Please turn to 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24.
And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly;
and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Faithful is he that calleth you, who will also do it.
Let us have a further word of prayer.
Dear Lord, we thank Thee for gathering us together this afternoon in Thy precious name. Lord, it is our confidence that Thou art here. We do realize that we are standing on holy ground.
Lord, teach us how to remove our shoes and be before Thee as Thy bond-slaves. Lord, what hast Thou to say to us? Speak, and we will obey.
We commit this time into Thy hands. We trust Thy Holy Spirit to quicken Thy Word to our hearts. Deliver us from just mental exercise.
Lord, we pray that our whole being may be open before Thee and allow Thee to do Thy work of sanctifying us according to Thy will. We ask in Thy precious name. Amen.
In these afternoons, for three sessions, God willing, we will focus on this benediction of the apostle Paul to the church in Thessalonica:
Now the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly;
and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Faithful is he that calleth you, who will also do it.
Thank God, He is the holy God. He is altogether different. He is unique. He is all by Himself, separated from everything.
And this God Himself will sanctify us, that we too may be separated from everything that is not of God. How much is in us that is not of God! What a tremendous work He has to do in us. But He said that He will sanctify us personally. He will look to it that it is done.
Our spirit, our soul, and our body—that is our whole being—will be preserved blameless. Now, brothers and sisters, just think of it: blameless. Nothing to be ashamed of. Not only will we not be ashamed before Him, but even He will not be ashamed of us, blameless at the coming of the Lord Jesus.
Thank God, He is faithful who calls us, and He will perform it. We know that it is the will of God, and it is the delight of God, to sanctify us.
By sanctifying us, it means that we are to be separated—not only separated from everything that is not of God, but wholly devoted to Him. That is sanctification. That is holiness.
In these afternoons, we will fellowship together concerning how this God of peace will do this marvelous work. Yesterday afternoon, we said that when God created man, He created us as tripartite beings, with a spirit, a soul, and a body.
He used the red earth to form our body. With this body, we are conscious of the world around us. Then He breathed the breath of life into our nostrils, and this breath of life, which came directly from God Himself—Who is life—became our spirit.
God is Spirit, so He gave man a spirit in order that we might communicate with God.
I remember many years ago, when the Russian astronauts first went into space. One came back and said that he looked around and found there was no God. Nonsense. Why? Because God cannot be seen with the body. God cannot even be imagined with our mind. God is Spirit, and unless your spirit is living, you cannot see Him, touch Him, or know Him.
When the breath of life that came directly from God entered the nostrils of this earthen form, a third element came into being, and that is our soul. The Bible says that man became a living soul. In other words, man became conscious of himself.
Our soul enables us to be conscious of ourselves. It gives us our individuality as well as our personality. Our soul is the central part of our being.
That is why you find that the Bible sometimes uses the word soul instead of person. The Bible says that seventy souls entered into Egypt, meaning that seventy persons came into Egypt. Our soul is the central part of our being; in other words, our soul is ourselves.
In God’s divine creative order, our spirit is in the highest place of our being. It is to be the master. It communes with God, receiving the mind of God and the will of God, and then it delivers what it learns from God to our soul.
Our soul is like a steward. It receives its orders from the master and then passes them on to our body, which is like a servant, to carry out the will of God. This is the divine order of God.
But, as we mentioned yesterday, when man sinned, the Lord said, “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Yet Adam lived on for hundreds of years, longer than anybody here, and he had sons and daughters.
As far as his body was concerned, it did not go into death until hundreds of years later. As far as his soul was concerned, he still had emotions and family life. His soul was still living, even though it was lost and one day would go into death.
But the Bible said, “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” On the day that man sinned against God, his spirit died.
Death means the cessation of communication with one’s proper environment. When our body is dead, we are no longer conscious of our proper environment—the world around us. When our soul is dead, we are lost in our fallen soul, cut off from the life of God. But when the spirit is dead, all communication with God ceases.
This was typified by Adam being driven out of the garden of Eden.
Brothers and sisters, we thank God that the first thing God does to restore us before Him, to reconcile us, and to bring us into peace with Him, is to quicken this dead spirit.
You must be born again. You must be born from above. You must be born of the Spirit—that is, of the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God touches our dead spirit and quickens it into new life: a new spirit.
Those who believe in the Lord Jesus—what does it mean to be saved? It means that when you believe in the Lord Jesus as your personal Savior, your dead spirit is touched by the Spirit of God and brought into new life. Immediately, your spirit is alive unto God.
The Holy Spirit and your spirit bear witness that you are children of God. First of all, God brings our spirit back into being, living unto God.
But this new spirit needs to be strengthened through communion and close relationship with God. By drawing near to God in our daily life, we exercise our spirit and its faculty of communion. We need to be in touch with God all the time. The more we draw near to God, the stronger our spirit becomes.
We also need to exercise the intuitive power in our spirit. We need to learn to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit, the anointing that is in us, because He will teach us in all things, small things and great things. If we listen to the anointing within us, we abide in Christ.
We need also to exercise our conscience, because our conscience is brought back to life. Before we believed in the Lord Jesus, there was still some function in the conscience; otherwise, no one could be saved. God must touch our conscience in order to bring us back to Himself.
But the standard of our conscience was lost. God should be the standard of our conscience, but society, the world, and public opinion governed our conscience. Thus, our conscience was no longer reliable.
People may say, “I have a clear conscience,” and yet do many things against God, against people, and against themselves, because the conscience has been hardened by sin.
Thank God, when we are born again, this conscience is cleansed by the blood of the Lord Jesus. The Bible says that His blood cleanses us from an evil conscience. God Himself now becomes the standard of our conscience, and we need to be careful to listen to it.
If our conscience is lost, we are like a ship without a compass. Thank God, He will purify our spirit from all the pollutions of the world and of sin. We need to be filled with the Holy Spirit, so that daily we are under the control and rule of the Holy Spirit. That is having our spirit wholly sanctified.
This is what we considered yesterday. This afternoon, we will go to the second part: our soul being wholly sanctified.
So far as God’s salvation is concerned, and so far as the finished work of Christ is concerned, when He provided His salvation for us, it was done once for all.
Our God is not limited by time and space. He is eternal. Whatever He does is everlasting. Therefore, the work of our Lord Jesus on the cross is eternal. It is not limited by time or space.
Those who lived before the time of our Lord on earth and those who live afterward all look to the cross for salvation, because the cross is eternal. So far as God’s salvation is concerned, it is once for all. It is finished.
But so far as our experience is concerned, as we enter into the salvation of God, it comes step by step until it is fully accomplished.
At the time when you believed in the Lord Jesus, something marvelous happened to you. Your dead spirit was brought into life. This is your new birth. You are now in communion with God, and you cry out, “Abba, Father.”
When you are saved, not only is your spirit brought into new life, but even your soul is touched. Why? Because repentance means a change of mind.
When the Holy Spirit uses the Word of God to touch our conscience and bring us into conviction of sin, at the same time our mind undergoes a sudden change. Before that, you were facing hell and sin. That was what you loved, and that was the direction in which you were going. But somehow there is a change of mind.
It is just like the prodigal son. He was in a far country, wasting all that the father had given him. But in desperation, he suddenly woke up: “In my father’s house there is plenty, and why should I be dying here?” So he rose up and began to return home. There was a change of mind.
Before that, he wanted to leave home as far as possible; now he wanted to go home. That is a change of mind. But remember: even though there was a change of mind, it was not yet a renewing of the mind. In other words, the soul still waits to be saved.
At the moment we are saved, salvation also touches our body. Before you believed in the Lord Jesus, you were under such pressure and burden of sin and of the world; your face became longer and longer. But when you believe in the Lord Jesus, does not your face begin to change? It begins to become rounder and rounder.
So salvation does touch your body, but unfortunately it is superficial. Your body needs to be wholly sanctified and to enter into resurrection.
Let us remember that when we are saved, something happens to our whole being. But the basic thing that happens is in our spirit. Our soul needs to be saved.
When God created man, He made us a living soul. He gave us all the necessary, legitimate, proper functions of the soul.
We are created as living souls. We have a will, we have a mind, and we have emotions. A baby is born, and very soon you discover that he has a will of his own. You want to sleep at night, but he says, “No, I want to eat.”
There is a will of his own. There is emotion there; he manifests his anger. He has a mind of his own. These are legitimate functions that make you a living soul, an animated being.
But in the garden of Eden, our forefathers used their soul illegitimately.
Eve, when she was tempted by the tempter, looked at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and saw that it was good for food. Her mind began to long for it, her emotion was stirred up, lust began to come forth, and she set her will to take it because it would make her as God.
After she ate it, she gave it to her husband. The Bible says that the woman was deceived, but the man was not deceived. Adam deliberately knew that he was against God’s will, but somehow he loved his wife so much that he did not want to lose her. He would rather choose his wife than God, so he ate it.
This was the illegitimate use of his soul. Through one man, Adam, sin entered into the world.
The soul of man was meant to be a steward, receiving the will of God through his spirit. In the beginning, when man and woman were in the garden, God came and fellowshipped with them. They were like innocent children. They relied on God for everything and trusted in God.
But man’s soul began to take over the mastership. Instead of asking God, instead of using the spirit to commune with God and know His will, the soul declared its independence.
The soul took over the place of the spirit, became an unrighteous steward, and tried to be a false master. Sin entered into the soul of man. Our soul fell and was lost.
Adam sinned and became a sinner. But we, who come from Adam, are sinners even before we sin. Adam sinned in order to become a sinner before God, but we are in a worse condition because we come out of Adam, out of that fallen line.
We inherit from him that fallen soul, the soul that is dominated and ruled by sin. We are sinners by birth, and because we are sinners, it is natural for us to sin. Are you ever surprised that you sin? That is normal for a sinner.
We inherit from our forefathers a fallen soul. Our soul is completely cut off from God, alienated from God, the Originator of life. Our soul is dominated by sin and falls into itself. It becomes self-centered and selfish. Everything is “I, I, I.”
The Bible says that man has become flesh. The flesh here does not mean simply blood and flesh. It means soul and body, but no functioning spirit—not that you have no spirit, but that your spirit has lost its proper communication and is dead to God.
Thus, you are just soul and body. That is why people in the world today know only that they have a soul and a body; they do not know that they have a spirit. Unfortunately, even in Christianity, people often speak of dualism: soul and body, with spirit merely a part of the soul. Because of that, people do not know spiritual things.
If you read the Word of God, what kind of life does fallen man, a fallen soul, live?
We are born with a soul, and to be soulical is natural. That is to say, because we have a soul, we properly function with all that God has endowed us with. We think, imagine, analyze, feel, and decide. These are proper things.
But when man fell, instead of being soulical, we became soulish. To be soulish means that we have fallen into our soul and allowed our soul to dominate our being and express itself instead of expressing God.
Before we are saved, brothers and sisters, we are all fallen souls. We are soulical—soulish—not spiritual. What kind of life did we live?
If you turn to Romans 1, you will find a description of the life of a fallen soul. Even though we know from creation the divinity and power of God, we will not honor Him or have Him in our lives. So our mind becomes darkened, our will is perverted, and our emotions find wrong expression.
We fall into the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. If you want to know the details, read Romans 1:18 onward.
If you want to know what kind of life you lived before, read Ephesians 2:1-3. We were dead in sins and transgressions. We were living dead because we were dead to God, dead to life.
We did everything according to our mind and according to our flesh. We thought we were free, not knowing that we were under the dominion of the evil power of the air. We were sons of wrath. That was our situation.
But thank God, He loves us. He will not let us go. He sent His only begotten Son into this world to become a man.
He took upon Himself the form of a man, the form of sinful flesh; but remember, there was one difference: He was without sin. Therefore, He Who was sinless could become a substitute for us sinners.
He took upon Himself all the sins of the world.
Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.
He took your sins, my sins, and all the sins we have committed. He took them all upon Himself, and there He became our substitute. He died on the cross, rejected by man and forsaken by His Father. Why?
Before He died, He cried, “It is finished.” Then He bowed His head and gave up His spirit to His Father. It is done, brothers and sisters. What God has done for us!
Because He took our sins upon Himself and died for us, we need die no more. Our sins are forgiven and remitted because of the blood of our Lord Jesus. We are born again and given a new life. Like the prodigal, we came home.
When you were first saved, you thought, “Now I am a new creature. Everything is new. All the old things have passed away.” Thank God, under that first love, it seemed to be so.
You loved to read the Bible; every word spoke to you. You loved to pray and draw near to God. You loved to assemble with the saints and fellowship with other believers. You learned to testify to the goodness of the Lord.
If there was any demand from our Lord, you willingly obeyed. No problem.
But gradually, your first love began to wane. You found that your old Adam, old “I,” old man, self, and flesh began to rise up and exert themselves upon you. Do you discover that?
As we said yesterday, a civil war began within you. Your spirit desires to do right, but your flesh is weak.
You enter into the experience of the apostle Paul written in Romans 7. You know what is right. You want to do the things that please God, but you find another law, another life in you, that is opposed to that desire.
In man there is an inner man and an outward man. According to the inner man, he wants to do the will of God and please God; but the outward man will not allow him to do so and drags him down to his former life.
He tries. He determines. He makes promises. No use. No use. There is repeated failure. He has to cry out:
O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?
Is there no salvation that God has prepared for us? Is there any imperfection in the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus? Certainly not.
So far as God’s salvation is concerned, it is finished. Everything is ready. Everything is prepared. Everything that needs to be done has been done by our Lord Jesus. Thank God for that.
But the problem is that we do not know it. We are ignorant. God has already provided, yet we are still striving, struggling, and trying by ourselves to live a holy life, a life pleasing to God. But we find it is beyond us.
I often say that a nervous Christian is a good Christian. You are nervous because you want to please God, but you cannot.
Until one day, you come to the end of your struggle. Thank God, He begins to open your understanding and bring you back to the old cross.
There you see that when our Lord Jesus died on the cross, He not only died as your substitute, taking all the sins you had committed upon His own body and receiving the penalty—the wages of sin, which is death—for you.
But He knows that that which is born of the flesh is flesh. We who were born of the flesh of Adam are flesh. That Adamic life cannot be changed.
No matter what you do with your old self, with your Adamic life, it cannot be changed. That which is born of the flesh is flesh.
Then you begin to realize, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Who? There is One. He has already done it.
God is not going to repair your flesh. God is not going to improve your flesh. God is going to do a drastic work. He says, “The flesh must die.”
When our Lord Jesus went to the cross, He took the whole Adamic race with Him. Our Lord Jesus is the second Man. He is the last Adam.
Adam is a federal head, the ancestor of mankind. Everyone born into this world is in Adam and receives from Adam his life and his nature. Though different people manifest different aspects of the Adamic life, it is still Adam: fleshly, selfish, sinful, dead to God, and rebellious.
When God sent His Son into this world, He came as the last Adam. In other words, God said, “Let the Adamic race be terminated at the death of this Man, the last Adam.”
He took the whole Adamic race—you, me, everyone—with Him to the cross. When He died, the whole Adamic race died.
I love to use this illustration. The Chinese often trace their ancestry to the Yellow Emperor. Legend tells us that one day the Yellow Emperor had a battle with Chiyou. During that battle there was fog everywhere. How could they fight in the fog?
Fortunately, the Yellow Emperor invented the compass. With the compass, he was able to defeat his enemy instead of being defeated. That is why you find the Chinese race today.
Now suppose he had not invented that compass and had been killed by Chiyou. Where would you Chinese be? You would be terminated, because your federal head would be dead.
How marvelous is the way God does things. He created only one man so that every man would be in him and under him.
You may say, “Well, if Adam sinned, God could create another man who would not sin. Would that not be easier?” No. If He did that, the other man would sin again. What would you do?
So God put all the men coming out of Adam in Adam, so that when the last Adam came, everyone in Adam died with Him on the cross.
That is what our Lord Jesus did on Calvary’s cross. It was more than bearing our sins in His body. He died as our representative. He represented every one of us—this Adamic life, this self-life, this flesh, this “I.” He took all of us with Him, and when He was crucified, we too were crucified. God did it.
In Romans 6:6, Paul says:
Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him,
that the body of sin might be done away,
that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin.
When Christ was crucified two thousand years ago, you and I were also crucified—dead. That old life was terminated.
You may say, “How can it be?” Let me ask you: why is it that when you confess your sins and ask God to forgive you, He forgives you? Because you believe in the blood of our Lord Jesus that was shed two thousand years ago.
You say, “I was not there. I was not born yet. I had not committed any sins yet.” Yet God knows, because He is eternal. With Him there is no time factor. God already knows every sin you will commit. He knew them already, and He laid all these things upon His Beloved.
When you believe, your sins are forgiven. Simple. Take it by faith, believing what God has done in Christ Jesus.
God does not do this separately in every one of us. God did it all in His Son, and by faith we appropriate it to ourselves.
That is why the apostle Paul says in Galatians 2:20:
I have been crucified with Christ;
and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me:
and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith,
the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.
Our dear brother Watchman Nee, after he was saved, found for a number of years that he could not overcome his old flesh.
After six or seven years—perhaps seven years—one day he was reading the Bible in his room. Suddenly, the Holy Spirit opened this truth to him. How could Christ, Who died two thousand years ago, have a death that was also his death?
He wanted to die to himself, but he could not. The more you try to die to yourself, the more alive you are.
But that day, suddenly the Lord opened his understanding. “Aha,” he said, “I was dead with Him. Why? Because I was in Him.”
If you put something in a book and drop the book, where is that thing? Does it remain floating in the air? No, it also drops. You did not drop that thing separately; you dropped the book, but whatever was in the book also dropped.
Suddenly it dawned upon him: “I am in Christ. God has put me in Christ, and when Christ died, I died. Thank God for that.”
He rushed down from his room and met a brother downstairs. He held him and said, “Brother, do you know I’m dead?” The brother looked at him and said, “What happened?” “Oh,” he said, “I’m dead. I’m dead.”
Brothers and sisters, thank God, that is the truth. Truth is eternal. It is real in God, and it is real in us, but we need to appropriate it by faith.
In the same way that you believe that Jesus died for your sins, believe that Jesus died for you. When He died, you died. When He rose from the dead, you were raised from the dead.
This has actually been demonstrated in your life, though you may not know it. You were baptized.
When you were baptized, do you know what you were doing? Baptism is not merely a performance; it is a testimony. It is an acting out of something that has already been done.
In baptism, you go into the water, you are buried under the water, and you rise again out of the water. What is it? It is identification with the likeness of His death, burial, and resurrection.
Actually, in your baptism, you already acted it out. Yet you may not believe it. You were dead. No longer I; it is Christ Who lives in you. This is salvation. This is the salvation of the soul.
In the Bible, you have the very term, the salvation of the soul. There are two books in the Bible, especially Hebrews and 1 Peter, that deal with the salvation of the soul.
In Hebrews 10:39, the Bible says:
But we are not of them that shrink back unto perdition;
but of them that have faith unto the saving of the soul.
The perdition there does not mean eternal perdition. The whole book of Hebrews does not deal with eternal salvation, eternal life, or eternal death. Those matters have already been dealt with for Hebrew believers. The whole book deals with the saving of the soul.
How can our soul be saved? Not unto perdition. That perdition does not refer to eternal perdition; it refers to the kingdom, the thousand years, the age to come—the saving of the soul.
Then you find in 1 Peter 1:9:
Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.
Concerning this salvation, as you read on, Peter says that the prophets of old, moved by the Holy Spirit, prophesied concerning the sufferings of Christ and the glories that should follow. Even the angels desire to look into this salvation.
Do you know that the salvation of the soul is something prophesied by the prophets of old? They knew it not for themselves, but for us. Do you know that the salvation of the soul is something even the angels long to understand? Yet today God’s people have completely forgotten it. How sad it is.
The foundation of the salvation of our soul is the finished work of Christ on the cross. His death is our death—death to the flesh and death to the self-life.
His resurrection is our resurrection, that we may live in newness of life. By faith, we appropriate it. This is the truth.
Now we come to the experiential side. How do we enter into the experience of the saving of our souls?
First of all, in your Christian experience, sooner or later you will discover that there is a difference between your soul and your spirit.
In Hebrews 4:12, it says:
For the word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword,
and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow,
and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Before we believed in the Lord Jesus, our spirit was dead. We were dominated by our soul. We knew only our soul: me, I, mine. That was all we knew.
Even when we are saved and our spirit comes back into life, the Holy Spirit becomes the very life of our spirit. But unfortunately, the “I” is still the life of the soul. Gradually, you begin to discover the difference between soul and spirit.
That is the beginning. Without that knowledge, you do not even know where to begin. You have to see this.
Personally, I feel that after salvation, this is the next Christian experience. You begin to see that there is a civil war within you. You become uneasy about it.
As you read the Word of God, gradually it comes to you that not everything coming from this born-again person is acceptable or pleasing to God. Something old is still there. That is the first awakening.
When you are awakened to that, some people begin to doubt whether they are saved. But actually, it is a good sign. It shows that you are gradually entering into the life of the spirit. That is the first step.
The second step is this: as you seek the Lord, He will open your understanding. He will begin to show you that when Christ died on the cross, you died too.
Romans 6 begins to become something you know. Actually, you should have known it long before, but unfortunately we do not know. When you come to Romans 6 after Romans 3, 4, and 5, you begin to know that your old man was crucified with Christ.
When you are enlightened and come to see the fact of the cross, then you embrace it by faith. That is Romans 6:11:
Even so reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin,
but alive unto God in Christ Jesus.
You begin to exercise your faith: to reckon, to accept, to count it as true that you are dead to sin in Christ Jesus—not in yourself, but in Christ Jesus—and that you are alive unto God in Christ Jesus.
When you begin to accept this by faith, you find that it is a finished work of Christ. It is done.
Still, at first it is something you accept objectively. It is the truth. You accept the truth by faith and stand upon it, and you find that it works. It works.
But sometimes it works, and sometimes it does not seem to work. When temptation comes, you say, “I am dead, I am dead.” The more you say, “I am dead,” the more alive you seem to be. What happened? Is there something wrong with the truth? No.
Let me use an illustration. Suppose in your yard you have a bad apple tree. All the apples are sour. How are you going to improve that apple tree?
By grafting. You make a cut near the bottom of the tree, then make another vertical cut, and place into that wound a twig that comes from a good apple tree.
Very soon you find the tree begins to grow with a new nature and produces sweet, juicy apples. Marvelous.
But that is not the end. Gradually, shoots will come out below the cut. If you are not watchful and allow them to grow, the apples that grow on those shoots below the cut will not be sweet. They will be sour, hard, and cannot be eaten.
What does the gardener do? Whenever he sees any shoots coming out below the cut, he cuts them off. Then you get all the good apples. Hallelujah!
Brothers and sisters, this is what happens. God has done a grafting into your life. The cross has made a cut in your life, and Christ’s life is implanted into you.
If you allow that new life to grow, that is the fruit of the Spirit. But unfortunately, under the cut, the flesh tries to come out again. Cut it off. That is what the Bible says.
What God has done is done. There is no doubt about that. But the Holy Spirit, Who is in you, will continually teach you, remind you, and warn you.
Whenever something from beneath the cross—your old self—tries to raise its head, the Holy Spirit tells you, “Cut it off.” By the power of the Holy Spirit, on the basis of the cross, you are able to cut it off.
That is why the Bible says that whoever loves his soul-life will lose it, but whoever is willing to lose his soul-life for the Lord’s sake will gain it unto eternity.
On the experiential side, daily we need to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him.
By the power of His cross, we are able to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him.
In following the Lord, you will find that the Holy Spirit arranges our circumstances and brings crosses into our lives. Do not try to create crosses for other people. Do not try to make crosses for yourself. There is no need. You have plenty of crosses to bear.
The Holy Spirit will arrange the crosses for you. Through the cross, everything that is of the old Adamic life, everything of the flesh, everything of “I, my, mine,” will be revealed and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, cut off.
Brothers and sisters, our emotions need to be purified. That is why the Lord said that if anyone loves father, mother, brothers, sisters, wife, children, or even himself more than Him, he cannot be His disciple.
Why? Because our emotions have fallen. They need to be rescued. By loving the Lord more than anything else, our emotions are set in their proper place. His life will control our emotions.
It does not mean that we will love less. We will love more, because it is Christ’s love that loves through us.
Our mind needs to be renewed. Do not mind the things of man, but mind the things of God. Remember how Peter minded the things of man and tried to persuade the Lord not to go to the cross.
The Lord said that if you save your life, you will lose it; if you lose your life for His sake, you will gain it.
Brothers and sisters, our will needs to be rescued. “Not My will, but Thine, be done.”
As we go through this process of sanctification, being delivered from the self-life and entering into Christ’s life, our soul is gradually and increasingly saved.
The salvation of our spirit is once for all. The salvation of the soul is a continuing process.
The salvation of our spirit happens when you believe in the Lord Jesus. The salvation of the soul happens after you believe in the Lord Jesus, until the day when you see His face.
As we continue in this path, then at the coming of our Lord Jesus, we are preserved blameless because we are like Him. We have been changed into His likeness.
When He returns in glory, we will enter into glory with Him. That is the will of God. He will lead many sons into glory. Praise the Lord.
Let us pray.
Dear heavenly Father, why dost Thou love us so much? Oh, Lord Jesus, why dost Thou love us so much, giving Thyself for us?
Full of gratitude, we thank Thee for dying on the cross for us, bearing our sins within Thee, forgiving us, and taking us to the cross.
Lord, Thou hast done the right thing. We accept it. We trust Thy Holy Spirit to bring us into the full experience of the work of the salvation of the soul that Thou hast accomplished for us, that we may be wholly sanctified.
Glory to God. In the precious name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.