The breath of God is His Spirit

I woke up to use the bathroom, and as it has become normal practice for me, I put some water in my mouth to hold it in for a few minutes before spewing it out. It’s part of my oral hygiene programme. I am still sleepy so I sat on the toilet seat for a bit, to enjoy the special form of sleep that comes while you are doing the business. I slept off and in a moment, I felt the water in my mouth trying to escape, with some having actually escaped. I clenched my mouth tight again, as I tried to wipe things off.

A few moments later, having fallen deeper into sleep, I repeated the same sequence, but even more of the water seemed to have escaped this time. I gave up and spewed the rest of the water in the wash hand basin. Then this thought hit me; “we are utterly and hopelessly unable to do anything by ourselves or by our own strength”!

As much as I wanted to keep the water in my mouth, immediately I started dozing off, as if I was dead, my mouth could not keep itself shut any longer. The muscles of my mouth slackened off on its own. The will to hold the water is still there, but the power to carry it out had, so to say, left me.

Whenever I see or visualize a dead person, I often wondered, “where is his will right now; where is his desire and the things that he would have done without blinking an eye lid? Even the eye lid; he is no longer able to move it. So if he died with his eyes open, opened shall they be till someone mercifully shuts them for him.

Phil 2:13 (for those who read the bible) says, “It is Him who works in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure”! So the power to will and also to do comes only from the almighty, not from us. Of course we know that often times, with the power He has given us to do His own pleasure, we would rather spend it on doing our own pleasures, dissipating as they are.

However, the truth of the matter is that without the breath of God, we cannot do anything. We cannot even get up from our beds in the morning. Without the power of God that he has put in his breath that he breathed into our nostrils, we will have been like statues forever. I hope someone is realising that without His breath, there is no power in you. The breath of God is His spirit. With His breath, He put a living mechanism in our bodies, a heart that beats every second none stop for decades. With the power of His breath, which is His spirit, He has given us the ability to will and to do, but His preference is only that we do His pleasure.

The Psalmist (Ps 104:29) says that when He takes away His breath from us, we die and return to the dust! There is no midpoint here; He withholds His breathe, and life is gone. That is why death is a mystery to me as much as sleep is a mystery. I have not been dead before, but I have been asleep many times. In sleep, we are powerless and often inert. We are not usually participants in what is going on around us, only as watchers and observers. Our souls continue to travel while we lay inert, often to places and to events that we have absolutely no forethoughts of. We dream, sometimes dreams that are not more than a soulical journey and foray into places and events that has never happened and will probably never happen physically.

When it is time to wake up, there is a fusion of mind and body, and as our mind is awakened to events around us, we open our eyes and wake up. Alas, we have been asleep, but we could easily have been dead. I believe the soul of dead men continue some sort of journeys, or perhaps they engage in the reminiscence of past life. I don’t want to dwell on this today, but I just want us to come to the realisation that we have no power of our own to do whatever we wish. We get the power from the breath that is in us, and this breath is the Spirit of God, and Spirit of God is God.

Therefore, the conclusion of the matter is to be sensitive to the mind of Him who by His breath makes us to be alive, so that we can live our lives for His pleasure.

Hebrews 3:7-8 says, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion….” So I say to you also, “today, as much as you would like to satisfy your own pleasures, remember that you are on borrowed breath, and it makes sense, and also gives peace, to rather satisfy the pleasure of Him that has given us breath by His Own Spirit”.