The normal state of most natural men is that the body rules. The appetites of the body and the desires of that physical sensual realm become the dominant feelings of his life. He wants a better standard of living, he wants more comfort, he wants better food, he wants all the appetites of the physical realm satisfied, that is what he is living for.
What we want to look at in this teaching is the carnal Christian. He has a body, he has a soul and he has a spirit.
When our spirit is born from above, it is a baby. It starts living on milk.
The tragedy is that many Christians having had this miracle take place inside them; have never understood that there must be a development of that spiritual baby. They have a body and a soul and have a tiny spirit which is just a little infant in them and God’s purpose is that that spirit in them should grow up to be a full-grown man.
The word baby in the Greek is Nepios-it means not talking, a little baby that can’t do anything for itself, you must nurse it, feed it with a bottle of milk, you must look after it, everything must be done for it. If it is too hot you must take the clothes off, if it is too cold you must put the clothes on. It hasn’t got any ability to do anything for itself.
When we are first born of God that is normal and that is natural and that is no problem. If we stay in that condition, although we have the potential to become a spiritual man yet in practice we have no hope of achieving it because that little, tiny spiritual babe within us is quite unable to come to the rule and government which God intended the new spiritual man to come to.
This word is contrasted with the word huos in the Greek, which has two essential elements. Number one it describes a fully grown adult son, someone who has come to maturity, who has come to full stature. In the customs of the New Testament days, you were reckoned to be mature when you came to the age of 30.
The second quality we need to focus on is that it was someone who then had come to the place where they inherited the father’s estate. Everything the father has is ours once we become a huois.
When Jesus turned 30 the Spirit came upon him and for the first time God had a son-a huois, God said you are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased, from that moment on all the treasures of the father were available to Jesus and he learned to draw on them and bring them out of the spiritual realm and distribute them liberally upon earth, that was his whole ministry, he knew how to get everything from God. He did that as a man. He moved in the Spirit as a mature grown-up son. Who knew how to lay hold of his father for everything he needed to complete his ministry.
The tragedy is that many Christians are babes when they ought to be sons. They are still little infants in the spirit when they ought to be full grown men in the spirit. Although they have the potential to live like Christ in the earth and move like Christ in the earth, they are still babies.
All that Jesus was able to do; he did as a grown-up son in pure perfect humanity. By the power of the Spirit, he didn’t use any means that is not available to us when we learn how to grow up and move in the Spirit. This is why Jesus said that the works that I do you will do also. All that we need is faith and the Spirit. The reason we are not fully into this is because we have not yet understood how to become truly spiritual. We must learn how to grow up and become an adult in the spirit.
When we are still carnal, we walk as mere men, although God has done a work inside us, but actually in our outward life we are almost indistinguishable from someone who has not been born again. We have same problems with temper, fear, and lust. We have the same reactions to circumstances that they have. If things are bothering us, we behave in the same way as someone who doesn’t know the Lord.
If we lose our job or a crisis comes, we react in the same way as someone who does not have the lord because we are so tiny in spirit that there is no way we can start to behave spiritually in these real-life situations. So, we become like a natural man where our body and our soul rules. We can have uncontrollable sexual appetites yet truly be born again.
The problem is that we have not learned how to develop our spirit. We could have uncontrolled eating habits, and the reason is because we have not yet learned how to be spiritual, that is our problem.