Part 9 – Just What Is Spirit?

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Spirit, which is our real self, is represented by the inner circle. Spirit has three basic faculties–desire/love, mind/knowledge, and will/choice. Desire or love is at the center of the human spirit. Sad to say, in our lost state we are self-love, with Satan expressing his self-for-self love through us. But as we touched on earlier, when we become born again, the glorious exchange takes place whereby our sinful operator, Satan, is cut off from our human spirit through the body death of Christ and, in turn, He (Jesus Christ) joins Himself to our human spirit, and we become “one Spirit with Him” (1 Cor. 6:17). As we said earlier, we are the vessels through whom He expresses His selfless love–spirit love, the term for which is agapé.

Mind is our second spirit faculty. It is where we know things–not what we think about things (that is a soul function) but where we know them. Ideas belong to the soul realm; knowledge belongs to the spirit. For example, we may know a lot about God and Jesus on a soul level, but we can only know them and matters of the spirit by means of the indwelling Holy Spirit who is the Knower in and through us.

The third faculty of the spirit is the will, and it is here that our spirit choices are made. Our love and knowledge (the other spirit faculties) both help shape these choices which are, in turn, expressed through our soul and body. The will is the arbiter of our destiny: our God-ordained freedom to choose for God or against God exists in our will.

Because soul and spirit are so closely linked, it takes a revelation of the Spirit for us to know the difference between them. Hebrews 4:12 gives us an illustration of their closeness: For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

The writer to the Hebrews is saying that the two are as closely connected as the marrow is to the bone. Like the marrow, spirit is the life of the body. The soul, like the joint, is the vessel for the marrow and is the means by which the inner spirit life expresses itself.