When we are defeated in our spirit, our spirit breaks its contact with God’s Spirit. You have broken connection.
Have you ever seen a corroded battery in a car that has its contacts and wires eaten up and it wouldn’t start? What’s the matter?
Something is corroded there. You should have kept that battery clean. Corroding cares come and surround your spirit life, and it just covers you and it breaks your connection with the Lord. This is true.
Desires for other things surround your spirit life and our spirit breaks connection with God.
The first real healing is the healing of your spirit, getting your spirit adjusted to the Lord.
Your spirit is the part that contacts the Lord. If your spirit is out of harmony and out of shape, you can’t experience the inflowing of the Holy Spirit in it where you experience the fruit of the Spirit.
Your divine love is quenched, you lose your joy, you no longer experience the peace of God which is supposed to be continually flowing into your spirit, given you rest so that you can function in the government of the kingdom.
The reason that people don’t have a rich, beautiful faith is that their spirit is denied the privilege of communion and fellowship with the Father.
Do you understand me? You don’t read your Bible, meditate upon it, you don’t live in it, you don’t spend any time in fellowship with the Father, and as a result, your spirit is depleted and weakened.
When your spirit life is made fruitful and built up and is enriched by communion with the Father and by reading His Word. And as your spirit becomes strong and vigorous, there rises from it a faith that is triumphant and creative.
I dare say that the men and women who are weak in faith, who once were mighty in faith, are so because they have stopped feeding on the Word of God, stopped waiting on the Lord (a focused listening, stopped worship the Lord, they have stopped having intimate, close fellowship with the Father.
Our physical body is related to your spiritual life. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 9 that he kept his body under discipline so that after preaching to others that he wouldn’t be disqualified or laid aside. Not lost but laid aside. No longer usable. Why?
Because the body had gained ascendancy over the spiritual life. If you become a glutton and just live to gratify your appetite by eating and drinking, you will lose out spiritually.
But if you keep your appetite and your body under as Paul said he did, it will not affect your spiritual life.
I know preacher after preacher who had great power at one time, but they’ve lost all the joy in the Scripture. I know by the way they talk and act.
When a man loves a woman, he wants her to be with him all the time. And when a man loves his Bible, you will find the Bible with him in his arms somewhere. He has gotten hold of the thing, and he’s holding it.
Whenever I reach a place where I lose my appetite for the Bible, and I’d rather talk with people than read the Bible or read books about the Bible than to read the Bible. Then I know I’m backslidden in my spirit.
I can trace the downfall of every spiritual giant when they lost their desire for the Bible, they are no longer shinning, worshiping, praising, and rejoicing in the Lord. They have lost the fire, there are no longer flames of fire.