Last week we were talking about how you can speak words into your own life, into your own spirit, that shape what's going on in your inner world. I encourage you to get that if you weren't here, and begin to start to look at each of the steps I gave. They could all be developed further, so they're just the seed steps of what to do. I can tell you now, you can change your inner world. Now if you're not going to change it, who will? Okay, now then, we talked about changing first your inner world, because out of the heart the mouth speaks, so if I don't change what's going on in my heart, if I'm still negative inside, inevitably negativity will flow out. So it's not a matter of just stopping the words. I've actually got to change the attitude of heart. I've got to let the Holy Spirit in, and work with myself, and we saw that required that I deal with inner conflicts and unresolved relationship hurts, and we talked about how to do that. It involves that I begin to break mindsets, and stop agreeing with words which are limiting and negative, and begin to start to speak words that build, and are positive, and begin to start to impart life into the world. So we saw how to do that last week.
Now this time I want to start off this year, I want to carry on that same theme. We talk now about shaping the world around you. Now one of the first places is to shape the spiritual atmosphere around your own life, so what I want to do today is to talk how to shape and build the spiritual atmosphere around your own life. Then next, we'll look at shaping your relationships by the word of God, then we'll look at shaping the world around you, in other words how you release the word of God, to shape and influence what is happening around you. Is this good? Okay, so we'll look at building or shaping your spiritual atmosphere, shaping the spiritual atmosphere around your life by the word of God, or shaping your personal spiritual atmosphere.
Let me just talk to you. Most things that are spiritual, are actually really easy to understand. Anything that God wants to teach us, is usually very, very simple in it's concept, it's just we make it hard, and so when it sounds complicated, I kind of switch off to tell the truth, because God talks really simply and directly. The things He shows us are hard to put words to sometimes, but the things He wants to teach us are very, very simple. So first what I want you to do is, I want you to - we're going to just talk about atmosphere for a start off. I want to talk about something that you would know and understand. This is something we can all relate to very, very easily. I want to talk a little bit about atmosphere, define what it is, and different kinds of atmosphere. Then we want to look at spiritual atmosphere, what that is, and there are three things that it could be formed from. Then I want to just give you some simple keys on how you can shape your own spiritual atmosphere.
Okay, so first of all, the word atmosphere means this: atmos means vapour, and from the word sphaira meaning sphere, so literally, atmosphere is the sphere or the circle of vapour that just surrounds the world, and is held to the world by it's gravity. Note that, we're going to talk about that in a moment. The atmosphere that the world has, when we go outside, we can feel the atmosphere. Go to Singapore, Asia, it's a different kind of atmosphere. It smells different, feels different, everything about it is different. You go to some countries in the world, the atmospheres quite different in some countries, and some places, a very heavy atmosphere, different kinds of atmosphere. So there's a natural atmosphere which circles us. We live in that atmosphere. We live and we breathe that atmosphere, so the atmosphere is the air surrounding the earth, which the gravity holds in. It's also a surrounding or prevailing mood or influence. An atmosphere is a surrounding, prevailing influence.
Think about that - a surrounding, prevailing influence. What influence, what spiritual atmosphere surrounds you, and does it prevail? See, because if we're going to talk about making influence, spiritual influence, and impacting people, you have to be able to carry something on the inside to do that, otherwise you get overwhelmed. We used to do an experiment at high school. You get a can, a big four gallon can, put a bit of water in it and boil it. When you boil it it turns to steam, you drive all the air out. Now if you just put a cap on it and let it cool, what happens is there's the atmosphere, the air's been driven out. The water then, as it cools, just turns from vapour, it turns just to water drops, then you see the whole four gallon tin crush. You can't see what's crushing it, but there's something crushing it you couldn't see. Now what's crushing it is the weight of the air which is in the atmosphere around it, and it just literally collapses. I've done it many times - it just collapses, about 14lbs per square inch, in the way I used to remember it.