There are people who think they can talk to the dead.  There are people who think they can leave their bodies and enter the spirit world on demand.  There are people who think they can access spirits of various kinds.  Some people even think they can control these spirits.  Just about everybody I can think of—even some atheists—want to know more about the spiritual side of life.  So what does it mean to have a spirit, to live by the spirit, to be spiritual?

It’s probably smart for all Christians to understand, because it’s how we are called to live.  After all, God himself is spirit…

John 4:24 For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”

And you and I, underneath this coating of skin and bones, we are spirit.

Romans 8:16 For his Holy Spirit speaks to our spirit and tells us that we are God’s children.

What a wild thought!  Have you ever really stopped to consider what that means?  That you have a spirit—that you ultimately are spirit.

I know it’s much easier to think of things in their physical sense.  That’s what we’re used to.  We breathe and walk and bleed when we are cut.  Our life is sustained by food and drink.  We exercise for better health.  We wear coats when we’re cold and shorts when it’s hot out.  We can get sick and worn out.  Understanding things as physical is second nature to us…or maybe it feels more like first nature to you.

But the truth is that the spiritual part of us is in a sense far more real than the physical.  Our physical bodies wear out over time.  They can develop sicknesses and sore spots.  They get old and eventually die.  After that they go right back to dust.  In fact, the bodies that we’re used to have to die for us to continue.  Like a seed that goes into the ground, we have to shed our outer shell in order to continue as spirit.

Now the average person might last a good 70 or 80 years these days.  And to you and I that can seem like a good long time.

But our spirits last a whole lot longer than that.  It might be difficult to comprehend, but even if we live well over 100 years, the time that our spirit goes on and on makes this physical life seem like the tiniest speck of insignificance.

1 Cor. 15:45-54 The Scriptures tell us, “The first man, Adam, became a living person.” But the last Adam—that is, Christ—is a life-giving Spirit.  What came first was the natural body, then the spiritual body comes later.  Adam, the first man, was made from the dust of the earth, while Christ, the second man, came from heaven.  Every human being has an earthly body just like Adam’s, but our heavenly bodies will be just like Christ’s.  Just as we are now like Adam, the man of the earth, so we will someday be like Christ, the man from heaven.

What I am saying, dear brothers and sisters, is that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. These perishable bodies of ours are not able to live forever.

But let me tell you a wonderful secret God has revealed to us. Not all of us will die, but we will all be transformed. It will happen in a moment, in the blinking of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, the Christians who have died will be raised with transformed bodies. And then we who are living will be transformed so that we will never die.  For our perishable earthly bodies must be transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die.

When this happens—when our perishable earthly bodies have been transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die—then at last the Scriptures will come true: “Death is swallowed up in victory.

So we can grasp the basics of this concept.  It’s easy to say sure I’m a spirit.  But how do you really relate to that idea—that you exist in a realm of nonphysical.  Because when it comes down to it, it can be an amazing thing to really try to grasp.

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We live in a fast paced culture.  Right?  Nobody likes to wait for anything.  We want everything now.  We hate red lights and long lines and people who show up late.  I’ve seen people lose it because they had to wait 5 minutes to get their fast food.  Just the other day I was at a stoplight, and across the intersection was a guy whose car had stopped running.  I could hear his starter kick in over and over as he tried to get his engine started again.  And when the light turned green, the guy behind him laid on the horn–several times. We love to be able to fast forward through the commercials.  We live faced paced lives.

But I’ve noticed that a lot of people who get involved with churches or pray some little prayer that’s supposed to magically change them into Christians are more than happy to wait.  Oh, they still want the sermons to be over fast so they can get back to more fast paced life.  But when it comes to making the world a better place, they don’t mind at all just to wait…to wait for Jesus to come back to fix things, to wait till they die to change their lives, to wait for somebody else to do something so they won’t have to.

So is that right?  Is that the way it ought to be?  Does God just want people to go to a church, sing a few songs, pray a few prayers and then sit around and wait?  The Bible seems pretty clear about how people who claim to follow him ought to be impacting and affecting the world around them.  Jesus talked all the time about helping the poor and the widows and orphans and prisoners and foreigners.  He was very clear that we’re supposed to stand up for justice and teach people to obey his commandments.  So then why do so many people who call themselves Christians seem to be waiting?

By the way, what are you waiting for?

PS. I mention a visual aid in part of this talk that might be a little difficult to see in the audio recording.  So for anybody curious about that.  I tied off a big roll of string and began to unwind it across the room.  A little way out, I used a marker to mark a tiny spot on the string.  Then I kept unwinding it all around the room.  I’d go all the way to one wall, wrap the string around something and go back the other way.  Eventually the string was unwound all over the place.  I thought it was fun.

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