We spend a great deal of money in building gymnasiums and in training our youth and young manhood in physical exercises. Our schools, colleges, and technical institutions are for the exercising of the mind.
How little we know about exercising our spirits. The church has never realized that the spirit of man is the foundation of faith—that faith is not the product of sense knowledge begotten of reason.
You see, all the knowledge that we have has come through the senses. There is nothing creative in the senses. The senses merely receive physical facts and transmit them into mental signs.
No school of thought has ever recognized that man is a spirit, and that the fountain of all creative ability is in his spirit. We know now that no people ever became inventors or creators, great scientists, or great musicians until that nation has received eternal life, the nature of God.
THE RECREATED SPIRIT
That nature of God doesn’t come into man’s reasoning faculties. It comes into man’s spirit. Man’s spirit is the fountain, then, of all man’s creative and inventive ability.
We ought to learn how to cultivate this recreated human spirit. Spiritualists and mediums have cultivated the un-recreated human spirit and turned it over to the devil to be educated, and they perform prodigious and miraculous things. The séances are spiritual, but they are never the product of the recreated human spirit. They are the product of a demon-possessed and controlled human spirit.
The recreated human spirit contacts divine ability and resources. It isn’t only the fountain of creative energy and ability, but it is the fountain of faith. How little we have appreciated the fact that the faith that Jesus exercised and that the church has demonstrated down through the ages, is the product of the recreated human spirit.
You see, God is a faith God and He imparts His faith nature to man in the new creation. If man could only learn how to develop his recreated spirit, he would develop his faith capacity and faith ability. You see, faith has given birth to all the great achievements of man.
The great achievements of our modern man are the product of eternal life in the spirit of man. One of the amazing things is that the children of men and women who have received eternal life carry with them as a prenatal gift the divine ability, the latent ability, the creative ability of God. The sons of clergymen and of outstanding Christians have been the great leaders of all the great moral, intellectual, and spiritual forces of our nation.
But the recreated human spirit not only produces creative ability and faith, but it is the source of love. “Love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (see Romans 5:5). It is the fountain out of which this new kind of love springs. We have learned that natural man in the heathen state, where he hasn’t contacted Christianity, has no love. He has sexual attraction, and he has the same care for his children that wild animals have for their offspring until they are able to care for themselves, but he does not love. He has no sense of relationship.
You remember that David didn’t raise his own children. They were put out among the leaders of Israel.
Eternal life has been given to man. With it comes a new kind of love, and that new kind of love has affected his children. There is hardly a family of recreated people who haven’t had in their ancestry men and women who had received eternal life.
The modern divorce court unveils the utter selfishness of natural man.
There is another thing. That recreated spirit gives birth to faith, creative energy, and love. It is the fountain out of which all wisdom comes.
Wisdom is not the product of sense knowledge. Sense knowledge may gather and garner from experience a lot of ability and what we call natural wisdom, but the wisdom that comes down from above, the wisdom that Jesus was made to be to you (God made Him to be wisdom to us, that new kind of wisdom) is the thing that comes from the human heart. I have been long convinced that if a believer would cultivate his spirit’s creative ability and wisdom ability, that he would be the most outstanding personality in his community. How we should learn to exercise ourselves along this line. Just as we have exercised ourselves physically to build up muscle, as we have exercised mentally to build up memory and store our minds with facts and data, so we now should build up our love life, build up our wisdom life, build up our creative energy.
STRENGTHENING THE SPIRIT WITH THE WORD
How? By feeding on the Word of God. The Word is God’s wisdom, God’s ability, God’s very life. As I feed on it, it cultivates, strengthens, and builds up my spirit. It builds faith into me. It builds God’s ability into me. It builds into me every attractive thing that you saw in Jesus’s life.
Committing the Word to memory does not do it; learning the history of the books of the Bible does not do it; learning the Hebrew and the Greek words will not do it. Only one thing will do: my doing the Word, practicing it, living it in my daily life, trusting in it, acting on it. That is our secret.
1 Timothy 4:6–8 If thou put the brethren in mind of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Christ Jesus, nourished in the words of the faith, and of the good doctrine which thou hast followed until now: but refuse profane and old wives’ fables. And exercise thyself unto godliness: for bodily exercise is profitable for a little; but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life which now is, and of that which is to come.
Notice that we are to be nourished in the Word. We are to nourish ourselves. We are to cultivate ourselves. We are to drink the sincere milk of the Word (see 1 Peter 2:2–3) until our spirit rules our thinking faculties. They, in turn, rule the senses.
But notice verse 7: “But refuse profane and old wives’ fables. And exercise thyself unto godliness.” This is an exercise in the Word. You give yourself to the Word.
Hebrews 4:12 (MOFFATT): “For the Logos of God is a living thing; and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of the threefold man: body, soul, and spirit.”
This living Word is quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart. You meditate in that. You see how the Word is unveiled to us in our spirits, our thinking faculties, and our body, showing the relationship, one to the other. That living Word is the thing that should direct our thinking, our meditations.
Psalm 19:14: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Jehovah, my rock, and my redeemer.”
The man who controls his meditation will control his conduct and control his speech. When we learn the secret of meditating in the Word, yielding our minds over to the Word, then Psalm 104:34 becomes a reality. Our meditation will be sweet unto Him, and we will rejoice in Jehovah.
Our spirits can be so developed, so strengthened, that we will become God-minded, Word-minded. In the morning our minds unconsciously go to Him for guidance and wisdom for the day. We have exercised ourselves in the Word until our whole being is saturated with it.
Hebrews 5:12–14 should be carefully studied. None of us have passed beyond it: “For when by reason of the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need again that someone teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of solid food” (verse 12).
Most of the believers are faith seekers. They distrust their own faith. They are looking for someone who can pray the prayer of faith for them. They are like the ones Paul speaks of in Timothy—ever learning but never arriving. (See 2 Timothy 3:7.) They have never yet reached the place where their spirits are quiet and restful. They are having a continual combat with the adversary.
One said to me, “I have had this combat with the adversary for thirty years. I didn’t know Colossians 2:15: ‘having despoiled the principalities and the powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.’”
What does this mean? It is Jesus’s combat with the adversary for us before He arose from the dead. He was our substitute, and His combat with the adversary was our combat. He defeated Satan, stripped him of his authority before He arose from the dead. This victory becomes ours when we remember that the adversary that is combating us is conquered, that he is our subject instead of our master. Then we should say, “In Jesus’s name, demon, you leave me,” and he must go.
Hebrews 2:14: “Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same; that through death he might bring to nought him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.”
Notice this: that Satan was defeated, conquered, stripped of his authority; and you, by your union with Christ, have become a master of the devil. Exercise yourself in the Word, now, until that thing becomes a reality to you.
Moffatt’s translation of 1 Corinthians 2:6: “We speak wisdom, however, among them that are full-grown; not a wisdom of this age nor of the dethroned rulers of this age.” Who are the dethroned rulers? They are demons and demon-ruled men.
Jesus gave us a legal right to the use of His name. Write out John 14:13–14:
The word “ask” can be translated “demand.” It is His promise to us of the use of His name in dealing with demons and disease, just as Peter used it in Acts 3:6, when he said to the man at the Beautiful Gate, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” Paul also used it in Acts 16:18: “But Paul, being sore troubled, turned and said to the spirit, I charge thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And it came out that very hour.”
When one exercises himself in the Word until this Word becomes a reality to him, he instantly becomes the master of demons. He remembers in a crisis hour that Satan has been defeated and that Jesus gave to us the power of attorney to use His name.
In Mark chapter 16, He said, “In my name shall they cast out demons” (verse 17). If you can cast out one demon, you can cast out any demon. If you can heal a disease in the name, you can heal any disease; for He said, “They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover” (verse 18).
You see, you become so strong in the Word that you dominate the circumstances around you. You understand that faith is not the product of sense evidences, but faith is something that grows out of your spirit that has walked in the Word, lived in the Word, and in which the Word has lived and dominated, until it becomes utterly one with the Word.
You remember that Jesus said, “I am the vine; ye are the branches” (John 15:5). There is a oneness between you and Jesus because you are a branch of the Vine. The same is true with the Word. There comes an utter oneness between you and the Word. The Word abides in you.
You see, that is not an intellectual thing. It is a spiritual thing. “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you” (John 15:7).
If you are a child of God, you do abide in Him. If that Word has found its place in your life, governing, teaching, and admonishing you in every phase of your walk, then it abides in you and you live in the Word.
Just as you walk in love, live love, breathe love, now you walk in the conscious authority and ability of that Word in your life. You see, it is the living Word in your lips that heals sick folks, that saves lost men, that puts courage and strength into the faint-hearted.
It is your consciousness of the authority of that Word in your lips. You say to yourself, “The Word of God in my lips is as effectual as it was in the lips of Peter or John, because it is the Word of my Father that I am using.”
Hebrews 5:13: “For every one that partaketh of milk is without experience of the word of righteousness.” That is one that never eats anything but the first principles of their redemption. That is, they say, “Yes, I have been saved and sanctified. I have received the Holy Spirit, and I have done this and that.” But they haven’t grown any. They say it as a parrot repeats words it has heard.
But the full-grown believer has not only received eternal life, but has gone on in the study of the Word and in the practice of the Word. He has had experience in the Word that teaches about his righteousness. You know, righteousness means the ability to stand in the presence of the Father without the sense of guilt or of inferiority.
You are not afraid of Satan. You are not afraid of disease. You are not afraid of lack of money. You are fearless, because you have experienced the reality of the living Word in your own heart life.
You see, “But solid food is for full-grown men, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). They have exercised themselves in the Word, and not their senses, until they have become absolutely master in their spiritual walk.
You remember 2 Corinthians 9:10: “And he that supplieth seed to the sower and bread for food, shall supply and multiply your seed for sowing, and increase the fruits of your righteousness.”
The sense of guilt and inferiority robs us of fruit bearing. When we recognize the integrity of the Word and enter into our inheritance of righteousness, we become fruit bearers.
Philippians 1:20 gives us a beautiful illustration: “According to my earnest expectation and hope, that in nothing shall I be put to shame, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether by life, or by death.”
Paul wanted Christ to be magnified in his body through the things he did and said. He wanted Jesus to be magnified, made attractive, so that men would want Him. This can only come as we exercise ourselves in the Word.
HOW MUCH DO YOU REMEMBER?
- What is the source of man’s creative ability?
- Explain how the recreated human spirit is cultivated.
- Explain fully the products of the recreated spirit.
- Explain 1 Timothy 4:6–8.
- Why is it that many Christians are “faith seekers”?
- Give Scripture, and tell why the believer need not combat the adversary.
- Who are the dethroned rulers?
- What authority does the child of God exercise of dethroned rulers?
- What does “experience in the word of righteousness” mean?
- Explain Philippians 1:20.