10. Living in Our Spirit

Spirit is greater and more real, if that be possible, than physical matter. Our spirit body is more significant to our lives in every possible way than our physical body whether we know it or whether we don't.

 

We need to explore the nature of our two bodies, our spiritual body and our physical body, how they are interrelated and how we learn to walk in both at the same time. We know very well how to walk in our physical body, but we are less skilled at functioning through our spiritual body.

But in order to have something real to share with you, I needed to know what God actually says about these things. And so I have placed on my website the studies of ten Greek words with every verse in which they are used in the New Testament, grouped into four groups. The first study is heaven and earth. The second is Spirit and life. The third is flesh and body. And the fourth is mind (twice), soul, and heart.

But the thing that blew me away in this study was the junction of the words pneuma and kardia, the Spirit of Christ in the heart of the believer.

Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our kardias by the Holy Pnuema who was given to us. Romans 5:5

Who also has sealed us and given us the Pneuma in our kardias as a guarantee. 2 Corinthians 1:22

You are our epistle written in our kardias, known and read by all men; clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Pneuma of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on sarx tablets, that is, of the kardia. 2 Corinthians 3:2-3

And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Pneuma of His Son into your kardias, crying out, “Abba, Father!” Galatians 4:6

…to be strengthened with might through His Pneuma in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your kardias through faith… Ephesians 3:16-17

And then this one: Ananias, why has Satan filled your kardia to lie to the Holy Pneuma. . .?”Acts 5:3

There is a direct and limitless connection between the Spirit of Christ, our hearts, and our mouth, but the connection can go in the other direction as well.

Here are a number of thoughts that the Lord made real to me as I went through these verses in this way.

First, there was only one part of the human makeup that was evil in itself. Here is a very telling verse:

And you shall love the LORD your God with all your kardia, with all your psuche, with all your dianoia, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. Mark 12:30

The only part of man that cannot love God is the fallen human spirit. The heart can be hardened and dull or it can be filled with faith. The mind can be darkened or it can be renewed. The flesh can be immoral or filled with the revelation of Christ. None of these things are evil in themselves; they are simply reflective of that spirit that fills them – except the fallen human spirit.

Our fallen human spirit was evil in itself because by it the spirit of Satan was able to impart his breath into man. That human spirit is what God calls “the old man.” God put that fallen human spirit to death in us at the moment that we were born again. And at the same moment He created a new spirit inside us. We were born again. Our new human spirit is utterly immersed in God’s spirit so that no meaningful distinction can be found between them.

Everything found in God’s Spirit has an expression in our spirit and everything found in our spirit is God’s Spirit. We are one spirit with God. And this union of God’s Spirit and our spirit finds its dwelling and center in our hearts. Literally, in that organ we call the heart.

The work of God through the time of our life on this earth is to turn our hearts from dullness to faith. That happens by the words we speak with our mouth.

Going through difficult things cannot change our hearts. Speaking what God speaks while we go through difficult things does.

But you can see how the theological belief that our hearts are “deceitful and desperately wicked” can neuter and cut off every transformation God wants to work in our lives. One who believes that Old Covenant theology can never speak in faith, personally and direct, what God says about us in the New Covenant.

But here is our problem as believers inside our physical bodies that remain dead because of sin. The shadow of that “old man” still casts itself across our minds and our hearts only because we are blind.

The pure in heart see God. To the pure, all things are pure. Our mind and conscience can be defiled only if we do not believe.

Believing comes by the words that we speak. Any time we say something negative about ourselves, our situation, or others, we cut ourselves off from the Spirit of God in our hearts. That is, we dull our hearing and our seeing so that we are unable to see the Mighty and Glorious One who fills us with Himself. That is an incredible blindness. How on earth can we fail to see Him when He fills us full? Yet so it is, if we speak that which God does not speak.

(Speaking negatively about ourselves is different from glorying in our weakness that the power of Christ may rest upon us.)

Let’s look at exactly what God says about the various parts of our make-up.

Do you not know that your somas are members of Christ?” “Or do you not know that your soma is the temple of the Holy Pneuma who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your soma and in your pneuma, which are God’s. 1 Corinthians 6:15,19-20

For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal sarx. 2 Corinthians 4:11

For we are members of His soma, of His sarx and of His bones. Ephesians 5:30

Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole pneuma, psuche, and soma be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Thessalonians 5:23

Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, receiving the end of your faith – the salvation of your psuches. 1 Peter 1:8-9 Since you have purified your psuches in obeying the truth through the Pneuma in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure kardia… 1 Peter 1:22

Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our kardias by the Holy Pneuma who was given to us. Romans 5:5

And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us a dianoia, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and zoe aionios. 1 John 5:20

But we have the nous of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2:16

But he who is joined to the Lord is one pneuma with Him. 1 Cor. 6:17

   So let’s stop speaking any of the other stuff. We can speak all these things about every part of our being with full assurance of faith because God says these things about us. The old man is gone; all that’s left of him is a memory. We erase that memory by speaking what God speaks. That is how we are renewed in the pneuma of our nous, in the spirit of our mind. John says that God has given us a dianoia, God has given us a “mind,” that we may know Him. And knowing Him IS life eternal. God has given me a mind to know Him! My mind knows God.

Let me tell you something! That is the only mind I have. That mind, that dianoia to know God, fills me. It fills every part of my heart and soul.

God has formed and created me — Daniel Yordy — to know God without limit and without end. (Put your own name in the blank and speak it out loud at the top of your lungs.)

I know God personally and intimately. I know His heart; I know His mind; I know His ways; I know the deepest cry of His soul.

But God has revealed them to us through His pneuma. For the pneuma searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the pneuma of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the pneuma of God. Now we have received, not the pneuma of the world, but the pneuma who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.

1 Corinthians 2:10-12

And what has God freely given us to know? Himself.

And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God manifest in the sarx.

~~~

For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free – and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. 1 Corinthians 12:12-13

If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Galatians 5:25

The apostles, upon receiving the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the revelation of grace and salvation through Jesus Christ, grappled with a brand new revelation of God and His ways that, although it was there in the Scriptures, it was hidden. They searched the Spirit within them for ways to share with others this brand new thing God was doing upon the earth, recasting their understanding of the Old Testament to unveil this wonderful salvation to the church.

The same thing is happening again today. The life of the age to come is rolling out of our innermost beings in ever increasing waves.

We say that Christ lives in our hearts. We concede the fact that God says something about being filled with all the fullness of God and that it would be okay for us to speak those things that “be not” as if they are. But then we motor along as if we are just a little old me living our lives in this world.

I am aghast at how it could be possible that the Creator of the Universe, the King of kings, the Lord of heaven and earth, Almighty God, omnipotent, all-powerful, knowing all things, seeing all things, could FILL ME, and I have walked blind and oblivious to that overwhelming reality!

Everything else vanishes in the presence of God. The presence of God fills me with all of His fullness. Almighty God flows out from me in every possible way. There is no other reality! He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.

This omnipotent and overwhelming Person, who calls Himself my Father and says that I am born out of His loins, has joined Himself with me in an intimate, personal, and total way. When I look at my spirit, I can see only His Spirit, and when I look at His Spirit, I am looking at my own. There is no distinction.

To walk in the Spirit is to walk in the Being and Person of Almighty God. To walk in the Spirit is to walk in my own spirit, a body made of the substance of spirit in exactly the same way that my physical body is made of physical matter.

To say, “Get out of the way so that Christ can be seen and not you,” is to speak meaningless nonsense that has no basis in the word or in reason or in reality. I am not two, I am one. It is not that I am God. It is that I walk and live in complete, fused union with this incredible Being who is God.

He says He lives in you. Do you see Him? How can we see anything else? 

Here is a further comparison between the life of this present age and the life of the age to come.

Now here is a fascinating puzzle. When you visit Christian websites devoted to exposing deception in the church and you look at what they have to say about “New Age” ideas creeping into the church, this truth that there is one Spirit in the body of Christ, that we, as believers, all drink of one Spirit and move in and are energized by the same Spirit has no place in their thinking. They simply denounce the whole concept as pagan and flee back into the isolated individualism under the control of a hierarchy of external authority that the Bible does not teach.

But consider, if you will, the “pagan ritual” in the movie Avatar performed by the Navi as they placed hands on one another in a vast network in order to join together as one spirit with the same spirit filling everything around them. This is the “new age” element most denounced in the movie. Then compare that with the top down authority structure of the humans, a structure that is honored and revered by most Christians both in the world and in the church.

Now, which picture is more in agreement with the nature of the body of Christ presented in the New Testament?

We are one spirit with the Lord and with one another. That is not just a nice saying; our spirits are as real as our physical bodies and more definite in every way. I have prayed together with other believers in a very similar “laying on of hands” as seen in the movie Avatar, just as God says in the New Testament.

And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!” Galatians 4:6

This fusion, this union between our spirit and God’s Spirit is who we are, it is Christ in us. It is Christ; it is me. It is me; it is Christ.

Spirit is greater and more real, if that be possible, than physical matter. Our spirit body is more significant to our lives in every possible way than our physical body whether we know it or whether we don’t.

What do we know about our Sspirit body? And I used Ss on purpose. The Spirit of God and our spirits are fused in an organic union which knows no point of distinction. This organic fusion is 100% unique to human sons of God. All of creation lives and moves in God’s Spirit. Angels enjoy a relationship with the Spirit of God; even demons obtain their life and being from that same Spirit.

But those humans, created in the image of God, enabled to come into union with God, to receive His seed into themselves, to bear and bring forth His life out from who and what they are, those humans, both on this earth right now, and those waiting in the heavens, whom God has chosen to receive this incredible portion of Himself that He is even now placing within us, share a union with and knowledge of God that no other element in creation can ever know.

That does not make us “elite” in any way. The nature of God is to leave the good people and risk His life to seek out that one worthless creature that got its own self into so much trouble. The nature of God is to come alongside the helpless, the no-good, the reprobate, and to love them with a love that never accepts rejection until it wins that first weak, and tentative “Yes.”

This union of our spirit and God’s spirit is centered in that organ called the heart. Our spirit is the largest part of us. It encompasses in itself every other part of our being and extends beyond our body. When someone you don’t know places their face two inches from your face, it is not physical proximity that makes you feel violated; they have invaded the space occupied by your spirit.

Man, the image of God, is the union between God and dirt. Out of that union, man becomes a living soul. Christ comes into man as a life-giving Spirit. But consider God’s words concerning David. “David is a man after My own heart.” It is by heart that we are most like God. Both Solomon and Paul urged us to protect and guard our hearts. Solomon said that out of the heart are the issues of life. The shaping of our hearts by God through a life-time of experiences, both positive and negative, is the most important part of our sojourn within this age.

In the books of Romans and Galatians, Paul places before us the dichotomy in which we presently live: flesh versus spirit. We can walk “according to the flesh,” or we can walk “according to the spirit.” If we walk “according to the flesh,” we die. If we walk “according to the spirit,” we live. Paul is not talking about the unregenerate in Romans 8:13, and he is not talking about the immature Christian. He is speaking a third feast understanding to mature sons of God.

I was twenty years old when I was introduced to this dichotomy in our lives, this vacillating between “flesh” and “spirit.” “Get in the Spirit, brother,” was a common injunction. The problem, of course, was that neither we nor the ministry exhorting us had any idea of what that meant.

I had no idea what Paul meant either. “If you (mature son of God) through the Spirit put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” To walk “in the Spirit” and not to walk “in the flesh” made absolutely no sense to me. Therefore I never ever tried to do it – because it made no sense. To try doing something that makes no sense is to pretend. And through the years of my life I had the privilege of walking and living closely with many who did try to do something they did not understand, who tried very hard, but who did nothing more than pretend.

I am absolutely convinced that trying very hard to do something that makes no sense results in only one thing – madness. And it was the madness in the eyes of my brethren who were caught in that nonsense that persuaded me that it was time to leave.

Why did it make no sense to me? Because I am me. I am an organic whole. What is in my heart to do is what I do. Yes, my theology said that my heart was “evil” and that in order to live I had to hear something entirely separate from my heart and to force myself to obey that outward dictate. But whenever the thought came to me “God says do this,” I always rejected that impression immediately without thought. I have always felt that whatever does not come out of my own heart must be nothing but a façade, a pretense — FAKE.

I can’t do fake. I suspect that God dislikes fake more than I do.

Over the last few weeks, I have found a growing understanding, a bit of light shedding itself upon what it means to walk “according to the flesh” versus to walk “according to the Spirit.” That inkling comes out of the opening awareness in wave after wave that I am filled with God, that I live encased in God; and everything I see, I see out from God, and everything I am, I am out from God.

This is nothing other than the normal Christian life.

How is it that God can fill us with Himself, and we not see Him? How is it that Christ can live in our hearts, and we be utterly oblivious? These are staggering questions. I can tell you exactly how that can be from out of my own life of seeking God in this world.

I could not see God in me because I did not value the blood of Christ and I did not value the cross of Christ. Oh, I would have argued that I did, I surely did. And that would have been true to the measure of my understanding at that time. But the fact that I could not see the God who filled me full tells otherwise.

When I saw myself as two, I could not see God in me. My eyes were closed tightly shut; I was blind. I saw myself as partly evil and partly good, partly fallen human and partly redeemed son of God, partly sinful and partly washed, partly flesh and partly spirit, partly up and partly down, partly in and partly out.

I saw myself that way because I did not believe that the blood of Christ continually removed all that separates me from God nor that the cross of Christ had already put to death all in me that once needed to die.

I did not believe these things for two reasons. First, I had received and been taught a false theology that ignored Paul’s statement: “You are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit.” A theology that re-inserted that Old Covenant, pre-gospel position, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.”

Second, I regarded my feelings as speaking something of consequence. I imagined that if I felt far away from God, rebellious, cut-off, brass heavens, and so on, then my feelings spoke the truth and I was in the flesh. My problem was that I felt that way most of the time. Then, I imagined that when I was lifted up in the anointing, feeling clean and rejoicing in the overwhelming presence of God, that my feelings were also speaking the truth and I was in the spirit. My problem was, of course, that those feelings never lasted more than a few days at any one time.

As I began to write The Jesus Secret, I discovered that God’s word in the New Covenant spoke the truth, not my feelings, that I was no more in the presence of God when I felt “anointed” than when I felt “rebellious,” and vice versa. I discovered that the Blood is sufficient at all times and that the Cross is present perfect tense, that is, completed fully 2000 years ago and made perfect in my immediate and present moment. I discovered that everything I am, Jesus carries fully in Himself at all times, and that everything I am is He living His life in me. I discovered these words that I had read many times, but never known, “In that day you shall know that I am in the Father and you in Me and I in you.”

For every believer, it all boils down to this one question. Is the blood of Jesus Christ in part or in whole for you personally? Is the cross of Christ, right now, in part or in whole for you personally? You alone must answer that question and the path ahead of you is an entire watershed, a continental divide of difference for your life depending on your own personal choice of answer.

To choose “in whole” is to leave behind forever the idea that you are in any possible way or at any possible time separate from God.

I am not two, I am one. When I look at myself, I do not see me here and God there, a spirit body over here and a fleshy body over there. I live in an organic union with God and He with me. That union extends out from me and includes you. We are one spirit together and with God. Yet we are completely unique individuals, and God is completely Himself, whether revealed in us or not.

And my fleshy body, though it is still dying because of the curse of Adam not yet cast off, is enveloped entirely in my Sspirit, and the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead enjoys my mortal flesh as His chosen and holy dwelling place. My physical body is holy, it is acceptable to God, and I love God through my body and through my spirit.

Our spiritual body shares very similar attributes with our physical body. Our physical body has eyes that see natural light; our spiritual body has eyes that see the light of heaven. Our physical body has ears that hear vibrations in the air; our spiritual body has ears that hear God speaking in the heavens – as our own heart.

But we have one bodily organ that is shared by both our physical body and our spiritual body. This organ controls everything. It sets the direction of our life, and the paths of our feet. It rules what we believe in our hearts and therefore what we see with our eyes. Out of this organ comes life; out of this organ comes death. By this organ hell vomits itself upon the earth; by this organ heaven rules triumphant in our lives.

I am speaking of the tongue. There is a direct, immediate, and continual connection between the words that we speak with our mouth to our heart out of which are the issues of life to our eyes by which we see all things whether in heaven or on earth. Tongue — to heart — to eyes.

What I speak is what I then believe. What I believe is what I then see.

God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. — Who calls those things that be not as though they are.

Why have I been seeing God the last while more than ever? It has begun to dawn on me that God lives in me! And how has it begun to dawn on me that God lives in me? Because God says that He does, and I speak what God speaks.

That is my right, you know, to speak what God speaks. It is my right, and nothing can keep me from it, nor can any voice entice me to speak otherwise.

I am filled with all the fullness of God. God flows out of me as a redeeming River of Life. By God in me and me in God, I prove the vindication of God in the earth; I cast down all voices that speak against His Word.

You do the same. Speak only what God speaks.