Body Soul Spirit
I like the C.S. Lewis quote: ‘Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.’ Living today is a focus time for believers, nothing moderate going on here; no fence-sitting here; maybe a little ‘I prefer either hot or cold’ here. (Rev. 3:15)
Each of us pretty much wants the same thing….peace, comfort, joy. Those are all spiritual terms. I think subconsciously our bodies want those also, similarly our soul (will, emotions) want those. Many times the problem is that we refuse to see, or are blind to the fact, that there’s even a spiritual aspect to our lives. We can pretty well default to the two dimensional, that people are just body and soul, if we’re not careful. Most modern day psychologists live there.
I’ll start this letter by referencing God’s ‘three in one’ description. Those are the words used to describe God: Father, Son, and Spirit. Each part of the Trinity is unique, yet each in agreement with one another. There was no difference in the Father, Son, or Spirit’s dream, their purpose or vision at Creation. Each was of one mind.
Each served different functions but Their pattern of being is as One; in agreement as One. Per Scripture we’re made in Their Image. They created man so it’s possible, even preferable, for us to be united in our flesh, our will, and our heart. The unity of all three creates power in our lives.
Our body, soul, and spirit each lived separately and independent of each other, leads us to much of the chaos we experience. An undisciplined body leads you to chaos, a free-lancing soul leads you to grief, but our Spirit, placed in its right order in our lives, leads to still waters. At birth we are body, soul with no awareness of the spirit. When awakened to God we can now prioritize their order correctly: Spirit, Soul, and Body. We are new creatures, converted to Spirit leadership, bringing our body and emotions under new management.
Under the old way we could know about Him, we could learn of Him, we could observe Him from afar. With the New Life we can know Him by acquaintance, by experience, we can taste and see….we can enjoy. It’s a new great advantage to know Him by acquaintance. It permits us to enter into what C.S. Lewis called a ‘dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal (Father, Son, Spirit) life’. It is a mingling (Lewis’s word) of God the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit in our daily lives.
The Jesus story is not about a death and resurrection and the story stops, rather it’s a story about the death and resurrection and the story continues. Jesus is still alive and active in our lives today. Our confidence is in the fact that God is in our lives no matter what. We’re to be of good courage; we do not live by sight (appearance) but by Faith. (2Cor. 5:7) We’re on a pilgrimage, each day a Faith walk, no matter what the day brings.
I’m often reminded: ‘Wherefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and make manifest the counsels of the hearts; and then shall each man have his praise from God.’ (1Cor 4:5) By judging things in the moment, we can become false prophets of our own futures.
I have a dear friend that many years ago was ‘crashing and burning’ in their personal life. Nice person, caring person, motivated person, with their world falling apart. I remember telling them ‘just hold on, in three years from now you will not recognize your life. It will have no resemblance to that terrible moment.’ That turned out to be so true. Today they live a life they never had imagined, let alone experienced.
This is what Moses wrote in 1Kings 19:18. Elijah was complaining to God that all had lost their way, turned from God, but God assured him that He still had 7000 Israelites that had not bowed the knee to Baal. Feel like Elijah sometimes, having so little personal hope and believing there are so few believers around you, all is seemingly lost.
Israel, God’s chosen, didn’t get it even after being delivered from the secular grasp of Egypt. The Prophets declared their messages about God and still Israel had little hope.
However, now as then, we should have hope, even if the ‘poll numbers’ look bleak. As believers, what we see today both culturally and globally, the amount of failure today, will someday loudly contain the fingerprints of God’s Gospel redemption. God doing what it takes to re-establish believers of His Truths, shown when we’re ‘redeemed’ from this daily chaos. It will be easy for us to say ‘He did that”, only a true Redeemer could do that with this mess.
Those Prophets kept the Faith for hundreds of years, years that could certainly be described as discouraging years for Prophets. That is unless you’re a Prophet that knows and believes that God is with them no matter what is going on around them or to them. These were men and women called by God to share His ways, His heart. They were not people inspired by their surroundings to Faith, rather they were men and women inspired in spite of their surroundings. They were inspired simply because they knew and were convinced that God was with them.
The joy of having found Him, finding something that is bigger, better, and more than wonderful, is sufficient. It’s a big picture Faith, not just of every moment of our lives but for the whole length of our lives. It is either insignificant or most significant, never moderately anything.
His gift to us is delivered with great Passion, a gift that came with a huge price on God’s part. It should not be a gift that, once given, we might question whether He would not stay around to enforce it. In Scripture, the gift is called adoption. That’s God’s word chosen for affirming God is in our lives, more amazingly, also we’re included in His! It is a mingling of His Life with our life to the point where you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends.
Everything we do is God filled. It may not be that we do everything Godly, but God is present and in us and on us, mingling with our daily lives. Each day, there may not be a burning bush, no cloud by day and fire by night. He may not be in the wind, or in the fire, but He is a small quiet voice for us. (1Kings 19:12) He is with us when we know His presence. He’s with us when we don’t have a clue.
He is present in the calamity and in the Peace. We can, as believers, be encouraged to take no thought for tomorrow–just trust in God. We should know He is with us even if there are only 7000 believers that have not bowed the knee to Baal.
I have a quote on my desk that gives a bit of comfort when I’m in a tense moment: “Beginning empty handed and alone frightens the best of men. It also speaks volumes of just how sure they are that God is with them.” Zerubbabel (Zec. 4:6) was a failure in his own mind. Then an angel appeared to him saying: ‘Not by might, not by power, but by My Spirit,’ says Jehovah. God’s Spirit is real, and when permitted to reign in our lives leads us to places where we will never thirst again.
Jesus did not come simply to prove there is a God, but to embrace people, to walk with them, talk to them, as in the beginning with Adam and Eve and to re-establish that kind of pre-fallen Garden relationship.