Will you please turn to 1 Peter, chapter 1? We will read from verse 3 to verse 12. I will read it in English first, and my brother will read it in Chinese.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you,
who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, ye have been put to grief in manifold trials,
that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold that perisheth though it is proved by fire, may be found unto praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ:
whom not having seen ye love; on whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable and full of glory:
receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.
Concerning which salvation the prophets sought and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you:
searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.
To whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto you, did they minister these things, which now have been announced unto you through them that preached the gospel unto you by the Holy Spirit sent forth from heaven; which things angels desire to look into.
I do thank the Lord for the privilege of coming to see you, dear brothers and sisters.
I have no intention to preach. I would like to have a heart-to-heart talk with you, because in recent years I have been disturbed by something which I have observed as I move among God’s people.
On the one hand, I do thank the Lord. There seems to be growth in knowledge. It seems as if God’s people have begun to know the Word of God better than before.
And yet, on the other hand, I was disturbed to find that it seems as if God’s people do not grow spiritually as much. So far as knowledge is concerned, we make big steps; but so far as our spiritual life is concerned, it seems as if there is little growth.
That is the thing that really disturbed me. So I have been before the Lord, seeking Him about it, and it seems as if the Lord reminded me that we have to go back to the basics.
Before I came, I prayed before the Lord, and He gave me two questions. These two questions are the things that we would like to talk about.
The first question is: Do our souls need to be saved?
The second question is: How can our souls be saved?
Now, I know these are very, very basic questions. But oftentimes, we need to go back to the basics in order to solve some problems.
If you will forgive me, I have to go to the very beginning. When God created man, you remember Genesis 2:7. God used the dust of the ground to form the body of man.
Look at your body. It is wonderfully and fearfully made, and yet it was made with the dust of the ground. God is to be praised.
But after He formed the body, the Bible says that He breathed the breath of life into man’s nostrils, and man became a living soul.
So we know that the word soul and the word man seem to be similar in Scripture. Even though, in the mind of God, He created man in three parts: spirit, soul, and body.
God’s intention is that by the spirit we keep in communion with God. What we hear from God passes on to our soul, and then we decide whether we will accept God’s will or not. Our soul then commands our body to act it out.
This is according to God’s order. But so far as human beings are concerned, our soul represents ourselves. It is our soul that really decides whether we want the will of God or whether we want otherwise.
That is the reason why we find God putting man in the Garden of Eden. In the midst of the garden was the tree of life, and beside it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
In other words, God allowed man to choose his life—how he was going to live upon this earth: whether he would choose to live by the life of God, live a dependent life, and do the will of God; or whether he would live by himself, by his own developed knowledge, independent of God.
God placed before man these two ways. Man might choose to live by the life of God, or he might choose to live by himself. He might choose to live to do the will of God, or to live for his own will.
I believe you all know the story of how our forefathers made their choice. They not only made their own choice, but they made a choice for all of us, because we are all out of Adam.
Something happened to the very constitution of human beings. God said that if you ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you would surely die—on that very day you would die.
Our forefathers ate the forbidden fruit, but did they die? No. We find Adam lived for hundreds of years, and he begat sons and daughters. He was very, very alive. But was God’s word false? Certainly not.
What happened? Their spirit died. God is Spirit, and the only way to be in communication with God is through our spirit. But because of the sin of man, that communication was cut off.
This does not mean that we no longer have a spirit. The spirit as an organ is still there, but it has lost its communication with its proper environment. Before God, man was dead; therefore, man was lost.
Then what became of man? Man became soul and body, and the Scripture says that man became flesh. From that day onward, man did not live by the life of God. Man lost his contact with God, became independent, and lived by his soul and body.
A man of high degree lives by his soul, and a man of low degree lives by his body. Their spirit is dead to God. That is the way we lived before we believed in the Lord Jesus.
Look back at your past life—from the time you were born until the time you believed in the Lord Jesus. How did you live? You may have lived a number of years, but you did not live by the life of God. You lived by the soul life, the Adamic life, a fallen life, a sinful life, under the law of sin and death.
We lived by the dictates of our soul life: “This is the way I feel. This is the way I like. This is the way I decide. This is the way I think.” Everything was self-centered. Everything was for ourselves. We did not care about God, and we were not able to know the will of God.
Now, what happened when you were saved? I believe all of you here this morning have experienced being saved. You believed in the Lord Jesus as your Savior. Something happened in your being.
The Bible tells us, “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Once we were born of the flesh, and we were flesh—soul and body, directed by our selfish, sinful life.
But thank God, in His great mercy, He sent His only Son into this world, and He died on Calvary’s cross for our sake. He forgave us all the sins that we had committed. But that is the negative side.
Positively, he that is born of the Spirit is spirit. He that is born of the Holy Spirit is renewed in his human spirit. We have a new spirit. Our conscience has been cleansed by the blood of our Lord Jesus.
This can be easily proved. When you believe in the Lord Jesus, the first time you pray, you find the difference. Before you believed in the Lord Jesus, you may have heard the gospel, been brought up in a Christian family, and learned to pray.
But when you prayed to God, your feeling was that God was far, far away. You believed He was there, but where? There was no living relationship.
But after you believe in the Lord Jesus, the first prayer you pray is different. I always remember a co-worker who told me that, after he was married, he went with his wife to his father-in-law’s home for the first time.
According to Chinese custom, you should call your father-in-law “Daddy.” He tried to call his father-in-law “Daddy,” but he felt it was so unnatural, because he was his father-in-law, not his real father.
Brothers and sisters, did you have such an experience? Now you call God “Father” because He is really your Father. There is a living relationship. It is no longer merely a matter of law.
Thank God, after we are saved, we have a new spirit. And who dwells in our spirit? The Bible says that Christ comes and dwells in our spirit. Our new spirit has a new life, and that new life is the life of Christ.
But more than that, when you are saved, God puts His Spirit into your spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in our spirit.
Why is it that He gave us a new spirit? Why is it that He put Christ in our spirit? Why is it that the Holy Spirit also dwells in our spirit? God never does anything without reason.
God wants you to live a different life. You are going to live by the life of Christ, and the life of Christ in you needs to grow up.
Who is going to take care of that? The Holy Spirit is there to see that the life of Christ in your spirit grows into maturity.
It is the eternal purpose of God. Those whom He called, He justified; and those whom He justified, He glorified. It is the will of God that we are not only saved, but that we may be transformed and conformed to the image of Christ.
This is the will of God, and He has made every provision for it.
But I want to ask a question. You are saved—but how about your soul? Is your soul saved? Does your soul need to be saved?
I am not going to preach another gospel. The Bible has only one gospel: the gospel of Jesus Christ. If anybody should preach another gospel, the Apostle Paul said, “Let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8).
But, dear brothers and sisters, what is the gospel of Jesus Christ? The gospel of Jesus Christ is a full gospel. It is so great a salvation. It is according to the glory of God, because God has called us by His own glory and virtue.
Can you imagine that God just wants to save you out of hell into heaven, and that is all? That does not look like God. That does not glorify God.
In the gospel of our Lord Jesus, He will not only save our spirit; He will also save our soul, and He will save our body. His salvation is so complete.
But remember, when you were first saved, was your soul saved at that time? Was your body saved at that time? Certainly not.
How did you repent? Can you repent by yourself? We can regret, but we can never truly repent. We regret because of what we will suffer. It is all self-centered.
But what is repentance? Repentance is a change of mind. Once your mind was set toward hell, but now you turn around and set your mind toward heaven. It is like a U-turn.
Where is the mind? The mind is in the soul. So there was some change in it, but it was superficial. It was just on the surface; it happened only for a time.
Organically and basically, your soul remained the same. The life in your soul is still your own life. Who dwells in your soul? It is still you yourself.
Who are you? You are a son of Adam. Your life is a fallen life, a sinful life, a self-life. It has not changed a bit.
That is why, at the moment you are saved, or for a few days after you are saved, you seem to have completely changed. The sky looks bluer, the birds sing sweeter, and you are walking on the clouds. If the Lord makes any demand of you, you gladly give it to Him.
But how long does that continue? Some people may continue for a month, and then they fall down and find themselves still on earth. They still think the same way, evaluate things the same way, and want to do what they want to do.
All their reactions are according to themselves. Their soul has not changed. Organically, it is still the same.
How about your body? You may have had some superficial change. You used to have a long face, but now your face becomes radiant. Yet your body is still a mortal body; it is still corruptible. It is not yet immortal. It is still a physical body, not yet a spiritual body.
So remember, when you believe in the Lord Jesus, do you think you are totally saved—spirit, soul, and body? If that were the case, probably the Lord would take you to Himself right away.
The fact is, thank God, we are saved; but that salvation is centered upon our spirit. God always works from center to circumference. The enemy always works from circumference to center.
God begins with our spirit, and then from our spirit He reaches out to our soul and eventually to our body.
That is the reason why we find in 2 Corinthians 1:10 that God “delivered us out of so great a death.” That refers to how our spirit was saved. That is past.
Then Paul says that God “will deliver us.” In our daily life, after we believe in the Lord Jesus, we are being saved daily. That refers to our soul.
And then we trust that He will still deliver us. At the coming of the Lord, even this mortal body will become immortal.
So far as God’s salvation is concerned, it is a full salvation, but it comes in steps:
Our whole being shall be sanctified—spirit, soul, and body—and we shall be preserved blameless at the coming of the Lord. That is the purpose of God.
So the first question is: Do your souls need to be saved? I am afraid that many Christians do not even have the slightest idea that their soul needs to be saved.
How can we live a Christian life if we neglect so great a salvation? From now on, we are Christians, and as Christians we must live a Christian life.
By Christian life, we mean that we have to do God’s will. We must please God. We are now Christians; we are different. Our lives should be different, and we should show forth the glory of God.
I believe everybody knows that. But how do you live your Christian life? Do you live by the life of Christ in your spirit, or are you still living by the self-life in your soul?
If you live by Christ’s life, then you find that you really begin to do the will of God. If you still live by the self-life in your soul, no matter how you try, you find it is superficial.
Outwardly, you may live a so-called Christian life, but inwardly, you are not.
Thank God, when He saves us, He actually shows us His way of living. How should we live afterward? He has already shown us. But oftentimes we neglect it.
Because we neglect it, we begin still to live outwardly. Christian life is an inward way of life. It is not an outward way. We ought to live by the inward life and not by the outward man.
Actually, when you are saved, even without your knowledge, you are already being shown that this is the way. But unfortunately, Christianity today has become something outward. We are being led to live outwardly.
We are told, “Now you are saved. Now you believe in the Lord Jesus. Now you shall live as a good Christian.” What do you mean by a good Christian? Go to church, say your prayers, read your Bible, and witness for the Lord.
If you do these things, then you are considered a good Christian. In other words, we try to keep all these outward laws and regulations.
I remember, after I was saved, I kept the Lord’s Day Sabbath. We were told that on the Lord’s Day, aside from going to church, you should not do anything else.
As a student, I dared not study on Sunday. So when there was an examination on Monday, it was a fearful thing. What did I do on Sunday afternoon? I played ball. That is under the law.
Before I was saved, I loved to go to movies. But on Sunday, never. I was trying to be a good Christian. It was so hard.
I prayed, but as soon as I knelt down, I opened my mouth and told the Lord this and that. I did not know that I should listen to what He was saying to me.
I read the Bible, but afterward, if you asked me what I had read, I had forgotten. Yet I was considered a good Christian. I was living what was called a good Christian life. Everything was outward.
Brothers and sisters, this is not God’s way. After we are saved, God puts His life in us, and His Spirit is in our spirit. He is seeking to see the life of Christ grow.
It is only when the life of Christ grows that you are really growing spiritually. Otherwise, nothing really matters.
You may gain a great deal of biblical knowledge. Your head becomes very big—but how about your feet? In recent years, people have been worried about obesity. I feel Christians today have spiritual obesity: they have a large head, but very small feet.
We need to remember that spiritual life is the life of Christ. It is from the spirit, touching our soul and reaching our body. It is an inward way of life, and that is the only way that we can live as Christians.
The Bible says, “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?” (Hebrews 2:3). God is going to do something much more.
After we believe in the Lord Jesus, we begin to work out the Christian life. But who can live a Christian life? Only Christ Himself can do that.
Sometimes people love the Sermon on the Mount because they think it is the highest ethic in the world. They try to imitate it and try to keep it. If you do not try, you are all right; but if you try, then you are in trouble, because you can never do it.
Brothers and sisters, how can we live a Christian life? There is only one way: you have to live by the life of Christ in you.
But when you are doing that, do you realize that within you there is an enemy? I think every believer has such an experience.
Every believer, after being saved, feels that he needs to do the will of God. We want to do it. But when we are trying to do it, we find there is within us someone who is deadly against it.
It is just like the Apostle Paul in Romans 7. He said, in effect, “What I want to do, I cannot do; and what I do not want to do, I do.”
In other words, you find that within yourself there is a conflict. Why is there a conflict? It is the conflict between the spirit and the soul. It is the conflict between Christ’s life in the spirit and the self-life in the soul.
A Christian has two lives within him. In your spirit, you have Christ. In your soul, yourself still dominates.
When you are moved by the spirit, you want to do the will of God. But it is not that easy, because you find there is one within you against you. There is a civil war going on within.
Who wins the victory? Most of the time, it is the soul. Why? Because Adam is pretty old, and the life of Christ in you is new.
Martin Luther said, “I am not afraid of the pope or the cardinals, but I am afraid of one within me.” Philip Melanchthon said the same thing: “Old Adam is too much for young Melanchthon.”
They all had this experience. We believe that Romans 7 is Paul’s experience after he was saved, because he said, “I will to do the will of God.” An unsaved person cannot say that. Only a saved person wants to do God’s will.
But Paul found a conflict within, and the soul life was so powerful that oftentimes it overwhelmed the spirit life. Do you have such an experience?
I often say that nervous Christians are good Christians. If you are not nervous at all, you do not care what kind of Christian you are. But because you do care, because you do want to please God, and because you find it so difficult, you are defeated again and again and again.
You become more and more nervous. So I say, nervous Christians are good Christians. But it is not the will of God for us to be nervous. It is because of our ignorance.
You need to be saved. What does the saving of the soul mean? It does not mean that you shall annihilate your soul.
Some people say that you should never think. If you do not think, what are you? People say that you should not feel anything. Does that make you more spiritual? People say that you should have no will at all. Does that make it better? Not at all.
I do thank the Lord that He gave us such faculties. He enabled us to feel. If I have no feeling, I am nothing. If I cannot think, I am nothing. If I cannot will, I am nothing.
These are precious gifts of God. The question is: who is using them? Is it you, or is it Christ?
Let Christ use your feelings, that your feelings may express Him. Let Christ use your thinking, that your thinking may come from heaven. Let Christ use your will, that your will may be the will of God.
The saving of the soul does not mean getting rid of yourself. If that were the case, you would be gone.
The saving of the soul is to save our soul from the self-life, so that the Christ-life may come and take charge in our soul. This is the saving of the soul.
This is a process that should be going on now. If this process is going on, then your soul is being saved. That salvation will be manifested at the coming of the Lord.
How can you save your soul? Can you save your soul by exercising your soul? You cannot do it.
You find people trying to do it. In the Catholic Church, there are people who try to mistreat their body in order to overcome sinful desires. In other religions, they do the same. They try transcendental meditation. They try to use their soul to save their soul.
But the result is that their soul becomes stronger.
How do we try to save our souls? We try to save our souls by being active in Christian work. We think, “If you love God, you should serve God according to what you feel like doing.”
Brothers and sisters, if we are doing that, instead of being saved, we are strengthening the self-life.
That is the reason why I find among God’s people that, even though we have the life of Christ in us and are trying very hard to be spiritual, it seems as if we are still living our Christian life by the power of our soul.
Even in our seeking the Lord and in our serving the Lord, we depend upon our soul. That is the reason why we have spiritual obesity.
This is something that troubles me. I am thinking of myself, and I am thinking of brothers and sisters. The Lord is coming soon. We do not have much time.
If we continue in this outward way, when the Lord comes, what will happen to us? Can He say, “Well done, good and faithful servant”? Or will we be in danger of being called a lazy and wicked servant?
Brothers and sisters, I feel that this is a very serious thing to be conscious of.
I want to put this before you, dear brothers and sisters—not only before you, but before myself. Do my soul need to be saved? I confess before the Lord that my soul needs salvation.
If my soul is not being saved, my spirit life suffers.
Whether you have believed in the Lord for many, many years or whether you are newly saved, I think the principle is the same. You can never depend upon your soul.
You have to depend upon the Christ in you, the hope of glory. Never depend upon yourself.
This is my burden. If the Lord wills, we will try to ask and answer the second question: How can our souls be saved?
So pray about it. The Lord willing, we will continue tomorrow. May the Lord help us.
Can we just spend some time responding in prayer?