The spirit man is also the inner man or the hidden man of the heart. When YHWH, the Lord God, formed man and put him in the garden of Eden, and having breathed into the nostrils of his nose, the man became a living soul with capacity to relate to God and to the intellect and the physical. The first is the spirit man for God is a Spirit and they that must worship Him must do so in spirit and truth (John 4:24); the next is the soul with which the man engages the abstract and then, there’s the body with which he contacts the external world, displaying the unseen life within in the physical.

In today’s meditation on the spirit, soul and body, Pa Austin Theodore Spark will be speaking to us. We quote generous fragments from his The Inner Man f the Heart

That which makes man unique in the whole realm of creation is not that he is or has a soul, but that he has a spirit, and it may be that uniting in one personality of soul and spirit makes him unique beyond this creation, in the whole universe 

The writer states certain qualities or characters as constituting the tripartite components of the soul: the emotional, the intellectual, the volitional (will). Here are some for the emotional component:

                    Emotional

Fear

Grief

Pity

Curiousity

Pleasure

Pride

Admiration

Shame

Surprise

Love

Regret

Remorse

Excitement

and of intellectual he sates

Intellectual

Imagination

Apprehensiveness

Fancy

Doubt

Introspection

Superstition

Analysis

Reasonings

Investigation and so and so forth

Then, there’s the department of will or vocational

Will

 

Determination

Reliance

Courage

Independence

Endurance

Impulse

Caprice

Indecision

Obstinacy and so on

He continues:

Only spirit can know spirit (1 Corinthians 2:9-11)

Only spirit can serve spirit (Romans 1:9;7:6;12:11)

Only spirit can worship God Who is Spirit (John 4:23,24; Philippians 3:3)

Only spirit can receive revelation from God Who is Spirit (Revelation 1:10; 1 Corinthians 2:10).

Writing on the spirit, he continues.

Its (the spirit’s) main departments or faculties being conscience, worship (or communion with that which is Spirit) and intuition (chapter Two, first paragraph).

…….The only knowledge of God which is of spiritual value for ourselves or for others is that which we have by revelation of the Holy Spirit withing our spirit. God never explains Himself in the first instance to man’s reason. Man can never know God in the first instance by his reason…..

The apostle Paul makes it very clear that the secret of everything in his life and service was the fact that he received his Gospel “by revelation.”……

….How does God know things, by what means does He come to His decisions, on what basis of knowledge does he run the universe? Is it by reasoning inductively, deductively, philosophically, logistically, comparatively? Does He think things out? Has Omniscience a brain? Surely not! All this laboriousness is unknown to God. His knowledge and conclusion is intuitive. Intuition is that faculty of spiritual intelligence by which all spiritual beings work. Angels serve the will of God by intuitive discernment of that will, not argued and reasoned conviction….. If human reason, the natural judgement, and “common sense” had been the ruling law, most, if not all, of the great pieces of work inspired of God would never have been undertaken. Men who had a close walk with God and keen spirit union with Him received intuitively a revelation or leading to such purposes, and their vindication came, not by the approval of the worldly, human reason, but usually with all such positively opposed… 

The wholesomeness of Adam-man was ensured under the care of God as he, under the absolute control of the spirit man, was accessible to the eternal presence of God. In this state, the spirit led the soul and God was expressed in reality, in the body. This was because the Lord was accessible to man’s spirit.

The Faith Movement in our contemporary world came up with a succinct maxim: “I am a spirit, having a soul, living in a body.”

Lord, return us to the primeval days when our spirit was able to carry intimate relationship with you because the spirit man was alive. We know you are exonerated from blames because you have re-created this existence in your Son Jesus Christ. Yet many of us, and I’m at the head of this (though have been born again, reborn with the spirit man fully alive) are, for some inexplicable reasons, still not active and taking our place in the spirit, in You. We are still bundles of mistakes and errors.  Help us, Lord.

Thank You, Lord