THE BASIC SUBSTANCE OF LIFE
Pastor Bankie
Download Sermon in PDF
THE BASIC SUBSTANCE OF LIFE (Transformation made easy)
Because of my professional training I know quite a bit of the science of biology. I have been a student of science all my life and so I know a bit of physics, I guess more than the average person (it doesn't imply I know much; it’s just that most people know none at all). So allow me to explain some things about the science of life here.
We all know that humans are made up of organic substances. All flesh can be analysed down to very minute details in the laboratory. The basic building blocks are the molecules and atoms of these organic substances. Now, because man was made from the earth (Gen 2:7), and indeed all animals too (Gen 1:24), all of the basic elements that make up Man are found in the earth. The plants also derive their basic substances from the earth. Like Myles Munroe said, everything must remain connected with the thing it was made from in order to live. Man and animals were made from the earth, and so have to remain connected to the earth through the things which they eat. That is one mystical reason why we eat. The foods we eat contain the basic building particles of our body. Another point here is that these atoms and molecules carry within their chemical bonds the energy that God abundantly supplies us through the Sun. These bonds are broken by our enzymes to extract the energy therein. With this energy we really live—we walk, run, work, talk, grow, repair damaged tissues, build new ones, etc. Also, with the energy from what we eat, our bodies communicate with our souls and spirit.
Please bear with me as I talk some more science. It is interesting to note that when those very basic atoms of different types are examined closer, even though they occur in a very wide variety as seen in the Periodic Table of elements, they are all made up of exactly the same basic particles, though combined and arranged in different proportions and fashions. They all contain the same protons, neutrons and electrons. The difference between one and another is just in the quantity and proportion of these ultra-minute particles. Oh, it is interesting to note also that each atom so formed by the combination of these ultra-minute particles is more than 99% ‘empty’ space. No, we are not through yet. Even the part that appears solid (called nucleus) is made up of smaller things (called quarks), and even those may one day be broken down until we get the real basic building blocks of matter.
SPIRITUAL ENERGY
The main thing I am getting at is that when we break these particles further and further, I believe we will discover they are made up of nothing but the same substance that makes up light. The first thing actually that God called into physical existence was light. ‘Let there be light,’ He said at the beginning; and this was even before He made the Sun and the stars. Light is divine energy manifested in the physical realm.
The truth is that the real basic building block of even our physical bodies is divine energy. Divine energy is the basic foundation of all things, including matter and the substances around us. As a matter of fact the spiritual world seamlessly connects with the physical. Now, the design of God is that the particles that make up our bodies must have His life constantly interacting with them so that they can continue to function.
WHEN MAN DIED
Eating the fruit of the forbidden tree in the garden was a declaration by Man that he would seek his own thing and determine his own way rather than continue with the spiritual umbilical cord that keeps God’s life coming into his system. It is easy to understand therefore when God said, “in that day you shall surely die.” To die means that there will begin a falling apart of the organized arrangement of Man’s body and the earth upon which God placed him. Death is a process; it is a law or force that works gradually most times (2 Cor 4:12). The only way to have life working again is for us to reconnect with the life force from God. That was what Jesus came to introduce. Paul said “If Christ is in you, even though the body is subject to death because of sin, yet the spirit will give it life because of righteousness.” (Rom 8:10, simple meaning).
”But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who indwells you.” Rom 8:11 NASB
TO LIVE AGAIN
So we see that the only way to have life working again is for us to reconnect with that divine life force. Please remember that light stands for the basic spiritual force of God that gives substance to what we see and feel as physical and tangible. Now, let us see the divine process for the introduction of that spiritual energy into us.
”We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts”. 2 Peter 1:19 KJV
Please note the words ‘word,’ ‘light’ and ‘star.’
”Thy word is a lamp to my feet, And a light to my path” Ps 119:105 NASB
From these scriptures above we see that the light, power or spiritual energy which communicates with our being and flesh is to be found in the word of God. God’s word is our light. Remember what light means; it is the force which tells our molecules to form; to bind, to remain and to not disintegrate. Everywhere Man has separated himself from the word of God, death has set in – physical things and societal structures begin to disintegrate.
It is also good to see this principle as explained by the Lord Jesus.
”..the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.” John 6:63 NASB
”The words I have spoken to you bring God's life-giving Spirit”. John 6:63 TEV
Any invisible thing that carries power and energy is called spirit; that is the biblical use of the term. The life God has in Himself is communicated through the transmission of light. That light is the word of God. That is why Jesus says that His words are spirit and they impart life.
WHAT LIFE IS
What is life?
Life is the controlling law or power that tells the molecules in your system to arrange and behave according to divine purpose and order. Life makes you well, successful and makes you walk in a manner pleasing to God. Life prevents death; it heals diseases. It corrects things that were wrong; it overtakes the consequences of sin. Life is God’s substance. It comes by the entrance of His light, and that is the word of God.
So you see that the word of God is not just a set of instructions or rules for life; it is the way by which the spiritual force called life is injected into us. If you are not busy exposing yourself to it, then you are asking death to keep working in your members. Darkness is the absence of light, and it is the climate in which death works. Once the light is constantly bathing your molecules; they will automatically be alive.
The message here is about being careful to constantly feed ourselves with the light of God. I mentioned earlier that we must constantly feed our flesh with the products of the earth in order to continue to keep the flesh alive. That is why we eat plant and animal products so as to keep healthy. But unfortunately that health is not complete as there is more to life than just eating plant and animal products.
Science understands easily how those visible things may help our bodies, but they are also often confused as to observed effects. One day we hear that milk is good for us, then next day it is told that it increases the chances of getting cancer of the prostate in men. One day they say eggs are bad for adults’ hearts, and then you hear that it contains certain things that are needed for cellular function. Even the cholesterol people treat like poison is actually a crucial part of life, and too little of it in the body is bad.
Still on this confusion, many people do all the good things with diet and exercise but disease and death still take them over, and another set does everything wrong and gets none of the bad effects. It was interesting to read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in which he described a community of people in the US who had all the ‘wrong’ eating habits but didn’t have the heart issues of the rest of the country. He attempted to explain the reasons for the observed effects but his reasons run against the main thoughts of today. I refer to these things just to underscore the fact that there is more to health than just the eating of the right things. On and on the confusion rages; the main issue is that there is a realm of life even more microscopic than that which biologic/medical science knows or is ready to admit.
EXPOSED TO LIGHT
See, a life force is needed to order the behaviour of those molecules we eat and those in our bodies, and science denies that realm even though the effects are often obvious. The spiritual realm can actually be described as a more microscopic realm of life beyond the realm of science. It is the controller of the quantum level; it is the realm that science is actually trying to reach as its searches for deeper and deeper knowledge but which scientists refuse to acknowledge. I always say that if God had not been introduced by religion, His existence and influence in life would have been postulated by science. All the equations and observations point to Him; it is just that acknowledging Him means accepting religion and sex control, and men just love darkness too much to accept that (John 3:19).
We need a real force to control the fibres of our beings and our spirits and souls. Beyond feeding your body with food and vitamins, you must take in that necessary ingredient which is the word of God. It is the energy that controls everything.
Just like food, you have to seek it.
If you want the entirety of your life to arrange and function properly, you have to deliberately expose each part to the dynamic working of the word of God. Have you ever seen how white people lie down in the sun so as to darken their skins (tanning)? They take a break, look for where sun is shining nicely, then they lie down almost totally naked. They just lie down exposed to the sun, and the rest is automatic. That is a near-perfect picture of what we should do with the word of God.
So how do we expose ourselves to this sun?
PAY ATTENTION
My child, pay attention to what I say. Listen carefully to my words.Don't lose sight of them.
Let them penetrate deep into your heart,for they bring life to those who find them, and healing to their whole body. Prov 4:20-22 NLT
The word of God is often misunderstood; people often look at it as a set of codes and instructions that we are supposed to obey. What I am teaching in this sermon is the often-overlooked quality and working of this Word. It is a living thing that has power in itself and performs functions in us when we allow it (Heb 4:12). All that is needed on our part is to be exposed to the word. People are trying to obey it when indeed no one can do so by his or her own will power and effort. Sometimes I hear it taught that we should act on the word; as much as I understand what the people are trying to say by that, I think we lay the emphasis wrongly. You don’t act on the word; the word acts on you. It is better to have the correct perspective and say, ‘allow the Word act on you.’
It is interesting to note that the word translated ‘obey’ in our English Bibles (OT) comes from the Hebrew word which means to pay attention. Let us see an example.
“…if you will diligently obey the Lord your God, being careful to do all His commandments…” Deut 28:1 NASB
In most translations, the word ‘obey’ is used as we read above. But the original Hebrew word actually means ‘to listen.’ Derek Prince quoted it thus: “if you shall listen listening to the Lord your God…” The Hebrew word pays attention to the listening, and not to the doing. I therefore favour the Amplified translation most here.
”If you will listen diligently to the voice of the Lord your God…” AMP
This is a similar thing as we see from Prov 4:20. It is all about attention.
The reason why God talks this way is because the word actually has the power in itself to make you obey. It doesn’t want you to try to obey; all it says is that you should pay attention to it and it will work out obedience in you. Obedience is a result of careful attention to God’s word; it is not a product of effort at doing. Attention is what God requires. Anyone who listens diligently finds obedience automatic in his or her life. The obedience we see is a sign that we have paid attention enough for the word to work.
So we see that Satan’s duty is to create distractions for us. He has no other thing to do to Christians than to cause them to be distracted. That is why Satan is not afraid of a dedicated church worker as long as he or she is too busy to pay attention to the preaching and to personal study. Hearing comes in through those 2 methods; preaching and personal study.
It is as we pay attention that the life-energy in the light of the word of God acts upon us. It speaks to our molecules.
SPIRIT AND LIFE
Please let me emphasize that the words our ears perceive as sound waves or which our eyes scan off the pages are nothing more than the conveyor systems for divine power. The interactions with our brains and minds are just to open our spirits to allow the energy to enter. The human spirit can be locked and can so disallow certain things. It is a semi-permeable membrane that restricts what flows through it. The words we perceive with our ears and eyes interact with our souls (in the ‘mind’ part) to open the appropriate channels for the spirit in the word to enter. Those sounds or letters themselves mean little. This was precisely what the Lord Jesus was saying in John 6:63 when He said the flesh profits nothings (i.e. the sound waves); it is the spirit or life-energy that is conveyed by it that matters. He then ended it with “the words I have spoken to you bring God's life-giving Spirit” (TEV). That is the force of the spirit of which I speak.
So you see that to receive the power or life-force of God we lay ourselves down under the power of His light. We lie down there and let our ears (and eyes) receive the light of God. We focus on it and suck on it. As we do this the power is being injected into us. There is a reason why I chose to use the word ‘suck.’
DRAWING FROM GOD
Drawing from God’s word is an attitude of the heart. God always expects us to draw something by our hearts from Him. This is what distinguishes one hearer from another. There is what is called ‘hearers-only’ (Js 1:22). These are the people who have a habit of church-going or reading, but they do not have the attitude of drawing from the word of God. Even though they appear exposed to the word, it is not acting on them because their hearts are not inclined to draw the power.
The second type of hearers are the real ones; they are the diligent-hearers. They are the ones who their lives end up being a demonstration of the reality of the word. James called them doers. Remember we established at the beginning that doing or obeying the word of God is an automatic result of diligent-hearing; it is not a product of our effort. The effort is to suck in the truth of God as it comes in.
There was a man like that; he was present as Paul was teaching the word of God. After some time the word had so entered into him that it produced faith to activate the power of God in that man’s life. He wasn’t trying to have faith; he was just paying attention to what Paul was saying. He was sucking in the word as it came, the life or energy in that word entered into him and caused his whole being to begin to attract the resurrection power of Jesus. Paul saw it.
”This man was listening to Paul as he spoke, who, when he had fixed his gaze upon him, and had seen that he had faith to be made well, said with a loud voice, "Stand upright on your feet." And he leaped up and began to walk.” Acts 14:9-10 NASB
We miss out on the power of God because we do not pay attention to what He is saying. We do not suck on the words that are being spoken. Many words come and bounce off the ears that hear them. They do no enter the heart.
OBSTRUCTIONS TO THE FLOW
Sometimes there are obstructions to the penetration of the word. The first obvious one, judging by what we have said so far, is lack of attention.
“And He said to them, Be careful what you are hearing. The measure [of thought and study] you give [to the truth you hear] will be the measure [of virtue and knowledge] that comes back to you — and more [besides] will be given to you who hear.” Mark 4:24 AMP
I was listening to Kenneth Hagin teach; he was saying that if his hearers who are in need of healing would only give to him the same attention they give to the doctors, they would get healed 100% of the times and it would not cost any money. This thought was not original to him; I heard him quote Lillian B. Yeomans and I have read John G. Lake teach similar things. The point here is this: attention is needed to draw from the word of God.
You know many people just want to get prayed for and God should do what He wants to do quickly. Unfortunately for them it doesn’t always work like that. Healing is often a process and it requires infusion of divine energy. Remember what we read in Prov 4. It is as we attend to the words and allow them to penetrate into our hearts that we discover the life and health therein.
“Let them penetrate deep into your heart, for they bring life to those who find them, and healing to their whole body.”
I have no doubt that the word of God is an all-round effective medicine; the problem is that people do not give it the kind of attention they give to the human doctor using physical medicine. Doctors have a lot of respect from the people. When they say to take a medicine daily for 10 years, people dutifully obey. Many people are taking their medicines daily for their whole lives; there is no stopping because the doctor promises a control and not a cure. If we gave the word of God that same attention we would get the life in it.
People do not give enough attention to the word of God; that is what the problem often is. They give attention to doing, and to things that magnify human effort. They do not give the word enough attention. Just see them in church running up and down on what they call Christian work; they forget that the main Christian work is to learn and draw from the Word.
The word is life’s food; you have to seek it and deliberately consume it. We must consume it daily the way we consume food. We must constantly reload. Most believers are better at food-dieting than word-dieting. How sad.
WHAT IT ACTUALLY MEANS TO BELIEVE
You know I studied some time ago and found the practical meaning of the word ‘believe.’ This can easily be decoded from 2 portions.
"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; that whoever believes may in Him have eternal life.” John 3:14-15 NASB.
We can easily understand that the same response to the lifted serpent required of those who needed healing should be the same we must have to lifted Son of Man if we will have eternal life from Him. That response was summarized here as ‘believe.’ To understand how God describes that response, let us look at it from the story in the book of Numbers, where God commanded Moses to lift up the serpent.
“…and if a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked to the serpent of bronze [attentively, expectantly, with a steady and absorbing gaze], he lived.” Num 21:9 AMP
That is the perfect description of faith or believing right there. Faith is not just to say I accept something; it is to hold unto that word with attention, expectancy and with steadiness and absorption. You cannot say you believe unless you are absorbed by the Word; that would be faith. It is not possible to be thus absorbed with the word of Christ and not see His full deliverance in every aspect of life.
FINAL WORD
Dear Saint of God, take every part of your life and tan it with the sun of the word of God. I’m not talking about trying to do something; I am talking about allowing divine energy to work on all the molecules of your DNA and flesh until you are the very picture of health.
"But for you who fear My name the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings; and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall. And you will tread down the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day which I am preparing," Mal 4:2-3 NASB
Divine invigoration comes from being bathed with the Sun. Take your finances and bath it with the sun of the word. Take you children and bath them with this sun.
“And these words which I am commanding you this day shall be [first] in your [own] minds and hearts; [then] you shall whet and sharpen them so as to make them penetrate… the [minds and] hearts of your children”, Deut 6:6-7 AMP
This is where the work is.
