All of the Law and the prophets are completed in:
"You shall love the Lord with all of your heart, all of your mind, all of your soul and all of your stregth, and your neighbour as yourself."
The New Covenant reads:
"For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.”Heb 8,10-12
Notice how in the New Covenant, God puts His laws into our mind and writen them into our hearts and how it leaves out the soul and the body.
This has to do with the journey from children of God to disciple of Jesus-Christ. The full grown disciple is one who has been taught to deny her/himself, self being the soul, to daily pick up the cross, which is the liberation from the power of sin and of death and to follow Jesus as He feeds and leads His servants by His Spirit into the service of worship and into the Ministry of reconciliation.
Paul makes it clear that the Spirit gives life to our mortal bodies:
"And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. Rm 8,10-11
Once sealed by the Covenant of God by God, eternal life grows and moves from the Spirit to the body and from the renewed heart to the soul's salvation.
Therein and therewith lies all of what governs our time on earth, once we are children of God. Be it in our body or our soul, when we suffer, it is for the sake of God's authority to manifest His glory through our searching, feeding, growing, deepening and learning to worship in spirit and truth.
Regarding the energy production of such spiritual life, I had offered the following at a Christian Classic site:
http://www.ccel.org/node/788/6623In the four gospels, we see in several intances that Jesus would release His disciples for their night of sleep, while He would go away to pray for the night.
During His darkest hour in the garden, the disciples could not stay awake to pray with Him, no matter how crucial was the moment.
This is explained as being caused by the weakness of the flesh, before the time when the power of God, the Holy Spirit, was poured upon all flesh, from pentecost on.
I have been and go on pursuing for several years now, the aim of becoming such a disciple of the Lord Jesus-Christ, who knows how to fulfill such experience of service, in the discipline of ceaseless prayer.
Such spiritual State is what I ubderstand maturity of the one Faith to be deployed in one's life and upon the Church's victorious ground.
Ceaseless prayer secures among other things, what Jesus describes as being:
"“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Jn 3,5-8
Paul is also quite clear from his own walk with the Lord, in echoeing that the Holy Spirit is the driving force of such discipline, keeping us going even when we have no clue as to how to proceed:
"Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.
And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified."
Rm 8, 26-30
The key to such discipline seems to be:
"...the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God."
Those "groanings which cannot be uttered" is the music that I ceaselessly fail to rejoice the Lord with. I go on uttering my pain, when in fact, all that is needed is my silent breathing of the Spirit into my attention and action.
-Please Lord, have mercy upon me and us all sinners and set me free to serve You and the Church in the complete measure that You've given me-
As I wrote earlier, I am seeking how to grow into praying ceaselessly, as the main exercise into the completion of the measure I am given of Christ. No more, no less and I am quite far from such completion, as I find myself thorned between the possibility of such maturity and the impossibility of my existantial-animal nature to comply with such spiritual basic need.
Can we share the experience of the Holy Sprit's power, love and wisdom in the midst of His family?
The Holy Spirit, the disciple and the Church become overcomers in answering God's calling by meeting Presence-to-presence with God, in the simplicity of our personal and communal devotion to our Savior, Lord and Brother Christ-Jesus.
In conclusion, the ceaseless prayer goes on in our spirit by the Holy Spirit, with or without our participation.
I am of the opinion that "the inner zone" of genuine ceaseless prayer is the only where and the only way for the children of God to remain aware of our participation into heaven's offer to heal humanity.
Please, let us pray until the connectivity of the All-Mighty emerges in all of His glorious simplicity of our being into His Being and of His Being into ours, personally and communally...
...may all blessings be with us all...
Benoit Couture
Edmonton, Canada
Ps: If interested, I pasted this from a conversation I am part of at:
http://housechurch.org/cgi-bin/bbcgi_hc/ultimatebb.cgi/topic/14/7#000004
