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.
Proverbs 20:27
The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord,
Searching all his innermost parts.
Let us have a word of prayer.
Dear Lord, we do want to thank Thee for what Thou hast done for us. We thank Thee that Thou hast perfected forever salvation. Thou dost save to the uttermost, and we thank Thee that Thou hast called us into this glory.
So we pray, Lord, as we continue in Thy presence, that Thou wilt, by Thy Spirit, quicken Thy Word to our hearts, that we may not only understand, but that we may enter in.
We commit this time into Thy hands. May Thy name be glorified. We ask in Thy precious name. Amen.
We began to have some fellowship on 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and 24. We find that we have all been called. What calling has God called all of us to?
God’s calling actually is that we may be wholly sanctified, and that our whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus. Now, that is what God has called us to.
We mentioned last time that sanctification, holiness, and being holy are actually the same thing. Holy is very unique, because it is the character of God. He alone is holy.
Last time I said that in the Korean, this word holy, in Arabic—not in Sanskrit—has never been used. It is only found in God. He is the Holy One.
He is the One Who is separated from everything that is common. He is unique. He is all by Himself. And that is what holiness really means.
And yet we thank God that it is His will that He wants us, who are His people, to be holy. That is to say, He wants us to be so separated from anything and everything that is common, ordinary, worldly, natural, and fleshly.
He wants us to take upon us His own character of being extraordinary, unique, and all by Himself. That is to say, to be like Him.
And that is what God’s purpose is for us. That is what we are called to. And He said He will perform it, because nobody can do such a work. But He said He will do it.
So what we need is to respond to Him: to be wholly sanctified.
Spirit, soul, and body—you know, when God created us, He created us in such a unique way that we are tripartite. Our being is made up of three parts: spirit, soul, and body.
Spirit gives us God-consciousness, because God is Spirit, and we can only communicate with God if we have a spirit.
Soul gives us self-consciousness. We are conscious of ourselves, of our being. And then body gives us world-consciousness, to be conscious of the physical world around us. That is how we are made up.
And God said He wants our spirit to be wholly sanctified. Our spirit will be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus. So this is something that really concerns every one of us, and this is something that we should seek after.
Last time we just laid the foundation. Now this morning, we would like to concentrate our meditation on man’s spirit.
Do you know you have a human spirit? Do you know that you are different from all the living animals in the world?
You have a body. The other living animals all have a body. You have a soul. You are conscious of yourself. You can think, you can feel, you can decide. You have a personality.
All the animals have a soul. They have a limited amount of thinking, of feeling, even of determination.
Now, what makes man different from all the living animals? Because we are created with a soul, with a spirit. We are the only living things on the earth that can communicate with God—the spirit.
So our spirit is very, very important. According to divine order, our spirit is like a master, or a master who decides and commands.
Our soul is like a steward. It receives what is decided and commanded, and passes it on, transports it, to our body. Our body is like a servant, a slave, which works out what is being directed and communicated.
So in God’s order, man’s spirit stands at the top, even though our soul is the center of our being, because that is what we are. In the Bible, oftentimes you find soul and man are equivalent.
But our spirit, because it is able to contact God, Who is Spirit, is intended by God to take the lead. Then our soul will follow, and our body will also follow. So it is very, very important that we know our spirit.
A human spirit is a substance, but it is not a material substance. It is immaterial, incorporeal, and not physical. Our body is made of matter and can be seen, but our spirit is immaterial.
But not because of that is it less real. As a matter of fact, our human spirit is more real than even our human body. Why? Because our body is temporal.
Scientifically speaking, every seven years all the cells of your body are totally changed, so you have a new body every seven years. Not only that, but this mortal body will one day pass away.
When you are resurrected, it is a spiritual body. So the spirit is eternal. It is much more real than even our body.
Unfortunately, you find that people in the world do not know they have a spirit. In a sense, this is correct, because their spirit was dead in sins and transgressions.
Therefore, people say that a man is made up of soul and body. I remember when I was a boy, we had a missionary lady who stayed with us. This lady came from Virginia. We called her Grandma because she led my father to the Lord.
Whenever she was exasperated, you know what she would say? “Oh, my soul and body!” Now, where is the spirit?
So you find that people in the world have a soul, a living soul, and a living body, but a dead spirit. By that, it does not mean that the spirit is nonexistent. It simply means it is in a coma, in deep coma.
It has lost its ability to communicate with its proper environment—that is, God. But remember, they do have a human spirit; it has simply lost its proper function.
That is the reason why unbelievers can communicate with evil spirits. The spirit is still there, but its function is completely distorted. It has lost its proper function.
But thank God, when we believe in the Lord Jesus, the first thing God does is renew our dead spirit. He quickens our dead spirit. He takes away our sins, cleanses our conscience, and gives us a new spirit, as it were.
It is a spirit that has been cleansed, awakened, and revived—a new spirit. This is regeneration.
Not only that, but after He gives us a new spirit, His own Spirit, the Holy Spirit Himself, comes and dwells in our spirit. That is what we usually call salvation.
Now, how do you know the spirit? You cannot see it, but how do you know that it is true? We know the spirit by its functions.
We cannot see it, but the spirit has certain functions. And when it functions, we realize it is there.
According to the Word of God, the main functions of our spirit are three:
When communion, intuition, and conscience are working, you know the spirit is alive.
Communion simply means that you can communicate with God. Before you believed in the Lord Jesus, you may have believed there is a God, but He was a distant God.
You may have known many things about God, but you did not know Him personally, because there was no contact. But immediately after you are saved, something wonderful happens.
You find that communion with God is immediately reestablished. In Romans 8, we are told that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and we cry out, “Abba, Father.”
Is that not true? Maybe before you were saved, because you were brought up in a Christian family, you knew something about the Bible, and you even prayed. When you prayed, you said, “Our Father Who art in heaven,” but the feeling was different.
I have a coworker in China. He said that when he was married, the first time he went to his parents-in-law’s house, according to Chinese custom, he was to call his father-in-law “Father.”
When he entered the home and saw his father-in-law, he tried to call him father, but he felt very uncomfortable. Calling his father-in-law “Father” was very different from calling his own father.
Before you were saved, that was what you were doing. You may have prayed to God, but you prayed to your father-in-law.
But immediately after you are saved, something happens. When you pray again, there is a relationship, a closeness. He is really your Father. There is a touch there, brothers and sisters.
Your spirit has been renewed, and the Holy Spirit dwells in your spirit and bears witness with you that you are a child of God. That is the proof of salvation.
After you have a new spirit, your spiritual life begins. Before you have a new spirit, you may be religious, but you have no spiritual life.
You may even be active in Christian works, but you have no spiritual life, because spiritual life begins in the spirit.
Spiritual life is the exercise of your spirit under the influence of the Holy Spirit. That is spiritual life. Anything that does not originate from the spirit cannot be considered spiritual.
If it comes out of your soul, if it comes out of your body, that is not spiritual, no matter how alike it may look. The working of the soul and the function of the spirit may look alike in many areas, but their origins are vastly different.
So, dear brothers and sisters, there is one thing we need to remember all the way: spiritual life must begin from your spirit.
It is the Holy Spirit Who communicates God to your spirit, and then through your spirit influences your soul and your body. So it has to come from the spirit itself. That is spiritual life.
Anything that is outside of that area is not spiritual, no matter how it looks. So, brothers and sisters, it is very essential that we who are the Lord’s should know our spirit.
Do you know your spirit? Do you know how your spirit functions? Do you know how, through exercising, you can make the functions of your spirit sharper, more sensitive, and more powerful?
After you believe in the Lord Jesus, you are a newborn baby. You have a new spirit, and all the functions of your spirit begin.
For instance, after you believe in the Lord Jesus, not only is your communion with God immediately established, but in your daily life, sometimes you are going to do something that you have done all along in the past.
But when you begin to do it again, someone seems to be warning you, saying, “Be careful. Do not do it.”
Do you have such a sensation, as if someone within you is speaking to you, telling you what the will of God is and what it is not? Now, that is intuition.
What is intuition? Intuition is direct knowledge.
Mental knowledge comes by receiving information from outside. We get the data, and as we gather information, it becomes our knowledge. Human knowledge comes from outside; it is indirect. Then you analyze it.
But intuition is direct knowledge. It does not come from outside information, not because someone has taught you or told you what to do, what is right, or what is wrong.
No, it does not come from outside. It comes from your spirit. The Holy Spirit speaks to your spirit’s intuition, and you directly receive that knowledge from above. That is intuition.
So after you believe in the Lord Jesus, you find that not only does the function of communion begin, but your intuition begins to function. Not only that, your conscience also begins to function.
Now, what is conscience? Sometimes we say conscience is the voice of God.
When you are doing something that is not right in the sight of God, it may be right in your sight. It may be right according to the world’s opinion. But after you are saved, when you are doing something that is not right before God, you find your conscience begins to speak.
When your conscience speaks, it contradicts your thinking. You think one way, and your conscience tells you, “This is not right.” It accuses you.
If you are doing something right before God, it excuses you—not accuses you, but excuses you. That is the work of conscience.
Sometimes we say conscience is like the brake in a car. When you are going too fast or having some trouble, you apply the brake. That is conscience. God is keeping His hand upon the brake in your spirit.
When that happens, you had better listen to it. Do not fight against it; listen to it. The moment you are saved, your new spirit begins to function. It is supernaturally natural.
That is why, in the new covenant in which we are, it says you do not need anyone to teach you, “Know the Lord,” because every one of you, from the least to the greatest, shall know Him.
What does it mean? It means that after we are saved, we have the anointing within us. Every one of us has the Holy Spirit as the anointing. He is in us, and He teaches us in all things.
Where does He teach us? He teaches us in our intuition. Whatever He teaches—the great things and the small things—is true; it is not a lie.
If you obey His teaching, you abide in Christ. That is 1 John 2:27. That is about intuition.
So, brothers and sisters, we need to learn to walk in the inward way. Proverbs 20:27 says, “The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord.”
Think of that: man’s spirit is the lamp of God, searching all the innermost parts.
Man’s spirit is the lamp of God. Man’s spirit is not the light of God; it is the lamp of God. In other words, it is an organ, like a lamp. It is not the light itself, but it is the vessel in which the light is placed.
The light is God. God is light. The light is Christ; He is the light of life. The light is the Spirit, because He is the Spirit of light.
God Himself is the light. But where does He dwell? Where does He reveal Himself? In your spirit, because your spirit is the lamp that contains that light.
Having that light within the lamp, it searches all the innermost parts. In the old days, the belly did not mean merely the physical belly. The belly represented the soul—our soul.
It is the light from the spirit that searches every inner part of the soul. It searches our emotion, our feelings, our thinking, our willing, our opinions, and our determinations.
This light of God shines through our spirit, searching all the parts of our soul, and revealing what our mind is thinking, what our feelings and emotions are, what our will, opinion, and volition are—whether they are from God, from ourselves, or from the world.
We do not know our soul. Nobody knows himself or herself. The Bible says that the heart is deceitful above all things; who knows it? Nobody knows, but it is God Who searches the heart.
So, brothers and sisters, you find that our spirit is so essential, so central to our whole spiritual life. If we neglect our spirit, then we live in our soul. We live a fleshly life, a carnal life, not a spiritual life.
We need to know how important our spirit is. Because it is so important, we need to pay attention to our spirit, and we need to know how to facilitate the functions of our spirit.
Here is the first thing: we need to exercise our spirit.
In 1 Timothy 4:8:
For bodily exercise is profitable for a little;
but godliness is profitable for all things,
having promise of the life which now is,
and of that which is to come.
Faithful is the saying, and worthy of all acceptation.
We need to exercise our body, because bodily exercise is profitable. A body without exercise will not grow properly; it will be weakened, and very soon it will lose its ability.
In order to maintain a healthy body, not only do you need to eat right, rest right, and drink right, but you need to exercise too.
Bodily exercise is profitable, but it is profitable only for a little while, because it is only for the time that you are in this physical body.
But the Bible says, “Exercise thyself unto godliness.” What does it mean? It means exercise yourself to be like God. What is to be exercised? Your spirit.
Your spirit needs exercise. Such exercise is profitable for all things—not only in this present age while you are living, but even in eternity. That is the profit of spiritual exercise.
Now, brothers and sisters, are you exercising your spirit, or have you never exercised it? If you have never exercised your spirit, your spirit is weak, weakened, feeble, and eventually will go to sleep.
But if you exercise your spirit, it becomes stronger, keener, sharper, and more powerful. It is profitable not only while you are living on this earth, but the profit will go into eternity.
What I am afraid of is that many believers never exercise their spirit—not to say that some do not even know they have a spirit. But the more you exercise your spirit, the more you know your spirit.
Our communion needs to be exercised. When you are first saved, you pray, “Abba, Father.” Thank God for that. Your communication with God begins.
But do not stop there. You have to cultivate your relationship with God. How do you cultivate your relationship? By being with Him, by becoming more familiar with Him.
In the Bible, many different words are used: draw near to God, wait upon God, commune with God.
In 1 John 1:7:
God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.
But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light,
we have fellowship one with another,
and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin.
Fellowship, communion, sharing something in common—by sharing, that union and relationship become closer and more intimate.
God is Spirit, and we must worship Him in spirit and truth. You cannot worship God merely with your soul.
You can pray a most beautiful prayer, but God has not heard it. You may prostrate yourself on the floor, but God is not worshiped if it does not come from your spirit.
Worship is the result of communion with God. If in your daily life you are not in touch with God, and on the Lord’s Day you come to break bread, there is no worship.
You can only worship Him in spirit and truth. No matter how loud you sing, how elated your feeling is, or how beautiful and well-organized your prayer is, there is no worship if it does not come from the spirit.
Just as God said to the Pharisees, “You worship Me with your mouth, but your heart is not there.”
Worship is the result of communion. Even in a natural way, with your father or your mother, how do you become closer? You try to be together, communicate, and share your hearts.
The more you do that, the closer and stronger the relationship becomes. The same thing is true with our God.
In our daily life, we need to cultivate our friendship with God, as it were. Draw near to Him—closer to Him.
Why do we pray? Why do we read the Bible? Why do we have a so-called morning watch? These are only means; they are not the end.
The essential thing is that through these means you communicate with God. You can pray without touching Him. You can read the Bible without knowing Him.
When you have your morning watch, when you get up in the morning and are before the Lord, how do you draw near to Him?
I like a hymn by Evan Hopkins, well known as one of the theologians of the Keswick Convention. I offer it in my morning prayer before I pray:
Nothing between Thee, Lord, nothing between;
Let me Thy glory see;
Draw my soul dear to Thee,
And hear Thy voice of love—
Nothing between, nothing between.
That is the preparation for communion. When you begin to pray, do you just start praying, “Lord, bless me. Bless my family. Bless my work. Amen”?
Or are you trying to draw near to Him? Let nothing be between you and Him. You want to see His glory. You want to hear His voice.
You do not just go to Him and pour out everything, and after you finish, it is goodbye. You do not try to hear from Him. There is no communion.
You are not exercising your spirit. Brothers and sisters, we need to learn how to exercise our spirit in communion.
Before you start to pray, draw near to God. Wait upon Him. Be quiet. The Bible uses all kinds of words: when you come into the presence of God, soften your steps; be still; wait upon Him; lift up your spirit.
Or, if you cannot distinguish your spirit, lift up your heart. Draw near. Lift up your heart before Him. Ask Him to examine you, whether there is anything between you and the Lord, that there may be nothing between.
Then begin to commune with Him.
The same is true in reading the Word of God. You may say, “Every day I want to read four chapters.” If you read four chapters, you will cover the Bible once again. You simply read, and after you read, that is it. You forget all that you have read.
But when you are reading the Word, are you merely reading it with your mind? Are you reading it with your heart? Is your heart open to His speaking?
To read the Word of God is to let Him speak to your spirit, to hear His voice, and even to see His face. These are means, but the important thing is that you are in communion with God.
There is a term called “practicing the presence of God.” Actually, it means that you practice, you exercise yourself, so that you learn how to be in His presence all day long.
When you are free, or even when you are busy, maybe you stop for a few seconds and lift up your heart toward the Lord. That is practicing the presence of God, helping you to know that you are in His presence.
These are ways and means of exercising your spirit. The more you exercise your spirit, the more you know God, the more you love Him, the more you see His glory, and the more you worship Him.
How worthy He is! You put Him in His rightful place, and you put yourself in your proper place too. That is worship. That is communion.
All our worship should come from the spirit. Mary, the mother of Jesus, said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” but do not forget that she also said, “My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.”
It begins from the spirit, and the spirit begins to overflow into the soul. The soul takes it up, and our whole being becomes involved. Then you find that God is worshiped.
Communion—we need to exercise it. Intuition is the same thing. I do not believe that in any true believer, the Holy Spirit Who dwells in him or her never opens His mouth, never speaks.
Sometimes people say, “How does God speak to me? Do I hear Him with my ear?” No. You hear Him within the inner ear—a still, small voice.
“This is the way; walk ye in it.” “This is not the way; do not go there.”
Brothers and sisters, I believe every believer has experienced these things. Sometimes you are speaking, and probably before you believed in the Lord, you liked to boast and magnify your own things. It was natural.
But after you believe in the Lord, when you begin to boast, someone within you says, “You had better stop.”
Do you still go on? Well, you may; we all do, because we have to learn. But after you go on, what happens afterward? You feel uncomfortable.
You have to repent and claim the blood of the Lord Jesus. Then you are able to go on.
The important thing is: learn to obey the inner voice. Learn to obey the inner teaching. Do not neglect it.
The more you learn to listen—sometimes we are all so busy, we are so loud with our own thinking and with people’s opinions—that we cannot hear the still, small voice.
We are thinking, like Elijah, to hear thunder, or fire, or an earthquake, and assume God is speaking there. But God is not there. It is in the still, small voice that God says, “What are you doing?”
Brothers and sisters, learn to exercise your intuition. The more you exercise, the keener it will become. That is where spiritual discernment will come.
God’s people today lack spiritual discernment because they do not exercise their intuitive power.
The same thing is true with conscience. Listen to your conscience. Obey it. What will happen? Let me put it this way to help you remember:
Turn to 2 Corinthians 1:12.
For our glorying is this, the testimony of our conscience,
that in holiness and sincerity of God,
not in fleshly wisdom but in the grace of God,
we behaved ourselves in the world,
and more abundantly to you-ward.
Our conscience leads us to testimony, that we may have a good testimony before God. We are really not living according to fleshly wisdom, but in God’s grace.
So, brothers and sisters, conscience is very important. When your conscience is lost, your faith leaks out; it is shipwrecked.
A believer’s conscience is very important, and the standard of our conscience, of course, is God Himself. He is the standard of our conscience.
That is the first thing: exercise your spirit.
The second thing you find in the Word of God concerning our spirit is that we need the strengthening of our spirit.
Ephesians 3:16-19 says:
That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory,
that ye may be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inward man;
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;
to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,
may be strong to apprehend with all the saints
what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,
that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.
In other words, our spirit needs strengthening. We need the Holy Spirit, Who dwells in us, to strengthen our spirit.
Why? Because this is the only way you can convert a vision into a vocation—convert your inward knowledge, the knowledge you receive by intuition, into your daily experience.
How do we apprehend? Not only do you know, but you apprehend. Not only do you have spiritual knowledge, but you have spiritual power to really apprehend it, possess it, and experience it.
It is through the strengthening of your inward man. The inward man speaks of our spirit. It needs to be strengthened.
Why? Because our outer man—the soul, the soul-life—is so strong. Oftentimes, you find your soul-life is so strong that your spirit is not only subdued, but sometimes quenched by yourself.
To put it another way, our spirit in the past was in captivity to our soul. When our spirit is renewed, it is still young and weak. It cannot overcome that old Adam life in us.
You have the knowledge. You are willing, just like Romans 7. In Romans 7, his mind is renewed. He knows the will of God. He even has the will to do it, but he does not have the power, because his flesh is so strong.
You remember Luther said, “I do not fear the pope, but I am afraid of the pope within me.”
How are you going to overcome your self-life? How are you going to dethrone yourself from the throne of your soul and let Christ be enthroned in your soul?
That is what is said: when you are strengthened in your spirit, Christ may dwell in your heart. In other words, Christ comes out of your spirit and displaces self from your soul.
He instead sits on the throne and begins to direct all the functions of the soul, to express Himself instead of expressing self. You need a strengthening.
Brothers and sisters, do you feel, do you sense, the weakness of your spirit? Do you cry out to the Lord, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”
You need spiritual power. Spiritual power is when your spirit is energized by the Holy Spirit, and all your visions are translated into vocation—to apprehend.
You begin to experience what you know inwardly. So we need to pray that our spirit may be strengthened by the power of the Holy Spirit to overcome the opposition and tyranny of our self-life.
Then Christ may be enthroned in us, and we may express Him instead of expressing ourselves.
The third thing is this: our spirit needs to be purified.
2 Corinthians 7:1 says:
Having therefore these promises, beloved,
let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit,
perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
Probably we think that our flesh can be polluted, and indeed our flesh has been polluted and corrupted. But we may never think that our spirit can be defiled.
There is something very dangerous going on in the Christian world. Some people have the wrong idea that whatever comes from the spirit must be of God.
That is not true. It is true that it has to come from the spirit, but not everything that comes out of your spirit is right, because our spirit can be polluted and defiled.
The Bible says we need to purify even our spirit, and then we will perfect holiness. Otherwise, we are not completely separated unto God.
Let me use some illustrations.
You remember Moses, the meekest of men. But his spirit was provoked, and when his spirit was provoked, he became angry.
You remember the story in Numbers. The people cried for water, and God said, “Take the rod before the congregation. Take it with you, and then speak to the rock, and water will flow.”
Moses was so provoked in his spirit, so angry, that he lost his temper. He told the people, “Ye rebels, shall we bring you forth water out of this rock?” Then he struck the rock twice.
God was faithful, and water still came out. But God said, “You cannot enter into Canaan.” No matter how Moses cried to the Lord, the Lord said, “Do not ask Me again,” because Moses misrepresented Him.
His spirit was polluted.
You remember Elijah—how God used him. Fire came down from heaven and burned up the sacrifice, and all the priests of the idols were killed. Such a victory! The people said, “The Lord, He is God; the Lord, He is God.”
But when Jezebel said, “Tomorrow I will have you,” he fled. His spirit was overheated—so overheated that he became so pitiful.
When God said, “What are you doing here?” he said, “They killed everybody, and they want to kill me. I am not better than my fathers.” Pride. So pitiful.
His spirit was polluted.
You remember Jonah. His spirit was so prejudiced that, even though he had to obey God, he wanted God to act differently. He told God that everything he did was right. You have to go to the book of Jonah; I do not have time to do it.
You remember in the New Testament, in Luke 9, our Lord was on His way to Jerusalem to be crucified. He passed through Samaria, but a village would not receive Him.
James and John came to the Lord and said, “Lord, wilt Thou that we bid fire to come down from heaven, and consume them?” How dare they not receive You? Zeal for the Lord!
You remember what the Lord said: “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.”
Our Lord’s spirit was the spirit of the Lamb, going to be sacrificed. The disciples’ spirit was a spirit of arrogance.
Our spirit can become polluted. Our flesh can invade our spirit and take control. Self can come in and overpower our spirit.
Even the world is able to come in and so tempt and cheat us that even Demas, at the last, loved the world and went back to Thessalonica.
Evil spirits can oppress our spirit to such an extent that it can hardly breathe, hardly function. You remember our Lord said, “My spirit is troubled.”
When He came to the garden, His spirit was oppressed. The power of darkness pressed upon His spirit. The only way was to pray; otherwise, He would fall into temptation.
So, dear brothers and sisters, we need to be careful. If it is from the Holy Spirit, it is always right. But if it is only from our own spirit, be careful.
We need to humble ourselves before the Lord all the time. We need to ask the Lord to examine us, search us, and shine His light upon us, that we may have our spirit purified, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
That will humble us and help us to be humble. Some who have been greatly used by the Lord have had very tragic ends because their spirit began to be polluted.
Pride, popularity, and earthly power can pollute our spirit—not only our soul, but our spirit.
So this is a warning that we have to take and be careful about.
This morning, we have gone over the spirit in a very gentle and basic way. Hopefully, that will start us on the journey toward spirituality.
Let us pray.
Dear Lord, we confess there is so much that we need to learn. We pray that we may be humble enough to come to Thee and allow Thee to work out Thy full salvation.
May our spirit be wholly sanctified and preserved blameless by Thy grace at the coming of our Lord Jesus. We give Thee glory. Amen.