For years, we were mystified as to the source of thoughts. They come to us from God through our spirit. They come from the enemy into our mind. They come from our brains that have been recorded from our life experiences.
Beautiful melodies would float into our consciousness and gain the mastery over us; poetry would come. Solutions of problems that had bothered us for days came to us unsought, unpredicted.
Inventions and creative things flashed into our minds independent of physical sense knowledge.
Designs of beautiful structures, fabrics, and pictures flowing into our mind. From whence did they come?
Then we discovered Proverbs 20:27: “The spirit of man is the lamp of YHVH.
Our spirit is to guide the reasoning faculties. So, few enjoy the Lord’s lamp or take advantage of it.
We learned that man is a spirit. He is in the same class with God. He can live independently of the body. He is eternal.
We learned that there are two kinds of education: spirit education and mind education.
We discovered that the church and our educational system had never seriously attempted to understand the spirit man.
We are careful to feed the child’s body, to build it up, to train the mind and make it efficient, but who has ever taught or trained the spirit?
There are two kinds of conscience: one of the Christian, the child of God, and the other, the conscience of natural man.
We discovered that there are three kinds of spirit development.
Natural man can develop his spirit until it becomes a force in him.
We see this in Christian Science, unity, spiritualism, and other psychological religions. This is the natural, unregenerated human spirit being cultivated.
The human spirit is naturally very religious because it is God-hungry. It is the mother of all human religions.
Christianity is God’s answer to the hunger of the human spirit.
Every human religion attempts to answer this hunger and fails.
The part of man that is born again is the spirit. It receives the nature and life of God.
It is our spirit that can contact God or contact Satan.
Reason cannot find God. Physical Sense knowledge has been unable to discover God, or the human spirit.
It can see evidence of a Creator, but it cannot find Him.
It can see evidence of man’s spirit, but it cannot understand it or find it in the body.
Natural man’s spirit is dominated largely by evil. Men have used it to gain mastery over others for their own ends.
Then there are demonized spirits, men who are controlled by evil spirits.
Oftentimes, it seems like they perform miracles. The Scriptures speak of necromancers, spiritualists, and mediums. They are all demon-ruled spirits.
Often their minds have no part in what they say. Demons speak through their mouth independent of physical sense knowledge.
These men can become deeply spiritual and become deep in the things of Satan.
The third kind of spirituality is that of the new creation spirit, for a man becomes a new creation by receiving the life and nature of God.
The Holy Spirit makes His home in the physical body and dominates the human spirit that has been born again.
As this is cultured and developed through the Word, there is no limit to its possibilities.
The effect of the spirit upon the body is little understood.
Proverbs 15:4 says, “A gentle tongue is a tree of life; but perverseness therein is a breaking of the spirit”.
Words affect the human spirit. Your mind may cast aside the unkind words that are spoken, but your spirit absorbs them.
Proverbs 15:13 says, “A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken.”
Then Job answered and said, how long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words? (Job 19:1–2)
Words are more dangerous than bricks or stones. They are more potent than pen or brush. They don’t break bones, but they crush hearts.
Proverbs 17:22 says, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
Proverbs 18:14 says, “The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear?”
In these Scriptures, we see the secret of healing for the body. We are praying for the sick daily.
Every man who is sick physically is sick in spirit, for the moment his spirit is healed, his body becomes well.
Our first ministry is to bring them in contact with the healing Word.
Psalm 107:20 says, “He sent his word, and healed them.”
In Matthew 8:8, the centurion said to Jesus, “but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.” The centurion recognized that Jesus healed people with words.
You heal the spirit, and then the spirit heals the body.
It is the Logos on our lips that heals the spirit of sick men and women. The Word of God is the healer.
When we know how to rightly divide the Word, we will be able to administer the right kind of spiritual medicine, the right portion of Scripture to the sick one to bring healing.
The secret of the divine life is to learn how to live in the spirit realm, how to have one’s lamp filled with the oil of heaven, and how to keep one’s spirit fit so that no disease can break in upon it.
This brings before our minds the distinction between wisdom and knowledge.
Knowledge comes from reflection, observation, and contact with people, books, and teachers.
Wisdom comes from one of two sources: God or Satan.
Here are the two kinds of wisdom in contrast:
James 3: 13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom. 14 But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. 15 This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic. 16 For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. 17 But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.
We have two kinds of knowledge in contrast. We have the knowledge that comes from physical senses.
We have this knowledge in our universities, colleges, and technical schools, the knowledge we use every day in our factories, knowledge that seems to be independent of God, and often seeks to be independent of God.
The other kind of knowledge is revelation knowledge, which comes from the Word.
Sense knowledge is often at war with revelation knowledge.
Man needs revelation knowledge to complete his education.
Physical sense knowledge cannot find God or know the reason for man, the reason for creation, the source of life, or the source of motion.
When it faces problems of this kind, it turns speculative and forms theories.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is a masterpiece of guessing. He went as far as sense knowledge could go, and then he boarded an airplane of fancy, left the realm of facts, and wrote a book of speculations and theories.
It has damned millions, but helped no one.
God imparts His message to your spirit.
The thing called a hunch, that still small voice, is your spirit, which is sometimes called your intuition.
The only way to know God and the Lord Jesus Christ is through the spirit.
Confused people say, “If I could see someone healed, I would believe.”
If one of these skeptics happened to be with a person with the gifts of healing sees a man who had been bedridden was miraculously healed. His legs had refused to function. He was healed instantaneously. He walked and praised God. The sceptic says, “Well, it was his time to get well anyway.”
Sense knowledge cannot understand miracles. Only the spirit can reveal them.
When people come to a healing service and see men and women healed and miracles performed, it gives them physical sense knowledge faith in healing.
Many of them take their healing because of what they see and hear.
But if the trouble returns, as the adversary would doubtless make it, they would have no foundation, no root. They have no deep, rich knowledge of the Word.
They are like the seed that was sown in shallow soil. (See Matthew 13:1–23; Mark 4:1–20; Luke 8:4–15.) When the heat came, it died, for it had no deep root system.
Before a person can be permanently helped, his spirit must be educated in the Word of God.
Creative faith, dominating faith, healing faith, and saving faith are all in the spirit.
Faith is not a product of reason.
physical sense knowledge has never produced the kind of faith of which we are speaking.
It can produce physical sense knowledge faith that believes in what it sees, hears, and feels.
Love is the fruit of the spirit. This does not refer to the Holy Spirit, but to the born-again spirit.
Here is a wonderful description of the born-again spirit:
“I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. 17 For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish”. (Galatians 5:16–17)
In Galatians 5:19–21, Paul tells us about the works of the physical senses, or the manifestations of the senses.
Then he tells us about the fruits of the renewed born-again spirit. They are “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts” (Galatians 5:22–24).
When our spirit gains the mastery over the physical senses, it brings them into captivity. Then a person says, “I cannot do that. My spirit will not permit it.” Their spirit has gained the mastery over their mind.
The mind, in turn, gains the mastery over the body, and brings the body into subjection to the spirit.
“If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25). That is the new born spirit.
Romans 8:1–3 deals with the same problem. The third verse states, “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”
What sin is condemned in our flesh? It is not sin of conduct as we understand it to be, but it is sickness.
Sin, here, is a broken law of physical senses. Disease is condemned in the body.
Until you recognize that disease is an outlaw, and until your spirit grasps this fact, you will never build a defense against physical distress and disease.
When you realize that physical disease is an outlaw, and you still partner with that disease by pampering it, you are joining forces with the outlaw, and it will bring you under condemnation.
The Scripture continues:
That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh [physical senses]; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So, then they that are in the flesh [physical senses] cannot please God. (Romans 8:4–8)
Paul is not speaking of the Holy Spirit, but of the new born spirit and its place in your physical body.
Romans 12:1–2 says, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your spiritual worship. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
Here, the body is brought into subjection to a renewed mind, and the renewed mind is brought into subjection to our spirit.
Until your spirit gains the mastery over your physical senses, your faith will never be strong and vigorous.
Because “the spirit of man is the lamp of YHVH” (Proverbs 20:27), God Himself must fill the lamp with oil of the right grade and from the right source. This oil is eternal life.
The lamp sheds light in the spirit realm, the realm of faith, and the realm of love. It throws light upon the Word.
“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105).
Your spirit is in the realm of creative faith, of dominating faith, a faith that rules demons and disease.
In dealings with the sick in the early days you may find that certain diseases fill you with fear. I declined from going into their presence. I have seen their devastating work in your own family, but when you realize that disease is not physical but spiritual.
When your spirit had fed upon the Word until it had developed a robust, unconscious faith, then you walk into the presence of diseases as a master.
Jesus’s dominion was not a physical or mental dominion. He ruled men, the laws of nature, demons, and sickness, by His spirit.
Jesus said:
The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. (John 14:10)
It is the spirit that quickeneth [brings life]; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. (John 6:63)
God is a spirit; Jesus is a spirit. He was here in a physical body so that men could see Him. His lips spoke words of the Spirit.
When you give your spirit right-of-way, and it assumes the dominion in your life, love will be natural. Love is the fruit of the spirit.
When your spirit is born again, that love will be the Jesus kind of love.
The natural man has natural love, which is selfish, and turns to hatred and jealousy. Often, it turns to murder.
The Jesus kind of love flows from the fountain of the newborn spirit.
Jesus said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.” (John 6:47). That nature has now come into a person’s spirit.
These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. (1 John 5:13)
1 John 4: 8 He who does not love does not know God.
1 John 3: 14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death. 15 Whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.
Eternal life abides in a person’s spirit. When a person is born again and filled with the nature of the Father, which is love, there will come forth from his spirit love actions, motivations for love words, and love deeds.
Let us study it from another angle.
The animal world acts by instinct. They have souls, they reason, and they have affection.
They have the power of choice in a measure, but instinct rules them.
God did their thinking for them.
The animal’s safety depends upon instinct. Sight and hearing have a second place.
When the wild animal trusts his sight or his hearing and ignores his instinct, he becomes the prey of his enemy.
When we ignore the voice of our spirit, we become a prey of the adversary.
1 Corinthians 2: 10 But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. 11 For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. 13 These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. 14 But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
It is spiritual teaching. God’s Spirit through the Word is teaching our spirits.
Natural man cannot know God.
Physical Sense knowledge has never been able to find God. Physical Sense knowledge makes a person more skeptical.
Often, the more physical sense knowledge a person possesses, the farther away they are from the Word.
2 Corinthians 5:7 states, “We walk by faith, not by physical sight.” Faith rules the spiritual man. Why?
Because Jesus is the Lord and head of this new man. The Word rules him.
It is deeply important that we realize that this new creation has a law all its own.
A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. (John 13:34–35)
The new creation has a priesthood of its own. Jesus is our High Priest. The New Creation belongs to the Melchizedek priesthood. We have the joy of functioning in the royal priesthood.
1 Peter 2:5 says, “you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
God has become our actual Father. We are His actual sons and daughters. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God” (1 John 3:2).
It is good to know that reason, feelings, and the physical senses are generally opposed to our spirit.
Some believers have never learned to live in their spirit. They live in their physical senses, their bodies largely ruling them.
Others live in their soul, “the soul realm”. They are what Paul calls natural men and women.
Now the natural (psychikos-soul) man receives not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged. (1 Corinthians 2:14)
A carnal believer is a baby believer who has been fed with milk and not with meat.
Do ye not walk after the manner of men? (1 Corinthians 3:3 ASV)
This is one of the most striking sentences in that wonderful epistle. This person, who is born again, has never yet learned to walk in their spirit, governed by the Word. They walk as a common man of woman. And just walk just as they walked before they were born again.
In a short time, they will break fellowship with the Father and fall back again into the old life, a spirit born of God, but one dominated by the physical body or by their physical senses.
The new creation is to walk by faith.
Hebrews 10:38 says, “But my righteous one shall live by faith: and if anyone draws back, my soul hath no pleasure in him”.
Draw back from what?
From the walk in the spirit by faith.
They fall back into a physical sense knowledge walk.
You can see that if you are a born again spirit, you should live in the realm of the spirit.
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. (Matthew 4:4)
This righteous, new born person lives by the Word, feeding on it and obeying it.
We have found that man is a spirit being. God’s dealings with him are through his spirit.
If he is sick, his spirit must be healed.
If he is ruled by sin, his spirit must be cleansed.
If his mind has not been renewed, the spirit does not have liberty or freedom and cannot manifest Christ in his life. The spirit of man is really the lamp of YHVH.