1. The Neglected Human Spirit
The challenge many of us as Christians face is that we have never really been taught who and what we really are - that we are essentially spiritual beings and that the spiritual part of us is at least as significant, real and vast as any other part of us.
One of the reasons for this is that there is so little understanding of this area in mainstream Christian culture. Churches tend to fall between two extremes in their approach the human spirit. On the one extreme there are churches that simply believe that the human “spirit” is just another word for our mind believing that anything “spiritual” is a quaint way of talking about our psychology. At the other extreme are churches that are extremely focused on the supernatural, but this focus is on the operation of the the Holy Spirit and not the spirit of the individual. In both cases, the human spirit remains neglected and there is very little though given as to how to intentionally develop it.
I am not saying there is no teaching in this area as clearly the Bible is full of references to our spirit, some of which are indirect such as
Eph 1:18 - that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened Eph 3:15,16 - to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith
And some of which are direct such as
Heb 4:12 - For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit Phil 1:25 - The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.
In fact many of us might have heard preaching and teaching on this - for example on the famous passage in Gal 5:22,3 about the fruits of the spirit. The problem is that we have not been taught about the reality of our spirit. These phrases above are simply not a concrete reality to many of us.
To illustrate. I was born and raised in Africa. I grew up thinking I knew about snow. I learned about it in school, I saw movies with snow in, I had seen pictures of mountains with snow on them and people skiing, I had read books about adventures in the snow. I was very comfortable with the idea of snow. However, there came a time when I first visited Europe that I experienced my first European winter. This was when I had my first actual experience of snow. I can tell you candidly that I was not prepared for that experience - the reality of snow was very different to anything that I had imagined! For example I had no idea it was so wet or so cold!
This is how it is regarding our spiritual nature, or our spirit. Although we may think we know about it and have this topic covered, the actual first hand experience of the reality of our spirit can be quite different to what we might expect. Although many of us accept that we have a spiritual nature, we have never really known how to experience it, recognise it and intentionally develop it. Although our spirit is often at work in our lives, we have used a range of words like ‘hunch’ or ‘gut instinct’, or ‘intuition’, or even ‘subconscious’ to explain it away. In church we have used word like “heart” as in Rom 10:9 “confess with your mouth … believe with your heart”. Controversial as this may be, it is actually fairly common for many people to confuse the operation of our own spirit with that of the Holy Spirit.
The Human Trinity
At this point the whole question of definitions might crop up. I can imagine someone thinking “what do we actually mean the word spirit anyway?” This is both a fascinating and important question. At the same time I am pretty certain that if I asked twenty different people what they understood by their “spirit” I would get twenty very different answers. I can also be pretty certain that in nineteen out of twenty cases those answers would come from people who had probably never experienced the reality of their spirit or if they had, had not recognised it as such.
For the sake of this book I am going to ask that we park the question of definitions for now. Rather, I would like to propose using a framework outlined in the Bible
1 Thess 5:23 - may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ”
In this verse Paul does three things. Firstly, he outlines that there are three vitally distinct parts of our human existence; secondly, he assigns an order to them, spirit first and body last; and finally, he states that all three of these parts of us will be preserved eternally, in other words, we are not just a body or a soul or a spirit - we are (and eternally will be) a combination of all three.
All that I am going to ask based on the above framework is that we agree two things: firstly, that there are three different, unique, and distinct parts to us; and secondly that no two parts are the same. Our spirit is a different kind of thing to our soul, and our soul is a different kind of thing to our body. To help our understanding we can use the simple model below:
Body: Our body is our hardware - the physical part of us including organs, blood, bones, skin, hair, joints, cells, nerves, bio-electrical systems, brain, etc. Basically, the part of us that functions by means of the physical senses.
Soul: Our soul is invisible, it is software. It is the part of us that thinks and feels and interprets the data coming from the body. The software depends on the hardware to run. If the hardware malfunctions, the software doesn’t work. For example, if you put me under anaesthetic, then everything from my soul goes away because my physical body is anaesthetised and I am unconscious .
Spirit: The invisible part of us that is distinct and separate from both hardware and software. This part does not depend on my body (hardware) to function. For example, if I am under anaesthetic and I have vivid memories of the experience. This is clearly not the soul, because the sensory machinery is off-line. Another example is a baby in the womb who is able to process and respond to language, even though the brain has not been physically formed and will only really start to function one year after birth.
My intention in outlining this framework is to provide a Biblical tool that can help us to pay attention and learn to recognise the different parts of us, and separate them out so as to learn more about how we are made and how to optimise that design..