Sitting With the Seven Spirits of God: Part 1

The Spirit of the Lord will rest on Him, The spirit of wisdom and understanding, The spirit of counsel and strength, The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. Isaiah 11:2 NASB

There are moments in my prayer life when a question turns into a study, the study turns into revelation, and the revelation completely changes how I approach God. That is exactly what happened when I began studying the seven Spirits of God described in Isaiah 11:2. What started as curiosity became an invitation into a deeper experience with the Holy Spirit. I began to understand the seven Spirits as dimensions or expressions of the fullness of the Spirit of God: the Spirit of the LORD, wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, and the fear of the LORD. Once I saw that, something clicked for me because this wasn't entirely foreign to the way I already approached God.

For some time now, I have intentionally taught about and interacted with the distinct Persons of the Godhead—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. There have also been moments when I approached God according to a particular revelation of His name because that was the dimension of His character I needed in that moment. There are times when I specifically need Jehovah Shalom because I need the God who reveals Himself as peace. I am not suggesting that God somehow becomes divided into parts. Rather, I am intentionally acknowledging and engaging with the aspect of His nature that is particularly relevant to what I am facing. As I studied the seven Spirits of God, I began to recognize a similar principle in my relationship with the Holy Spirit.

That realization also challenged the limited way the Holy Spirit is sometimes presented. We are comfortable with the imagery of the dove. We talk about His gentleness, His comfort, and His quiet voice, and all of those things have their place. But then you read Acts 5 and encounter Ananias and Sapphira. Suddenly, you are confronted with an expression of the Holy Spirit that doesn't fit neatly into the image of gentleness that many believers have been taught to expect. Peter receives supernatural knowledge concerning what has occurred, exposes the deception, and directly identifies their offense as lying to the Holy Spirit. In one encounter, you begin to see multiple operations associated with the Spirit working together. That made me look differently at what it means to experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

So, I decided to do something intentional. Instead of simply studying the seven Spirits academically or theologically, I began sitting with the Holy Spirit while intentionally focusing on these different dimensions described in Isaiah 11:2. The first dimension I intentionally chose was the Spirit of Counsel. Counsel was significant to me because it connects directly to something that had been prophesied over me in 2016: a Deborah mantle and a double portion of the Spirit of Counsel. At the time, I did not fully understand what that meant. As my understanding of Kingdom identity has developed, however, I have come to understand counsel as deeply connected to strategy. That connection makes sense to me in light of the work I now do as a spiritual warfare strategist. The reason it comes so easily to me is because I have a double portion of that attribute of Holy Spirit.

I had something very specific that needed strategy: my new murder mystery. I had received permission to write it, and I was excited because I have always wanted to write a murder mystery, but I quickly discovered that this type of writing required something different from me. With a mystery, I couldn't simply follow the characters and see where they took me. I needed to understand the end so that I could strategically place the pieces throughout the story. I had to understand investigative procedure, how an investigation unfolds, and what changes when a murder investigation becomes a cold case. I had written four chapters, but then the writing essentially stopped because I didn't yet understand the larger plot well enough to move forward.

Before this, I had intentionally sat with Jesus concerning the book, specifically approaching Him as the Son because, in my experience as a scribe, He is the One who speaks to me most concerning that aspect of my calling. I had received information, but I still needed strategy. I needed to know how all the pieces were supposed to work together. So, I sat with the Spirit of Counsel. And Counsel gave me the plot twist. When it came, it was one of those Ohhhhhhh! moments where suddenly the story made sense. The information I had already received could now be organized around a strategy. That experience was enough for me to decide that I wanted to continue this process and intentionally sit with each dimension of the Holy Spirit.

The next day, I sat with the Spirit of Might. This one immediately connected to something God had already been highlighting for me: Ephesians 3:20. That scripture has been foundational in my life for years, particularly because of the Greek word dunamis, translated as power. As I had been studying the Spirit of Might, I noticed language and concepts that reminded me of what I had previously learned concerning dunamis. That made me wonder whether there was a bridge between what Paul describes as the power working within us and this dimension of the Holy Spirit identified as might. So, I sat down expecting to explore that connection.

Might was quiet.

The questions I asked the Spirit of Might were: How does the dunamis power in Ephesians 3:20 apply to me? How do I activate that power in my life? How do I build God’s army? I set a timer for my standard twenty minutes and listened. I only received two words: online school. That was it. But those two words carried weight because they weren't introducing something new; they were pointing back to something God had already been talking to me about. Jesus had spoken to me concerning an online school earlier in the year. Around April, a divine connection had emerged with someone who could help me build the platform. At the same time, I had recently completed my doctorate and had been asking God what I was supposed to do with everything He had placed in my hands. I had curriculum. I had years of teaching. I had ministry experience. I had academic training. I had information developed through years of studying spiritual warfare and Kingdom identity. The question was what all of it was supposed to become?

When the Spirit of Might pointed me toward the school, I recognized a connection to the power and resources God had already been speaking to me about since the day after I released my first book, “Surviving Sunday” back in 2012. But recognizing a connection and understanding what to do with it are two different things. So naturally, I needed Understanding.

When I sat with the Spirit of Understanding, several seemingly separate conversations began moving toward the same destination. God had recently brought another divine connection into my life with someone who genuinely wanted to be taught and trained. Around the same time, one of my spiritual daughters visited me, and while I was telling her about this new connection, she told me plainly that I needed to have a retreat. Her reasoning was simple but significant: I talk about receiving information while sitting still before God, but there are people who don't actually know how to do that. They don't know what it looks like to sit quietly for twenty minutes and listen. We can tell people to hear God without ever teaching them how to cultivate the discipline of listening.

The retreat had already begun appearing in my prayer time, and the instruction that surfaced was to start with Tallahassee. So, I began researching locations and thinking through what that experience could look like. Then, while sitting with Understanding, I began receiving language that helped me know what to search for, what to study, and how to begin structuring the retreat, which would actually be an intensive. What had initially felt like disconnected pieces started becoming research categories. Understanding wasn't simply giving me information; it was helping me comprehend how to investigate what I had already been shown.

At the same time, another piece surfaced concerning my identity as a prophetic scribe. I had been listening back through one of my books when something occurred to me concerning my prophetic scope. When I shared what I was seeing, my spiritual twin essentially fussed at me and told me, you need to teach this. The point was that other prophetic scribes need to understand how this works. That immediately opened another door in my thinking. If there was a warfare intensive, there could also be a scribe intensive. So, I began researching that as well. Again, Understanding was helping me gather and organize pieces, even though I couldn't yet see exactly how everything would fit together.

And then, the next day, I sat with Wisdom. This was the point where the entire experience shifted.

I had already determined that Wisdom needed to be next because after receiving all this information, I needed to know what to do with it. That distinction became incredibly important to me. Counsel had given strategy. Might had pointed toward power and capacity. Understanding had helped me comprehend and develop what I was being shown. But Wisdom began showing me application. Even before I formally requested an audience with the Spirit of Wisdom, information began coming as I sat down in my scriptorium, turned on worship music, and prepared to pray and journal. Questions I had not yet verbalized began receiving answers. Wisdom connected the dots.

I received greater clarity concerning the online school, my doctorate, the intensives, and how these things fit together. I received instruction concerning connections that needed to be made. I received names for the scribe intensive and the warfare intensive. I began seeing how my doctoral training connected to the teaching assignment God had given me long before the degree was completed. For years, I have understood part of my assignment to be teaching and training the Body of Christ. Sitting with Wisdom helped me see an avenue through which that assignment could now be structured and executed.

What made the experience even more profound was realizing that Wisdom was bringing together things that had been developing for months. Some of these threads reached back to The Freedom Blueprint, the twenty-one-day fast I completed in October and November of last year. That fast coincided with the completion of my doctoral journey. Then came graduation and my hooding ceremony in January, followed by additional revelation and instruction throughout the year. At the time, these events could have looked like separate milestones. Sitting with Wisdom caused me to see them as connected pieces of a larger strategy.

Each encounter has been different. Each dimension has had its own emphasis, its own way of communicating, and its own contribution to the larger picture. But Wisdom absolutely blew my mind because it brought layers together. There was one point when something surfaced during that time, and when I went to research it afterward, the amount of information connected to it was overwhelming. My response was essentially, Oh my God. The Body of Christ doesn't know this. Not because it is inaccessible, but because there are dimensions of what God has made available to us that many of us have never been taught to explore.

That is probably the biggest thing this experience has impressed upon me so far: we don't know everything we have access to because we don't know what we have access to. Isaiah 11:2 has been sitting in the Bible the entire time. The sevenfold description of the Spirit has always been there. But reading something, studying something, and intentionally allowing that revelation to shape the way you seek God are very different experiences.

And I'm not finished.

I still have the remaining dimensions of the Spirit to sit with, and after what happened with Counsel, Might, Understanding, and especially Wisdom, I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen next.

But y'all... Wait for Part 2!

Remember… it’s real in these spiritual streets!™

Dr. Melinda Michelle Jefferson

www.gmme21.com 

How to Apply This to Your Life

If you want to engage with these various dimensions of Holy Spirit, or any of the Trinity for that matter, this is literally what I do. I write my questions in my Prayer Tracking Journal under the “Answers I’m Seeking” section. Then I say aloud, “Today, I request an audience with ____________ (insert name here) and then I ask my questions. I set my timer, which is normally 20 minutes and then I listen. I write down what I hear in the allotted time and then if there’s more to search, I do that based on whatever is revealed.