Lesson 54

Freedom from Oppression I – 24:5-16

We’re going to take a break in our Deuteronomy series to summarize what we’ve been presenting throughout the book of Deuteronomy and Ephesians and go through the various functions of the soul with one basic objective; that it will aid us in our spiritual life. One of the first and interesting things that you notice about the soul in the Bible is that the word “soul,” “body,” “spirit,” “flesh,” “heart,” etc. that these terms which tend to be used by Christians as though they were all interchangeable, like they were sort of vague synonyms. Basically that is not the case. If you take a concordance and check out the usage of each one of these words, you find an amazing thing, that they do not parallel one another, there are distinct patterns of usage. Therefore what does this tell us as believers? It tells us that the people who wrote our Bible had in their mind a definite Biblical psychology of man, such that when they referred to human spirit it wasn’t something vague to them. When Paul said “I serve Jesus Christ in my spirit” it wasn’t a vague expression for doing the Lord’s work; it was a precise expression. When Luke said in the first chapter and he’s speaking of Mary, and he says Mary, after you bear this child from God your soul is going to be pierced through by a sword. That was something very meaningful to Mary and she would understand what it meant to have her soul pierced through by a sword.

Therefore that we may understand the precise meaning of some of these terms we’re going to work through the human spirit and the human soul and go back to the Scripture and try to tie this together but from the aspect tonight, not of just pure function, but from the aspect of walking by the flesh or walking in the Holy Spirit. As you can see the diagram is the same thing we have been putting up here and the first thing we note is the difference between the word “soul” and the word “spirit.” These are two different words. The word soul in Hebrew is nephesh, in the Greek psuche, that’s soul, so there are two definite words in the original language. Spirit is ruach in the Hebrew and in the Greek, pneuma. There are two different words here and the words basically mean entirely different things.

To catch this turn to Gen. 2:7, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Something started here and the picture we get here is always, going back to Genesis, very important, like we did with marriage, going back to Genesis when we were dealing with sex rights in Deuteronomy. We went back and dealt with Adam and his plan for God and Eve and we found that the model for marriage was to have the man plus the plan of God, and then he was to find the woman that would compliment what God had given him to do. Remember God gave Adam a job before He brought Eve to him and Adam was able to appreciate his wife because he knew that she was a gift from God to him, to help him accomplish the plan of God. And that basically gives you in a nutshell the concept of marriage in Scripture, that the man’s role is the spiritual leader, to ascertain the plan of God and the woman’s role is to help him accomplish that plan.

In Gen. 2 we have another one of these models, they are very important to understand, and that is that we have man’s body, for the word “Adam” in Hebrew is like adamah and adamah is simply the word for ground, it means red ground or soil. So man was called “Adam” because Adam means that he is made from adamah, which therefore leads us to emphasize the body of Adam. First you have the body, then God breathes in the human spirit. Then when the human spirit hits the body, you have produced a soul. Therefore, which is causative? It’s the human spirit that causes the existence of the soul. It’s the human spirit that causes the existence of physical life. Now He did this both to the animals and to man, and in verse 7 you’ll see where it says when God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” that refers to the human spirit, “and man became a living soul.”

Just to give you perspective on verse 7 turn to Gen. 6:17 and you’ll see that this is in common with animals. Animals have a kind of soul, notice what it says about the flood, “And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven,” same word, it’s talking of animals there, animals have the same thing that man has in this respect. Look at Gen. 7:15, “And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.” Then in verse 22 of the same chapter, “All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.” So what he’s saying here is that man shares something with the animals. We are similar to the animals in that the animals too have a body; they have a spirit of sorts, Eccl. 3:21 says, however, the spirit is not like your human spirit but it functionally does much the same. And then they have a soul. The reason why this is so is because the animals are used throughout the Bible for blood sacrifices and they have to have a soul to be able to perform the function of the sacrifice. This is why Cain’s offering was not respected by God. Cain offered plant life; plant life has no soul, it’s the animal life that has the soul in it and God wants the soul life offered to Him for sin. Therefore this is why animals and only animals are types of Jesus Christ in the Bible.

This also, I feel, explains why Satan can indwell animals and evidently why in the early conflict of Genesis 1 that was the problem, whether Adam was going to listen to Satan as he spoke to him through animals or whether he was going to listen to the Lord Jesus Christ in His preincarnate form speaking to him through the Word of God. So you have this choice that Adam made and he, of course, listened to Satan speaking through the animal.

Nevertheless we have the spirit as the causative factor and the soul as the resulting factor. I make two observations about these words; these are important because as far as I can conclude, looking at all the occurrences in the concordance, these rules never fail and I don’t think that Christians have given them adequate consideration. But if you look at this it’s interesting that you never have the spirit indicating a person in the Bible. It’s always the spirit of somebody but you can have the word soul used to designate the whole person, particularly when there’s counting involved. Turn to Gen. 46:27, one of the functions of the word “soul” is to stand for the entire person, which means therefore that the real you, the center of your personality, is in your soul. That’s where your self-consciousness is located. When you think and you’re conscious of your mind thinking, when you feel, when you’re conscious of choosing, that is your soul operating and I hope as you go through these verses that you’ll be challenged in your own life to try to think through and actually experience your soul, and when you have experiences to yourself that you’ll be able to detect that which comes from your soul and that which comes from your human spirit. T here’s a subjective aspect here where the mature Christian should be able to sense this inside.

Now the soul, in Gen. 46:27 notice, “And the sons of Joseph, who were born to him in Egypt, were two souls: all the souls of the house of Jacob, who came into Egypt, were threescore and ten.” And there are enough other Bible verses that you can check this out yourself. You’ll always find it, when there’s counting of people, they counted not as they were three spirits that came down to Egypt, they were three souls that came down to Egypt.

Another feature about the word “soul” and “spirit,” the spirit is never addressed in soliloquy, and if you look through the Psalms David will say, “O my soul, why art thou cast down,” or the rich man in Luke 12:19, remember he said to himself, “Soul, thou has gotten great things and great possessions,” he’s speaking with himself and he speaks as though he is speaking to his soul. So again we have the soul as the location of self-consciousness. This is the proper location of self-consciousness.

The key passage to identify the fact that our personality is centered in the soul and not in the spirit is found in Matt. 16:26, now I want you to compare the reading in the text with the reading over in Luke and after you’ve done this comparison you’ll see something very interesting, the soul, the word “soul” is completely interchangeable with the person. In Matt. 16:26, the famous clause, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” There in the original text you have the word psuche, you’ve lost your soul. Turn to Luke 9:25, “For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself,” so you see, the two are interchangeable, so the soul therefore stands for the whole person and the spirit for something else.

Now let’s consider functions of the soul. We want to go through some of these functions. The soul, basically I have divided up having four functions, most people have it having three, the will, the emotions and the intellect, but I have divided it up for reasons which I think will become clear when we begin to discuss the Christian life and the filling of the Holy Spirit. One function of your soul is choosing. Now in some senses it’s a faculty but also it’s a function; your soul chooses between options, between alternatives, personal affections, these are people centered emotions; mentality and bodily affections. Now let’s go through some of these functions and see them in the Scripture.

First, can we prove from the Scripture that the soul has volition? Turn to Psalm 27:12; “Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies,” the word “will” in the original Hebrew is the word nephesh and your King James translation has correctly identified the thrust of the usage of the word and therefore translated it by “will,” but really it says in the original, “Deliver me not over unto the soul of mine enemies,” and there are additional verses so you can check this out yourself, Rom. 2:9, says “in the great day of the judgment God shall judge the soul,” and the judgment presumes responsible decisions, again showing that volition is in the soul.

Now we have personal affections, turn to 1 Sam. 18:1, these are emotions that characterize the human personality, love, hate, frustration, things that you as a person feel because you are a living soul. These are part of the functions of your life. “And it came to pass, when he had ceased speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” Now the liberals would make this refer to homosexual acts between Jonathan and David, it has nothing to do with homosexuality. This is a simply innocent portrayal of two men that cared very much one for one another, Jonathan and David, and it is the human emotion of love, and there are other references, Song of Solomon 1:7, Luke 2:35. These are human emotions; they are part of your soul.

Now let’s go to the mentality and for this go to Psalm 13:2, this is the mentality by which term I try to designate the reasoning of man plus his memory. These are two aspects of mentality. “How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily?” There the word “taking counsel” means to process thought, so here it’s the mentality working in the human soul. So here we have the third function of the soul and that is to process thinking, it’s the place where the thinking goes on inside you.

The fourth term, also part of emotions but I’ve separated it because I deliberately want to show you something that many Christians seem to overlook and that is the word “nephesh” or the word “soul” in the Bible has a physical connotation. People tend to say body and soul and that’s true compositionally, but our human soul has physically oriented desires. You can prove this by turning back to Deut. 12:15, when we went through this we said this was a party that the nation had before the presence of God, and if you have taken college courses and heard the professors say that in the Old Testament the God is a God of wrath and in the New Testament He’s a God of love, I want you to notice these passages. Worship in the Old Testament was a time of joy, it was a time of relaxation, translating it with careful use so you won’t take advantage of the loose words involved, it means have a blast, and that’s basically what Deut. 12 means. God has blessed you, now just enjoy it. Verse 15, “Notwithstanding, thou mayest kill and eat flesh in all thy gates, whatsoever thy soul lusts after [desireth],” and here you have the hunger drive in man, “thy soul lusts,” it’s part of your soul. You see your soul is intimately related to your body and the physical needs of your body reach into your soul. There are other passages in Scripture, there is one in Jeremiah that proves that the sex drive also emirates from the soul.

So these are the four functions of the human soul. These are things that you have on your inside; these are things that you feel and experience each day. And as you experience these things, just think, that’s your soul functioning, that’s your self-conscious soul functioning.

Now let’s go to the human spirit and see what functions does the human spirit have? First let’s got to worship? We’re just talking about three words, conscience, guidance and worship. To show you that worship takes place in the human spirit, turn to John 4:24, the location of real worship is in the human spirit, not in the human soul. I think as we go through this and begin to draw some conclusions you can see why I have been saying over and over again that you’ve got to know the Word of God in order to worship. People ask what’s the worship service, you don’t have a worship service at Lubbock Bible Church, all you have is teaching the Word, that’s not a real worship service. I challenge that and I’ll show you why that we actually do in fact have a worship service.

In John 4:24 Jesus speaking to the woman at the well and He says, “God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” And you remember the argument that He was having with the woman. [Not sure of word] said we worship we worship on this mountain or that mountain and Jesus said forget the location, true worship occurs in the spirit. To see this again turn to Rom. 1:9, Paul, describing his own human spirit as the area where he served God, “For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of His Son,” so you see there that worship and service take place in the human spirit. Now also you’re going to wonder why I list conscience as the human spirit. This is one of the reasons because in verse 9 you see the word “God is my witness,” that word “witness” is always a word used for the function of the conscience and so God is right there and looking it, and that’s later on one reason why I assign conscience into the human spirit, not in the soul.

Rom. 7:6, “But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held, that we should serve in newness of spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.” I’ve had that misrepresented to me, when you’re involved in witnessing someone will say, oh because you know so much of the Bible what you’re doing is trying to live by the letter and not by the Spirit. It has nothing to do with it; what it’s talking about is the function and means of living the Christian life and the function, he says, is performed over here in the human spirit, it’s not over here basically in the mentality of the soul. The actual dynamics for living the Christian life are found in the human spirit. Rom. 12:11, this is one of the signs of the filling of the Spirit in the Christian, “not slothful in business,” this is not necessarily talking about business relationships, it’s talking about any service for the Lord, lazy Christians. “…slothful in business, fervent in spirit,” fervent in spirit means boiling, it means full of energy in the Spirit.”

So I think you see here that one of the interesting aspects of the human spirit seems to be a center of worship. And I want you to notice something, it’s not the volition, it’s not the emotion, it’s not the mentality, it’s in back of those… it’s in back of those, it’s deeper than those. This is why certain Christians will oscillate between mentality and personal affections. For example, you take a person who is the unbeliever who is very intensely intellectual, very intellectual, very much emphasizes the mentality of the soul, that person accepts Jesus Christ as his Savior, now the tendency that you are going to have to watch out for that person who is very intellectual is that he will go over to the other extreme and after he becomes a Christian now he thinks that well, I had all this intellectual thing when I was an unbeliever and now what I’m going to have to do is get emotional because that’s the spirit. In other words what he does is substitute one function of the soul for the other one and so you have a person who is very strong in his mentality, always thinking through things and when he becomes a Christian he tends to drop it all and then turn and major on the emotions and he thinks that this is a sign of spirituality and it isn’t. It’s just substituting one area of the soul for another one.

And conversely we have the other thing and I’ve seen this work out, people that are intensely emotional and they become a Christian and all of a sudden they realize the stability they have in Jesus Christ and now they turn around and major on the rationality and the intellectual and they try to think everything through and try to derive all these things, try to second guess God on issues, etc. and they’re not going to follow the Lord unless they have it all mapped out, not going to use their TV set until they can build one, this kind of thing, not going to follow the Lord by faith.

So here we have people that exchange one function of the soul for the other, but both are wrong. What you should do as a believer is just relax, if God has given you more mentality than He has emotion, let Him work through your personality. Don’t try to mimic someone else, don’t try to replace your emotional pattern with your intellect, just relax and let the Holy Spirit take you from there, using what you yourself are, and not trying to change yourself in the areas of these soul functions. Worship occurs back here in the depths of the human heart; back here in the human spirit, and perhaps the best was of describing it is what Elijah found when God appeared to him in this vision, remember, there was a wind and God, it says the voice of God was not in the wind, and then the rocks slid around and it said the voice of God is not in the rocks, all these great noisy physical penmen and each time the Hebrew text says but God was not there. And then it finally says but then there was “a quiet still voice,” and that was God, unhurried, not worried, not pushed, not shoved, not hyper emotional but a quiet stable voice. That’s the voice of the worship in the human spirit, the confidence that we have.

Let’s look at guidance for a moment; turn to Prov. 20:27, here it talks about the spirit of man and what it does inside, “The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts,” and the word “inward parts” here means compartments or rooms and it’s as though your soul has all these rooms in it and your human spirit constantly monitors it, constantly searches as the candle of God, looking to see what kind of a person you are. I think it’s as though God contacts us through the human spirit. God senses who and what we are through our human spirit. It’s because we have a human spirit that God has a direct link with our soul; He knows at all times of course, by omniscience, but I think the means of omniscience is through our human spirit. It is the candle of the Lord that gives light to all our soul from God’s viewpoint.

You see the same thing in 1 Cor. 2:11, these passages are all related. “For what man knows the things of a man, except the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knows no man but the Spirit of God.” It’s making an analogy between the third personality of the Trinity and the first, and it says it’s the Holy Spirit that takes the things of God and reveals them to us, and so similarly the thing that really knows on our inside what we really are as a person is the human spirit. You might say it this way: the human spirit is like a tape that’s constantly recording every thought we make, every word we say, it’s the monitor of God on the inside and in the judgment day God takes that tape recording and he plays it and He says this is what you were. That’s how God knows what kind of people we are because He looks at the human spirit.

What else do we know about the human spirit? We’ve listed the function of worship, we’ve listed the function of we feel detection of God which would go along with conscience or guidance, let’s turn to Rom. 8:16 and we see one of the normal functions of the Christian life. Here’s why it is not a cliché to say that Christianity is not a religion, it’s a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. All religion or philosophy can do for you is to get into your soul. For example, philosophy can entertain your mentality, a religious ritual can entertain your emotions, but you see, religion and philosophy can’t get into your human spirit because they’re not spiritual. It takes the things of God to get over into the human spirit and this is why a lot of what passes, I’m afraid, for Christianity is just so much soul activity, it basically does not guarantee, although sometimes it does, it does not always guarantee that the person is living by the power of the Holy Spirit just because they have experienced stimulation or emotional stimulation. That is not a guarantee that they are in fellowship with God.

In Rom. 8:16 it tells us something else, it tells us that when we become Christians what does the Holy Spirit do for us? “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.” Now if you can think back to the time when you received Christ, and this is why some of you who received the Lord earlier in your life, in fact, when you were a child this is going to be hard for you do unless you passed some time of spiritual self-examination, but if you can think back to the way you felt when you accepted Christ as Savior and you can think back and recall, well, I believed when I heard the gospel and I prayed to the Lord and then I was assured that I was a Christian, I had experience of assurance. Now if you can think back to that, that experience that you had of assurance was one that came from your human spirit; it was not an emotion, although it may have been expressed to your soul emotionally. I’ll explain that in a moment but basically it emanated from your human spirit, “For the Spirit bears witness with our spirit,” now this is the kind of confidence that you can’t shake. This is why, you see, when the Christian has this inner confidence, no matter what man says on the outside doesn’t influence him. Three or four weeks after I received Christ on the college campus I experienced some run-ins, we had a fellow from Arabia down the hall and this fellow was a member of the communist party and he used to ridicule religion. At that time I couldn’t really say why I believed or anything else, but it was interesting because I can distinctly remember before becoming a Christian being very impressed with the intellect of this person and after I became a Christian all of his intellectual arguments seemed to wash off my back like water. Why was that? It was because “the Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit,” so that I had that inner assurance in my human spirit that I was a Christian. So therefore not all the intellectual arguments in the world wouldn’t shake me because the Holy Spirit had given witness to my human spirit.

That’s theologically, for those of you who want to study systematic theology, is known as the testimonium of the Holy Spirit. That’s one of the great Reformation principles and is the answer to the Catholic claim that the Catholics have the authority vested in the Church. The Protestant answer to that is that we have the testimonium of the Holy Spirit in our human spirit plus the outside Word of God, that’s where we get our authority from.

What’s another function of the human spirit; this is a little harder to see. To see this turn to 1 Cor. 5:3, this is the function of conscience. This is a deduction but I think it’s a sound deduction based on these other functions of the human spirit, they’re very parallel. Paul says there’s a problem in the church at Corinth, “For I verily, as absent in the body but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that has done this deed.” The word “judged” here means one of the exercising function functions of the human conscience. He says, therefore, my conscience can be exercised when I am here but in my spirit. Therefore he has the authority to exercise his conscience in his spirit.

We find it again in 2 Cor. 2:13, when there’s something [can’t understand word] and you experience unrest, oftentimes that’s a testimony of the human spirit. Do you see what Paul says? “I had no rest in my spirit, because I found not Titus, my brother,” something unsettled him, deep down in the inside he had a very unsettled feeling, and this again is the leading of the Holy Spirit in the human spirit, prodding him, trying to guide him, trying to show him these things.

But one of the most important functions of conscience is found in Rom. 14:23, here’s one that’s going to really shock some of you, at least it did me when I first say it. Here’s a question. You have a situation in your life, the Word of God says one thing, your conscience says another; which do you follow? Conscience, that’s what it’s saying here in Rom. 14. Let me explain why. It’s talking about the weaker brethren and it’s saying that these weaker brethren shouldn’t eat these things, even though the Word of God says it’s okay to eat them, but they can’t eat them because they can’t eat them by faith. Verse 23, “And he that doubts is damned if he eats,” and this is the weaker brethren, and by the laws of the Word of God it’s okay for that brethren to eat, it’s all right God says, and yet his human conscience condemns him for eating. So Paul says if you can’t eat with good, clean conscience then don’t, follow your conscience, “because he that eateth not of faith; for whatever is not of faith is sin.” And it appears that one of the functions of conscience in the Bible is to turn on faith. This is a very interesting thing, that before you can exercise real faith you have to be convinced in your conscience that it’s right to do it. This is apparently a function that conscience performs, that no matter hard you want to believe something you can’t believe it because your conscience says no, this isn’t right, this isn’t right, you’re not convinced it’s right.

Now the solution to this kind of a thing, it’s an abnormality, the solution is to learn the Word of God, as we’ll see later on, and let the conscience be matured or edified by the Word and then the conscience will function normally. In other words, the conscience functions by what you’ve got in your human spirit, and if you haven’t got much Bible doctrine in there, your faith must be very weak. This is why the New Testament says faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Your faith, mathematically, your faith is directly proportional to what we call epignosis in your human spirit, or that amount of Bible doctrine that you’ve absorbed and it’s become part and parcel of you. Now that’s a measure of your faith, and as you mature this fear of knowledge on the inside grows so that you’re confident in it. And then you can have greater and greater faith. People say how can I believe? Basically if your conscience condemns you there’s nothing you can to but follow your conscience but at the same time build and edify your conscience by taking in the Word of God so that your conscience now becomes pliable and it’s filled with Bible doctrine and now has confidence that this promise is true.

Now where this happens oftentimes is in the area of the promises of the Word of God. Oftentimes we’ll come into a situation in our lives and experience worry and frustration. And then intellectually we look down, we see the Bible, and we see this promise, and we’ve all experienced it, and that is that here’s our soul, and in the mentality we know that promise, we can quote it to you in Arabic if we had to, but the trouble is we can’t believe it. Now why is that? Why is it that you can know the Word of God and you can’t apply it, you can’t believe it in your life? It’s because basically your conscience is not giving you freedom to believe it, your conscience is tight, it’s narrow, it’s restricted and you need growth. This is why I say if you have trouble claiming these promises by faith and meeting the tests from day to day, the little things as well as the big things, you need growth, you need to develop your conscience where it will give you confidence that the Word of God means what it says. This is only a process by which this can come to pass. So we have these various things, conscience and the human spirit.

The next thing has to do with miscellaneous terminology and then we’ll get into the filling of the Spirit, etc. and what it does. I just want to clear up certain words. The word “heart” in Scripture refers to the orientation of the soul, it’s not the soul, it’s not a term that is identical with your soul, it’s a term which means which energy pattern is controlling your soul, the flesh or the Holy Spirit, one or the other. And if it’s the flesh then it’s the old heart, the uncircumcised heart. If it’s the Holy Spirit then it’s the new heart. We have another term in the Word of God, “bowels” and this is a word that refers to the personal affections and bodily affections; turn to 2 Cor. 6:12, here is a warning to you as believers, watch out for your emotions. Verse 11, “O ye Corinthians, our mouth is opened to you, our heart is enlarged,” that’s Paul’s love for his converts. He’s led these people to Christ and now he sees them having self-induced misery. He goes to Corinth and he sees them dying, he sees them sick because God is disciplining them physically. He sees them involved in fornication and it’s frustrating to him, and he says “O Corinthians,” I would teach you all these things but I can’t, and the thing that is blocking Paul’s ministry to these people is verse 12.

“You are not straightened” or stiffened actually, “in us,” or due to us, “but you are straightened because of” or due to “your own bowels, your own emotional pattern, that’s the point. [King James: “O ye Corinthians, our speech to you is candid, our heart is wide open. [12] On our part there is no constraint, but there is constraint in your affections.”] In other words, these people were so wrapped up in their emotions that they couldn’t let loose and this is what happens to our soul. When our soul operates under the status of the flesh, the flesh does various things.

Now because I tried to tie all this stuff together in a diagram I’ve had to make several arrows and I want to explain what they are. Arrow #1 refers to the confident factor of the human spirit to keep you alive physically. There are three words for life in the Bible; one of these words is bios, and that’s natural life or just plant life. There is psuche, and psuche is the life of the soul. Now it’s those two forms of life that are given to you by your human spirit. You see, even though the unbeliever’s human spirit is not regenerated it is still existing; it’s dead, functionally the man is dichotomous, but actually the human spirit is still keeping him alive for James 2 says “the body without the spirit is dead,” he’s talking about physical death. So the human spirit is there but it’s not functioning properly.

So now let’s see what happens. The human spirit is causing life to go on through channel one, that is true for the unbeliever and it’s true for the carnal Christian. You have psuchicos life, psuche life and you have bios life, but you don’t have zoa or eternal life, actual experienced in your soul. When we are filled with the Holy Spirit then through channel two He causes that eternal life to flow out into the soul and it’s that time when you can experience the eternal life emotionally and intellectually. But remember it flows from the human spirit under the influence of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

So here you have now this channel two and it’s channel two that’s the big thing in the Christian life. You’ve got to keep your channel two open, any unconfessed sin clogs channel two immediately, there’s no either/or, immediately you are back in this status. Notice channel two is obstructed, the flesh doesn’t like input from channel two and it just obstructs it, etc. So now you have the flesh. Now when the body, the physical body decays, as it began to do at the point of the fall of Adam, you have death introduced in the system. This death, because the soul is linked to the human body, flows out and engages and encompasses the soul and causes these functions in the soul to behave in a certain behavior pattern.

So what I’ve tried to depict is to show you what happens when you’re out of fellowship and your flesh controls these things. First, negative volition, that’s the problem in the first place. Then you have the personal affections and because now your personal affections are not controlled by the eternal life factor, through the indwelling Holy Spirit, they go wild and you begin to experience all sorts of things. You begin, first of all, to experience emotional instability. That’s one of the signs of working in the flesh, people are emotional, people that are unstable… and I don’t say that you don’t have emotions, notice the word “personal affections” still functions, but my point is that when the flesh controls you these things happen, you become irresponsible, you’ll tell people oh yeah, I’ll do that and then no show. That’s irresponsibility and it’s a sign of the flesh. We have approbation lust, power lust, materialism lust. What is approbation lust? Do you know what it is? It simply means that you want the approval of other people, either in your own group or some other group and so therefore what you try to do is improve your image. The biggest thing in life is your image before others. That’s wrong. The biggest thing in life is your image before Jesus Christ, not other people. You take care of that your image before others will take care of itself. So approbation lust means you do things… and you can examine this and what I’m trying to suggest as we go through this is take a personal inventory, make this true personally so that when you experience these emotions you can identify them. That’s the mark of maturity. Therefore you’re walking along and you begin to check yourself and you begin to say why am I doing this? Well, I’m doing this because I want to be impressive in the group; and immediately what happens? You’ve identified approbation lust and that told you were out of fellowship. Maybe you’re going along and you have power lust, power lust is a desire to dominate everything, if there’s two people you’ve got to be chief, always, and if you can’t have your way you’re going to pick up your marbles and leave and go somewhere else. We have that all over, people can’t run the church so they go to some other church where there’s a weak pastor and they can run him all over the lot and they love it. The poor guy has never been told in seminary, as I never was told in seminary, that the pastor’s job is to lead the flock, not be led by the flock. So we have people with power lust and that is a function of the flesh. So you go in a group, you ask yourself, why is it that you volunteer for something. Is it because you want to get in there and change the show? Power lust, operation of the flesh.

Mentality, when your mentality is controlled by the flesh you begin experiencing certain things, 1 Peter 5:7, turn there a minute, I want to bring out the satanic factor. “Casting all your care upon Him for He cares for you.” Here you’re going along in life and you feel confusion, you feel worried, occupation with human viewpoint. The command to be spiritual here is not a command to turn off [blank spot] because if you confess by 1 John 1:9, really confess and I hesitate even mentioning it out of context, but we’ll show if you confess your sin and you’re filled with the Spirit and this worry keeps up, and it does not go away, that is one of the key signs, either you haven’t confessed it in the right way or it’s a satanic attack, in which case you adopt a different tactic as indicated in verse 8, “Be sober, be vigilant because your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walks about seeking whom he may devour.” This is not put in there just by accident. If you go to James you see the same thing, you see “Humble yourselves unto God” but “resist Satan.” So therefore while the flesh is battled by the filling of the Holy Spirit, Satan and his hordes have to be battled off by an act of the will to just bump them off. This is why the Bible says you don’t resist the flesh, that’s one tactic you use against the flesh, filling of the Holy Spirit but when you’re under a demonic attack it’s like a soldier, then you have to stand and fight it out. But I don’t want to get involved in that, I want to just show you the flesh versus the filling of the Holy Spirit.

Take bodily affections, here we have things like sex, we have hunger, etc. some of you people that can’t stop eating, you’d better look at your spiritual condition. I’m not saying because you have a healthy appetite it’s wrong, let’s not misinterpret but I’m saying that if you sit down and you can’t help but walk off with four or five servings every meal and when you sit down to the breakfast table you have to have 24 eggs before you feel full, there’s something wrong. Either you’ve got organic difficulties or you have a spiritual problem. The sin of gluttony is obviously one of these cases where your bodily affections get the better of you and you have no control over it.

Now, let’s look at what happens when we are filled with the Spirit. When you become a Christian, the Holy Spirit comes to indwell; He will always indwell you, He never will leave you, you don’t have to pray Psalm 51, “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.” The Holy Spirit will always indwell; you have to remember that, that’s a source of comfort. The Holy Spirit is not going to leave you, He’s not going to forsake you, the Holy Spirit is not like some Christians that stand around when they can get something out of you but when it’s time for you to need some support from them, they stay away in droves. That’s the kind of Indian giving that the Holy Spirit does not engage in. The Holy Spirit is always there, He always indwells your human spirit, always will. In fact there’s an analogy that you can draw from the Old Testament. Here’s the Temple of the Old Testament, in here you have the Holy of Holies, out here you have the holy place, and out here you have the outer court. The outer court would be analogous to the human body. The holy place where the high priest went in and you experienced the candelabra and the showbread, here is your soul, here’s volition, volition of the priest, you have the light of the candles which is the Word of God illuminating your mentality, you have all these things, but where was the presence of God. The presence of God was in the Holy of Holies and no man could go in there except… do you remember what happened at the crucifixion between the Holy of Holies and the holy place? The great Temple curtain was torn from top to bottom, that’s a point the Gospel writers were trying to get across to you, someone didn’t come along and tear that thing. First of all, it was three inches thick we find from Josephus and you try to tear a three inch thick velvet cloth and see how far you get. This was shredded from top to bottom instantaneously when Jesus Christ died on the cross. Do you know why? Because that was a sign that now the presence of God could come out and that’s why we have that the Holy Spirit can cause us to have fellowship with Him through spilling out the eternal life into our souls.

Now let’s watch this. Why is it we have the Holy Spirit only partially occupying the human spirit? It appears that the Holy Spirit regenerates our human spirit, but there’s a section of our human spirit that operates when we’re carnal. For example, through channel one, you just don’t die when you’re out of fellowship, you go on living physically. So the human spirit still is existing and functioning. So we have that area of the human spirit that causes you to live physically and gives you soul life. Now as you mature in the Lord, that Holy Spirit involves more and more territory in your human spirit. It’s like this; here’s your human spirit. You take this and you have divine viewpoint, here you are, listening to the Word of God, and I want to show you two tests that are used throughout the Bible. Divine viewpoint comes to the mentality, obviously it comes first to the mentality of your soul. We have the divine viewpoint coming into the mentality of the soul. Here’s what happens in a carnal Christian; he just sits there, and this explains why you can have Christians sitting under Bible teaching year in and year out and see nothing happen in their life. It’s very easy, it’s never getting into the human spirit.

But now let’s suppose that channel two is functioning and so now this divine viewpoint goes in the mentality and you’re asking God all the time while you’re listening to the Word of God, Lord, show me the reality of this, is this right, is this true, a desire, John 7:17 says, that if any man desires to know whether this is of God he will know it. Positive volition continually expressed during the input of the Word of God takes that Bible doctrine and puts it over here and the Word of God calls this epignosis. This isn’t strictly true but it’s parallel enough to get the point across. Gnosis in Greek means the word for general knowledge. Epi is the preposition two and it means knowledge of a specific thing. And I’m using these words to point to the fact that when Bible doctrine gets inside the human spirit we know that particular truth, that precious truth becomes specifically ours. That’s what I’m pointing to. Now you have Bible doctrine stored in the human spirit, epignosis; now what happens? Now you go through life and you hit a problem and you’re thrown and all of a sudden you’re upset and everybody begins to criticize you, the money doesn’t come in, you have all sorts of problems and you’re frustrated. At this point instead of falling apart you recall something in the mentality of your soul, you say wait a minute here, I know some Bible promises, I know 1 Pet. 5:7. So what happens? Since this has become epignosis, it hasn’t just sat there dwindling in your soul, now this comes booming through on channel two, stimulates your mentality and you say yes I can believe that promise and I’m going to right now.

Now that is why it is so important that you be taking in Bible doctrine because it’s that, only as you take in Bible doctrine can you expand the frontier of your faith. Now here’s one of the great fringe benefits of this. I always look upon this as fringe benefit. You know you can really dissolve a lot of suffering in your life if you’ll learn what God wants you to learn direct from His Word because if you do not learn what God wants you to learn direct from His Word do you know what He does? He takes the paddle out and He begins to knock you around a little bit. For example, seven out of ten reasons why Christians suffer is because we have insufficient knowledge and God is trying to teach us a certain thing. And so He runs us through the college of hard knocks so we learn. We’re going to learn it one way or the other. Frankly, I have been disciplined by the Lord enough so that as far as I am personally concerned I just love to learn it the easy way. My advice to you if you don’t want to learn the hard way is to learn it the easy way. Nothing could be simpler but to sit before the Word of God and say Lord, I want you to burn this on my heart; I want this to be real. I want this to be part of me, I want to understand this. Like Paul says to Ephesus, I want you to be able to comprehend, not with half of the saints but with all the saints, what is the breadth and the height and the depth of the riches of God. Now isn’t that an amazing statement? He expected every believer to know the full counsels of God. And this means you do not have to go to Bible school or anything else, all you have to do is be faithful to the Lord in studying the Word and you will know truths that would make a seminary professor jealous because you have learned them the right way; you have learned them under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit.

Here’s what happens. You have the mentality taking in Bible doctrine, there are two tests that you run and here are the two tests now to test doctrine and guidance. The tests run in opposite directions. Here’s the human spirit and here’s the mentality. Test one, [can’t understand word] the mentality of the human spirit, here you are exposed to an idea, you want to check this idea out and see whether it’s of God or not. Turn to 1 John 2:20, “But you have an unction from the Holy One, and you all know things.” Now that sounds like oh boy, now I don’t have to have Bible teaching or anything else. Look at verse 27, “But the anointing which you have received of Him abides in you; ye need not that any man teach you but as the same anointing teaches you of all things, and is truth and is no lie, even as it taught you, abide in Him.” Now you say ah, now I don’t need Bible teaching, the Holy Spirit is going to teach me directly. If that’s the true interpretation how come John wrote the epistle? It can’t be the true interpretation or John would never have bothered to write the epistle if people didn’t need something coming into the mentality of the soul. So therefore here’s the test. You take the content that comes through the mentality of your soul and you bring it before the Lord and you ask the Lord, is this right or not? And if it’s right there will be a confidence and if it’s wrong you’ll just feel uneasiness. Your mentality is always where you understand but your human spirit is sort of like a red and green light, it just gives you a sensation whether this is of the Lord or not. So that’s one test, you can call it subjective but there it is, 1 John 2.

Now a test comes the other way, here’s test number two and here’s where you’re being led by the Holy Spirit through your human spirit and you want to test whether it’s true or not. And you turn to 1 John 4 this. This is the opposite, before the idea came to your mentality and went into your human spirit for check. Now you have an experience of guiding of the Lord out of your human spirit and you want to check whether it’s really of the Lord or not. “Beloved, believe not every spirit but test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the spirit of God; every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God.” You can be deceived and this is why the leading of the Holy Spirit is dangerous unless it’s led with the Word of God.

Let’s conclude this guidance principle from the human spirit by looking at two things. There are always two factors in guidance, the Word of God plus the Holy Spirit. The Word of God gives you the general framework. For example, the Word of God, say you’re involved on the job and there’s this non-Christian with whom you come in contact, you know by the Word of God if he is a non-Christian you have the responsibility before God to share with him the gospel or at least pray that someone else will share with him the gospel, but the chances are if God has put you there He wants you to do it. So evangelism, you know that to be the will of God. So the Word of God gives you the general knowledge. You know this.

Now when you are led by the Holy Spirit you will have a confidence that this is what you are to do now. In other words you don’t meet the guy in the shower and start talking about the Lord unless it’s of the Lord. Guidance of the Holy Spirit means that you have confidence; it means that you have confidence in applying the general to the specific, that’s the point. Now when you get your guidance you test it backwards, and say if the Holy Spirit is guiding me, does this fit with the Word of God, does this fit with what I know of the Word of God. Now God isn’t going to deceive you, if you really want to know His will He’s going to let you know it. He’s not going to deceive you, He’s not in that business so all you have to do is tell Him you want to know His will and He’ll let it be known to you.

Conclusion, let’s go back to the diagram once again. Here we are out of fellowship, how do we get back in fellowship? We have to understand there are to things produced by the flesh. Now if you’ve just received Christ you’re going to answer personal sin. All right, personal sin is just one of the things that the flesh produces in your life. The flesh also produces human good; things that look okay, things that would pass by external witness. So here you are now, you’re out of fellowship, here’s the will of God for your life, you’re out here in the toulies somewhere and now the problem is to get back in fellowship. First of all, how do you recognize you’re out, that’s the first step. Well you know you’re out of fellowship if you have some personal sins and the Word of God condemns it, your conscience will condemn you and tell you you’re out of fellowship.

The second thing is not so easy, however, and that is to recognize that you’re out of fellowship when you’re cranking out human good. That’s not so easy and that’s the job if you are a mature Christian you have that problem. You can recognize personal sin but the problem in your life is this just human good that I’m engaged in, all this Christian activity, this meeting and that meeting, go to church service, etc. Is that just human good or what, and you have to check your motivation.

So therefore when we have these two things in our life we realize that often times we can be so far out of fellowship that it’s not funny and yet not commit any obvious personal sin, simply because the greatest sin we’re committing, negative volition, but we’re not having any manifestation of it, we’re just going along, coasting in the Christian life with no power or anything else and it’s just human good. Now go to 1 John 1:9, “if we confess our sins,” now there’s a little trick that I’ve noticed some Christians doing recently, they say yeah, we confess our sins, big deal, nothing happens. The reason nothing happens is they fail to see that human good is a sin; it’s a sin of failure to follow the Lord’s will for your life so when you use 1 John 1:9 you’d better be clear that this includes not just personal acts of sin but if you’re going your own independent way out here and you want to do what you’re doing and not actively seeking the Lord’s will, that’s a sin and that has to be confessed as well as the more obvious personal sin.

So don’t forget human good when you use 1 John 1:9. How do you confess human good? How do you operate with human good? Turn to Romans 6:6; I think this will solve some of the questions some of you have asked me about why 1 John 1:9 doesn’t seem to work with you. “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed that henceforth we should not serve sin.” Now that’s a statement in verse 6 and it says that God has given you the legal right to rule in your life. Do you realize that? You’re free, and when you face temptation from the flesh you can look at it right in the face and say essentially that this temptation has no ground in me, absolutely none, I am dead with the Lord Jesus Christ and as far as the legal principles are concerned I am free and I can be free from this temptation.

Verse 11, here’s how this truth of verse 6 is applied in the life, “Likewise, reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” So we go back to positional truth now. At the time you receive Christ, Christ puts you in union with Himself. He does many things for you; He gives you imputed righteousness, death, resurrection, eternal life and the Holy Spirit. Death and resurrection He gives you, how do you take the death and resurrection that Christ has given you positionally and make it experiential in your life. Verse 11 tells you how you can move from the top circle down to the bottom circle and make that a real living experience with you today. Verse 11 tells you, “reckon” or count on, believe this to be true, “to be dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God,” in one sense the old sin nature has no power over you, Jesus Christ broke the power of the old sin nature, before you were under a slave form to the old sin nature, now you’re not.

The second thing, Jesus Christ gives you resurrection life or eternal life and this life can be boomed through on channel two by the Holy Spirit into your soul and flood your soul with all sorts of things, and when this eternal life begins to move in your soul, verse 13 is one of the immediate effects, “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin,” that’s the sin nature, “but present yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.” Now do you realize that this is a split second transaction? It’s like being saved. At any given time you can claim Romans 6 in your life, any given moment and you can make it real simply by believing. That’s the way to end temptation and that’s what’s going to happen when you use 1 John 1:9, you’re going to be alert to the fact that even though you may not be committing personal sins, though you obviously are, if you don’t believe it ask someone that lives with you, but nevertheless the problem is that you often times don’t realize the extent of personal sin, mainly that it itself is insidious and lies behind this self-centeredness. So coming back in summary to our diagram, if the old sin nature is controlling, that’s what we have. When the Holy Spirit controls He takes from his basic maturity that you’ve given him, remember the Holy Spirit is a gentlemen, the Holy Spirit never cancels your volition, you will always have control over yourself if the leading is of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a gentleman, and gentlemen do not coerce people and twist their arm. Gentlemen always win a person’s will.

Now when the Holy Spirit comes in, positive volition, but He’s only staying as long as you actively seek His will. When you decide my personal affections, mentality, I’m going to let them run loose. All right, that’s it, and so when you want to use 1 John 1:9 and seek God’s will then the Holy Spirit is one to go along, but you’ve got to give Him the green light. And you’ve got to say 1 John 1:9, I confess my sins, I actively seek the will of God.

Now when the Holy Spirit works the personal affections are now under control and the thing that really excites you is spiritual truth. This doesn’t mean you don’t have emotions toward your wife, toward your husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, towards some other person. That’s not saying you don’t have these emotions, but the emotions are under a control and a pattern, so if you had a list of all the things that really turn you on, Jesus Christ would be at the top of the list. That’s the point under the filling of the Holy Spirit.

Mentality, living in the Word of God, this doesn’t mean you don’t think about other things but it means again if you have a hierarchy of the things most on your mind the Word of God will be at the top. You will have a relaxed mental attitude and your bodily affections will be under control. Now as you mature this area in the soul enlarges. God doesn’t hold you responsible for things He hasn’t shown you yet, so relax. If you’re a new believer God isn’t going to hold you responsible in this either/or situation for things that He hasn’t shown you yet. Relax and hang on and later on God will give you various other truths, but God may hold you responsible for only a certain set of truths in your life, so here’s your life, you’re a new Christian and God says look, I want you to look at this part of your life and God works in this area of your life. And as you mature in the Lord then He begins to show you, there’s an area out here I want you to take a look at and it’s very humiliating because after the Lord works with this a while you think you’ve got it pretty well mastered, you’re Mr. Spiritual now and all of a sudden the Lord says now look, I want to show you something else over here, then bang, and you begin to realize wait a minute, I’m not Mr. Genius after all and I’m not a spiritual giant. Therefore you get that straightened out with the Lord and then bang, there’s another area and you discover something else and that’s the mature Christian. So don’t think because someone has trusted the Lord 20 years before you have that he’s got an advantage over you. No, he’s got more of a problem than you have because the older Christian is responsible over a wider area. This is the way you grow, you take what the Lord is showing you at that time and you deal with it, use 1 John 1:9, follow Him and you’ll begin to grow and these Bible truths won’t seem like something dull; these will mean something to you.

In conclusion go to Eph. 3:16, Paul’s desire for every believer, “That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; [17] That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith,” now Christ always indwells but his point is that the area over which Christ dwells and controls in your life expands in proportion to your faith. Your faith expands in proportion to the Bible doctrine you’ve taken in which is in proportion to your maturity. So the more you mature in the Christian life the more area Christ controls in your life. “…that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, [18] May be able to comprehend, with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth and height.” Now I want to encourage some of you because some of you have gotten a defeatist attitude in the mentality of your soul and you say look, I never possibly can know these truths, predestination, election, how am I ever going to know these things, why do I have to bother with these things. Because Paul wants you to know them, they have practical results, and this verse gives you encouragement because this means, Paul would never have prayed this prayer for you had this prayer not be answered. If you want to make it personal with you, just write your name before the word “May,” so that Paul personally prays for you, “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,” and put your name, John, Joe, Mary “being rooted and grounded in love, [18] May be able to comprehend with all the saints” and stick your name in there and read that through about 15 times this week and then ask yourself, are you walking in the way that God would have you walk.

That’s what the Christian life if all about and God doesn’t expect you to stay in the moron status all your life. When you accept the Lord fine, but He expects you to grow and to stabilize. Do you know why He wants you to stabilize, if I can put it this way without blaspheming, God has a selfish reason, He wants to use you, He wants to use you in production for His glory, and the only way He can use you for production for His glory is for you to be a trained Christian. You should be disciplined, it doesn’t mean disciplined by the soul, it doesn’t mean you’re become an ascetic, it means that you are insistent in your volition to pull the will of God from your human spirit and your mentality, say Lord, I want to know your will and I don’t care what it is. The man that led me to the Lord had an interesting expression to illustration this in sort of a humorous light. He said the person that really wants to know if it’s for him to jump off the building he’ll ask the Lord for instructions on the way down, and that was his humorous way of saying that under any and all circumstances you are positive toward the will of God.