God wants us to come into that place of relationship and responsibility into which Adam would have matured if he had not chosen to follow the DIY pathway of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
For that to happen, we have to build our spirit. If we are not strong in spirit, we will not be able to overcome and dethrone the soul.
We were created to be spirit, soul and body, with the spirit taking the lead. But because our spirit was dead to God, our soul has become accustomed to having its own way. When we are born again and our spirit comes alive, that has to change. The soul must submit to the spirit, but it will not do so willingly.
How to build our spirit
There are a number of things we can do to build our spirit. We will look at them in more detail later on in this series, but I will just list some of them for now:
1. Make sure we give God first place, first love, first priority.
2. Pray and sing in tongues.
3. Wait on the Lord and be still.
4. Meditate on Bible verses and passages.
5. Praise and adoration, soaking in the presence of God.
6. Come to God and ask Him to build our spirit. Often we do not have because we do not ask (James 4:2).
7. Confess and call things into being. Call forth our spirit. Speak it out.
8. Persevere. You don’t build your spirit in a day.
If you want to get fit and have rippling muscles in the natural, you have to go to the gym and train, session by session, week after week, until you build muscles. It is the same with your spirit. Your spirit grows stronger through exercise; spiritual exercises train and equip your spirit to connect with God, to flow in revelation, and to rule in your life. You have to persevere.
Desire, discipline, delight
If we give up on exercise, it is usually because we don’t enjoy the discipline. Discipline itself is not very pleasant. I would love to have a real six-pack, and the body of Mr Universe, but I have not got the discipline to go in and train myself to do it. It would take a lot of training, and I do not want it enough to submit to the discipline.
But what I do want enough is a strong spirit, and therefore I am willing to do whatever it takes to train it. I spend a lot of time training my spirit. Hours, every day, training my spirit to discern the words of God, to flow, and to build up my spiritual senses. You can do the same. We will look at each of them in more detail in coming posts, but there is nothing in the list of 8 things above that you cannot do. It just takes practice and perseverance.
It starts with a desire, it takes discipline, and then it becomes a delight.