10 Principles of the Spirit-Led Life

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

The following ten principles are from my book Indwelling Life.

Principal 1 – Spiritual Intuition

Your spirit’s intuition is the sixth sense, enabling you to know intuitively what the indwelling Spirit communicates directly to your spirit.

This principle helps you:

  • Recognize the Spirit’s voice.
  • Know God’s thoughts and live by the mind of Christ.
  • Develop sensitivity to the conviction of the Spirit, keeping you on the narrow path of life.
  • Discern what is of the Spirit and what is of the soul.

Principal 2 – Communion with Christ

Spirit-to-spirit communion with Christ is the food that strengthens, nourishes, and energizes your spiritual life.

This principle helps you:

  • Know God experientially.
  • Engage in Spirit-to-spirit communion with Christ.
  • Dine with Christ in rich spiritual fellowship.
  • Hear His voice and experience His life.
  • Enjoy prayer.
  • Feast upon Jesus in the secret place.

Principal 3 – Spiritual Strength

The strongest part of your being—whether spirit, soul, or body—will be the part that influences, leads, and governs you.

This principle helps you:

  • Recharge your spirit, somewhat like a cellphone.
  • Strengthen your spirit so that it’s stronger than your soul or body.
  • Shift from a carnal state to a spiritual state.
  • Gain new strength as you wait upon the Lord.
  • Activate your spiritual instincts to operate organically. 

Principal 4 – Live from Victory

To live in victory, you must live from victory—the victory Christ won for you through His crucifixion and resurrection.

This principle helps you:

  • Breakthrough the power of guilt, shame, and condemnation.
  • Experience a cleansing of your conscience from dead works.
  • Draw near to God.
  • Overcome the devil’s accusations.
  • Live from love, acceptance, and righteousness rather than living for love, acceptance, and righteousness.

Principal 5 – Live from God Not for God

Living by the Spirit begins when living for God ends.

This principle helps you:

  • Avoid spiritual burnout.
  • Live from Christ’s life rather than by self-life fueled by knowledge.
  • Live in a moment-by-moment relationship with Jesus Christ.
  • Exchange living by the soul in the power of the mind, will, and emotions to a new life of relational dependence upon Christ.

Principal 6 – Enabling Grace

God’s grace empowers you to obey what His truth demands, enabling you to abide in Christ deeper and yield Christlike fruit in abundance.

This principle helps you:

  • Obey what God’s truth demands from the heart with joy.
  • Change your mindset from achieving to receiving.
  • Change your mindset from earning to yielding.
  • Overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil.
  • Become who God calls you to be.
  • Do what God calls you to do.
  • Develop new desires that empower obedience from the heart.

Principal 7 – Renewing Your Mind

Renewing your mind comes from meditation, and meditation always determines your orientation, whether you live from the spirit, soul, or body.

This principle helps you:

  • Remember who you are in Christ.
  • Activate your faith.
  • Experience life and truth.
  • Rewire your brain, mind, and heart beliefs.
  • Change from a carnal state to a spiritual state.
  • Experience transformation.
  • Remove mental hinderances that block Christ’s life from being released from within you.

Principal 8 – Spiritual Alignment

You must rely upon the indwelling Spirit to align your living condition—how much you experience of the finished work of the cross—to your legal position in Christ.

This principle helps you:

  • Become who you already are in Christ.
  • Experience Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection.
  • Experience righteousness and victory.
  • Close the gap between who you are in Christ and who you are in experience.

Principal 9 – The Crucified Life

Applying the cross to your soul, especially to your will, releases greater measures of the Spirit from within you.

This principle helps you:

  • Put to death self-will, pride, independence, rebellion, and self-reliance.
  • Crucify the sin nature and the body of sin that produces death.
  • Release greater measures of the Spirit’s life, power, and presence from within you.
  • Experience the exchanged life, where Christ lives rather than you.

Principal 10 – Christ Dwelling in the Heart

Whoever dwells in your heart—whether self or Christ—will be the life source from which you live.

This principle helps you:

  • Take off the old self and put on the new self.
  • Cleanse and purify your heart.
  • Unleash the life of Christ from within you.
  • Put on Christ and take off selfishness.
  • Abide in Christ.

If you want to learn more, my book Indwelling Life devotes one chapter to each of these principles.

Bryan Kessler