Spirit, Soul, and Body

Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

I am a spirit being, I possess a soul (mind, emotions, and will), and live in a physical body. Let me explain.
 
With my spirit I make contact with the spiritual realm where God exists. My conscience is the voice of my human spirit. My spirit is eternal, ageless, and will never cease to exist. My spirit is the seat of my human personality and motivations for living. The new birth has removed the sin nature from my sprit and placed within me by the Holy Spirit the nature of God (which is love). I am to allow this reborn human spirit to rule my actions, my thoughts, my words, and my choices.
 
My human spirit is nourished through the word of God and prayer (Matthew 4:4). I must feed my spirit the word every day by reading and meditation. I must exercise my spirit daily by praying in my natural and spiritual language. I must learn to listen closely to the promptings of my own spirit, for that is where I will hear the voice of the Father speaking to me intuitively about my life. The more I allow my human spirit to rule my conduct, the simpler and freer life will be.

My soul relates me to natural life in a fallen world. My soul consists of thoughts, emotions, and volition or will-power. My soul has been influenced by my surroundings since birth. It has absorbed much of its habits from observing and associating with events and people around me. My soul is full of residue from the sin nature that left me when I was born again. Negative, wicked, and malicious thoughts have been deposited in my soul from past events. I must learn to resist and replace these thoughts by renewing my mind with the Word by meditating and acting on it. I must purposely resist the negative deposits from my past into my soul, and must actively seek to control what my mind dwells on.
 
I must harness my emotions and not allow them to control my behavior. I must realize that my emotions have been greatly influenced too by my former sin nature and they will often feel things that are wrong and perhaps untrue. My emotions will seek to highjack my life perspectives and make me feel things that are not really true. I must purposely subject my emotions to the word of God. Instead of acting on emotions, I must act on the word. I must choose to believe the word over emotional feelings. This is a difficult thing to do at first but must be practiced until acting on the word and overriding wrong emotions becomes a way of living.

I must learn to moment by moment yield my will to God. My will has a stubborn streak from the residue left by my former sin nature. I must refuse to allow my will to chart its own course in my life. I must consciously yield my will to the word of God throughout my day. I must choose God’s word over my own self-centered desires. This too takes much practice and effort. My first attempts to harness my will may be met with failure. But I must repent when I fail and consciously yield my will to God by yielding it to His word.

My body is the temporary house for my spirit and my soul. One day, I will either leave it behind in death. Or it will instantly change at the rapture of the church. My body bears much scarring from my former sin nature. It has many appetites and desires that are reside from the sin nature and that were learned in my before Christ days. I must invoke stern discipline on my body or it and its appetites will seek to rule and ruin my life. I must set boundaries for what I allow my body to do. This is a lifelong struggle. One day, the Father will clothe me with a new body that will fit me for eternity in His presence. This new body will be in accord with my spirit and will allow me the freedom to express my spirit and soul in eternity as I walk with my Father through the eons of time in the New Heaven and New Earth.

I must keep this perspective of life continually before me.

Emotionally Free

Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

We are spirit beings, who have souls, and live in bodies. Our souls are made up of our mind, our emotions and our willpower or volition. I want to discuss the use of our emotions, but let me mention a few things first.
 
God gave us every sense to be used for His glory. With our spirit, we contact the spiritual world, and discern God through the voice of our human spirit called our conscience, and through the Holy Spirit who comes to reside in us in the new birth.

With our bodies, we contact the physical world through the five senses enabling us to enjoy God’s beautiful creation. He created every sense to be used.

With our intellect we think and reason, exploring the vastness of God’s creation, and we are constantly learning more and more about its’ complexity and the simple synergy with which every organism works. From the farthest galaxy seen from the Hubble Telescope to the smallest matter seen with the most powerful lens, there is a Divine design to all of creation.
 
God also gave us emotions. They have a purpose in us and the Father expects us to use them for His glory and for our benefit. Our emotions are a gauge that we can use in our relationships. Happy, sad, exuberant, melancholy, exasperated, or joyful; the Father wants our emotions to work but not to rule us.
 
I have come across so many people who have emotions that are numb. They feel nothing. They live from day to day with no real emotions about much of anything. Psychologists call this the flat effect. I call it just being numb.
 
Here’s what happens. If a person has a traumatic experience, and they try to keep from feeling the pain of the trauma by shutting off the feelings or emotions it produces, then they also shut off every other emotion. They way emotions work is that when you shut one down, you shut them all down. For some reason with emotions, you just can’t turn one off and keep the others running. You either feel the good and the bad, or you turn then all off and don’t feel anything!
 
Many people lead emotionally numb lives and it is not the will of God. God created emotions so that we could feel relationships with others and with Him! Through the years many people have told me that they never feel the presence of God. When I inquire, they also tell me that they don’t feel much of anything ever emotionally, and that’s when I see that there’s a big problem.

If you find yourself emotionally numb, go back and make sure that you’ve really forgiven every person that has emotionally wounded you. Forgive them from your heart and release them. Release from yourself every hurtful thought created by any incident with any person. Sometimes people let these hurtful feelings and thoughts pile up, and they don’t know where to begin.
 
Here’s an exercise that may help. Start with each close relationship in life, beginning with parents and go on to siblings, friends, teachers, bosses, relatives, and those you’ve loved. The people closest to us are the ones that have the ability to wound us the most emotionally. We must choose to forgive each one. Make an itemized list of the hurtful thoughts that come to mind when you think of each relationship in your life that has brought you emotional pain. Take the list and purposely forgive each item listed, releasing the person from the judgments you’ve had against them because of what they said or did to you. Ask the Father to forgive you for holding offense, and then pray for God to bless and help the person, even if you don’t think they deserve it! Pray for their salvation if they don’t know the Lord.
 
Emotions will wake up if you release hard feelings and grudges that lie deeply buried. Work on it! The Father doesn’t want you ruled by feelings, but He does want you to experience them in relationships!
 
This won’t happen constantly, but at times the Father also wants us to sense Him with our emotions. And He wants the Holy Spirit to be able to use our emotions as He uses us to minister to others. The Father sometimes wants us to feel what He feels when we minister to or pray for others, and we can’t do that unless our emotions are free! Start the process today of releasing the weights from your emotions so that the Father can use your spirit, soul, and body!

Putting Off By Putting On

That you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:22-24).

Putting off and putting on are terms Paul used to describe the change in a believers life after salvation because of mind renewal. Before salvation, we’ve trained our bodies to yield to certain appetites, we’ve trained our minds to think in certain ways, and we’ve trained our emotions to act and react certain ways.

Stopping these learned behaviors is called putting off the old man with his deeds. The sin nature that produced appetites, thoughts and emotional responses has been removed by the new birth! We have become new creatures in Christ, and our daily lifestyle must be retrained to yield to this new person that we’ve become inside.
 
Developing new habits that reflect the new person that we’ve become within is called putting on the new man.

This process occurs in us as we feed on the word and purpose to live a life of obedience to God. A key to putting off and putting on is in understanding the fundamentals of how behavior changes. We can’t stop a habit by constantly refusing to act it out. That keeps the attention on the habit.
 
Habits change by being replaced. When we make the decision to renew our minds with the Word, we decide to act on what we read and meditate on in scripture. For instance you read in Ephesians 4:29 that you are to refuse to allow yourself to speak any hurtful words to or about others. You meditate and think on this scripture over and over again for a period of time. And you may find that you still slip up and say things that shouldn’t be said and you repent. Just keep that process up, and the habit of hurtful speech will be broken and replaced by a habit of blessing with your words.

At first, it’s hit and miss. You may take a step forward and then a step backward. The key is persistence. Just keep on meditating in the word, and acting on it by repenting when you miss it with your words, and soon you’ll be catching yourself just before you begin the tirade of negative speech.

Putting off the old man and putting on the new man is a process that continues throughout our lives as we grow in Christ. His plan is that by the time He comes for us, we act just like Him in our thoughts, our words, and in our responses to others!

The Foolishness of God

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are,
that no flesh should glory in His presence (1 Corinthians 1:25-29).

It’s not talent, skill, mental acumen, or social standing that causes God to place His anointing upon our lives. It’s faithful, obedient hearts that catch His gaze. Regardless of what “side of the tracks” we come from, there are no special privileges due to social or financial standing, or even natural abilities in the kingdom of God.

What the Father does in us and through us is all a work of His grace of which we cannot boast. He who boasts, let him boast in the Lord.

God has a purpose for you as a member of the body of Christ. That purpose is not rooted in your natural heritage or background, and does not depend on natural strengths. That purpose was programmed into you from eternity past when God planned your life.
 
Moses was a murderer with a stuttering problem at age forty and years later was called by God to lead his generation. David was a shepherd little known by his fellow man. Joseph was ridiculed by his brothers and sold as a slave and did prison time. Amos was a farmer. Elisha was called from the back of a plow to lead a nation spiritually. Peter was unstable, but used by God to lead the church after the resurrection of Jesus. Paul was one of the most educated men of his day but counted his education as a pile of trash compared to knowing Jesus.
 
When God called me, I was an awkward introvert with no plan for my life. None of us can trust who we are in the flesh, talented or unskilled. It’s the power and grace of God that make us what we are in the family of God. So we can’t boast of anything God does through us. We’re merely the pipeline for the glory of God to be revealed to our generation through the good news of the gospel.

Don’t allow who you are naturally, good or bad, strong or weak, keep you from the glorious things that the Father has called you to do. You’re His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God has planned for you to fulfill. Don’t look at yourself or you’ll get discouraged; don’t look at others or you’ll envy and compare; but look unto Jesus. He’s the beginning and ending of all you are and all He’s called you to do.

Saving Your Soul

So get rid of all uncleanness and the rampant outgrowth of wickedness, and in a humble (gentle, modest) spirit receive and welcome the Word which implanted and rooted [in your hearts] contains the power to save your souls (James 1:21 – Amplified)
 
The Holy Spirit working with the Word can change elements of your personality! When I first came to Jesus, I was obsessed with inferiority, rejection, fear, phobias, and basic insecurity.

As a result of many childhood traumas from friends and acquaintances, I learned that you just couldn’t trust people in general, and that the best policy is to stay away from them as much as possible.

When I came to Jesus I began to devour the Word of God, and learned that God’s Word is truer than my feelings and personal perceptions. I began to speak God’s Word out loud, positively affirming what God says I have and what He says I am. Nothing seemed to changed for a while, but as I persisted after months and months I noticed that the basic pessimism that ruled me most of my life began to give way to a new confidence that came from the Word. The inferiority, the rejection, the fear, the phobias, the insecurity began to be replaced with boldness and confidence.
 
An added ingredient in the change in me is that over time, I came to know that the Father loved me no matter what I’ve done. And I began to take time to talk to Him about things that bothered me, hurts that I had experienced, and perceptions in life that I knew were distorted by my personal hurts.

I would take time to pray in the spirit and pout my heart out to the Father and I found that as I did, He began to minister His love to my spirit, and to nurture the emotional wounds created in my soul from incidents in my past.

He saved my soul! He restored my mind and emotions! He brushed away the hurt and pain, and replaced it with a joy and confidence that came from knowing that He is for me in life’s fight.
 
Take time each day to build the Word into your spirit through meditation and to  confess verbally what God says about you. Take time to pour out your heart to Him and to pray in the spirit. You’ll find the enormous power of the Word of God lifting you from personal insecurities to a new boldness and confidence rooted in the love of God and in who you are in Christ Jesus!

Perfecting Holiness in the Fear of God

Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God (2 Corinthians 7:1).
 
This is a day to cleanse ourselves. To be the salt and the light we’re called to be, we must look and act different than the world. In Exodus 33 Moses told the Lord that it was His presence that made the Israelites different from the heathen nations surrounding them. In Acts 4 people notice that Peter and John had been with Jesus. They acted differently than their cultural norm.
 
Salt is a purifying agent, a preserving agent, and a taste enhancing agent. If salt loses these properties isn’t much good for any purpose. As we walk in holiness, we change the atmosphere wherever we go, bringing purity, keeping the world from being completely corrupt, and we enhance the quality of life!
 
Light provides life. Without the light of the sun we light could not exist on earth.  Darkness produces death.  Darkness recedes when light appears. The Greater One is in you! That light within is no brighter than the holiness that we walk in.

Our power is in our purity and holiness. We lose our power when we compromise. And our world desperately needs to see the light and experience the salt of godliness!

I’m reminded of Smith Wigglesworth, who walked with the Father so closely that when he sat on a train with others, conviction would permeate them. His consecration to holiness produced tangible power that affected people when they were in his presence!

Make a choice today to refuse to compromise with the world and the flesh. Wash yourself daily with the water of the Word to keep the impurities out. Guard your eyes, your ears, and your thoughts.  Keep your fellowship intimate by spending time alone with the Father every day. Remember, you become like the people you hang around! Be a bearer of the Presence!
 

Pray in the Spirit!

So too the Holy Spirit comes to our aid and bears us up in our weakness; for we do not know what prayer to offer nor how to offer it worthily as we ought, but the Spirit Himself goes to meet our supplication and pleads in our behalf with unspeakable yearnings and groanings too deep for utterance.  And He who searches the hearts of men knows what is in the mind of the Holy Spirit [what His intent is], because the Spirit intercedes and pleads [before God] in behalf of the saints according to and in harmony with God's will (Romans 8:26-27).

  

Praying is the spirit, in other tongues, is such an effective means of prayer! Think about all of the incredible benefits you gain by spending time with your Father praying in your heavenly language.

  

Praying in the spirit gives us the ability to pray unlimited prayers about any subject and any person worldwide! It takes us out of the finite and places us in the infinite. It takes us out of the realm of reason and places us in the realm where God knows, understands, and sees all! We literally pray the perfect will of God when we take time to pray in tongues.

  

Many times you’re praying about future events in your life when you pray in tongues. Romans 8:28 reveals that all things work together for a pattern of good to those who love God and are called to His purposes. Things work out for good in your life if you’re a person given to spiritual praying.

  

Praying in the spirit helps us pray about the most important things. 1 Corinthians 14:2 calls them secret truth and hidden things that are not obvious to the understanding (Amplified). Family, friends, business, government, ministry, relationships, finances, the list goes on as to areas covered by this kind of praying.

  

Praying in the spirit builds up your spirit. It brings edification, rest, and power to the human spirit. Think of it, this is the rest with which the weary rest (Isaiah 28:12). I work hard often to the point of weariness mentally and physically. But after a season of praying in the spirit comes a sense of refreshment from the inside.

  

None of these things I’ve mentioned are attached to feelings. Most of the time your mind will tell you praying in tongues is a waste. But nothing could be further from the truth! It’s the best way to pray!