The Mind Fully Alive

The Mind Fully Aware

Joshua 1:8 NIV

Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.

Are You Alert Right Now?

Several years ago my wife gave me a gift certificate for a massage at a local spa.  It is a spacious, clean, popular, legitimate spa with a good reputation so I was happy to go down and get my hour massage.  As I sat in the waiting room with several others, I rehearsed in my mind the determination to have a man give my massage.  After about ten minutes, I was ushered in through the walk-way and into the large central room where there were perhaps twenty cubicles and I was brought to one of them.  A young woman came in and gave me a towel and said that I was to undress and then place the towel over my waist area.  I asked her if a man was going to give me my massage and she said there weren’t any male masseuses available.  With that she left, giving me the opportunity to privately take off my clothes.  Now if this were some dimly lit room with a closed door and no one else around, I would have immediately gotten up and walked away but this was a public setting and a reputable spa.  I sat on the massage bed for what seemed like hours, trying to decide what I would do.  Was I going to take off my pants and underwear and let a young woman give me a massage with just a towel to cover me, would I leave on my pants and just take off my shirt, would I get up and walk away from the spa?  My conscience was working at full speed, evaluating this situation and trying its best to come to the right decision.  Should I as a Christian man and a pastor have a woman give me a full massage with only a towel covering me?

Is it possible that some of us spend too much time fussing over moral and ethical issues?  Are we sometimes overwhelmed by a super stimulated conscience?  When everyone else says something is fine to do and we don’t think it is fine to do it, do we go along with the crowd?  Do others make us feel guilty or are we alone responsible for any guilt we feel?  How much guilt should we let get hold of us?  Is guilt good for the soul or just a trouble maker?  Does your conscience ever crush you?

Sigmund Freud is universally given credit for dramatically developing and energizing the field of psychology.  It is easy to come up with a large list of his significant contributions…some would even speak of them as inventions.  He brought us the concept of carefully listening to patients and encouraging free association as they rambled on about whatever they wished.  He popularized the analysis of dreams, the concept of psycho-sexual forces within the personality, the importance of early childhood experiences and the oedipal complex.  However, by far his most critical and influential impact upon Western society and culture was his dismantling of conscience as a critical component of a healthy personality.  He coined a term, the super-ego, to discredit the conscience and render it ineffectual.  The super-ego was essentially what we call the conscience but over reaching.  He claimed that many if not most people suffer from too much guilt, silly, frivolous guilt that sickens us and makes us neurotic.  The enlarged conscience he treated like an enlarged thyroid or an enlarged heart, as something needing treatment.  Much of western culture became convinced that Freud was right, a functioning conscience was not good for people; we need to have less of a conscience, we don’t need its guilt and the bad feelings it produces.  Many in the Christian community agreed with Freud…even many pastors and so it became almost “anti-godish” to give the conscience credence or encourage feelings of guilt.  We are generally thought to be doing Christendom a disservice to incite guilt and support the functioning of the conscience.

Suppose however the conscience is more like a muscle that needs to be exercised and developed rather than a vestigial organ that sophisticated and healthy people let shrivel until it no longer functions.  Most of us have been raised to believe that what used to be called sin is actually just a minor mistake, a slip-up or maybe something to ignore.  We have given Freud the store so to speak and let him define God for us.  God (although he actually had no theology of god) thinks it is ok if you don’t get things right, struggle with your decisions, don’t live up to other’s expectations.  God is comfortable with whatever choices you make because after all, it’s all fine in the end.  What though if God is not like that?  What if He does expect us to be holy and pure and to live lives of righteousness?  What if it is not ok to sleep with your girlfriend, gossip about your boss or hold grudges?  What if God really does hate sin and it is truly unbearable for Him when we sin?  What if we have been wrong all along about what sin really is?

A typical example of the modern approach to conscience and guilt and sin is found in John 5.  A man who had been crippled thirty-eight years was healed by Jesus but seemingly did not appreciate what had been done for him nor show any loyalty toward the healer.  Later, Jesus found him in the crowd and spoke harshly to him.  "See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you." (John 5: 14 NIV)  How this man responded to this strong rebuke is fascinating.  He gave it not a moment’s notice.  He instead went to Jesus’ enemies to betray Him.  Surely he knew it was wrong to turn Jesus over to the authorities and we would think his conscience would have warned him against it, especially after he had just been healed of his thirty-eight years of misery by the very Savior he now was rejecting.  The point though is that Jesus defined sinning as something to stop doing or something worse may come your way.  Sin, to Jesus, is not just a mistake or a learning opportunity or a throwing off of the constraints of an over reaching super-ego.  Sin that continues is worse than being crippled thirty-eight years.

We all laud Jesus’ kindness in rescuing the woman caught in adultery from certain death by stoning but rarely do we ponder deeply Jesus’ strict admonishment to her when the crowd of accusers had left.  “Go and leave your life of sin!” (John 8: 11)  To leave a “life of sin” you must realize you have a life of sin and have begun to abhor it.  This means you have thought about it, turned over what you have done in your mind and grown to hate it.  Otherwise you just continue doing what you are doing because it brings you some desired pleasure, some comfort from your difficulties, some relief from your pain.  We sin because it does something for us we want and the only way to break away from sin is when something has converted our thinking about it…our conscience has concentrated on the sin and become its enemy.  It is only then that someone like the woman caught in adultery has the will and determination to leave her “life of sin”.

When Thomas the disciple doubted the reports that Jesus had been raised from the dead and questioned the evidence brought him by eyewitness accounts, he was left with seven days of pondering his reaction.  Of course it was logical at some level that he not believe Jesus actually was alive because He really had been dead.  There was no question Jesus died.  And yet He was wrong to doubt that Christ was alive.  Jesus had already promised He would live again after dying.  For a week Thomas had to process with his conscience his lack of faith in Jesus to actually come alive again after the crucifixion.  When that next Sunday Thomas was in the upper room with the other disciples and Jesus indeed did return and approach Thomas, the disciple was left with the realization that he had been wrong and his wrongness was sinful.  He had doubted not the resurrection but Christ Himself…He had not believed in Him.  The words of Jesus make sense to us then.  “Stop doubting!”  It was not stop doubting resurrection but stop doubting me.  “Believe!”

We want to encourage Thomas.  You had every right to doubt.  The crucifixion of Jesus was brutal.  You were traumatized by it.  Any one of us would have questioned the resurrection accounts.  Doubting is normal.  Not everyone is honest and sometimes people think they see something but are mistaken.  Of course you would have questioned the resurrection.  Jesus did not give Thomas wiggle room on this sin though.  Just as forcefully as He confronted the sin of the woman caught in adultery and the sin of the man who turned on Jesus, so He confronted Thomas.  Stop doubting.

There is a strong urge in us to make excuses for sin and ignore them altogether.  By doing this, we wreck our conscience.   We make it powerless to stop us from the evil at our door.  Before Cain’s anger blew up, he had a conscience that we must guess was warning him against the direction he was going.  God Himself spoke to him.  If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it." (Genesis 4:7 NIV)  We mustn’t believe Cain is the only one of us given warning before he sinned.  We are warned moment by moment.  We have the conscience God has given us to send the alarm.

We have a tremendous picture in the Old Testament of the Conscience of God given to man.  When the Law was being presented on Mt. Sinai, a miraculous event occurred.  The Cloud of God descended upon the mountain and rested upon the Law being poured out of the Mind of God.  For forty days the Cloud brooded upon the mountain with the Law word by word coming forth.  This was the original Cloud, before the Silicon Valley invented its own much, much smaller version.   Like our conscience broods over our sins and the decisions we make, the Lord brooded over the giving of the Law to man.  It is normal and wise for us to follow the Scripture that tells us,  “Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.” (Joshua 1: 8 NIV) 

If you meditate upon the rights and wrongs of God’s structure of the universe, you will naturally with your conscience think long and hard about the rights and wrongs of you.  It is the most normal part of life…to evaluate your deeds through God’s eyes.  “I drank too much last night.”  “I was judgmental and critical.”  “My gossip was hateful and destructive.”  “I looked at her too long because I was lusting.”  “I trusted myself rather than pray.”  “I am not reading the Bible enough.”  “I gave my wife grief.”  “I did not respect my husband.”  “I was mean to my mom.”  I was bitter and took out my problems on my children.”  “I have not been patient.”  This is not a super-ego gone manic; this is a healthy conscience taking seriously sin and its consequences.

Jesus told us without reservation and with all His faculties in place that we are to be “perfect”.  This doesn’t mean He expects us to never trip over the clothes in the house or never misspell a word we send out in a text.  But it does mean that God expects us to do what He has told us to do and never make excuses for not doing it and never pretend as if it doesn’t matter.  The person who wants her prayers answered by God and wants His blessings upon His life must do what He says to do.  We gripe and complain that God doesn’t care about us, God isn’t real because our prayers aren’t answered; God is cruel because of the difficulties we face.  God is waiting for us to take seriously our lives and do what He tells us to do.  This means we must listen to our conscience and think about the sins we have committed and hate our sins.  When we look at our sins and hate them with enough hatred to really love God and love the people God has given us, the Lord will unleash His power and give us the desires of our heart.  Because only when we truly hate our own sins will our heart be ready for God to bless it through and through.

Young

There once was a little girl who loved to have her feet tickled.  She would cackle with joy whenever her father grabbed one of her bare feet.  As she grew older, she hated to have her feet tickled and would get angry if her father threatened to go after one of them.  Eventually the game ended between them and they were two adults with adult-like ideas of what fun and happiness were.  They fussed about their finances, their schedules and the vacations they planned.  One day the father died and the grown up little girl sat and reminisced about her dad.  She remembered with a touch of bemusement the times he tickled her and the happiness it once brought her.  Try as she might, the grown up little girl could not dam back the tears that trickled down her cheeks.  "Why did those days have to end", she wondered.  And then the revelation or perhaps just the silly little curiosity came to her.  "What other parts of me have vanished?"  "What other childish joys have I cast aside because I thought them beneath me and my dignity?"  The grown little girl looked over at the ancient picture of her dad that had been taken "just yesterday" sitting on the dresser and released a deep and weary sigh.   It was time to get back to work but she paused for just a moment…

And they had nothing to say.    Luke 14: 6 NIV

Conscience Reboot

Acts 24:16 NIV

So I strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and man.

Do You Have a Clear Conscience?

I don’t ever remember a time when I was taken to school by my parents.  It must have happened but my only memories of getting to school were walking or riding my bike. My mom at some point stopped walking with me to elementary school…I know this because I can’t think of a single time that she actually accompanied me.  Those trips to school have long ago all blended together into a single blur except for one particular morning that is perhaps forever etched in my mind.  As I always did each day on my treks to school, I came to a since closed mom and pop grocery store on E. 14^th Street that was a constant curiosity to me.  My mom as far as I knew never shopped in it and so I never had an occasion to see what was inside.  Each day I went to school and then returned home I went past the little store and wondered what it would be like to look around.  One morning, I was a bit early for school so I finally decided to see what deep magic the store held within.  I walked up and down each aisle like I belonged, as if I intended to buy milk or bread or green beans.  I did not have a penny in my pocket; I was only on a fact finding mission.  Eventually I came upon the candy aisle and now I had found nirvana.  I looked at each candy bar, at every ball of gum, at each wrapped piece of hard candy and thought long and hard about what it would be like to have one of those candies.  In the most split of split seconds, I had a most delicious idea.  Why don’t I just take one?  No one was looking.  I was perhaps nine years old…too young to realize how stupid that idea was since I was the son of a police officer and too old to blame my action on ignorance of right and wrong.  I glanced about, stuck my hand down, grabbed a single Jolly Rancher, shoved it in my pocket and hurriedly walked out the door and down the street.  I kept waiting for the clerk to come running after me, for the police to chase me down and frisk me, for my dad to pull up in his car and confront me…but nothing happened.  I had gotten away with stealing the little piece of candy.  I wasn’t arrested.  I did not get a spanking.  I was not pulled out of class and sent to the principal’s office.  No one ever discovered my crime…as far as I knew.  But, my conscience knew what had happened and it would not let me off the hook.  It attacked me with a vengeance and despite the success of my great crime, I never unwrapped the little candy because I felt too guilty to eat it.

Not everyone is like me.  Many don’t feel guilty about all sorts of matters that are considered wrong.  They feel no qualms about stealing or lying or the use of swear words.  They don’t sweat it if they watch pornography or run through a red light or take too long of a shower.  They are unmoved by no trespassing signs, they are perfectly fine with cheating on their biology tests, don’t worry a bit about driving on a suspended license and will drink and drive without giving it a thought.  What are we supposed to do about such people who don’t seem to ever have a guilty conscience; who aren’t bothered by their bad behavior?  Are they hopelessly lost?  Should we try to make them see the error of their ways?

There is a mature, well thought through examination of the conscience in the Bible and it provides rich insight into the psychology of the conscience.  For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.  They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong.  They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills.  Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence.  From their callous hearts comes iniquity; the evil conceits of their minds know no limits. (Psalm 73:3-7 NIV)  “Hearts” in this verse is speaking of the conscience.  Who hasn’t had at least a little bit of jealousy that some people seem to feel no guilt over what they do.  They live wild lives with impunity and no one can get through to them that what they are doing is wrong.  It seems impossible to convince such people to change; their consciences are nearly immutable.

Consider the strange case of Jonah who had a profound hatred for Assyrians.  He refused to go to their capital city and warn them of God’s coming judgment because he did not want them to get out from under the destruction the Lord had planned for them.  Even after God had Jonah swallowed by a great fish and in its belly he stewed for three days, he still was unbending in his loathing of the Assyrians.  He did go and preach in the Assyrian city but nothing inside him changed even after the people repented   He was furious that God did not destroy Nineveh; his conscience felt no guilt over his hatred of the Assyrians whom the Lord clearly loved.  Not even three days in the gut of a great fish could rework Jonah’s conscience.

Likewise it is odd that the great Solomon who experienced several miraculous encounters with God did not seem to feel the least bit guilty about taxing the people excessively or dabbling in paganism.  His conscience was unmoved by the scriptures he read or the poverty he saw all around him.  Even while living in the golden age of the church when the pastors were Apostles like Peter, James and John, Ananias and Sapphira seemed to feel not the least twinge of guilt when they lied about the extent of their charity.  The great Paul seemed to feel no guilt over all the atrocities he committed against the Church even while facing the resurrected Jesus Christ in the middle of the road.  The conscience in many ways is as unbending as a steel bar and no amount of supernatural signs and wonders can force it to change its opinion of good and bad.   All of us have tried to talk someone into believing some action or attitude was morally wrong to no avail.  Just think of the times pro-life demonstrators have tried their best to convince abortion advocates of the horrors of abortion without success or how many have tried to get alcoholic family members to feel guilty for their actions.  We can wreck a conscience by our actions but rarely can we build up a conscience by our rhetoric.

We are thoroughly ineffective at trying to convince others of the wrongness of their wrongs.  We can try interventions, guilt-tripping and emotional pleas and rarely, if ever will we get far with another person’s conscience.  There is only one way for a conscience to be significantly altered.  It must be transformed by the presence of the Spirit of God.  Isaiah provides the perfect example of a converted conscience.  When He came up into the presence of God, he realized just how filthy and disgusting his speech had been before.   "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined!  For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty. (Isaiah 6:5 NIV)  Before this encounter with the Lord, Isaiah thought nothing of what sort of things he said…at least his conscience was unfazed by his words.  The moment he met the real God, he came undone with guilt for his conscience had been converted.  He knew that the sorts of things he had said before were ugly and wrong.  This did not come to him as an intellectual unearthing, it was a Spiritual revelation that not only uncovered the sin he did not before think was sinful but also brought deep remorse for what he realized he had been doing.

The Apostle Paul is a clear example of how the conscience is altered.  As mentioned before, Paul did not seem to feel guilty about his past persecution of Christians when he first met Jesus in a blazing manifestation of His glory.  It was much later that his conscience convicted him of the wrong he had done and he saw himself clearly as a sinner and really a sinner.  This is how he put it after the Spirit of God had changed Paul’s conscience.  What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Romans 7:24-25 NIV)  This is not false guilt…not like someone weeping over the death of a mosquito he killed; this was the guilt of having done rotten things that before he had never thought were wrong.  This is the guilt of an alcoholic who suddenly realizes what horrible consequences his drinking has brought his family but more importantly, how it has wrecked his life with God.  This is the guilt of a stockbroker who had merrily cheated his clients out of their savings but now saw clearly the evil of his actions.  This is the guilt of young mother who finally realizes how terrible it has been for her to abandon the church.  No one can make her see how truly bad her own sin is; only God can reveal it.  The Bible puts it this way in 2 Corinthians 10: 4.  The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. (NIV)  God alone can break through into a conscience that is unable to see its own sin and change the way the conscience interprets badness.  Divine power can accomplish what we are powerless to undertake.

There is a second way our conscience is awakened to real sin within and it is a terrible discovery.  Let the Apostle Paul explain.  Timothy, my son, I give you this instruction in keeping with the prophecies once made about you, so that by following them you may fight the good fight, holding on to faith and a good conscience. Some have rejected these and so have shipwrecked their faith.  Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.  (1Timothy 1:18-20 NIV)  There are times when even a Christian has abandoned his conscience and it becomes wasted on him.  What does God do in those situations?  Honestly it is terrifying but it is the epitome of “tough love”.  The Lord turns over the person to Satan.  We know what happened when God let Job be in the hands of Satan.  It can feel like “hell” but it isn’t.  God lets the person who has turned off her conscience and given up on it be in the grip of Satan.  It happened to Nebuchadnezzar when he went crazy for a year.  It happened to David after he committed adultery with Bathsheba.  It happened to Jonah when he was cast into the raging sea and it happened to Peter after he denied Christ in Caiaphas’s courtyard (see Luke 22: 31).

The church is given authority to do this and it must happen for the good of those who are ruining their consciences by going against them.  The Bible says that it is strong medicine for the sick spirit that is reeling from sin.  When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord. (1 Corinthians 5:4-5 NIV)  In this instance it was a man who was sleeping with his father’s wife.  It could be someone cheating on her husband, another who is an angry man who won’t control his temper, it might be a person who is cheating God out of the tithe or someone destroying her family by her drug addiction.  But we have to be careful here.  This is an extreme measure and only to be done if someone has completely shut out the conscience.  When that happens and there is no remorse for sin, you just quit praying for the person and stop trying to change his behavior.  You let Satan have his way with the person and in the end, God will have freed him or her of the taste for sin.  All rebellion against God will be gone and a craving for the Lord’s presence will surface and dominate the personality.

It is most dreadful when God turns us over to Satan…the most horrible of turns.  That is why we must keep our conscience clear and let the Holy Spirit of God direct our actions.  You see misery and unmitigated corruption in the personality turned over to Satan, a complete blindness to the destruction that person faces and yet, when like Nebuchadnezzar, he turns back to God, when he gets free of Satan’s grip by praying and seeking the mercy of Christ, it is like a fresh and exciting new dawn, filled with promise and hope and the joy of God.  When we walk in the light and trust Jesus Christ to direct us in each and every way whether it is something we see to do or stop doing in Scripture or when the quiet prod of the Holy Spirit through our conscience guides us, we have the peace of God surrounding us and protecting us and keeping us safe.  

Wish or Do

There is a level of Christianity that never reaches farther than a wish.  It likes the thought of praying, it is impressed by sacrificial giving, it believes in loving hurtful people, it knows it ought to look away when tempted but it just will not make the move.   What good is an "amen" if it has no legs under it?  Would we think it reasonable for a fisherman to bait the hook and never cast the line out into the water or a student to prepare for an exam and never take the test or for a bride to stand at the altar with the man she loves and never voice the vows?  Are we Ananias and Sapphira who wished for the reputation of holiness without the sanctification of the gift?  Our born-again spirit longs to run to the horizons of holy living but our body wants to just go so far and no further.  Like the child standing at the edge of the pool who dreads the first chill of the water, we wait and wait to throw our lives fully into God, afraid of what true holiness will mean.    But those who have gone before us...the Apostle Pauls and the Apostle Peters and the Mary Magdalenes and the Ruths urge us onward and outward.  "Forsake the love of the world" , they urge.  "Abandon yourself to Christ."  Trust Him with the sorrow of leaving behind your chair and chase the dream of living within the wild unknown of God's will for you today.  Perhaps He has something risky and preposterous for you to do at this moment but you sit waiting and waiting for the breeze to blow another way so it will be easier for you.  It will never get easier; only more risky and more preposterous as the hesitation extends beyond the limits set by God.  Now cannot be later if you do not want to go away "sorrowfully"  like the poor young man who was too rich to go beyond the wish of Christianity.

How can you believe if you accept praise from one another, yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?   John 5:44 NIV

Spirit Journey

Psalm 51:10-11 RSV

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.

Do You Have a Spirit Or Are You a Spirit?

When I was ten years old I made a most terrifying journey that only was about fifty feet long.  I got out of the chair where I was sitting, stood up, and walked to the pastor who was standing at the front of the congregation of Pacific Avenue Baptist Church.  He asked me why I had come to him and I told him I wanted to become Christian.  The pastor had a few more questions for me and as the rest of the church waited, I prayed with him that God would forgive my sins and give me eternal life.  I that day put all my hope in Jesus Christ as my Savior.  About six months later, a new pastor had come to our church and in the church’s brand new baptistery; Pastor Culp baptized me on Easter morning.  I was stunned by how I responded to this.  For no reason that I could figure, I began to weep as soon as I came out of the water.  It was amazing to me because I didn’t think I was nervous nor was there any reason for me to be sad and I cannot say I was overwhelmed by any relief to get my life on track.  My spirit simply broke apart that morning and weeping was my physiological response.  Now I know that it was the Holy Spirit that came over me and after seeing this same reaction in others who have been baptized, I realize that I wasn’t weird or “just a cry baby”.  But back then, I didn’t understand what had happened and no one ever pulled me aside to tell me what I had experienced.  Some would call it a “spiritual moment”.  But what does that mean?

We speak of certain things as “spiritual” but do we really know what that means?  Is going to a Buddhist temple spiritual?  Is walking through a meadow spiritual?  Can sipping coffee at a café be spiritual?  Is it spiritual to sit in on a worship service or to read your Bible or give to a charity?  Are we spiritual?  Is there something real and discernible that we know about the spirit that we can explore and discuss?

One way to make sense of this question is to consider the part the spirit plays in life.  The Bible teaches that each person is comprised of body, soul and spirit. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1Thessalonians 5:23 NIV)  More than that, our spirit is what makes us a living human being.  Until God breathed into Adam, he was just a dead body.  After he gained his spirit, Adam was a “living soul”.  God tailor makes each spirit for the particular person who receives it.  The Lord, who stretches out the heavens, who lays the foundation of the earth, and who forms the spirit of man within him… (Zechariah 12:1-2 NIV)  Without spirit, the body dies.  What we call death is when the spirit returns to God.  …and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.  (Ecclesiastes 12:7 NIV)  Jesus, when He was about to die on the Cross quoted from Psalm 31: 5 as He gave to the Father His spirit.  Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last. (Luke 23:46 NIV)  In John 19:30, the spirit departing and returning to God is synonymous with the declaration, “He died”.  Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (NIV)  Death is the loss of spirit…that is the definition of death…even more so than the brain no longer functioning or the heart no longer beating.  As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead. (James 2:26 NIV)  Consider the great miracle of Jesus bringing back to life a little girl in Luke 8.  She was dead but when her spirit returned to her she rose up and was alive again.  But he took her by the hand and said, "My child, get up!"  Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up. (Luke 8:54-55 NIV)  The spirit was not wrecked when the girl died but still existed…Ecclesiastes tells us it goes to be with God.  It lives even when the body and soul die.

The spirit is therefore who we are eternally.  Some would speak of it as our personality.  The spirit processes what the body receives.  John 13: 21 expresses this perfectly.  As He contemplated His coming death, Jesus in His spirit sorted out what this would entail.  After he had said this, Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified, "I tell you the truth, one of you is going to betray me." (NIV)  After Jesus told the paralytic that his sins were forgiven, in Jesus’ spirit He recognized the reaction to His words of the lawyers who overheard His declaration.  Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, "Why are you thinking these things? (Mark 2:8 NIV)

Consider the most fascinating relationship between one’s spirit and body delineated in 1 Corinthians 14.  For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.  So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind. (1 Corinthians 14:14-15 NIV) The spirit and the body do not have to work together all the time.  Our mind can be completely unaware of what is happening within our spirit.  When we talk about the unconscious, often this is exactly what we mean.  Our spirit can connect with God without our mind knowing anything about this.  But there is another possibility here also.  Our spirit can connect with the demonic realm, with Satan, and not be aware of it either.  This is a most exciting and troubling discovery.  There may be much going on with us that our mind is oblivious to and unable to process.  All sort of wants, hateful feelings and godly interests can bubble up to the surface and we wonder how they got there.  It is because our spirit can interact both with God and with Satan without our mind realizing what this is doing to us.

There are crucial ramifications to this.  There is a back door to spiritual forces that can wreck us psychologically.  But there is a tremendous benefit also.  When we pray for someone, God can open this back door wide enough for a great working to take place.  Suppose you pray for Joe whose mind is shut firmly to God.  He has no interest in Him and in fact due to some terrible things that have happened to Him, Joe has a rather intense hatred toward God.  But, the Lord can, as we pray open this back door, interact with him in his spirit and by doing so, prepare the mind for repentance and faith.  In other words, we can never assume that Joe or any of the Joes or Josephines are hopeless cases.  Even a closed mind can be impacted and transformed by an open spirit.  The back door is available for God or Satan to enter and we decide in our praying or lack of praying who gains access.

Now we must turn to the most important part of our discussion regarding spirit.  Perhaps the greatest promise found anywhere in the Old Testament is presented in Psalm 51: 10.  The English translations differ in this verse in a significant way.  The RSV has the best rendition of the Hebrew intention and so we shall use it here.  Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.  Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.  When Jesus told Nicodemus and the rest of us that we have to be born again, He was referring to this promise.  We do not get a new body when we are born again nor do we receive a new soul...both come much later when the resurrection of the dead occurs.  But now, as soon as we put our trust in Jesus Christ to save us, it is a new spirit God gives us and that spirit is new because it now is joined to the Holy Spirit…we become as Jesus put it, “born of the Spirit”.  The great prophet Ezekiel put the promise this way.  I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. (Ezekiel 36:26-28 NIV)  This work of God in joining our spirit to His Spirit is made explicit by Jesus.  Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him."  By this he meant the Spirit… (John 7:38-39 NIV)

So what do we have here?  We have the most extraordinary finding.  The cross of Jesus Christ has the potential to work out a miracle in you.  If we stake our lives on the forgiveness of God and His mercy to give us eternal life because Jesus Christ took the punishment of God for our sins…the Holy Spirit then becomes a part of us; our personality saturated with the personality of God.  So what is wrong with us?  Why is it that so much of us does not seem like God?  You cannot remember because you were too young but you have seen it in others; when you were a baby and even older, your spirit struggled to express itself through your body.  You spoke gibberish, you threw tantrums, you stumbled about, you misunderstood the world all about you; your disorganized thinking caused you all sorts of problems.  Your spirit was ready to take on the world but your body was young and clumsy.  When we are born again and we gain a new spirit, one joined with the Holy Spirit of God, our body and soul are not ready for it.  They aren’t trained with the new spirit, too clumsy and corrupted by sin to act right, think right.  As Jesus puts it perfectly,  “The spirit is willing, but the body is weak." (Matthew 26:41 NIV)

How do we look…how does our personality express itself if the new spirit we have is not developed in us, if we are childish and our spirit, the one joined to the Holy Spirit, is not established fully with our body and soul?  A snapshot of the untrained body is found in Galatians 5:20 and it isn’t very attractive...discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness and the like… (NIV)  We don’t have to live like this though because we have a new spirit.  A similar list describing how we can look if our new spirit is not fully in control of our personality is found in Colossians.  …Sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. (Colossians 3:5 NIV)  But how do we look if our new spirit is directing our body and soul?  But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23 NIV)

How do we get our body to catch up with our spirit so that we look like that?  The spirit must express itself through the scriptures within the structure of the body.  This can only happen through faith.  We must begin to believe that what the Bible says we are to do, we can do because we have a new spirit.  Until we begin to do this actively, aggressively, we will look and act like babies…jealous, angry, given to selfishness, impure actions and thoughts, unforgiving, trying hard to get our way.  The moment we take a behavior or attitude from the Bible, something we are told by God to do, and believe that because of the new spirit we have we can do it, a miraculous change occurs in us.  God will work in us His spirit.  Our habits will look like God.  Our dreams will look like God, our spontaneous thoughts will look like God, our behavior when we think no one important is watching us will look like God.

Until we are born again, Bible thinking and doing will be annoying and impossible to continue.  The moment though we put our hope in Jesus Christ to save us, the Spirit of God will join Himself to our spirit and the Bible will make sense, become reasonable and realistic to follow.  Until then, it is mere disconnected gibberish.  But you, if God’s Spirit lives in you, will begin to look like Jesus Christ Himself if you let the Scriptures unleash the new spirit you have that is fired up to take charge of your personality.  At some point every lion must stop pretending to be a rabbit and fulfill its God ordained destiny.  Christian people are made to live Christian lives.  Why should we look like the devil when God has made His home in us?  We are too good for that!