occurs, you won't want to get off of the couch. You'll just want to lie there until the manifestation subsides. I have had this particular manifestation 3-4 times over the last 10 years or so, and each time I could not stay with it for very long and had to ask God to take it off of me. One time I lasted 2-3 hours with it. Another time only an hour. The research I have done with other people who have experienced this manifestation all had the same effect. Not one of the people I had read who have had this manifestation come in on them could stay with it for any appreciable length of time. Every one of them had to ask God to take it off of them after a certain length of time due to the intensity of it. I have yet to find or read about anyone who could stay in this manifestation for any appreciable length of time. It is that intense and that unpleasant. When God does allow you to experience His pain on something, He will respect your limits and He will pull the manifestation off of you if you ask Him to do so. When you ask Him to pull it off of you, it will disappear in 5-15 seconds. It can come off of you that fast. So if anyone of you receives this manifestation anytime in the near future, remember, God will pull it off of you the second you ask Him too. You don't have to worry about God overwhelming you past your own personal limits. Scripture Verses1. This first Scripture verse, where God is showing you that He can manifest some of His emotions to you through the Holy Spirit, is the one I stated in the last article on "Laughing in the Spirit." For the purposes of this article, I will go ahead and restate this verse for you.
Again, I believe the words "manifest Myself" to him is literal interpretation, and shows that God can manifest Himself and His emotions to us through the Holy Spirit if He should choose to do so with anyone of us. 2. This next verse shows us that Jesus Himself had this groaning in His Spirit when He came upon the death of Lazarus. As you already know, Jesus ended up raising this man literally from the dead once he arrived on the scene. Here is the verse:
Lazarus had been dead for 4 days by the time Jesus arrived on the scene. If you'll notice when He first arrives on the scene, Lazarus' sister Mary is weeping along with the other Jews who were with her. They were all crying and weeping over the death of this man. When Jesus sees all of these people crying over this man, He then starts to get the groaning in His Spirit. He obviously was feeling their pain to the same degree that they were and it was causing Him to groan with this severe and intense pain. It also says that Jesus "groaned in Himself" a second time when He actually entered the tomb that Lazarus had been buried in. I believe what was happening was that both Jesus and the Holy Spirit were feeling and experiencing severe and intense pain over the death of this particular man. When He saw Lazarus' sister and friends crying and weeping over his death, I believe God the Father allowed Jesus to raise this man from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit just due to the fact that Jesus was feeling such intense sorrow and sadness for the grieving they were all going through. This dramatic story right here shows us that God can and does actually feel our pain, our sadness and our sorrow when we are faced with a real sad or traumatic situation. Many of the times when we are crying, God is crying right along side of us. However, most of the time, we cannot see or feel God crying with us on a sad situation unless He decides to manifest His sadness and His pain to us through the Holy Spirit. In my opinion, when God does decide to manifest His sadness and His pain to you on a particular situation where you can actually feel what He is feeling - this is an incredible privilege, blessing and honor - because God is sharing with you His feeling on the matter - even if it is feeling of sadness, sorrow and pain. AnalogyIf God's pain is so intense and so uncomfortable to handle for any length of time, then why would any of us want to experience this particular unpleasant manifestation? The answer is in an analogy that I feel that the Lord gave to me. The analogy is the "husband-wife" or the "lover" analogy. When two people are truly in love with one another, they are willing to share the good times with the bad times. When your lover is crying over a sad situation, you are feeling your lover's pain because of the love-bond that exists between the two of you. You are so in tune with your lover's feelings and emotions, that sometimes you may be able to feel their pain to the same depth and degree that they are. Imagine your father has just died and you are really grieving over his death. Then all of sudden your lover says to you that she will see you later after all of your grieving is over because she can't deal with the pain that you are going through. How would that make you feel? When true love is entered into between two people, it really is for better or worse. You have to be willing to stand by your partner during the sad times and be willing to feel and share some of their pain during their times of sadness and vice versa. The same analogy applies to our relationship with God. Remember, the number one thing that God wants from each one of us is a loving, intimate, personal relationship with Him. And in this personal relationship is the desire to want to share our thoughts, our feelings and our emotions with Him - just like in a human love relationship. And then God wants to be able to share some of His thoughts, some of His feelings and some of His emotions with us just like we will want to do with Him. And sometimes when God decides to share a feeling or emotion with us, He will literally manifest that feeling or emotion right up to us through the Holy Spirit. You will thus be receiving an actual manifestation from God Himself. You are literally feeling His actual emotion on something! He is sharing that emotion with you when He does this. He is allowing you to feel what He is feeling for that short period of time. Do you see what an incredible privilege this is - to be able to feel, through an actual manifestation, what God is actually feeling about something? This is true sharing. This is what true love is all about. If we can share our emotions and our feelings with our natural lovers - then why can't we be willing to share our emotions and our feelings direct with God Himself? And then allow God to share back with us His feelings and His emotions? ConclusionI know some of the above may sound too deep or too heavy to get into for some of you, but it really isn't. Some of you have had the basic love stirrings from God through the Holy Spirit. This is just the next step up the ladder. You are simply allowing God to manifest His other emotions to you in addition to the love that you have already felt through the normal stirrings. For those of you who would like to try and venture into a little deeper water with the Lord on this, simply go to Him in prayer, and ask Him, if it be His will to do so at your present level of spiritual development with Him, to release some of these other emotional manifestations up to you through the Holy Spirit. Tell Him that He has a green light to manifest any of His other emotions anytime that He will want to with you. For those of you who are willing to give it a try - I guarantee that you will get to know God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit much better than you already do now. When you start feeling what They are feeling and you allow God to start to share His feelings and emotions with you within this manifestation realm, it will simply draw you that much closer to God in your own personal relationship with Him. It will help increase the love that you already have for Him because you will really see how much God really does love and care for the people that are in this world. Knowledge about God from the Bible is everyone's first step in really getting to know God. However, I really believe that this manifestation realm is the next big step up the ladder. It's one thing to know that God does love and care for all of us because the Bible tells us so. However, it's another thing to be able to actually feel God's love for us through some of these manifestations that He is capable of giving to us through the Holy Spirit. These manifestations seem to seal the deal with God. One time I felt like the Holy Spirit gave me a powerful word about 8 years ago. He said to me: "Do you know how dry your walk would be with Me if from time to time We did not manifest Ourselves to you?" I received an immediate analogy of the lovers again. Imagine a love relationship with no physical intimacy, no touching, no hugging, no handholding. The love relationship would dry up without the physical touch. It's the same way in our personal relationship with God. God does want to "touch us" from time to time with these manifestations. They will help keep us from drying up in our walk with Him. However, we always have to keep all of this in proper balance. Some people would go overboard with these manifestations. The only thing they would seek after would be these manifestations because of the intensity of them and because they make you feel so good when you do receive them. I believe God will hold these manifestations back from these types of people because He will lose them due to them getting too flakey and too out of balance with all of it. Remember, it's the Word and the Spirit working together that will cause true spiritual growth to occur in a born-again believer. If you have all Word, but no Holy Spirit, you will dry up. If you have all Holy Spirit, but no Word, you will blow up. However, if you have both the Holy Spirit and the Word - you will grow up. The two will go perfectly hand-in-hand with one another when you stay in proper balance within these two realms.
Slain in the Spirit - Bible Verses Join Our Free Newsletter
> Michael Bradley Scripture taken from New King James
Version. |
his next manifestation that is possible to
receive from God, through the Holy Spirit, may be the one
that may considered to be the most unpleasant. To have God
manifest His love, His joy and His peace to you through
the Holy Spirit are very nice and pleasant manifestations
to receive from the Lord. However, when God decides to
manifest His sadness or His pain to you, this can be very
uncomfortable.
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