4. Why Work on Your Spirit?
The human spirit has received very little attention in Christianity. It has been written about a lot over the centuries but it has rarely been taught in its own right. The Church historically has not invested in developing a mature theology of the human spirit. That is going to make this journey challenging because it will mean that there is going to be no safe, well-developed body of teaching we can refer to. In other words, nobody has done the producing on this yet. But, what we do have is an an abundance of raw materials. There are also vast resources that will only become available (i.e. begin to make sense to us) once we have gone a little way on the journey. The Bible is one of these.
When we start to engage our spirit I can guarantee that the experience will seem new and unfamiliar to many people. That will be because we will not have previously paid much attention to our spirit . Our souls either have no idea that our spirit exists or if they do, they do not really believe it. The result is that when our spirit makes itself known it can come as quite a surprise which can cause us to experience some doubts and fears. It can cause us to start to question what we are doing and why. To prepare for this it is quite important to set out some of the motivating reasons on why we want to develop our spiritual potential, so that these can help us to keep going and press through through any initial disorientation.
God is Spirit
The first motivation is that it is a key part of Jesus’ teaching. Jesus said “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth (reality)…” (John 4:24). This is a striking verse and a very stark statement of how things are. God is a Spirit, and therefore the essence of who He is is spiritual. If we are going to have fellowship with Him, we are not going to be able to do this with our minds and bodies alone. We are going to need to connect with Him by means of our spirit. It therefore follows that the more we develop our spirit, the better our relationship with our Father will be. In fact, the Bible refers to God’s Fatherhood primarily in spiritual ways, firstly as the “Father of Lights”
Jas: 1:17 - ..every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights”
and secondly as the Father of our spirits
Heb 12:9 - Shouldn’t we submit even more to the Father of spirits and live?
Taking this further, we know that God has revealed Himself by means of his Word. This is a fundamental Christian truth. This means by studying His word, we can get to know him. This is the basis for preaching, bible study, theological training and ministry. At the same time, even in this area both Jesus and Paul hint that God’s revelation of Himself through His word is aimed at our spirit rather than our soul. Jesus says “The words that I speak to you are spirit and they are life” (John 6:63). It follows logically that spiritual words are aimed at our spirit. Paul says something similar in 1 Cor 2:13 “which also we speak, not in words taught of human wisdom, but in those taught of the Spirit, communicating spiritual things by spiritual means.” This seems to imply that without developing our spirit, our appreciation of God’s word will be limited, and our ability to apprehend Him through His word.
The challenge that we will encounter here will be that mainstream Christian culture is not geared towards engaging God in a spiritual way. This is not intentional, rather it stems from a lack of knowledge and investment in this area. It is quite simply not a priority. With so little investment and teaching there can be there can be little surprise about this. As a result, the dominant focus of Christian worship has become engaging our senses, our mind, our emotions, and our bodies, in a best effort to stimulate spiritual growth and maturity. The challenge is that each of our natures, body, soul and spirit, functions in a very specific way, and while there is undoubtedly some indirect benefit to our spirits and people undoubtedly do grow spiritually in some churches, I do not believe that we achieve anything near the potential that is available to us in terms of spiritual connection with our Father nor the spiritual growth that is possible through worship.
To recap, the first motivation to engage our spirit is because God is Spirit, His word is spiritual, and if we want to experience the fullness of a rich and rewarding relationship with Him, we are never going to do that with our soul. In order to know God and engage Him with our spirit that implies we need to know what our spirit is, how it works, and how it is different from the other parts of us, and intentionally develop it.
Fulfilment
The second motivation to develop our spirit is that we cannot be fulfilled otherwise. Most of the lack of fulfilment we as Christians and as human beings experience in life is rooted in our spirit. Our spirits have a desire to be recognised, to be engaged, and to be a vital part of our daily existence. They have a desire to develop, to grow, to contribute to the world and to do what it is they were designed to do.
The desires of our spirit are specific to the nature of our spirit. This means that they cannot be satisfied with things of the soul or body such as wealth, position, family, learning, prestige, achievement, food, shallow relationships, etc. Our spirit desires to do what it was designed to do above all things. And in order to do those things, it needs to be acknowledged, developed, and made strong - and this takes commitment, understanding principles, and practice.
It is vital to understand this. Our spirit is the biggest part of who we are which means we cannot live a meaningful, fulfilled and effective life - the kind of life God designed us to live - if we ignore it and do not take time to develop it and allow it to be free to do what God designed it to do. When our spirit is doing what it is designed to do then life flows to us and life flows from us into the world around us, and we become life-giving and fulfilled - and God gains great pleasure from this and rejoices with us.
Freedom
The next motivation is a bit deeper and has to do with freedom from circumstance. The world is an unfair place. Some are born rich, some poor, some disabled, some not, some into loving families, some orphaned, some into places where their skin or gender are hated, some into great privilege. On the surface of it there is not much we can do about the circumstances we were born into. The only choice we seem to have in life is to make the best of what we have and work to improve it. As the saying goes - we all need to play the hand we were dealt. And so we generally accept the constraints around us and do the best we can. This is the widely accepted status quo.
And yet none of the constraints that we have listed apply to the biggest part of us, our spirit. Our spirit is not constrained by the circumstances of our birth or even for that matter the world around us. Our spirit is not the product of our environment but a product of the Light of God. Each and every one of our spirits was designed personally by Him and is magnificent Not only that, but our spirits have so much potential inside of them that they are able to complete transform our circumstances. History has proved time and again that people with well developed spirits are able to rise above any circumstance and achieve remarkable and full lives regardless of any disadvantages they might have experienced in life.
This is great news because it means that there is a great hope for each of us. There is a fantastic opportunity for us to change our circumstance, and not one single one of us is disadvantaged in this area. Due to the fact that our spirit is not subject to circumstances every single one of us gets exactly the same opportunity to develop it. Nobody starts off in life with a spiritual advantage. It is just as easy or hard for each of us to develop our spirit as for the next person - regardless. Practically, this means that there are no barriers - each and every one of us is able to develop our spirit equally.
In summary, the next motivation to develop our spirit is that it frees us from the circumstances and constraints we were born into and opens up a whole new world of possibility for us. This gives us a very different perspective on the unfairness in the world around us. Once our spirit starts to develop, the spell of the rat race around us will be broken, and we will begin to see the world in a new and fresh way. That opens us up to experience a wonderful new freedom to enjoy the world around us.
Your Spiritual Talents
The next motivation is that we will miss out on the excitement and satisfaction that comes from discovering and unpacking our unique spiritual talents and using those spiritual powers to contribute to making the world around us a better place. During our life, we invest a huge amount of time and effort to develop our natural abilities. We go to school, we study, we go to university or take an apprenticeship, we build a network of relationships, and we get a job, or engage in some kind of business to sustain us. We also develop our bodies through exercise, training, sports, outdoor pursuits, diet and nutrition. And yet we fail to make any investment in identifying and developing our spiritual abilities.
If we do not invest in this area, we will miss out on one of the greatest joys given to us as human beings to discover and develop the astonishing special abilities that God has designed into our spirit. These abilities are designed to impact the world around us and it is a great loss when they are not developed. God has given each one of us unique spiritual powers to enjoy and for the benefit of all. And yet, even when we understand this, we can forget the principle that that these abilities are just like our natural abilities, they need to be discovered and developed. And developing our spiritual powers takes time, study, effort, and practice, just the same as developing our natural abilities; except the returns for the effort we put in are far greater. It is a tragedy for us to live our whole life ignorant of our true power and impact, leaving us poorer and unfulfilled, the world around us a darker place, and God saddened that we have not discovered the gifts He has placed in us to discover and use.
Effective Living
The final reason to engage our spirit is that a vital and healthy spirit gives us the ability to live an outward focused, effective and transformational life. There is a lot of inward focus at the moment in society and the Church. Somehow, with all the changes happening around us, new technologies, the breakdown of marriage and society, massive population explosion, global environmental crises, bio-technology, communities and groups are turning more and more inward to find safety from the uncertainty and unpredictability of the world outside. In theological circles this has been called ghetto Christianity - where we retreat into Christian ghettos to be together with similar minded folks and build an insurmountable barrier between ourselves and the outside world. While getting together is very important, this is not our Father’s great mission to establish His Kingdom on Earth.
There are however good reasons for this, and one of these is a poverty mentality where we look at the very limited resources of our soul and realise that they are just not nearly sufficient for the mission we are called to. We see this as a numbers game. There are lots more of “them” out there in the world than “us”, which leads to an unhealthy reliance and expectation that either we need better and more effective programs and the financial resources to implement them, or that the Holy Spirit must do it all supernaturally. But what if the reason we are having so little impact is because we have failed to develop the vast resources that God has placed in our spirit? What if developing our spirit could allow each one of us to have a phenomenal impact on the world around us - impacting things such as political climate, corruption, economic upturns, crime statistics, urban renewal, education, social change? What if numbers are irrelevant because one individual with a developed spirit is able to have a massively disproportionate influence on the world?
My hope is that once we as Christians begin to develop our spiritual potential that this will change our ghetto mentality and create an earnest desire to be transformational and start seeing the Kingdom of Heaven established on earth. Think about this. What kind of change could you effect in the world around you if you were a billionaire? You could set up institutes, charities, hospitals, feeding hundreds of thousands of starving people, and accomplish a huge variety of things. If only we had those kind of resources! But what if we do have the resources, resources that are far more powerful and weighty than money, resources which are powerful enough to produce money, and all that we need to do is to develop them.
Summary
The reasons we have just looked at are in no way a complete list - they are just the tip of the iceberg to get you thinking. The purpose of this section has been to outline some of the key reasons to engage our spirit so that we can stay motivated. This should be enough to help us decide if the journey is something we are ready for, that it is worthwhile, and most importantly, help to motivate us in getting through any discomfort in the first stages.