Concentration required. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
Faith involves what we think & more
Inward Authority is about learning instructions to practice and doing them. Then we can be situated to experience sensations spiritual in nature that can teach us. Learning from these Spiritual Elements involves our continued focus upon them.
Faith & Belief Formation
Growing Senses
How are you feeling right now? Do you even know? Does it matter? Are you comfortable talking about your feelings? I once was a therapist where I ran groups to help others who were inwardly challenged, as most of us are. Early on each person would be asked, "How do you feel?" Their response would often be "fine" or "good." Then they were told "good" and "fine" were not feelings. Confusion would happen. Many people required guidance to learn how to identify and describe their feelings. Living closer to God involves growing deeper emotional awareness of ourselves and others.
The kingdom of God is all about inward sensations involving love, peace, and compassion. (1 John 4:7)
The world can guide us to be fake, dishonest, disconnected, insincere, hurried, worried, angry, shallow, and self-seeking. We are rewarded and encouraged for production of worldly interests.
God's interests are different. To experience spiritual rewards and encouragement we need new production of spiritual good. We need more experience with sincere truth, love, compassion, empathy, kindness, caring, and other Godly sensations. Often times that means relearning and making inward corrections.
Inward Authority involves a soul searching process, learning God's Righteous Elements, practicing them, and experiencing resulting perceptions and sensations. As we practice and experience new spiritual principles or elements, we can improve our understanding of spiritual good and evil. We can grow discernment between right and wrong. We can walk more rightly with God.
We can learn to identify evil within us, confess it, repent, and let God reshape us. We 'let go & let God.' We make ourselves clay for the potter. This process involves a continuous deeper exploration and participation with our inward spiritual senses. In the beginning it can feel awkward and challenging. For many of us, God's love and peace will involve a new and improved way of thinking. We can experience reorganization within our heart, mind, and soul. We can gain new direction by trusting more and responding better with God's principles and character.
I have personally inwardly transformed through this process a number of times. I continue to fall short of perfection and always have room for growth.
I have helped a few others along the way. This is not mere theology. I've been practicing this for over 32 years and have listened to thousands of stories testifying to the truth of it. Our pride, fear, self-seeking, conformity, cognitive bias, lack of willingness to walk with God . . . will sabotage growth.
Sensing God
Colossians 3:11 where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all.
John14:26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.
We have access to a guiding Spirit. We have help available to us. To learn from this Spirit, we need to seek it out. We need to utilize our inward parts to focus upon the invisible and intangible Spirit of God. This seeking, listening, and learning is a process involving our senses. We can improve our awareness of God. It's can be a slow gradual experience developed over time. Perseverance, endurance, and standing firm can be needed to gain a spiritual experience. Our minds can influence us to demand an immediate response. When it doesn't happen quickly, we can be tricked by such thinking to give up. Thought discipline can help. Being around others who believe can encourage us to continue.
Choose & follow
We can choose to meditate and think more with God. We can choose to spend more time learning our inward sensations of anger, worry, fear, peace, compassion, or love. We can choose God's good for correction and healing. How I feel today is largely the result of my past experiences. It took some doing good to grow more peace within me. First, I needed to make some corrections and get abiding in God.
Those who are willing to give themselves over each day to God's Good in mind, heart, soul, and strength can grow spiritually.
We each put the pieces together differently
Renovation of the Heart ~ Dallas Willard
“The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing those destructive images and ideas with the images and ideas that filled the mind of Jesus himself.” Page 103
Who is Inward Authority for?
The humbled, broken, desperate, or even curious. Essentially, the willing and ready to be transformed more with God, little by little, one day at a time.
James 4:10 and 1 Peter 5:6 instruct us to “humble yourselves.”
Inward Authority is for those who are inwardly ready to journey with introspection, self-examination, confession, slowing down, meditation, choosing God's righteousness over self-seeking, prayer for God’s Good, collaboration, and self-discipline. We are to humbly guard against self-deception, self-seeking, fear, resentment, pride, and insincerity.
This process is about getting real with ourselves. We get real with who we are, what we do, and what we think. We face our inward truth of both good and evil.
We can gradually center our thoughts more and more with God's grace.
2 Peter 3:18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.
The instructions say to "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." We will need to grow our thoughts, attitude, words, and actions with that grace.
Many of us may focus upon the cross while neglecting the many instructions and demonstrations of Jesus. Jesus provided instructions on how to live. Let's imperfectly grow into that which is perfect. Let's practice doing what Jesus taught.
Matthew 7:26 "But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand:"
Will we hear and do or just hear?
We are to transition ourselves into alignment with God’s righteous ways and purposes. We are to grow love and peace increasingly within our hearts, minds, words, attitudes, and actions.
Each day we can seek new experiences with love, mercy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, compassion, forgiveness, and generosity. To do so, we must set our hearts and minds upon them and give our inward selves over to them. We can practice empathy if we choose to think and feel it. It's never about being perfect. Instead it's about growing more with that which is perfect.
This website, InwardAuthority podcasts, and more can help guide our thinking and senses to grow spiritual experiences and enhance spiritual awareness, if we choose to cooperate with it. We can cooperate more with God. We can hear the words, do them, and experience spiritual results.
Romans 12:9 "Let love be without hypocrisy (not fake).
Romans 12:9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good.
One Goal ~ Growing Inward Love & Peace
Matthew 22:34 - 40 But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
Jesus says “all the Law and the Prophets” hang on these two commandments. Essentially, if we can get this one instruction right with our inward being, all will be Good.
There are many who teach that all is good now. But if that were true, there would be no evil. But there is evil and we all get tempted. We are in a battle and we need the armor of God. (Ephesians 6:10 - 18)
Many people everyday are gaining spiritual experiences through practices of confession, repentance, restitution, prayer, meditation, service, love, peace, and more. This process helps us to cleanse and purify our minds and hearts. However, pride, self-seeking, dishonesty, resentments, and many other forms of evil can sabotage and block spiritual development. We will need to be ready to each day gradually let go of our evil ways and practice God's Good. Because of our attachment to such evil, our minds, out of self-preservation instincts, can resist God's good. We can unconsciously defend evil in our thoughts, words, attitudes, and actions. We can habitually defend our pride and self-interests. We can become enslaved to evil and not even know it.
Romans 6:18 And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.Romans 12:9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. The goal is to increase God's love & peace within our minds, hearts, attitudes, words, and actions.
We will have to choose God's good which can go against things we unconsciously believe we need. Our unconscious beliefs can miss the mark. This affects our faith. The faith that can save us.
What is Inward Authority?
The Hebrew word for ‘Heart’ includes the mind. It is our Inward Authority. How our hearts and minds are situated impacts our faith and salvation. Our faith is to be with God and with God's ways. (See Psalm 119)
Key Biblical terms to learn and understand are ‘Heart’ and ‘Faith.’ God values our inward senses. We will need to walk in awareness of our inward senses.
Inward Authority is a process that involves training toward God reliance with more specific guidance. The world is full of ambiguous teaching. We can understand God better in everyday language and serve God better with that new understanding. This training involves doing things differently with Biblical instructions. The goal is to gain spiritual experiences. We hear the words and then do what they say.
1 John 4:7 "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God."
We can understand this love better. We can do it better. We can witness the spiritual results. (Read slowly 1 Corinthians 13, meditate upon the verbs and adjectives and how we can be more like that. Here is a podcast to help with questions on the topic)
To know God more is to develop our Inward Authority more with God’s love. This means we need to increase thoughts and senses toward God’s good. We can do this!This means we gradually become less dependent upon the world's ideas and more reliant upon God’s.
Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with the problem longer.”
We stay longer with God's instructions to understand them better. We are to stay longer with God's Good everyday. We can shift our minds away from worry toward God's Good. We can simply focus each day upon engaging with and trusting it.
Matthew 6:34 "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."
We can grow love and peace if we commit to respond with it better. We can experience it more as we set our hearts and minds to it. God's Good, sincerely practiced long enough, can renew our minds.
The pieces will come together on their own as we grow in them. Understanding will build through our participation with God’s Good. It's usually hindsight.
This is a humbling, freeing, and fulfilling experience.
If you want a different life with God, what are you going to do differently to have it?Try The Good Daily Practices and confess hurts that can block the experiences of God’s Good. Give it time to work within you. Let your Inward being be renewed with God’s peace. Trust in it with perseverance. It is different, but it is Good. Good for you, Good for others, and Good for God.
Aligning our hearts and minds with God means we live differently. It involves a new and different perspective about life and ourselves. If you are sincerely ready for change, you have come to the right place. Although willingness can open the door, perseverance is the path for new character development. Each day we have a choice to do God's will or not. Growing with God is a process and a personal commitment.
Deuteronomy 6:4 describes what is known as the first and great commandment of God and how to abide in it. "“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength."
These words are to be alive inwardly in a way where we progressively live by them. We can do this gradually with slow improvement. We can know God more and sense what is spiritual.
Deuteronomy 6:6-9 “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."
Jesus describes this same idea of giving our all to God in John 15. The instructions here describe a daily and continued focus to know and be with God.
Experience
At 21 years of age I learned these principles in a 12 step program. "God is everything or God is nothing." Pg. 53 Alcoholics Anonymous. But I had to choose to believe it. If I trust God, I will seek to do God's will. I traced the origin of the spiritual principles and found them in the Bible. I've studied the Bible for 20 years and began putting the instructions into practice. Now I try to help others. My experience is also shared through a podcast. (See the podcast page)
I kept asking the question, "could I follow the instructions better?" I have found life is better when I inwardly apply myself more with God's righteousness. And when I don't, my life becomes dull, miserable, self-seeking and/or empty.
Spiritual goodness exists and we can partake in it, but that means we need to daily set our hearts and minds to be in it.
This means we think and act upon Biblical instructions involving God's character and begin practicing them daily. We can slowly learn to evaluate ourselves, our thoughts, and make adjustments. (2 Corinthians 10:5)
We can focus our studies upon God's character, character we can build in our own thoughts, feelings, and actions.
I surrendered myself to serve God, confessed my resentments, searched my life for character defects, practiced daily prayer and meditation, and restored wrongs I had done. (I also went astray and felt lost. reconnecting with God involved getting back into the process and recommitment.) Slowly over time I experienced a new reality. I changed. The way I looked at things changed. Life became different. I changed my identity from being an addict to a spiritual being. Instead of seeking alcohol, I sought sobriety with God. Anyone can do this a little each day. We don't have to be in a crisis, it's just that being in a crisis makes it easier to give up ourselves to serve God. (pride, control, self-seeking. Here is a podcast on self-seeking)
Biblical concordance studies on God's Good can help clarify meanings. Seeing repeated messages and patterns can help us understand it better.
It can be challenging to unlearn and relearn. We tend to require much evidence to prove past learnings wrong.
Below are a couple of examples of concordance studies with many instructions.