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!
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