Groaning in the Spirit

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, joy, and 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 pain to you, this can be very uncomfortable.

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 own natural 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 these manifestations are coming in from the Lord or when they are just coming in from your own natural emotions.

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 you are also feeling 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 and concentrate will be impaired. If you are lying down when it occurs, you will not want to get off the couch. You will just want to lie there until the manifestation subsides.

When God does allow you to experience His pain on something, He will respect your limits and He will pull the manifestation off you if you ask Him to do so. When you ask Him to pull it off you, it will disappear in 5-15 seconds. It can come off you that fast. So if anyone of you receives this manifestation anytime in the near future, remember, God will pull it off you the second you ask Him too. You do not have to worry about God overwhelming you past your own personal limits.

Scripture Verses

1.  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.

“He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him … and We will come to him and make our home with him.” (John 14:21)

Again, I believe the words “manifest Myself” to him is literal interpretation, and shows that God can manifest Himself and some of His emotions to us through the Holy Spirit if He should choose to do so.

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:

Then when Mary came where Jesus was, and saw Him, she fell down at his feet, saying to Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.” Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He groaned in the Spirit and was troubled … Then Jesus, again groaning in Himself, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lie against it … now when He had said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” And he who had died came out …” (John 11:32-44)

Lazarus had been dead for 4 days by the time Jesus arrived on the scene. If you will notice when He first arrives on the scene, Lazarus’ sister Mary is weeping along with the other Jewish people 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 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 Jesus 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, sadness, and 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 pain to us through the Holy Spirit.

In my opinion, when God does decide to manifest His sadness and 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 feelings on the matter, even if it is feelings of sadness, sorrow, and pain.

Analogy

If 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 an analogy that I feel that the Lord gave to me to be able to understand all of this. The analogy is the “husband-wife” or “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 close, 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 they are.

Imagine your father has just died and you are really grieving over his death. Then all of sudden your lover or spouse says to you they will see you later after all of your grieving is over because they cannot deal with the pain that you are going through. How would that make you feel?

When true love is entered into between two people, 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.

The same analogy also applies to our personal relationship with God. Remember, the number one thing that God wants from each one of us is that we establish a loving, intimate, personal relationship with Him. And in this personal relationship with God is our desire to want to share our thoughts, our feelings and our emotions with Him, just like two people will want to do in a normal 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 will literally be 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 and blessing 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 feelings with our natural lovers, then why can’t we be willing to share our emotions and feelings direct with God Himself – and then allow God to share back with us His feelings and emotions on any particular situation?

Conclusion

I 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 do so 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 all of the people who are in this world.

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.

One time I felt like the Lord gave me a powerful word about 12 years ago. He said to me: “Do you know how dry your walk would be with Me if from time to time I did not manifest Myself to you?”

I then received an immediate analogy of the lovers again. Imagine a love relationship with no physical intimacy, no touching, no hugging, no hand holding. 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 flaky and too out of balance with all of it.

Remember, it’s the Word and 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 Word and the Holy Spirit – 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.

-Mike

Other links and articles for Christianity.

Flickr: Everyday Faith: Orthodox Christianity in Pictures
Christianity Vs. Darwins Theory
Christianity Today - Reference.com

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Comments

3 Responses to “Groaning In The Spirit”

1. Matthew Arin Adams says:

   October 23, 2011 at 8:26 am

   It is God Himself that causes us to hunger and thirst for Him. It is His mercy upon our lives that enables us to desire spiritual things beyond the usual church setting. He can do anything not against our will to ensure His perfect will is accomplished by Christ’s finished work… Your articles are encouraging!!!
2. Emmanuel says:

   January 20, 2012 at 11:59 am

   Pls pray with me, I’ve been trusting God for the evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in my life. Beyond all doubts I’ve got the convinction that I’ve got Him (Holy Spirit) inside of me. Whenever I ask specifically for His help and guidance, I recieve in clear tone. Whenever I ask Him to speak to me concerning any issue, He does, even concerning understanding sciptures during my Bible study, He does give me understanding each time I ask Him. But am yet to speak in tongues and this is giving me a serious concern. I’ve read several articles which says that speaking in tongues is an evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Pls pray with me that God blesses me with this confirmation. Blessings.
3. Samuel Sardauna says:

   January 25, 2012 at 2:15 pm

   hands were laid on me for the baptism in the holyGhost i did nt pray in tongues but something strange happened, my mouth started vibrating and this would intensify during my prayer and worship, and i was afraid it was a contrary spirit but becoming aware of the holySpirit through teachings asked the Holy Spirit to Help me, while sleeping he would almost mechanically cry out jesus is lord jesus is lord, but last december i prayed until i was no longer aware of my physical body and i discovered i was groaning in my spirit, sort of like vomiting my hrt with no words, but i still desire to pray in tongues……