5 HABITS THAT UNLOCK THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT WITHIN YOU
... undeniable happening in the room. She knew Isaiah 53:5. She knew First Peter 2:24. She had taught those scriptures in women's Bible study. She had prayed them over sick strangers and watched some of them recover. Then her 8-year-old son was diagnosed with a serious illness.
And something happened that she could not explain and did not expect. The woman who had led thousands into the presence of God could not find her way there herself. Not because she stopped trying. She tried harder than she ever had. She prayed longer. She fasted. She called every pastor she trusted. But in the quiet of that hospital room with the machines beeping and her son asleep and nothing else demanding her performance, she sat across from me and said something I have never forgotten. She said, "I have led worship for 19 years. I have helped hundreds of people encounter God. So why can I not feel HIM in this room right now?"
I did not give her a quick answer because the question she was asking was not a simple one. It was not a crisis of sincerity. Margaret was one of the most sincere believers I had ever met. It was not a crisis of knowledge. She knew her Bible better than most people I have sat with. And it was not a crisis of faithfulness. She had shown up for 19 years without a single excuse. What Margaret was experiencing was something quieter and far more dangerous than outright unbelief. Millions of genuine, sincere, hard-working believers are living in exactly that same state right now. Not because they are bad Christians, not because they lack dedication or devotion, but because they have been given a legal reality without being given the daily practice that activates it. They know verse 1 Corinthians 3:16.
Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the spirit of God dwells in you? They believe it. They have said amen to it a hundred times. And yet when the storm hits and the ground shakes beneath them, they look at their daily lives and see the same weakness, the same fear, the same paralysis that should have no power over someone who carries the Creator of the universe inside their spirit. So they ask the question that nobody seems to want to answer honestly. If the Holy Spirit, the same spirit that Romans 8:11 says raised Jesus Christ from the dead is living inside of me, why am I still so powerless?
That is the real question. And here we believe you deserve a real answer. Not a motivational one, not a theological deflection that sounds deep but leaves you exactly where you started. A real answer, one that will change not just how you think, but how you actually live starting this week.
And the answer begins with a distinction that most of the denomination church people have never been taught. Are we studying the nature of the believer's union with God including the hidden man of the heart and in His presence?
It is exactly what most of the modern church has quietly forgotten. In His Presence. Real prayer is not a petition presented to an unwilling God. Real prayer is fellowship, conscious, deliberate, daily fellowship with the Father who dwells within. The believer who has never learned to practice this fellowship is drawing on nothing, though everything is already there. Read that last line again. Drawing on nothing, though everything is already there. That is not a statement about God's willingness. It is not a statement about your sincerity or your salvation or your standing before heaven. It is a statement about a practice that most believers have never been taught. A daily turning inward to the One who has already taken up permanent residence in the deepest part of their being. It is called practice fellowship. And in this teaching, everything we are going to show you flows from that one word. Fellowship.
Because here is what most believers have been told. That the Christian life is primarily about what you know, about what you confess, about how many services you attend or how many chapters in the Bible you read or how many years you have been walking with God. And all of those things have their place.
But we saw something deeper. We saw that between the deposited power and the released power, there is a practiced connection.
And without that connection, regardless of how long you have been saved or how much scripture you can quote, nothing flows. The current is there. The power is real, but the switch has never been turned on. So, let me give you the real answer. Now, the answer is found in one fatal misunderstanding that has quietly crippled the modern church. We have confused having the Holy Spirit with actually communing with the Holy Spirit.
And those are not the same thing. Having the Holy Spirit is a legal reality of your redemption. The moment you were born again, the moment you confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and believed in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, the Holy Spirit took up permanent residence inside your recreated human spirit. That is settled. That cannot be undone. No failure reverses it. No inconsistency removes it. No dry season empties it. 6:55 But having him and activating his power are two completely different things.
Think about it this way. You have a smartphone in your pocket right now. It is fully charged 100%. Every application you could possibly need is already installed. The processing power is there. The connection capability is there. Every tool you need to navigate, communicate, create, and solve problems is sitting right there in your hand. But if you never unlock the screen, none of it matters. You will stand in the middle of a city you do not know, completely lost, holding a device that could have given you every answer, every direction, every resource you needed. Not because the power was not there, because the connection was never made.
That is the condition of most believers today. The power is real. The deposit is genuine.
The Holy Spirit is fully present inside the recreated human spirit of every born again believer. But the daily practice of turning inward, of deliberately making contact with the One who is already there, that practice has never been established. And so they live on the surface of a reality that goes miles deeper than they have ever explored. We called the practice of that connection fellowship. Not crisis prayer where you run to God when everything falls apart and wonder why he feels so distant. Not Sunday morning worship which is real and valuable but not sufficient on its own.
Fellowship is the real daily intentional habitual communion with the indwelling One. This is the connection that activates everything God has already placed inside you. And it is the connection that most believers have never been shown how to build. Teach about to learn about the inner man in 1 Thessalonians 5:23.
And the point that cuts through all the religious noise, is that most believers have the order completely reversed. Living body first, soul second, spirit last, if ever. And the result of that reversal is exactly what Margaret felt in that hospital room.
Power present but not accessed. Presence real but not experienced. Everything available and yet nothing flowing. The problem is not the supply. The problem has always been the connection. To understand why most believers never access the power inside them, you first have to understand how God actually built you. Not how the church has described you. Not the vague spiritual language that gets used on Sunday mornings that sounds meaningful but leaves you with no practical framework for your Monday onwards. How God actually constructed you according to His own word. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 is one of the clearest statements in all of scripture on this subject.
And the very God of peace sanctify you holy. And I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless. Three parts in that specific order. Spirit first, soul second, body third. 1. You are a spirit. 2. You have a soul which is your mind, your will, and your emotions. 3. And you live in a physical body. Those are not interchangeable. They are three distinct realities and the order matters enormously. This is where teaching in the hidden man of the heart becomes razor sharp. This points out that God designed human to live from the inside out.
1. The spirit in constant fellowship with God was designed to govern the soul and the soul was designed to govern the body.
2. The spirit leads, the soul follows, the body obeys.
3. That was the original design.
That was Eden before everything changed. But when Adam sinned, the entire order collapsed.
Spiritual death entered the human spirit and suddenly human found himself cut off from God at the deepest level of his being. His spirit which was designed to lead went silent. And because the spirit went silent, the senses took over. From that moment forward, man began living from the outside in. What he could see, hear, taste, touch, and feel became his primary source of information about reality. His emotions began reacting to his circumstances. His mind tried to make sense of what his senses were reporting. And his spirit, the deepest part of him, had nothing to contribute because it was spiritually dead.
This is the condition apostle Paul describes when he talks about the natural man who cannot receive the things of the spirit of God. Not because the information is not available, but because the receiver is offline.
Now, here is the good news that changes everything. When you were born again, that order was restored. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new." The recreated spirit is not a patched up version of the old one. It is not a repaired version of the spirit that died in Adam. It is brand new. It is alive with the very life and nature of God.
1 Peter 1:23 says, "You have been born again of incorruptible seed by the Word of God, which lives and abides forever.
Your spirit is no longer dead. It is no longer cut off from God. The Holy Spirit has taken up permanent residence inside it. And in your spirit right now, at this very moment, is everything you will ever need. Wisdom is in there. Strength is in there. Healing is in there. Provision is in there. The peace that passes understanding is in there. The courage that does not bend to circumstances is in there. The clarity that does not depend on favorable conditions is in there. All of it already deposited, already present, already yours. So why does it feel so inaccessible? Because even though your spirit was recreated at the new birth, your soul was not automatically renewed.
Your mind still carries the old patterns. Your emotions still react to what your five senses are reporting. Your thought processes were formed over years, sometimes decades of living from the outside in. And they do not change overnight simply because something changed in your spirit. If you have never been taught to live from your spirit, if nobody ever showed you how to access the hidden man of the heart, then you are a new creation on the inside, still living like the old man on the outside.
2 Corinthians 5:7 puts the challenge plainly, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Faith is the language of the spirit. Sight, sense, knowledge is the language of the body. And the believer who has never learned to walk by faith is still being governed by what they can see and feel and physically experience.
This is why the same crisis that destroys one believer barely touches another. It is not that one has more faith in some mystical sense. It is that one has learned to access the hidden man. They have developed their spirit.
They have built the connection. So when the storm comes, and the storm always comes, they are not dependent on what their five senses are reporting. They go inward. They access the One who is greater than any storm. First John 4:4 says it directly, "Greater is HE that is in you than he that is in the world. HE is in you, not around you, not available to you in theory, HE is in you right now at this very moment." The question is not whether He is there. The question is whether you have learned to live from where He is.
Now, here is the good news that makes everything else in this teaching worth your time.
Colossians 1:13 says, "Who has delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son."
Notice the tense of that verb. Has delivered. Not will deliver. Not is in the process of delivering. Has delivered. Past tense already done. Complete. Before you woke up this morning, before this crisis entered your life, before you had any of the faith you are standing on today, the redemption is finished. The transfer has already happened. You are not fighting your way toward His kingdom that might one day receive you. You have already been translated into it.
The dominion of darkness over your life, including the dominion of sickness, of poverty, of fear, of defeat. That dominion was broken at the cross of Jesus Christ. It was applied to you the moment you were born again.
Which means the powerlessness that most believers experience is not God's design for them. Let me say that clearly. It is not a test. It is not discipline from a Father who is teaching you through suffering. It is not the price of a deeper faith that you have not yet earned. It is the result of a connection that has not yet been built.
Ephesians 3:20 says, "Now unto him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us." Read that phrase carefully. " According to the power that works in us, not the power he sends from heaven when you pray long enough, not the power he releases when your faith reaches a certain level. The power that is already working, already present, already deposited inside your recreated spirit, present tense, active tense in us right now.
And here is what most people miss about that verse. The power is not automatic. It works according to something, according to a condition. And that condition is the alignment between a spirit that has been consistently nourished and a soul that has been consistently renewed by the Word. When that alignment is established, when the inner man is strong and the connection is active, the power does not trickle, it flows.
First John 4:4 anchors the entire reality. Greater is HE that is in you, not beside you, not available to you if you ask with enough desperation in you. That is the foundation of everything that follows.
The problem is not the supply. The problem has never been the supply. The problem is the connection.And that connection has a name. We called it fellowship. Real daily intentional communion with the indwelling One. Not crisis prayer. Not emergency meetings asking God to send more of what he has already deposited inside your spirit. Daily fellowship.
The daily practice of turning inward to the hidden man of the heart and building the connection that activates everything God has already placed there.
That connection is built through five specific habits.
But before we get to those habits, there is something we need to address first. Something the enemy is doing right now in your life and mine to prevent that connection from ever being made. And once you see it clearly, you cannot unsee it.
Here is something the enemy cannot do. He cannot take the Holy Spirit out of you. Your redemption is settled. Your salvation is sealed. The moment you were born again, the Spirit took up permanent residence in your recreated spirit. And no power in heaven, on earth, or under the earth can remove HIM from that place. The enemy knows this. He has known it since the moment you were saved. So, he stopped trying to steal what is inside you.
Instead, he developed a different strategy, a quieter one, a more patient one, one that does not require him to touch your theology or your doctrine or your salvation at all. His strategy is simple and it is devastatingly effective, keep you too busy to ever go inward.
Think about the average believer's day. The phone turns on before their feet hit the floor. Notifications, news, messages, the noise of a world that never stops demanding attention. Then the commute, the work, the responsibilities, the conversations, the problems of family and finances and health that never seem to fully resolve.
Then the evening, more screens, more noise, more input from every direction until finally the body gives out and sleep comes. Not rest, just exhaustion.
And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, between the morning alarm and the midnight ceiling, the still small voice of the indwelling One never gets heard.
First Kings 19:12. God was not in the wind. He was not in the earthquake. He was not in the fire. After the fire, a still small voice.
The God of the universe chose to speak in a whisper. And He has not changed His method. The Holy Spirit does not compete with the noise of your circumstances. He does not shout over your anxiety. He does not force His wisdom into a mind that is running at 100 m an hour through a 100 different problems. He speaks in the still small voice. And you only hear that voice when you become still enough to listen. But here is what makes the 20:27 enemy strategy so dangerous. It is not just noise. It is specifically shaped noise. three targeted traps. Each one designed to keep you from going inward.
Each one dressed up in something that looks almost legitimate.
The first trap is the trap of religious busyiness.
This one is the most deceptive because it uses the church itself as the distraction. You can fill every hour of your week with ministry activities, with service, with meetings and outreaches and Bible studies and prayer groups and still have almost no actual fellowship with the indwelling One.
Activity is not communion. Serving is not the same as sitting.
Doing things for God and being with God are two entirely different experiences.
And the enemy is perfectly content to let you spend your entire Christian life in the first one, never discovering the second.
I want to tell you about a man named Daniel. He was 28 years old when I met him, 5 years into ministry, passionate, gifted, the kind of young pastor whose energy fills a room. He had planted a small church in his city. He was preaching every Sunday, leading a midweek Bible study, doing hospital visits, counseling couples, running a youth program. He was doing everything right by every external measure. And he came to me completely empty, not backsliden, not in sin, not doubting God's existence or the truth of scripture, just empty, hollow in a way that frightened him. He said to me, "I am preaching about the presence of God every single week, but I cannot remember the last time l actually experienced it myself." He had been so busy doing things about God that he had stopped being with God. That is not a discipline problem. That is not a character flaw. That is the first trap working exactly as the enemy designed it.
The second trap is the trap of spiritual comparison. When the connection feels weak, when the inner man feels under developed, the enemy offers you a convenient story, someone else has more faith than you, someone else hears God more clearly, someone else was born with a gift you were never given, and instead of turning inward to develop what is already there, you spend your energy measuring yourself against a standard that was never meant to be your benchmark.
1 John 4:4 does not say greater is he that is in them. It says greater is HE that is in you. The indwelling One in you is the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead.
The same Spirit who spoke the universe into existence. He did not give you a lesser version of Himself based on who you are or where you came from.
Comparison is a strategy to keep you looking outward when everything you need is already inward.
The third trap is the trap of accumulated failure. This one is the most personal. You have tried before. Maybe you committed to reading the Word every morning and made it 3 weeks before the habit collapsed. Maybe you set aside time for fellowship and fell asleep. Maybe you prayed in the spirit for a season and then stopped and you are not entirely sure why. And now every time the conversation turns toward daily spiritual habits, something in you pulls back quietly. Not loud rebellion, just a quiet reluctance.
A private voice that says you have tried this before. The enemy uses your past inconsistency as evidence that the connection is simply not available to you, that others can build it, but you cannot. That something in you is too distracted, too undisiplined, too far gone for this kind of daily practice to ever take root. That voice is a lie.
Romans 8:1 exposes it completely. There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. No condemnation for yesterday's failed attempts, no penalty for the seasons when you went quiet, no waiting period before the connection becomes available again. The moment you turn inward, the connection resumes instantly without a single condition attached. The enemy cannot take the Holy Spirit from you.
But he does not need to. All he needs is to keep you too busy, too distracted, too comparison conscious, or too shame laden to ever go inward long enough to discover what is waiting for you there.
Now you see the strategy, and now you are ready to build something the enemy has been working for years to prevent. Five habits.
Each one a specific daily practical act of turning inward. Each one a way of making the connection that most believers never make. Each one building on the last, compounding over time until the believer who once stood in Margaret's emptiness begins to feel something entirely different.
Not just hope, not just encouragement, the actual power of the actual indwelling One moving through an inner man that has been built, developed and consistently connected. That is what comes next.
So now you understand the problem. You are a spirit. You have a soul. You live in a body. You know what the enemy is doing to keep you from going inward. And you know that the power is already there, fully deposited, fully real, waiting inside a recreated spirit that has never been taught how to be accessed. The question now is how?
How do you go from a believer who knows the truth in their mind to a believer who actually lives from the inside out?
How do you reverse years of outside-in living and build the connection that activates everything God has already placed inside you? The answer is communion. Daily intentional habitual communion with the Holy Spirit. Not crisis prayer, not Sunday morning worship alone. A consistent daily practice of turning inward to the hidden man of the heart and building the connection through five specific habits that compound over time.
The first habit is feeding your spirit the Word of God.
Jesus said in John 6:63, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life. Not they contain spiritual principles, not they point toward spiritual truth. They are spirit. They are life." The Word of God is not information that describes a reality. It is the substance of that reality delivered in a form your spirit can absorb and be strengthened by.
¶Note : that the Word is the food of the spirit.
Just as your physical body grows weak without food, regardless of how hard you try to will it into strength, your spirit grows weak without the Word, not weak in the sense of losing salvation, weak in the sense of losing its voice, weak in the sense of losing its capacity to lead your soul and govern your daily experience.
The believer who feeds their spirit the Word consistently builds what we called a Word consciousness.
A state where Philippians 4:19, "My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus feels more solid and more dependable than an empty bank account." That is not denial of reality. That is a higher reality asserting itself over a lower one.
I want to tell you about a man named Thomas. He was a structural engineer, 41 years old, 15 years saved. Good man, steady man, the kind of man who showed up every week and served without complaining. But he came to me during a period of severe professional pressure. A major project had gone wrong. The financial fallout was real. And he told me that every morning he woke up, the first thing that hit him was the weight of what he owed and what he stood to lose. He said, " I know God is my provider. I have believed that for 15 years, but I cannot make myself feel it when the numbers are staring at me. "
I gave him one instruction. Before your feet hit the floor tomorrow morning, find one scripture about provision. Just one.
Read it out loud. Not in your head. 🗣️ Speak Out Loud. Then go about your day. He did it for 3 weeks before he called me again.
He said, "I cannot fully explain what is happening. The situation has not changed yet. But I changed. Something shifted in the way l am thinking about it. I stopped feeling like a man drowning and started feeling like a man with options.
That is not psychology. That is the Word doing what Jesus said it does. Spirit and life entering a spirit that was starved and beginning to build something from the inside out.
The second habit is conscious acknowledgement of the indwelling One. Every morning before your phone, before the news, before the demands of the day begin pulling at you from every direction, you acknowledge His presence out loud, deliberately, not as a ritual, not as a recited formula, but as a deliberate choice to set the terms of your day before your senses get a chance to set them first.
John 14:17 records Jesus saying, "The spirit of truth dwells with you and shall be in you. He is not a distant god who visits occasionally when the atmosphere is right. He is the indwelling One. He was there when you woke up. He is there before you open your eyes. He is present before you have done a single thing to deserve His presence. And the moment you wake up and acknowledge that reality before your circumstances get a chance to define the day, something shifts in your inner man that no amount of positive thinking can produce.
I knew a woman named Ruth. She was 37, a school teacher. She had gone through a divorce 2 years earlier that left her raising two children alone on a salary that barely covered what the month required.
She was not bitter, but she was exhausted. And there was a loneliness in her that went deeper than the absence of her ex-husband. It was the loneliness of a person who felt they were carrying everything by themselves. A woman at her church shared one simple habit with her.
Every morning before her feet touch the floor. Say this out loud. Greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world. Ruth told me later that she felt foolish the first morning, but she said it anyway. And then she said it the next morning and the morning after that. She said after about 2 weeks, I stopped feeling like I was fighting alone. Not because my circumstances changed, because l stopped Iying to myself about who was in the room with me. That one sentence spoken with intention every single morning began to do what years of theological knowledge had not done. It made the reality of the indwelling One feel personal instead of doctrinal.
The third habit is praying in the spirit.
1 Corinthians 14:2 says, "For he that speaks in an unknown tongue speaks not unto men, but unto God. For in the spirit he speaks mysteries." When you pray in the spirit, you completely bypass your natural mind. You bypass your sense knowledge. You bypass the limitations of what you know and what you understand and what your anxiety will allow you to ask for. You allow the Holy Spirit to give your recreated spirit the exact utterance needed in that moment whether you understand it or not. Jude verse 20 builds on this directly. Building up yourselves on your most holy faith. Praying in the Holy Ghost. Building up, that is the language of construction of a structure rising one layer at a time. Every time you pray in the spirit, you are adding another layer of strength to your inner man. Another layer of sensitivity to the voice of God, another layer of distance between you and the fear that used to control your reactions. You are not performing a religious exercise when you pray in the spirit. You are doing spiritual construction work. The building goes up whether you can see it happening or not. And over time, the structure you have built is the thing that holds when the wind comes.
The fourth habit is genuine worship, not performance. Not waiting for the right music to create the right feeling before you are willing to engage. Jesus said in John 4:24, "God is a spirit, and they that worship HIM must worship HIM in spirit and in truth." Must, not should, must. Worship that does not originate from the spirit is not the kind God is looking for. True worship is your spirit magnifying the reality of the indwelling One above every physical circumstance pressing in on you. Not pretending the circumstance is not there. Not manufacturing an emotion that does not exist. But deliberately choosing to focus the eyes of your spirit on who He is, on what He has done, on what He said He is inside you until His reality becomes larger in your inner man than the problem that was filling your vision a moment ago. When you adore HIM for who He is and not for what you need from HIM, something shifts in your inner man that no amount of reasoning can produce. The soul comes into alignment with the spirit. The emotions follow not leading the worship but responding to it and the result is a settled peace that does not require favorable circumstances to sustain itself.
The fifth habit is intentional quietness and I want to give this one more attention than the others because I believe it is the most consistently neglected of all five and possibly the most powerful.
Psalm 46:10, be still and know that l am God.
Not be busy and no, not be productive and no, not be in motion and no, be still. The word still in that passage carries the weight of deliberate sessation. Not just the absence of physical movement, but the conscious choice to stop the internal noise, to settle the mind, to release the grip of every demand and every thought that is racing through your soul and simply be present to the One who is already present to you. Most believers have never done this. Not truly. They have had quiet moments but not intentional quietness. They have had silence in the room but their minds were still running at full speed through the list of problems.
The fifth habit is not silence in the room. It is the quieting of the inner man. The deliberate choice to still the soul so the spirit can speak. Here is how to practice it practically. Set aside 10 minutes, not 2 hours. Not a commitment you will break by the third day. 10 minutes. Find a place with no phone, no music, no agenda, and no performance. Sit comfortably. Take one or two slow breaths. Then say out loud or in your spirit, "Holy Spirit, I am here. I am listening. You are inside me." And then stop. Do not fill the silence with more words. Do not fill it with requests. Do not fill it with the spiritual equivalent of a voicemail you leave for God and hang up before He can respond.
Just stop and wait. Your mind will wander. That is normal. When it does, do not condemn yourself. Simply return. Bring your attention back to the one who is already in the room with you. Back to the quiet, back to the stillness, and wait again. The voice you are waiting for is not loud.
First Kings 19:12 established that a long time ago. God was not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire. After all of that, a still small voice. He has not changed his method since then. The Holy Spirit does not compete with your noise.
He does not escalate His volume to match your anxiety. He speaks in the still small voice. And you only access that voice when you become still enough to hear it. We described this in the hidden man of the heart as two-way fellowship. Not a monologue, not a list of requests presented to a divine customer service line, but actual contact. Your spirit reaching toward the Father and the Father responding through the indwelling One with wisdom , with peace, with direction, with the exact thing you need in that particular moment.
And here is what I need you to understand about all five of these habits together. None of them works as a one-time event. None of them produces immediate dramatic results on the first day. None of them is the spiritual equivalent of a switch that floods the room with light the instant you flip it.
They are construction. They are the daily unglamorous quiet work of building an inner man that is strong, sensitive, fed, developed, and consistently in contact with the One who lives inside it. Every morning you feed your spirit the word, you are building. Every time you acknowledge his presence before your circumstances get a chance to define your day, you are building. Every moment you pray in the spirit, every act of genuine worship, every 10 minutes of intentional stillness, you are laying another layer on a structure that does not look impressive from the outside yet. But give it weeks, give it months, give it the kind of consistent daily investment that you give to anything in your life that matters to you. and something will begin to happen that is quiet at first but becomes unmistakable.
You will find that the crises that used to level you are not leveling you the same way. You will find that your first reaction to bad news has changed. You will find that the peace that Paul described in Philippians 4:7, the peace that passes understanding is no longer a phrase you believe in theory, but an experience you live in practice. That is the five habits working exactly the way
