A person who's peaceful - have you ever met someone who's incredibly peaceful, they carry a spirit of peace. When you come near them, you become very calm. It's actually quite nice being in their presence, because you feel the peace. Have you ever met someone who had self-pity governing their life? You can literally feel the emanating self-pity, and you feel like it's drawing you in, and you have to do something or say something and help them in some kind of way. Have you ever been near an arrogant person? An arrogant person, they put out into the atmosphere that they are superior to you, so you feel put down, even if nothing much is said - so whatever's inside us flows out of us, and the spiritual part of you can pick it up. It's helpful for you to be aware of that dynamic flow. I'll just give an example here - don't mind using you as an example again? Can I use you as an example? There we go.
Just come and stand there. I need someone to stand behind her. Now, so we know that the Holy Spirit lives within us, and so He fills us up. So we pray in tongues, [prays in tongues] then our whole spirit can become filled, until the whole atmosphere around me starts to be filled with the presence of God. Now if I was to lay hands on her, then there can be a release of what's in me, just through the contact of laying on of hands, so I could just go: power of God, and the power of God starts to touch her. But the power of God can touch her also without me connecting. If I was just to allow my heart to be filled with the presence of God, just release the power of God touch you now - now she'll start to feel the power of God just come around her life touching her. Now see I didn't touch her that time, but something flowed. Your spirit substance flows. The things of the spirit flow beyond you. It's helpful to realise that, so therefore, just your presence in a place can affect what's going on around you.
If you're conscious that God is inside you, you're filled with the presence of God, you begin to release the peace of God. We saw it come into the meeting just before, so your spirit is vital to your life. Your spirit can affect the quality of your life. Your spirit can gain thoughts and ideas, your spirit can flow out of you. That's the most wonderful thing, to think that something can flow out of you through your words, or just being there, that touches people. Healing can flow, life can flow, so we want to minister to one another shortly. We want to get that flow going, want to give you an exercise to try. So those are some of the things our spirit can do. Here's another vital thing, and that is your spirit can be strengthened. In other words you can become really strong in your spirit - or you can be very weak.
So Ephesians 3, Verse 16, I pray that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man - so the inner man is your spirit being, joined to the Holy Ghost. Strengthen means increased in dominion, and with might, supernatural ability, dunamis see? So here's the thing, that the Holy Ghost can strengthen you. Now how is that going to happen? Well I'm glad you asked that [laughter] because we want to see exactly how that happens. I always ask the question, how does that happen? If I don't know how it happens - well it's wonderful, it sounds very, very good but how does that happen? I still feel weak like I was yesterday. See, we need to know what we can do that will engage the Holy Spirit working with us. How can I become strong on the inside?
Now if I wanted to gain physical strength like my son-in-law [laughter], then I'd have to do a number of things, but the most important - I could eat the right food, drink the right drink, but here's the most important thing of all: you'd have to exercise. All exercise involves the same kind of thing, various forms of it but essentially, you have to exert your muscles against something that is resisting. You have to actually overcome the resistance, and in overcoming the resistance, you begin to build strength inside yourself. So we can pray that we'll be physically strong, and you know it doesn't work. You can pray you'll be physically fit - you know it doesn't work. You actually have to do something to get physically fit. You can pray that God will strengthen you, and there's nothing wrong with doing that. We should pray that God would strengthen us, but there are ways you can co-operate with the Holy Ghost for that to happen, so let's have a look at some.