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.