“God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24).
We live in an age spawned by the Enlightenment. With the rise of scientific discovery, modern society began to reject beliefs grounded in a spiritual reality. The intellectual elite chose, rather, to believe only in those things that could be empirically proven. Gradually, a once deeply spiritual society began to banish spirituality. God became unimportant and irrelevant. The cultural consequences of such a philosophical rebellion have, of course, been devastating.
Despite this attempt to resign spirituality to the irrelevant, our society has seen a resurgence of spiritual things through the New Age, superstition, and witchcraft. Why this sudden shift? The main reason is that the legacy of the Enlightenment has left man empty. Because man is more than a physical being, people will inevitably turn to spiritual matters. The age we live then is not only blanketed by the residue of Enlightenment thinking, but we live in a time of reaction, a time when people are searching for the truth, for spiritual awareness.
We cannot deny spirituality for long because we are made in God’s image with a spiritual dimension just as real as our physical nature. Although we might not think about it often, God is spirit. He is not a physical being. “In theology the spirituality of God stresses that God has a substantial Being all His own and distinct from the world, and that this substantial Being is immaterial, invisible, and without composition or extension,” Louis Berkhof wrote. “By ascribing spirituality to God we also affirm that He has none of the properties belonging to matter, and that He cannot be discerned by the bodily senses.” Being a spirit does not mean God is an energy force or a gas, these are physical. The best analog to a spirit is the mind. The mind is distinct from the brain. It is not physical but spiritual.
The naturalists offer no comfort to humanity because they believe that all existence is physical. All we have is the here and now. The reality of God’s spirituality, on the other hand, brings abundant comfort. While your body is dying each day, while you suffer sickness and pain, you can know that your spirit is being renewed day by day. You do not need to be overly concerned about outward things because there is more to you than the physical. Our God is spirit, and we can commune with Him in spirit.
At the end of the day, take inventory of the time you attend to physical needs (eating, exercise, preening, etc.) compared to spiritual needs (emotional, intellectual, religious, etc.) If you spent little time on spiritual concerns, make some changes by listing priorities. Put your relationship with God first.
