So for example if I were to take the truth that I am the temple of the Holy Spirit, my body's a temple of the Holy Spirit, well you know that verse. See we know it in our head, but what if you were to become conscious everywhere you go, the spirit of God is living within me? What would it be like with God's spirit living in me? What would it feel like, if God was to just fill every part of me, just like He filled the Old Testament temple? What would it be like if God filled every part of me? I begin to imagine that, and I can begin to feel the spirit of God filling me. See, your imagination is the way for the reality of the truth to be experienced. A lot of people get worried about this. They think New Age and all that kind of stuff. Listen, New Age came around a long time after this. It's a latecomer on the scene. They just found what worked, and used it to their own methods without God. We're talking about taking the word of God, what God says, so for example, just Jesus - now Jesus reveals Himself in the Bible in many ways. There's many pictures formed of Him, so you could just imagine yourself encountering Jesus.
Now you're not going to worry about the colour of His hair, or how tall He is. You're not going to be worried about the colour of His eyes. There's no need to be looking at that. We need to be looking at the character of the person Jesus, so what I'm looking at, is what the Bible describes of Him: His eyes are ablaze with fire and passion and zeal, of immense love for me. Now as you behold this, it begins to affect you. You become changed as you behold - that's how you get changed, not by trying. You get changed by stopping trying, and beholding. You get changed by believing, not by working. How did you get saved? Did you work real hard to get saved? No, you chose to believe, but then from then on, we work hard. Meditation allows us to see and experience the truth that is, and it changes our experience. Our dilemma is one of unbelief.
A dilemma is one of not really believing what God says, so if I was to meditate, which I do every day, that Jesus is before me, I'm standing before Him, and I begin to look, and I'm looking at His character. I'm not looking at the colour of His eyes. I'm looking at the fact that His eyes are ablaze with passion and zeal, and He looks right through me, so I'm just going to be transparent before Him. I can't hide. No one can hide, but religion is all about hiding who you really are, and trying hard to be something you're not, or taking the methods you hear preached on a Sunday. You hear something, and then you turn it into a method, but it's never about methods. It's about believing what God says, and our challenge is we don't really believe. If I knew and believed in my heart I'm filled with God, so everywhere I'm going, God's presence is flowing, how would I behave? What would I feel like? When I face difficulties what would I do? The Bible says: you are the temple of God, so as you meditate and believe what God says, you start to be changed to be like that, not by trying harder. That's the dilemma everyone has, they try harder, and we try so hard; if I do this, I'll be blessed. Well see there is the problem straight away. Why don't you just handle this completely different, and say: I am already blessed with every blessing. I'm a blessed person. Now Lord, what would a blessed person behave like, talk like, and look like?
See, in other words, we are so bombarded and pressured to conform to the world and the image of what we used to be, it takes time and effort to renew our mind and heart, so we understand who we've become now in Christ. Most people just don't do it, so therefore they struggle immensely, but if you were to just take these disciplines, very simple disciplines, of the praying in tongues, and allowing your spirit man to flow; and taking the word, and begin to meditate in who you are, and who Jesus is. I have stood and just meditated on Him loving me, what it would look like in His eyes. You know when you don't feel loved, you don't really want to look in anyone's eyes, or look too hard at their countenance. You'll just want to say things and do things to prove you're okay, compress them, but if I just come before Him, and stop trying to do anything, and just hold the truth in my heart and meditate on it, the lies will come up quite quickly of course. You need to deal with those. Sometimes we need deliverance and healing to deal with those lies, but it always helps to meditate in the truth, the truth of being the temple of God, the truth that wherever you are, you're not waiting for revival to come, it's inside you.