Walk In The Spirit 5: Key Steps

Hello people of God. It is a new week and I am delighted to write another post in Vignettes of Grace. 

For a little over a month my posts have centered largely on the need for us to walk in the Spirit. I was pleasantly surprised to get a message from one of the readers on this blog with the following questions:

“How do we walk in the Spirit? How do we live in full conformity with the Spirit? What practical steps should we take?”

I therefore crave your indulgence to provide answers to these questions in my post this week as I believe it would probably be helpful to a number of people.

It is very important to clarify from the beginning that walking in the Spirit does not refer to a “mystical” or “trance-like” experience in which the believer mysteriously lives and behaves like an “other-worldly being”. As you will notice in the whole section of Galatians 5 that we have been considering all through this period, there is no insinuation of such a pattern of life.

Walking in the Spirit as I wrote in last week’s post means to live in accordance with the Holy Spirit or to say it in another way, walking in the Spirit means living under the direction of the Holy Spirit.

I will now share some key steps I that I have found helpful in doing this in my own life:

A. Maintaining a conscious awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit: Many believers do not have a knowledge of the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives and this makes it difficult to achieve the goal of living under His direction. This topic on its own is one that needs to be properly understood and it is not the focus of my post this week but I will mention that every single believer in Christ has the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:9). We need to be consciously aware of His presence in our lives. 

B. Consciously relying and depending on the power of the Holy Spirit: The Spirit of God is present in us to empower us to accomplish God’s purposes and plans through and in us. Many times we attempt to live out the life God has called us to in our own human strength. The new life in Christ is to be lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. This means that to walk in the Spirit, we have to acknowledge our own helplessness in ourselves and recognize the ability of the Holy Spirit in us to enable us to accomplish all God’s desires. One of the things the Holy Spirit does is that He produces within us strong desires in accordance with God’s will just as God promised in Ezekiel 36:26 & 27. 
  
C. Praying: Prayer has so many effects in our lives (James 5:16b, Jude 1:20) and one of the effects I have seen is that it helps in the area of living under the direction of the Spirit. I find that periods of my life when I have been “prayer less” have been the times when I have also struggled to live in accordance with God’s desires. Prayer is also one of the practical steps to consciously express our reliance and dependence on the power of the Holy Spirit. 

D. Acting in faith in accordance with the revealed word of God: This is a very important step in walking in the Spirit. We must understand that the Spirit of God will never direct us to act contrary to the word of God revealed in the Scriptures to us. The Scriptures reveal God’s desires and directions for our lives. When we act in conformity with the things that are clearly revealed (in reliance and dependence on the Spirit’s ability in us to accomplish them), we can be sure that we are keeping in step with the Spirit of God. As we do this continually, it creates and reinforces a pattern of obedience to God’s Spirit and makes it easier to keep following the Spirit’s direction. But this will mean that we must fill our minds with the word of God and have our minds renewed consistently (Colossians 3:16a, Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:23, Colossians 3:10). Sometimes believers in Christ express a desire to walk in the Spirit and at the same time place a very low premium on the word of God. This sort of outlook usually leads to errors and a failure to actually live under the direction of the Holy Spirit. We must understand that they go hand in hand. The Holy Spirit utilizes the agency of the word of God to direct us in addition to the strong desires He produces and the empowerment He supplies in our lives.
 

These are the key steps I have identified to be helpful in the quest to walk in the Spirit. I trust that God by His Spirit will impress these truths in our hearts and cause us to live in the reality of all that He desires for us.

My song for the week is another song by Hillsong Worship, "Love On The Line". 

Kindly come back to the blog next week when we will proceed in our journey through the epistle to the Galatians as we look at more practicalities of the inward working of God's grace in us.

Please feel free to drop your comments or contact me through my email address unjoule@gmail.com for any further clarifications.

Have a splendid day and a beautiful week.

"Love On The Line" by Hillsong Worship