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!