When we get a Word from the Lord it seems like everything goes in the opposite direction of that word. You get a Word and you’re tried in it before it comes to pass. “Until the day that it came to pass, the Word of the Lord tried him,” was the way the Psalms talked about Joseph (Psalm 105:19). We’re breaking through to something that is timeless; it belongs to the time that we’re in right now.
Ruth Paxton, a woman who spent her life ministering in the China Inland Mission wrote Life On The Highest Plane, and Jessica Penn-Lewis, who wrote War On The Saints. These are outstanding ministries of revelation who saw something that we’re into right now: spirit, soul, and body.
Life On The Highest Plane dealt with the fact that man is a threefold being. There are people in whom the physical is very, very prominent. Athletes are like that, and they struggle to have some kind of a mental or soulish identity. So they focus and they concentrate and they discipline—like marathon runners and people that turn to the physical.
I’m not saying that the physical isn’t important, because Paul says that bodily exercise profiteth a little, but godliness is profitable for all things (I Timothy 4:8), pointing out that the human spirit actually could come to the place where it could control the physical.
If we can reach this level of pure spirit we could command our body and it would rejuvenate and reproduce and respond—every organ within it, every cell within it. Scientific study has shown that every cell of the human body contains within itself everything necessary to reproduce that human body.
If the physical nature is in ascendency the soul, and the spirit are below it. Now that can explain people’s relationships out in the world. There are people who enjoy a relationship as long as it doesn’t involve their spirit, as long as it doesn’t involve their soul too much, as long as it’s just kind of a physical arrangement. They like that—no commitments. There are a lot of people who like that.
And there are those who go out in the world for lust and for sex, and they are only concerned about a one-night stand—something which becomes an interesting physical experience, but nothing that they want to relate to or communicate with later.
There are other people who are very much on the soul level. And when we talk about the soul, we’re talking mainly about the mind, the emotions and the will, but the will is also involved in all three parts of us.
Sometimes there is a strong will in those who are physical, a strong will in those who are soulish, a strong will in those who are spiritual. The spirit, soul, and body have one common denominator, the will.
If your spirit is really set on something in God, it will command and direct your soul, everything of the psychic level, everything of the mental level, everything of the emotional level, everything of the intellectual level, and drive it to a certain thing.
I think it’s necessary to get a hold of this, because we are entering into an age, of spirit. And that means that your spirit is going to have to predominate over your soul and your physical body.
“Does that means that if I go to college, I don’t study?” No, you set your heart to study, but your spirit determines what you’re studying for, and what you’re going to retain, and how much you’re going to be influenced by it.
Your spirit becomes almost a self-appointed filter, that the things that happen to you on a mental, emotional, or a physical level are filtered through your spirit for it to determine exactly the meaning of it.
The soul is like a wild, untamed beast until the work of the cross is done in it. And once that’s done in it, then everything is brought into subordination to our spirit.
It’s very difficult for some people to know the difference between the soul and the spirit. But we begin to understand the difference once we start learning how to walk with God.
First of all, we believe for a complete dedication to the Lordship of Jesus Christ over our life. That dedication has to be a thing of spirit, and it has to involve the work of the cross in the soul-flesh.
And once that takes place, your spirit begins to take more and more control. It not only dominates you, but it controls everything around you. God is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). Now that’s not talking about the Holy Spirit; it’s talking about in your spirit. There has to be a reality of your spirit.
Almost all of the religious activity of the world is soulishly generated. But God is leading his people to break through to this realm and age of spirit.
And when they break through to it, it’s strange that the religious world out there says you’re deceived, you’re not following the religious rules; and you aren’t. You break out of the soul limitations that were bound upon it.
You’re getting an education about spirit, soul, and body, aren’t you? You’re beginning to understand what we are going to do in appropriating this freedom in our spirits. We’re emphasizing above everything else that this has to be something more than a mental thing. It has to be a reality.
This is something where our total, absolute dedication to the Lord Jesus Christ is going to lift us out of the realm where our flesh, our soul, is going to dominate and control and try to whip up some reasonable facsimile of what God says.”
We need to break out of the soul and find a renewal of our spirit.”
God is setting you free—not to be self-conscious and say, “Well, I don’t want to move in self, so I won’t move at all.” That’s self. Take a step in God, a step of faith, because true faith is a belief in what God has provided for you. And that faith in what God has provided for you has to be based totally and completely upon a spirit acceptance of it, or you never do totally accept it.
If you emotionally accept what I’m saying, you’ll have to accept it again a dozen times. But you take a person who breaks through to the realm of spirit and he’s got it—once and for all time, it’s there. And there is a resurgence of faith that comes forth in every situation, no matter what the verdict of the senses, no matter what the response of the emotions, the appearance of the circumstances, or even that which is inflicted upon you physically. You come right back, you spring right up, “But God said this, and this is what I believe.”
You’re going to find a lot of Scriptures coming alive to you all over again, because this realm of spirit, as your spirit is free, can loose you from a lot of the emotional trauma, the agony of the soul and the mind.
Now why are we emphasizing dedication to the Lordship of Jesus Christ? We’re setting your spirit free. But we’re doing more than setting it free; we’re setting it on the throne. Your spirit is going to dominate everything that you think, feel, everything that happens to you.
If You have been consistently and carefully led through that work of the cross for the soul-flesh (Matthew 16:24–25). If you followed it, it was an agony to you.
The rebellion of the soul-flesh against the cross means that your spirit can be a lamb that’s submissive, but your soul is a goat that’s hard to catch and hard to kill.
You say, “Well, how do I know whether I’m a soulish person?” If you persist in individuality instead of oneness, you still need the work of the cross in your soul, because you’re not going to make it while you persist in being an individual, retaining the rights to yourself.
The basic thing of a spirit is that when it is dedicated to the Lord and God has met it, that spirit is so submissive to the Lord.
You see, God isn’t just a soul, He’s a Spirit (John 4:24). And He never intended for you to be just soul. He intended for you to be a spiritual being—actually, a triune being like Himself (Genesis 1:26–27; I Thessalonians 5:23).
Don’t get the idea that your soul is a rebel against God; it’s just a rebel against what God wants to do to it. Your soul can be more religious then you know, and you can say, “I don’t need any of this thing. I’m a religious person.” The Pharisee prayed, “O God, I give tithes of all that I possess. I fast twice a week—not like that publican over there” (Luke 18:9–14). See, that soul-flesh always comes forth, no matter what form it goes through. It says, “Jesus is my Savior,” but it winds up with a religious arrogance that is a part of the soul.
And those of you who are breaking through to this realm of spirit will find that this is the realm of spirit in which you speak it and it is imparted.
The realm of soul labors with things; it has to feel them emotionally; it has to come to an altar and sing songs—all of those things that you go through emotionally, and then try to build it up. Can you picture what I’m trying to say about this whole process? They labor to attain; they struggle to get there.
When we lived in the soul level of the Church that was the best thing we had. That’s all we had. But God always gave the promise that the Holy Spirit was going to dominate us.
And where the Spirit is Lord, there is liberty (II Corinthians 3:17). The more that you understand this in your heart, the more that you’re going to see it appropriated.
You could just say to one another, “We’re free! We’re free from the greatest trap that we ever knew, where Satan coming as an angel of light tried to make us religious (II Corinthians 11:14), instead of us becoming transformed sons of God in spirit and in truth” (Romans 8:12–30; John 4:24).
There’s always a residue of self-condemnation on the soul level. It’s always trying to be spiritual. There’s always that striving. There’s always the battle that goes on between self-condemnation, and withdrawal, and periods of aggressiveness in which you are reaching forth into the Lord. And then back and forth the pendulum swings, always striving, but never really convinced of the fullness of the blessing of the Lord.
Then there comes that breakthrough in the spirit, and you’re no longer striving to be righteous, but you realize that it is imparted to your spirit (Philippians 3:9). And it filters down like the rain of heaven, and it saturates your soul and your flesh, and you realize that this is the hour of I Thessalonians chapter 5: … I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it. Verses 23–24, KJV.
Let’s get into that dedication of spirit. Let’s get our spirits free, the greatest thing that’s happening is for you to come to the day where your spirit can appropriate; your spirit can impart.
Your spirit will not know limitations that are like leg irons that shackle you, so that you say, “I know in my heart what I want to be but I can’t be that.” Yes, you can. “Well, I’ll try harder.” Oh, no. You just trust Him more. It will come by faith.
This is one of the mysteries of mysteries. This takes it out of the realm of struggle and puts it into the realm of victory.
We’re entering into the realm of the spirit where a man’s years shall be as the years of an oak tree (Isaiah 65:22). That can be a long time! What about limitations? They’re overcome by the realm of spirit. Is there anything impossible to a true believer? (Mark 9:23.)
A true believer—that means someone who really has in his spirit faith. You can listen to all of the audio messages and read all the books out there and still miss God a thousand ways, because you can make it a focus of concentration to try to learn something about God instead of your spirit soaking up and saturating God in His Living Word. That’s where change comes.
Church after church is going to go through this revolution. Struggle is going to give way to the actual appropriation and walking in the victory of the Lord. He won it. We should not ever consent to struggling to attain and win what He’s already attained and won for us.
I want you to realize that in the spirit we have total authority and control. Your ministry is not going to be the struggle of emotional intercession so much as it’s going to be the prophetic proclamation of your spirit in faith that brings down from the promises of God into an actual fulfillment before your eyes!
There’s a difference between the soul and the spirit. The soul comes into one thing: “Now we must walk by faith and not by sight” (II Corinthians 5:7); and it always struggles to ignore what it sees, and it never sees what it’s trying to believe.
But when you get into the realm of the spirit, you say, “I believe to see the goodness of the Lord (Psalm 27:13). I believe to see it. It’s going to happen. I’m going to see it. Because I see it in the spirit, I know I’m going to see it with my physical eyes.”
Faith is the substance of the thing hoped for, the evidence of the thing not seen; and it’s by faith, by a Word from God, that the very ages and worlds were determined (Hebrews 11:1–3). Everything that has happened has happened because men of faith proclaimed it, and it happened.
There’s something generated in your spirit that says, “Everything God ever said to me makes a lot of sense now, and I believe I can walk in it. I believe that I can be it.”
I minister to you in just one simple prayer: I loose you from whatever domination the soul-flesh has had over you. I loose you from that, in the name of the Lord, and I loose you for your spirit to sit on the throne with the Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:6; Colossians 3:1). I loose you to be spiritual people.
We set your spirits free, because it’s the free spirit that seems to reach in and inherit and appropriate.
You’re going to be free. This is not a mystical jargon; we’re just talking about becoming sons of God. They’re spiritual entities, basically, still manifested in the flesh.
But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. Romans 8:11, KJV.
We don’t want to ignore the body. Paul said that we don’t want to just cast off this tabernacle, but we yearn to be clothed upon with that which is from above (II Corinthians 5:2, 4, KJV).
And he was talking about one thing there. He said that the outward man can be perishing day by day, but the inner man is being renewed (II Corinthians 4:16).
In other words, he was seeing that the spirit was being renewed by the Lord. You’ve got to believe that. You can’t make your decision about where you are and how much victory or how much defeat you have in your life by what you see, by what you feel, by what somebody tells you. It has to be based totally upon what your spirit appropriates and says: “This is the Word from the Lord.”
All reality is found when the Father has found a people He has been searching for from ages past who worship Him in spirit and in that reality (John 4:23–24).
In the book of Isaiah, God spoke in the first person and told about all the strength He had, how He created everything and what He did; and then He said, Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. Isaiah 30–31a, KJV. It’s those who wait on the Lord—in their spirit the strength comes.
Learning to wait on the Lord is always battled by the enemy. A ministry is born out of waiting on the Lord.
“You’re going to have to learn to wait on the Lord, or else you’ll never really know the voice of the Lord.”
Look at the people who are still dominated by the soulflesh. They can receive wonderful things from the Lord. They can receive the Holy Spirit and shake and speak in tongues. But there are people who stand against what God is doing, shake their finger at you and talk in tongues.
We need to reach the realm of spirit that opens up our ears to hear the Word of the Lord.
“It’s all going to be done now by a gift of faith.” The preaching and the teaching is important and it lays a foundation; but now you need the faith to believe it, and make it happen, and become it, and do it.
We’re not going to go around the mountain over and over again (Deuteronomy 2:3).
We are going to be a person of spirit, a free spirit, an appropriating spirit, an imparting spirit, a functional spirit. We refuse to be an earthbound soul. Instead we sit down on the throne with Him in our spirit.”
What was it the man of God said? Consider what I say, and the Lord give thee understanding in all things. II Timothy 2:7. There has to be that hearing of faith, and then there follows the understanding. The understanding can expand if the spirit has received it as a revelation.
The Word of God must be constantly fed. It’s the seed that’s going to produce and it has to be constantly fed. When Paul wanted to instruct Timothy how to see it come forth he said, “Give yourself wholly to these things, and then the profiting will appear to all. Remember the prophecies. Remember the Scriptures. Give attendance to that. (I Timothy 4:13–16).
It isn’t a comprehension that fails, but it’s a comprehension that is constantly made vital and alive by the Holy Spirit by your continuous application to it.
You will grow because you become that Word as you give yourself to it. That’s the key: the diligence with which you give yourself to that Word.
When you listen to the Word don’t say, “Oh, that was a wonderful tape; let’s get to the next one.” The people who profit from a Word are ones who hear it, it falls in their hearts, and after they’ve listened to it a dozen times something is done.
Not just by repetition—the Word is not just a thing to be memorized. It’s a thing that you unwrap, and it becomes deeper and more spiritual to you.
You read a Word the first time, “Oh, that’s wonderful.” Read it tomorrow. “Oh, I didn’t see that.” Read it the next day. “Isn’t that great? I didn’t see that either.” And after a while it begins to explode something within your heart.
There are those who say, “You have to read so many chapters a day.” There are those who say, “You won’t backslide if you read the Bible fifteen minutes a day, pray fifteen minutes, testify to somebody for fifteen minutes.”
Read until some Word came alive. Thy words were found and I did eat them. Jeremiah 15:16a, KJV. You have to understand that that’s the way the things happen to you.
It isn’t what you learn; it’s what you become. You’re created by that Word. You’re devastated; you’re killed by it. You’re destroyed by it. You’re inspired by it.
One verse that comes alive to you—you could give yourself to it to find everything else would be added to you. It isn’t how much you read; it’s how much comes alive.
And this is the key, because His Words are spirit and they are life, and you cannot be a person of spirit apart from that Word (John 6:63). I am not for the discipline of devotions. I’m for the search for that little Word that belongs to you today, and you hang onto it.
A living word is producing the people of spirit who are going to walk with the Lord.