Hebrews 4:12: Spirit,Soul, and Body by Brian Coatney
Doesn't ordinary life also offer plenty of opportunities for daily dying as we discern between soul and spirit? We all we feel threatened or hurt, or on a body level we think that we cannot live without food, sex, or some kind of comfort. Hebrews 4:12 speaks of this dividing: "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." This means that the Spirit knows how to cut beneath our fears and affirm in us our real intentions, showing us how to walk by faith when our outer world is falling apart.Let's look more closely at this dividing work of the Holy Spirit that Hebrews 4:12 talks about. Some interpret the verse to mean that the writer mentions three pairs of synonyms-making soul and spirit the same, joints and marrow the same, and thoughts and intents the same. This interpretation sounds confusing and vague, leaving us to wonder what the word of God divides. The more natural reading of the passage connects soul, joints, and thoughts as a contrast to spirit, marrow, and intents.The context of the passage as a whole confirms this. Hebrews 4 tells us that the Israelites failed to enter God's rest in the wilderness because they majored on food, water, and escape from conflict, allowing lack on a soul and body level to turn them to unbelief. They insisted on physical provision and security at the expense of stepping into the unseen world of faith. The application to us is obvious: though the body is important and God's temple, we don't go around as body-fussers, but as see-throughers in the spirit. We live from the spirit of rest instead of the turmoil we feel on a soul/body level.There is no need to take condemnation for our negative thoughts and feelings, and we even use them as the opportunity to live in God's rest during our times of physical and emotional hardship. Sometimes those hardships come about from how others treat us. Intentionally or unintentionally, people always do things that irritate us, go against our will, and deny us what we want, even tempting us to think that we don't love them. If we reason according to soul, we will think that we really do resent others. If we reason according to God's fixed nature of love in us, we will say, "I feel like I hate that person, but Christ loves that person perfectly by me."Only the Spirit Himself can do this dividing. In conflict and turmoil, our best option is to slow down. We don't have to let our souls and bodies drive us on with their imperatives. Waiting on that still, small voice, we can say, "Lord, I'll end up deceived if You don't guide me, but thank You that You are guiding me." He sorts everything out as we wait and trust in Him. When contentment fails on a soul/body level, we count it all joy to affirm again that He is life-"When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory" (Col. 3:4 NASV).This kind of faith leaves God free in us to meet our emotional and physical needs through people and things, but it also leaves God free to meet our needs without people and things. It is He either way. Abraham and Sarah represent the walk of faith; they let go of their soul/body contradictions and believed the impossible. So do we!
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This hope that purifies- Chris Welch
There are verses in the Bible that should have notes attached to save people's sanity! One verse is Christ In You the Hope of Glory Colossians 1.27. The health warning should read "It is advisable that this verse not be read with the left-brain frontal lobe/the conscious mind. This type of verse should be SOAKED only by meditation and in God's felt Presence.
I am not doing this in a critical way. This guy William Barcley has done a noble left-brain attempt in his 1999 book....but I think you get my point.
What on earth does Christ in You the Hope of Glory mean to your surface mind, to your step by step thinking. The bit of you that can plan the sequence in which you make an omelette or change a tyre. But what on earth is Christ in You the Hope of glory on about?
That's why we need the baptism in the Holy Spirit. He comes to make the things of God understood. He comes to give us Light. He comes to make us feel this Christ burn His way into our soul, heart and spirit. He comes to show us on a daily basis that which we do that Christ just ain't doing! And conversely He comes to show us what Christ is doing through us...or the next thing that He wants to do through us...and sometimes giving us what Morris Cerullo calls "an advanced supernatural burst of revelation" of what He wants us to co operate in. This is not just for work life. This is not just for family life. For anything that we are doing. But also meetings together. This is how the Bible says they are run. Each one "hath" a gift or tongue, or word of preaching, or healing gift, or word of wisdom, or song or prophecy. The Bible is deliberately loose. But not THAT loose so that there is nothing left. And that saints is the problem in the bulk of the church. In reality meetings are not run in the Holy Spirit. Even among those who know the daily truth of Christ living his life out as them.
In the Bible the key men of God had to have last minute adjustments! They'd got Christ as you as a daily walk, learned over decades. They'd even known the supernatural in their own personal lives and in those around them. But they needed a last minute "slap down" just so they knew who they were serving, so they walked in the fear of the Lord, and so they were rightly representing the one True heavenly reality of the Tabernacle not made with hands...but nevertheless a heavenly eternal reality.
Jacob had faithed in speckled and striped sheep. He was some charismatic!
Moses had met God in a supernatural burning bush! And was now finally ready to storm down and meet the elders of his people and confront Pharoah.
Joshua had served Moses all these years before the great leader then died. Now he knew his job was to set his face to the Land promised by God.
So what happened. Jacob had an angel come up against him.
Moses had his wife warn him that he'd better get circumcised darned quick before that angel confronting him finished him off before he'd started.
Joshua meets an angel who he addresses with an either or question. Are you for us or against us? The angel bypasses the whole framework of the question which in an earthly way makes no sense. Except that Joshua was framing his question on top of a whole unholy attitude. So rather than give the top of the question even house room, the angel speaks piercingly and prophetically to the haughtiness underneath: No Joshua! I'm head of the show here! I have been sent as Commander of the heavenly Armies and you..just learn your place!
So that's where we are now. We've got some people who know about Christ as them in their form, but absolutely no idea about heavenly protocoll. About the supernatural way God wants to build His Body. About the dedicated time the Body is to have lavishing its love on the Bridegroom in a worship planned before time was begun, and to be celebrated now, long before we ever reach heaven, as a demonstration to principalities and powers of the glory and riches in the Church.
Then we've got the charismatic Jacob community, used to faithing in benefits and blessings, but still like Jacob, having no heavenly understanding as to who they are, who they really are, and how they must experience a NAME change like Jacob. And when he had his crisis encounter at Peniel, his name was changed to Israel. THEN history started accelerating!
That's where we are right now after 100 years of Pentecostalism and 50 years of Norman Grubb's teachings.
Christ IN YOU the hope of glory. Not just any Christ. THE Christ. The same Christ that has come to reside in every born again believer. So if your theology is not the same as their theology and it is the same Christ...either or both of your theologies are up the pole! Are not in Christ.You can have Christ in You but still have absolutely rubbish theology and still be convinced you are right.
Well that's why we have the supernatural. To put us straight on those still "iffy" areas . And they must be "iffy" or others who know Christ in them as them, who also move to a high level in the supernatural would also agree with you. If you know Christ in you as you but you have no sort of signs following you, then it can't be the same Christ that is in the Bible. Because the One in the Bible said "These signs shall follow after you".
And if you are Benny Hinn and Morris Cerullo storming around the world doing signs and wonders, but you in no way link in with what the Body of Christ is doing sovereignly in every nation on the earth...that is building itself up corporately, feeding itself, learning the full meaning of Christ in You the hope of glory in every day settings....away from church...away from praise...away from Bible readings and quiet times and conferences....and even God TV (sorry Rory and Wendy and I love you)...then I seriously have to question what it is you are building. You may just be building a separate organism that knows how to faith in speckled and striped sheep....but never becomes the Israel of God...the Body of Christ that has had a name change and is being caught up with the central Plan of God in the Earth
that out of the Twain, Jews and Gentiles, ONE NEW SUPERNATURAL MAN shall spring forth, who is a manifestation of that mystery hidden since before time began.
My section of this whole post comes out of reading "Miracleworkers, Reformers and New Mystics" by John Crowder this morning. This leapt out at me: "Getting Past the Mind. p85. The very word repentance implies a change of mind. Repentance, or metanoia does not just mean a turning from outward sin. Rather it means a shift of consciousness from self to God. It is is a type of inner transcendence. A change of focus. It is simply a change of mind, or better yet a change of heart. (We've tried to live our own life entirely relying on our own insight, our own left-brain,our own mental constructs..not Proverbs 3:5 in other words)
We must focus everything within us on Heaven. God does not call us to abandon the mind- far from it! He wants us to redirect it. God does not want a church full of idiots. He wants us to use our minds, to be leaders in science, medicine, technology and other areas....
(BUT) a man's spirit is the seat of his being: the mind is subsidiary.....We want to be led by the Spirit and the Word, and not by human wisdom.
Although we are making a strong case for supernatural encounters and godly wisdom in these chapters, we do not preach a "signs and wonders" gospel anymore than we preach an "intellectual gospel". We preach Christ crucified. that is our gospel. It is a gospel with signs following, and it also leads to wisdom. But the cross will always be an offense and a stumbling block to many."
Which brings us back to the positive of the Cross. Now it's Christ in us as us, Christ in me as me.
It's an anchor line straight into heaven which is pulling me in. I can't miss! Because my believing is pulling on this anchored line. And the other end which is anchored in Christ is not moving...so the only thing to move will be me as I'm dragged in! That is the truth behind the "shorthand" Spirit expression "the Hope of Glory". I can't miss. It's a dead cert. The aim is absolutely accurate. All I've got to do is keep believing and the payline is reeling me in.
What is the payline. The anchor. It's this bold statement in the context of the previous verse in 1 John 3:2 "what we will be has not been made known." John Crowder writes" I believe we are slowly coming into an awareness of that power and identity in this hour. John goes onto say in this (next)verse: "But we know that when we see Him we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is."
It's no fun seeing Him if all we sense is inferiority. But Jesus has arranged this mighty thing to happen as a result of the power exercised by the Hope within us. Total transformation.
1 John 3:3 "Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as He is pure.
Now without a Spirit revelation of Hope and its magnet - type propensities...drawing us supernaturally - morphing us from one degree of glory to another- although down here it looks pretty messy at times - but within we are preparing an eternal weight of glory....kind of our own internal Eternal weight of Glory Factory plant....
without any of this revelation we are going to think the words "purify himself" mean works activities like a definite amount of hours doing community service or reading the Bible to try and be spiritual....which is all missing the point that we are not independant selves, and it is Christ living His life out through us.
Just as the Father lived out His life through Christ on earth, and knew how to get Jesus from baby status to full grown Father status, reproducing life in the disciples...
so Jesus knows how to get us, from wherever we are in God...perhaps we have not even asked Him in yet.... to a place of maturity fulfilling what we were put on the Earth for.
I learned through John Clark (with Sam Fife and the Move) that we are "Called by the Will of God". Well that's obvious!
No, listen, it's better than that! When you want that sin. When there's no possible way that you think you will ever giving up loving that sin. When you've exhausted all possibilities! Guess what.
God takes out your "Will" pack and inserts His packet of "Will" instead. We are called by His will. We are drawn by His will. His shiny glorious amazingly clean righteous will glows and shimmers and calls to us, but more than that it seems to get inside us to change what we think we wanted to what we can entirely live without.
This is then some of the nature of this Hope that purifies us and has nothing to do with us working harder and wearing ourselves out getting nowhere.
1 comment:
Oh this was excellent, I will be linking you!!!
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