God has left it to us to decide what kind of person we want to be. It is the exercise of the will that is all important here. It was the will of Adam that brought him into the fall, and it is the will of a person that will bring them 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 must supply the will. It is 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 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 will not find a power beyond ourselves that will suddenly change 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 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 in their spirit, and 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 our spirit. And this is what we need. It is a tremendous advantage.
There is nothing wrong with 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.
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 in his spirit, but what we have a problem with is the flesh. We must 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 the front of our awareness, and we are more aware of it than our soul and body. We can 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. We want to have heavenly encounters, but we always come back down to earth because our body is still mortal.
So, we don’t say that our thinking 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. If 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 old 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.
When we have a spirit which rules, we have a very well balanced trinity. It is not all spirit and not all 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, so that then we are 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 from under the Lordship of Jesus over our spirit.