Tuesday 3 March 2015

How To Recognize Spiritual Experiences With God

By Olivia Cross


According to some polls, as many as half of all people alive today claim to have experienced some sort of interaction with the Divine during the course of their lives. While some may scoff and suggest that such things run contrary to logic or science, true scientists readily acknowledge that there is far more to the universe than their experiments and instruments can ever hope to understand. If you've ever felt that you've had spiritual experiences with God, there are ways to confirm it.

First of all, recognize that not every supernatural interaction is divinely inspired. Most people of faith understand that there are darker forces at work in the world as well, and that those forces offer nothing good for mankind. The three main faiths of the Western world all attest to the existence of tempting spirits that seek to lead people down the path to their own destruction.

That's why it is important to consider the nature of any encounter of this type. Many times, spirits such as this leave the human participants distraught, filled with hurtful thoughts, and feeling unloved and cast adrift. Those are good signs that the encounters were not from the Creator, since His goals are always those things that improve people and fill us with greater love for our fellow man.

At the same time, the opposite is generally true for people who have turned from faith. Evil spirits will often tempt those people to justify their misdeeds through excuses rather than take responsibility for their own sins. God's Spirit, on the other hand, will speak to the person's conscience so that his own heart convicts him and drives him to seek forgiveness.

Ignatius was a scholar who aptly described the fundamental issue that must be addressed for such discernment. To succeed, the person must first know himself and recognize where he is at in his own spiritual journey. When you are actively seeking God and trying to live by faith, His presence will leave you feeling loved and consoled, and not separated from Him in any way.

The Scripture is the best benchmark for such judgments, since those encounters cannot run contrary to the Word. When someone lays claim to an encounter that contradicts those things taught by Scripture, the spirit involved was most definitely not of a divine nature. The fact is that all encounters of this kind must not contradict the Word if they are truly from the Creator of the universe.

Despite the vast number of such reported incidents, the skeptics still mock those who make such claims. Still, their arguments about how religious people are delusional or following ancient cults have little weight when one considers that they offer no rational explanations to explain away such an experience. In most instances, they simply fail to acknowledge that there is much that science cannot know.

In the end, even ardent believers often struggle to discern the nature of supernatural encounters. Even so, those who focus on their own current spiritual state, the nature of the encounter in question, and how that encounter compares with God's written Word can usually determine for themselves whether they've actually been touched by the presence of God.




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