We need to understand what it means to be spiritual. We are living either on a spirit level, a soul level or just a natural or physical level.
Being spiritual does not mean that we cease being normal. When we are spiritual- simply means that the Holy Spirit now becomes the governor and ruler of our spirit, soul and body.
Our spirit enters into an oneness with God’s Spirit where who he is, is transferred into us. We think, feel and have the same attitudes and disposition that God has.
We don’t cease to use our soul and we don’t cease to use our body, our soul and body are not evil, they have a part to play in becoming a spiritual person. The problem some people have is they try and cease to be human in trying to be spiritual.
When we come into divine order, then all of our being, spirit, soul and body can function spiritually. We will pray like Jesus and do the works of Jesus and literally become Christ moving through his body, the church in the earth.
1 corn 2: 14But the natural (from psuché -soul) man (a generic name, a man or woman, an individual of the human race, a person)receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. 15But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. 16For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? but we have the mind 3:1And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal (from sárx -flesh), even as unto babes in Christ. 2I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. 3For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?
When I use the word man or men in this teaching I am speaking of the generic sense, a man or woman, a human being.
Here we find the three kinds of people it is possible to be. We will all fit into one of these three categories.
The flesh is the main hindrance to being spiritual. We need to be able to distinguish the old man from the flesh. Some people are trying to get rid of the old man, or old nature when what they should be doing is dealing with the flesh.
Our old man has been crucified with Christ, but we have to deal with the flesh on a daily basis. The flesh is that union of soul and body that acts independently of the Spirit of God.
We can become effective in putting the flesh to death in our life. This is what Jesus did every day of His life. Jesus never had an old man, but he always constantly kept the flesh completely crucified in His life. We will learn how to do the same thing and that will clear the way for us to become spiritual.
We do not want to be the weak link, in what God is doing in the earth today; we need to lay hold of these principles.
Sarx is the Greek word for carnal. The word sinful nature in the new international version for Sarx is a bad translation; it is not justified by the Greek, and does not teach us spiritual truth. Sarx means the word flesh or carnal.
We find three different kinds of people. There is the natural person, they live on the natural level, a human being whose spirit is dead to God, and they have no spiritual understanding. To them the things of God are a complete blank, and there is no communication at all.
And then we find a spiritual man who is able to judge everything, they actually have the mind of Christ. And then we find in chapter 3 this carnal person, this fleshly person who is a babe in Christ. He is born again, yet because of their carnality they are like an infant that can only be fed with simple words and cannot develop their spiritual life, they are not able to grow to maturity and their life is characterized by being full of the natural things of a natural person although their spirit is born again. There is strife and there is jealousy. Their attitude, their reactions to life are very much the same as a person who has never been born again. They are behaving like mere people or mere men.
Anyone who has been born of God is expected by the word of God and by the Spirit of God to live in a way that is supernatural to mere men. There is to be a supernatural quality about the way we live because of what God has done in our lives.
Secular philosophers and psychologists will teach that man has got two parts. A body and a soul or psyche, But man is a trinity. It is easy to distinguish between the body and the soul, but not the soul and the spirit. There is a blurring in all these three compartments; there is a sense in which they overlap.
Even the soulical and the spiritual parts of us can have a very definite influence upon the body. Most sickness is caused by our spiritual condition. Some is caused by our soulical condition; it has an impact upon our body. It produces physical symptoms and physical disorders and can even produce death, because we are not in three water tight compartments. We are a trinity which blends one into the other.
God made us like this and before the fall of man. Man’s spirit was alive and active and was actually the governmental part of the triune person. Mans spirit encompassed his soul and body, mans spirit was on the outside of His body, so that man had a tremendous communion with God the father.
The function of the soul is very, very important. When the soul is properly ruled over by the spirit, then we are able to exercise our will to make spiritual choices. But the root of the will is in the soul.
As a result of the fall of man, the soul swung towards the body and became a union of body and soul, which made man essentially a carnal person from that day forward.
He then became strong in the appetites and desires of the body. The soul now being primarily linked to the body, gave him a tremendous strength in the realms of the physical, and natural, but he still had a spirit. Do not think the natural man is without a spirit, he has a spirit, but it is a natural spirit.
There are three kinds of natural man. The first is the usual situation of a natural man. The largest part is body, then soul and then spirit. He is controlled usually by the appetites of the flesh, the body rules over the soul and the spirit.
Certain people are very body conscious. And very body concerned. They live to gratify and satisfy the realm of comforts, and pleasures which touch the body. To have a body which is pleasing and presentable to others, these are the most important things. The natural man is usually body dominate.
But there is a minority that fit into category two. They have become strongly developed in their soul; they are the sort of people who will do things in the world by the strength of their will, by the strength of their soul character.
Such people become great musicians because they develop that part of them which is soulical, they become dedicated to become successful.
Great athletes would be another example. Also the body must be involved but actually it is the driving will of the soul that makes them into champions.
Politicians for example, great industrialists, some people who have a burning ambition which eats them up and drives them, it can be a soulical thing, it has nothing to do with the body or the spirit. They will even ruin their body to achieve the ambitions of the soul. So sometimes the soul can be dominate. There are a few who even in the natural realm develop their natural spirit. Until that becomes the dominant part of them.
This is perhaps the most dangerous thing the natural man can do. Because of the fall the natural man has been cut off from the Spirit of God. Sin has separated between the natural spirit and God. And that is the sense in which the first Adam died. When he died, he didn’t die physically, what happened was the communion between, that first mans spirit and God was cut off in the moment of sin and there was no longer any communion. In that sense he died, because death in the bible never means annilation, it always means separation.
When it says we have become crucified to the world and the world to us that doesn’t mean that we cease to have any contact but what we don’t have is communion. When Adam died he died spiritually in the sense that he lost all communion with the living God. He was out of touch with God; his spirit could no longer reach God.
If a man starts to develop his spirit, all that he will make contact with are demons. He will make contact with the spirit world and you will meet people who so develop their spirit that there body and their soul is put right under this craving for spiritual experience so that they become mediums, they get into the occult, become wizards and witches and they learn to use the powers of the demonic spirit world and cooperate with it and they become very spiritually sensitive but only in the realms of darkness, never in terms of God.
To have a developed spirit that is not joined to God is perhaps the most dangerous state the natural man can get himself into because he really is in bondage then.
The natural man is a triune being, he has a spirit, but that spirit is cut off from God, it is dead. But 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.
Others can have a very strong soulical realm.
What we want to look at in this teaching is the carnal man Paul was talking about, he has a body, he has a soul and he has a spirit.
In Ezekiel 36 we read what happens to the man that has been born again, this is a picture of the new birth.
Ezekial 36: 25Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. 26A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. 27And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.
What God does in the new birth, is he takes away the heart and changes it and gives us a new heart and he gives us a new spirit. But when that new spirit is born within us, by what we call the new birth it is a baby. It starts by living on milk.
The tragedy is that many Christians having had this miracle take place inside them; have never understood that there has to 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 have to nurse it, feed it with a bottle of milk, you have to look after it, everything has to be done for it. If it is too hot you have to take the clothes off, if it is too cold you have to 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 huos 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 those 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. That is true in the natural and the spiritual.
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 learned 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 they needed was 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 have to learn how to grow up and become adult in the spirit.
When we are still carnal we walk as mere men, although God has done a work inside us 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 circumstance 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 the number of type of natural man where our body rules. We could 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.
God has left it to us to decide what kind of man we want to be. The exercise of the will is all important here. It was the will of Adam that brought him into the fall and it is the will of man that will bring him into all the fullness of Christ. And God is not going to do it for us as we passively sit there and wait for it to fall upon us from heaven.
He will supply the power, but we have to supply the will. It is all important that we understand the function of the soul in all of this, and the realm of the will. He who wills to do my will Jesus said shall know, whether this teaching is of God or if I speak of my own authority.
An exercise of our will is like power assisted steering. When the engine is running we can turn the wheel with one finger, not because you have a mighty finger, but because there is a mighty power working with the indication of our finger to make it happen in the physical realm. With all that power and potential to turn those wheels, absolutely nothing happens until we put our finger on the steering wheel and indicate with our hand which way we want the thing to go.
This is an indication of how our will as it were is a crucial factor in deciding how the power of God is going to be released in our life. If we choose to stay carnal we will stay carnal and God will not breathe on us from heaven and we find that a power beyond us will do it for us, this is not how God operates-works.
When Peter was in the innermost prison and waiting his execution, the angel came into the prison and slapped him on his side, from then on peter had to act in obedience to the word and the angel didn’t do a thing for him. If he had not responded in his will against what seemed impossibilities and started to move on that word even when it seemed unreal to him, he would have stayed in the prison and died the next morning.
He had to exercise his will to obey the word that was being brought to him by the angel; he did not sit there and wait for God to translate him outside the prison. If we are waiting for that sort of miracle, it will not happen to us. We will stay in our defeat, in our bondage and we will remain carnal. We will remain a tiny little babe inside, always having to be fed with milk, and we will never actually achieve anything for God until we learn that there has got to be the exercise of our will to come out of our carnality.
Some people are totally dominated by their body even though they are regenerate and in that sense they behave as mere men. Other people are totally dominated by the soul. They are the strong sort of people, people who are a pain to try and work with or live with.
This soul strength will be a pain to many people, until we do something about it. To have a strong will is not a handy cap once it is ruled over by the spirit. And this is what we need. It is a tremendous advantage.
There is nothing wrong in having a brilliant mind once the spirit is in control. We are going to need all the brain cells we got to understand God and still we will be struggling to try and comprehend him. We don’t stop thinking when we become spiritual; in fact we start to think really deep and properly for the first time. We don’t have to stop thinking to become spiritual on the contrary the truly spiritual man can think clearer than Albert Einstein. But it is the will that decides.
We can be one of these two categories but we cannot be the third. we cannot have a strong natural spirit that is in touch with the occult and at the same time be regenerate. Because darkness cannot have any fellowship with light, Christ cannot fellowship with Satan or belial. If we had this type of background and the Spirit comes into our life it will be war and chaos until you’re free. There will be turmoil, unrest, constant harassment within until all that is of darkness is expelled by the power of the Spirit of God.
The sooner we become spiritual the better. Then all the conflict will cease and we will be able to rule completely by the power of the Spirit that God has given us. The carnal man has this miracle of new birth, the old has been taken away, but what we have a problem with is the flesh. We have to learn how to hate it as much as God does.
The spiritual man has a spirit, and within that spirit, the Spirit of God dwells, and his spirit is dominant. He has a body but the body is under the rule of the soul which is under the rule of the spirit. So we see here that God has reversed the order.
The natural man is in the order of body, soul and spirit. This is how the natural man perceives himself.
To be spiritual means that our spirit has become the ruler of the triune man, our spirit is out in front and we are more aware of it than our soul and body. We are able to play football spiritually if we want to spend our time that way. The spirit is ruling over the body.
All the delightful potentials and abilities in the soul can all come under the rule of the spirit so that we can function in all the different departments of our triune man and every part of it will be spiritual.
Our will can be spiritual, our emotions can be spiritual, our physical exercise can be spiritual, and every part of us can be spiritual. And that is what a spiritual man is. It is not someone trying to protect himself from the world. It is not someone who is trying to detach himself from the world, trying to escape into the heavenly realm where God is, then by definition you have to leave your body and soul because they are intrinsically evil, but they are not. God made us like that.
So we don’t say that thinking by definition is wicked, it is not wicked unless it is carnal. But our thinking can be spiritual, totally of God. Every part of us can be made wonderfully alive in the spirit; even our humor can be spiritual. We can have great fun and joke and have lots of laughing. As long as it is under the rule of the spirit it never gets out of order.
We are not terribly serious with a long face if we are spiritual. We are not always fasting; we can have a jolly good dinner spiritually to and enjoy every taste of it, and drink a glass of good wine spiritually, if we are not alcoholic.
It is delightful to be spiritual. It is not that we are losing out on all the fullness of life. That is a perversion the devil is trying to get us to buy into, trying to make being spiritual unattractive.
We are more fully alive in every part of our being when we are truly spiritual. When we grasp this we will find that it is ever so easy and natural to be spiritual. To become a man of prayer isn’t hard work when we are truly spiritual. We are just our self. When we are spiritual our self is spiritual, we are not trying to be someone else. The problem with self or our soul is when it acts in independence from God.
We have a spirit which rules, we have a very well balanced trinity. It is not all spirit and no soul or body. The thing is that God’s Spirit has come into our spirit and it has enabled us by the strengthening of His Spirit in the inner man, we are then able to exercise a spiritual government over the soul and over the body. So that it is free to function fully, if it never moves out of the spirit.
It would be wrong to think of the three parts of man as distinctly separate, there is a fusion between them, And especially between the soul and the spirit. It is hard to distinguish between them; it says in Hebrews that it is only the word of God that is able to distinguish between soul and spirit.
The body is the physical outward tent in which the real me dwells. We make contact through our physical senses with the physical world. The body enables us to contact and sense the physical world.
The spirit is not the same as the soul and the human spirit is not the same as the Holy Spirit. The human spirit is the residence for the Holy Spirit; it is there that we meet God and commune with him. God is spirit and we need a spirit that is alive to him to commune with him we need a pure spirit.
There are depths of us that we do not consciously know, but our spirit knows them. Our spirit knows us thoroughly. As we learn to become more and more alive to the Holy Spirit, one of the things or fruits is that we are going to know our self better and better.
We are going to know the new you that God has made which is lovely. Our spirit is a means of communication with God. Gods Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. God can only communicate with our spirit. So if we have a tiny little spirit that is not yet talking, how much can God say to us?
We can be informed with our mind, one of the reasons that God has to say something again and again is that we are so small in spirit it is like a baby that can only understand four words. You cannot communicate much with a two year old. You cannot get into anything like serious concepts, until there is a better level of communication.
If His Spirit can only bear witness to our spirit and our spirit is infantile, how can God communicate with us? We can sit under the best teaching in the world and we are clueless to what things are about because it is only by our spirit that we can know them. His Spirit communicates-bears witness with our spirit and he does not seek first to communicate with our mind.
The life of God has to flow into our spirit, through the revelation gate in our spirit out into our mind, it comes into our mind as spontaneous thoughts, but it comes from the inside out. It does not come from the outside in. unless God is speaking through another person or an audible voice.
After 3 ½ years of teaching the disciples sat in an intensive bible school with Jesus Himself and at the end of 31/2 years they didn’t understand a thing. And the reason was that they had no spirit yet that was regenerate that could receive it. But it was all deposited in their memory, in the levels of the subconscious or conscious mind and when the Holy Spirit came He could draw it all out and show them the things that Jesus said and they started to understand spiritually once the Spirit had come. When we are a babe in Christ, until we grow up we cannot be taught certain things because we are babes. There is no way of communicating because it has to come through our spirit.
Proverbs 25: 28He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.
This is one of the problems we face in pastoring, we go to a person again and again and we may cast out devils, we free them from demonic bondages, we put the truth in them and get them through their rejection. But the trouble is because they have no spirit that is strong and able to retain the word of God and to rule over the soul and body, then the devil comes right back in and they are exactly where they started, they are like a city without walls. They have a violated personality and until they are built up in spirit there is no way they can become permanently secure in God or permanently free from demonic interference.
It is not so much ministering to people in deliverance although it has its place, it is a very important dimension of ministry but without people being made strong in spirit we are never going to produce people who can stand in God.
Before the fall man communed with God in spirit, after the fall man died in his spirit, he lost contact with God and in that sense he died. He died in his spirit. After regeneration man is born again in the spirit, he receives a new heart and a new spirit and God lives in his new spirit but it is a babe and needs developing.