Knowing and Growing – Who were we - Who are we - Who are we becoming - Part I
Vern Peterman · Apr 9, 2017
Knowing & Growing, No. 14
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926553104798

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

So we will be starting into about four weeks of what we call spiritual anatomy, and we'll be talking about, well, what do you mean spiritual anatomy? Have I got a spiritual liver or, you know, that sort of thing? And what I would say is the Bible, in fact, describes things about how we are made. that I put under the category of spiritual anatomy and it is helpful for us to be able to understand what the Bible is saying and to be able to talk about it together as we continue to look at this question in the months ahead, what God is doing in the life of the believer. And we look at the spiritual anatomy of believers and unbelievers because they're different. And we'll be talking about in what ways are believers and unbelievers different in their spiritual anatomy. One of the things we're going to be focusing on particularly is church-age saints, that is, those who are believers from Acts 2 to the rapture, because in fact scripture reveals some different things about those who believe of other times, and some unique things about us who are in the body of Christ that are not true of believers in other times or in other groups. One of the things we brought up briefly, we are baptized as believers in the church, we are baptized into whom? We are baptized into Christ, right?

In his death, burial, resurrection, ascension and seeding. The Jews, we are baptized into whom? into Moses. This is 1 Corinthians chapter 10. Initial verses there provide some information on us being baptized, or us, excuse me, they being baptized into Moses. Other places talking about us being baptized into Christ. So there is a different baptism. So let's ask this question. Were the Jews, when they crossed the Red Sea and were under the cloud, Were they in Christ? No. So it's a different position, and that also makes for a different spiritual anatomy.

So here we have a breakdown that comes out most clearly in 1 Thessalonians 5.23, where it reads, and I'm reading about a third of the page down on page 1 of your handout. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely, and we'll be talking about what being sanctified means, and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. So we'll take a look at the word sanctify, but that's not this month, that's down the road here a bit. For now we're going to look at the term spirit, soul, and body.

Now, you may or may not be aware of this, but just to let you know, there are two primary understandings of how man's spiritual side is composed, and there is actually a controversy over this. One belief is that man is composed of two parts, mostly held by those of the Reformed background, where his body and soul, and the soul equals the spirit. Generally speaking, those of the Reformed background will say that those are synonyms for exactly the same thing. No difference between the two.

So they would look at this translation of 1 Thessalonians 5.23, May your spirit, which is your soul and your body, be preserved complete. That's how they would look at it. Yes?

So the word body there, is Paul inferring the physical body or is he inferring something else there? Because soul and spirit are eternal, ongoing, whatever. And we'll talk more about what that means because if you think about it, Is our body spiritually insignificant? Is it spiritually irrelevant? No it is not. So our bodies are not irrelevant. Why?

This fleshly body though is kind of, right? We have this fleshly body, what's God going to do with it? Is he going to say, hey guys, we're just throwing that thing away, just forget about it, because I'm going to give you a brand new one that has nothing to do with the one you've got here? at the very minimum is going to be remade. Yeah, so I think probably the core thing is, are we going to be resurrected like Christ?

Right? So think about Christ, what did they do with his body once he died? By the way, did he actually die? Yes. He actually physically died, so that's correct. So he physically died, they put his body, and by the way, where was his spirit? It's gone from the body, separated, by the way, death is separation, right? Separation of the soul and spirit from the body, right? So then, here's Jesus, the thief on the cross, what does he tell the thief on the cross?

Today you'll be with me in paradise, the first time of three times in the New Testament that that word is used. The Persian word means pleasure garden. Today you'll be with me in paradise. So where is Jesus' spirit at that time? Is it separated from the body and it's not still hanging on the cross, it's not hanging on the tomb, is it? It is with the Father, because He also said, not just to the thief on the cross today, you'll be in paradise. A few hours later, it says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

So you'll have that picture. Now, so when Christ was resurrected, did God just leave the physical body there in the tomb and make another one? No. As a matter of fact, Thomas comes up to the body that Christ was resurrected into, and what's he looking for? a different kind of body because this body all of a sudden just goes through doors and walls and isn't limited by that and can be in Jerusalem one moment and then on the road to Emmaus another and then back in Jerusalem for another one so this body is not just like the one we have now but it relates to this body there is a remaking of it Are the soul and spirit inseparable? Very good question. We're going to get to that, because that's a very good question, and we'll take a look at that.

And so anyway, man is three parts, mostly held by those of dispensationalist background, where we would say body and soul and spirit are three separately identifiable things. Yeah, in other words, if you say reformed, you're typically implying Calvinism.

You're often implying, along with that, some other conclusions, often not entirely, but often on millennial conclusions. So the reformed background also says that when you die, death is not defined as separation, but death is defined as incapacity, inability. So a different definition of death than what we would say scripture teaches. Aren't a lot of reformed people dispensationalists also?

OK. So this thing is complex, as you might expect. So here you have, when you say reformed, the Reformation started officially, you would say, with Luther, 1512. And what did he do? He put 95 theses, as it is said, nailed them on the door of the church of Wittenberg. And so that was the typical way in that time and in that place. of announcing I'd like to have a public discussion on this topic.

Well, you didn't get a public discussion, you got a firestorm, right? So here it was, and then you had another significant leader, and that subsequently was John Calvin, who's actually started off as a Frenchman. I say John Calvin, that's the Anglicized version. If I had said, hey John Calvin, he wouldn't have responded probably. Yeah, because it was French and so we speak in Anglicized version.

But anyway, so he went to Geneva and established a militarily untouchable base there, whereas Luther was running for his life and stayed at several different places in order to keep alive. as he ran from place to place. I think I've been to one of them.

So that's generally looked at as the Reformation. We've covered the Reformation in Church History, but a quick summary. In the Reformation, they established some new and different things, but whatever they didn't see as needing to be changed from the Catholic Church, they continue to embrace. And so prominently from the Catholicism was the amillennial belief, there's no future thousand year reign of Christ, we're in the kingdom now. And we talk about, that terminology is used when people talk about building the kingdom and that kind of thing in the present since we're referring to the church as the kingdom and Christ as our king, that whole terminology goes along with that.

And many reformers went along that direction. But there did begin also to be expression of what's called pre-millennialism, that is looking forward to a literal millennium, looking forward to Christ coming again and reigning from Jerusalem over the land of Israel and over the whole world. So that pre-millennial view was present as well.

Now, so in someone like John MacArthur, you have dispensationalism, but otherwise holding to a Calvinist view, and so it's a little bit more complex. So it's not simplistic, and there are people, the Bible Presbyterian Church, holds to, there's a future seven-year tribulation, thousand-year reign of Christ, but they're not dispensational. So you can have a lot of little variations on the theme. But most of the Reformers just believe their body and soul are equal. Yeah, and so that's been a Reformed tradition, that you've got body and soul, and the soul is the same as the spirit, and so that's been the general pattern.

So, then we have in the bottom of page 1 here examples from Job 7.11, Isaiah 26.9, and Psalm 44.25. These are examples that show in Hebrew poetry, as we covered in How to Study the Bible, Hebrew poetry pattern, there are shows where the soul and spirit are used interchangeably.

And we would still say, well, they're used interchangeably, but they don't mean exactly the same thing, as we'll show in just a minute. They mean something close, and so they're therefore used interchangeably. Yeah. Okay. So now. The other part, it may be that the author of this psalm intended the word soul and body to be two halves of a whole. That is, the word soul meaning living being, rather than the word soul and body as synonyms. OK, so now we get on to page 2. There we get into kind of the beginning. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.

This is out of the King James. By the way, this isn't the 1611 King James. This is the 1768 King James. The King James that people read is the fifth revision. It's not the original King James. I can bring in a copy of it for people to take a look at. It's really quite an education to look at it. It has the Apocrypha, it has notes in it, it has the Ecclesiastical Calendar. It's quite a sight to behold. The Us and the Bs are switched, so it isn't Jesus, it's Yesus. It's actually hard to read. So what most people call the King James is a boiled down, edited down, fifth revision of the King James, and that's what most people refer to, and then people try to defend that as somehow inspired or something.

Okay, so now we have another insight here, Hebrews 4.12, for the word of God is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit.

This is another passage that to those who embody soul and spirit as three separate parts, that this would indicate that there is a dividing line and that there is a place of difference between soul and spirit. So how is that explained by the Reformed folks who tend to go for the soul and spirit are the same? What's the dividing line between the body and the spiritual side? Death is separation, yeah, but in other words, what you would say is, here's this physical side, and then there's the spiritual side, and where those meet in a person, the Reformed folks would say that's where, with soul and spirit being the same thing, that on the spiritual side is where the word of God applies itself. Yes? I always thought that being brought up in basically a Reformed church, I always thought that the dividing line between the soul and the spirit is so... so far above us that we couldn't pick it out, but God can. Now I realize that there is a dividing line. Yeah, and we'll actually get into it.

This diagram that's in the bottom half of page two is where we start getting into it. This is a model in the physical realm. Essentially what this does is it says the soul and spirit in this diagram. on the spiritual realm side are two different entities, but that the soul is a part of the spirit. So this is where they could be used as near synonyms in Hebrew poetry. that the soul is a part of the spirit.

Now here's the one instance where we go into modern science and observation, and I would say just as the brain is a part of the body, just as the brain is a part of the body, now is a brain a part of the body? Do we observe that? Yes, the brain is a part of the body. Is the body just a brain? No. So it is a physical entity that is a part of the body overall.

And so we have that, and then on the spiritual side we say that the soul is a part of the spirit of man, which is why scripture could use them interchangeably in Hebrew poetry. Yes? So it would be like having two liquids pour both of those liquids in a container and they interact and they are all mixed up and all that sort of thing, but there's still two different entities inside that. Yeah, that would be an illustration that might be somewhat helpful to think about.

That's why it's so hard to divide soul and spirit because they're so Well, and it's also, it is, what we have is biblical revelation regarding it. We can't say, hey, there goes the soul, you know. And I say, ah, there's the guy's spirit, and I can look real close and have my glasses cleaned, I can see the difference between the soul and the spirit. See, we're just not in that place as humans, are we? So what we're looking at is in the spiritual realm, we're looking for biblical discernment between one thing and the other, and for insight from Scripture. As a matter of fact, one of the things you could say is, if we did not have Scripture, what of the spiritual realm would we really understand clearly?

Not much. As a matter of fact, if you look at what does the Bible say is revealed about God from looking at the physical world, what we see is eternal power and deity, that's Romans 1. That's evident, right? And Psalm 19, the glory of God, is made evident. But would you know that Christ died for your sins and was buried and rose again from looking at creation, just looking around you?

No, you wouldn't know that. We also wouldn't know things about these insights into the spiritual realm without Scripture's revelation. Yes, Dan? It's like my sister in New Age. they would say that you can learn these things since they don't believe the inspired word of God is the scripture.

They would say you would have to discern this from all different kinds of worldly documents and letters and books and all this other sort of thing. And then each person has a different take on what it is because there's no one. There's no final authority and that's a big difference because we look at it as not, here's an insightful man who wrote this.

But what we look at it as, this is God's revelation through men that he chose to reveal through, who wrote this down. And that's a different thing from, boy, this guy seems to have a lot of insights. But how would I cross-check that? Well, good luck with that. So anyway, so we have this picture.

Here's the physical realm. And we have a body, and of course there's much more detail to that body, right? And then there's a brain, which is a part of the body, and then we have a soul, which is a part of the spirit. When someone dies, what happens to these two halves? They're separated. The two halves are separated. Does that person cease to exist spiritually? No. It doesn't. What we say is that person's soul and spirit have separated from the body. But the body continues on in whatever condition or form it is, and the soul and spirit continue on separately. All right, so now let's take a look at the top of page 3. And we provide a little bit more detail.

And that is that as we read scripture, we have these insights. One, scripture, just like we have five classical senses, and by the way, other people have proposed other senses, but the five classical senses that we have in the physical realm are described as having an equivalent in the spiritual realm. And we give examples out of Hebrews.

And by the way, this is not exhaustive out of Hebrews. There are other ones. It's just these are examples. And it's not exhaustive out of the New Testament. There are other examples outside of Hebrews. So this is just a quick sampling, not a thorough listing.

So we talk about Hebrews 2.9, we see him, or Hebrews 12.2, looking unto Jesus.

So we have, as believers, five senses into the spiritual realm as believers, and those are turned on and capable of functioning. But there are degrees of functioning and there is a maturity of insight from those spiritual senses. Example, Ephesians chapter 1, the translations typically say, I pray that the eyes of your hearts may be opened. Well, it's perfect tense. So what that really is telling us, I pray that the eyes of your hearts, having been opened, that you might see. See that? I pray that the eyes of your hearts, having been opened, perfect tense. that you might see.

So the believer is given the ability for full functionality of all five spiritual senses at the time of belief. Now, that varies from one believer to the next as to how that full function is developed or used. Thinking of Adam and Eve and the fact that their eyes were opened when they ate the fruit of knowing good and evil? Here's what's interesting is their eyes were opened, of course that was spiritual, right? Their spiritual eyes were opened, their eyes were opened to what? To good and evil. So their eyes were opened to good and evil, but what the Apostle Paul is writing, I will summarize Ephesians chapter 1, are blessings in Christ. Which is good. Which is a good thing and it's not good and evil.

So he's looking at having them see an entirely different realm and spectrum of things that Adam and Eve never saw. But is it possible that a believer might not have a well-developed sense of sight or hearing or So here's a book of Hebrews, chapter 5, and he says, by now you guys ought to all be teachers, but guess what?

You are dull of hearing. So what it means is the capacity to hear was there, was turned on when they believed. The development of that, oh, and use of it, can be squelched or diminished. Undeveloped. Yes. Couldn't it depend on your maturation too, in Christ? Yeah, in other words, one is a maturity issue, the other is it possible to retrogress? And the Hebrews would say yes. That by now you ought to be here, mature, and maturity wise, by the truth that's been revealed to you, but instead you become dull of hearing.

You're not hearing what there was. Now Mike was saying last Tuesday in class that obedience, the word for that in the Greek is hearing up under or something like that. To listen and place oneself under. So this is similar to this, right? So one is to listen. What if I don't listen? I can't place myself under, but I don't want to hear, right?

Having them turned on is one thing, but having the ability to really use that and use that with understanding is another. Think about what is a baby, a healthy baby, we just get fascinated watching babies and what they are doing. It turns out about six months, and that varies from kid to kid, about six months, they're actually beginning to do some scientific-like investigation. They've had babies between six months and a year where they'll roll a ball behind a chair, and in one case they'll stop the ball and the baby's exploring, looking to find out why the ball didn't roll behind the chair and show up again. So this is a, hey I saw something and I'm wondering what this means.

Now let's ask this question, what enhances our ability to use our spiritual senses? The Holy Spirit. One is the Holy Spirit, right? So this is the Holy Spirit's ministry. So good, what else? Sensitivity to the Word of God. It's ultimately to the Word of God, and the problem with the Hebrews, you know, readers, is that they would become dull of hearing.

They weren't picking it up. Whereas they ought to have matured and turned around to the point where you guys should all be teachers by now. It never got there. Why? Because that sensitivity to the word of God was not there and therefore people became less and less able to hear, spiritually speaking.

The word says, you know, set your mind on things above and under. Yes, right. Let this mind be in you. So let's go on here. So we have the five senses in this diagram at the top of page three. And we show in there the brain, which is a part of the body, and we show the soul, which is a part of the spirit. Now there is a cross functionality in the brain and the soul. and we call those the mind, emotions, and will. The mind, emotions, and will. So what's happening, let's say here's the unbeliever who is intelligent and maybe even very well educated. We'd say, this guy is brilliant. Are there brilliant atheists? There are guys who are brilliant on the physical side, but their minds and emotions and will on the spiritual side is shut down.

They can't see it, they can't understand it, it's not working for them. And you ask them to look into the spiritual realm, and this is where you either get I'm an atheist, I just don't see anything in the spiritual realm. There is nothing there. And you say, well, given your spiritual condition, that's understandable. Right? The agnostic who looks there and just says, I just don't know. It looks dark to me. I don't hear anything. So to them, they're not picking up on anything either. And so here is Paul writing to Corinthians talking about Satan having blinded the minds of the unbeliever.

You see the mixture of these senses and the mind and all that? And by the way, does the flesh, which is the sin nature working through a body, we'll talk about that more later, does the flesh have a will? Does the flesh have a set of emotions that go along with that?

And a mindset. So there's everything on the spiritual side, the mind, emotions and will, that impacts what people do with their bodies, and what they see and what they perceive and what they consider. And so you have that aspect. Now here's something else. So we have mind, emotions and will, and that can be on the physical side or on the spiritual side. And this is a very helpful kind of picture to work with. Let's take it for instance.

Let's say somebody has an accident. and their brain function is somehow not normal after the accident. Has anything happened to them spiritually as a result of that? No, because the accident was physical. One of the things that can occur is aphasia. Aphasia is where different things in the mind get shut off or scrambled. And so instead of looking down the pews, what comes out instead of saying, well, you're all sitting on pews, it might be something like, well, you're all sitting on tables. Well, that's not quite the right word, is it? So aphasia can scramble or cut off certain portions of the physical aspect of things in the mind, in the brain side.

We had, when Nancy and I first came here, we had Doug and Frances Hallam. Frances was beginning to come down with Alzheimer's. And so at one point I sat down with Doug and I said, look, she's obviously on her physical side got some limitations, but I want you to know that spiritually she's still all there. She's still a believer on the spiritual side. And what's amazing is, I mean, there were days, unfortunately many of them, when Frances did not recognize Doug and say, well, that's my husband.

It was very difficult. But he could bring in a recording of gospel songs and hymns and things like that, and she had him right there. And she could sing right along with him and remembered all the words. So where did that come from? It came from the spiritual side, that those things all connected for her. This is a helpful model for, okay, somebody is dealing with something on the physical side that impacts the brain, but mentally We use the word mentally, but on the spiritual side, the full function is there. So here's Verne, for instance.

I was born, my left eye is legally blind. Left eye is legally blind. The nerve center and the optical center don't line up. So you close my right eye, put a book in front of me, good luck, I might be able to read the title. But, so does that mean that I have the same limitations spiritually? No. So that's one thing that's interesting is I might in my senses, I might in my brain function have some diminished capacity that doesn't translate into diminished capacity on the spiritual side. So for me as a believer, I see more than I see. Yes. So every human being that's born then has a capacity for the spiritual realm. Yeah.

Let's take, here is the Matthews with Oak. Oak's now starting to walk by the way. So what was recognized early is he's got some physical limitations, right? some physical limitations. Is he limited spiritually because of that? No. So spiritually he's all there.

So this is a very interesting thing. As you look at it, this can impact everything from how we understand aging, disease, accidents, birth defects, different things like that. This understanding is actually very useful. And it's useful for us to think about, it's useful for medical doctors and nurses and people who work in that field who are Christians to understand what's going on, for pastors and counseling and things of that sort. So there's a lot of really useful understanding that comes with this. And clearly, what are we doing now?

We are studying the Word of God and therefore we get insights, Hebrews 4.12, we get insights that impact us at the deepest level. As intelligent and as smart and as well equipped with technology and the latest research that, say, some neurologist might be. regarding the brain, and I'm not discounting that at all, but there's nothing they do, there's nothing they can impact that goes as deep as the Word of God. So that's something I look at, this is a tremendous privilege for me to be able to teach the Word of God and say I can have an impact deeply by teaching the truth of the Word of God, that no other, as valuable as it is, no other medical specialist of any kind can touch with all the technology that we have.

So this is cool. This is really cool. Plus, what I have has eternal impact. I mean, it's great that we can go and get some surgery to correct a birth defect, an injury, an impact from disease. It's great that we can do that, and that's a phenomenal thing. But to be able to have impact that touches a person that deeply, in that dividing line, and impact spiritually their mind, emotions, and will. This is really big. So this simple diagram here is a very helpful tool for lots of people and lots of circumstances. And you may even, during the course of life, come into understanding yourself or others in terms of what needs to be dealt with. If someone has a spiritually based problem, is the medical doctor, who doesn't know the Lord, going to be able to help them?

Probably minimally and only symptomatically. If the problem originates spiritually, then on the physical side, you're really not going to be able to touch it. Question. Is it possible that a person has both physical side issues and spiritual issues? Could happen. Could happen that there are both spiritual and physical issues that work together. Let's ask what happens if I am afraid of something. Is that a spiritual issue? It could well be, right? Could it have physical side issues? It could, right?

So fear, example, anxiety, depression. Depression could actually have a spiritual origin. So anyway, you get different things here and kind of thinking through just this diagram because this is a good you know, picture, diagram, to work with in terms of thinking through different circumstances.

Yeah. Okay, so, and I don't even know if I can express this or not, but the spiritual realm, okay, there's, you said at one time there's like 20,000 different denominations. 30,000, yes. 30,000, okay, and then beyond that there's also people who dwell in what they call the spiritual realm as well. but they are far from being believers. Like Saul when he contacted the seer or whatever. So this whole spiritual realm contains what? A lot of untruth and truth? I mean, you can enter into this? Yeah, let's ask this question. Let's just kind of take a big picture here.

If we talk about the sin nature, which is principally addressed starting in Romans 5.12 on into the beginning of chapter 8.

We talk about the sin nature and the things that the sin nature does and the way the sin nature operates. The sin nature is a spiritual entity, so it's in the spiritual realm here, connected to the physical body. connected to the physical body. So here is the unbeliever, and spiritually speaking, that sin nature entity, which is in the spiritual realm, is connected to the physical body, but it's hardwired. There's no way to get rid of it. As that sin nature is then implementing and exercising things within the body, then a person sins. The unbeliever then sins based on the sin nature which is a spiritual outside entity connected to the physical body.

For the believer, I now have an entirely different situation. I am now, my senses are turned on, I am on the spiritual side, I am in Christ, Christ is in me, the Holy Spirit is in me, and I am in the Spirit, I am in the Father, the Father is in me, all that taking place here on the spiritual realm side.

And so, why doesn't God say, hey, you're a believer now, you're in Christ, Christ is in you, the Holy Spirit is in you, you're in the Spirit, I mean, all that's true, right? Why doesn't He just say, I'm taking you home? And you see somebody just all of a sudden just croaks, right? And well, he must have become a believer. Right? Why doesn't God just do that?

Because Christ wants to live his life through us, to interact with us. Yeah, so he's got a whole bunch of different purposes for still having us here, including the things we're talking about for the next several months, the processes. So he has a plan for those processes.

There's one other thing, how's anybody else going to become a believer? if we don't have believers there. So it's the believers who are then going to impact others who are not believers as well as impacting other believers. So God has a purpose in all that. If you look at it, that's what this whole elective is about all year. It's about all those purposes that he has between the time to become a believer and the time to go home. So all these things have purposes and so if we look at this model that helps because we start looking at the sin nature as an entity in the spiritual realm side connected to the body. It's hardwired for the unbeliever. For the believer it is still present but only has power if we give it to the sin nature. If we grant it. It's in nature.

Which is why the Apostle Paul says in Galatians 5, 17b and in Romans 7, both places, you cannot simply will to do the right thing and will not to do the wrong thing. Why? Because your primary issue in all of life is am I giving the Lord the authority to live out his life in and through me as a ministry of the Holy Spirit, or, or am I handing it over to sin nature? The unbeliever, by the way, doesn't get that choice.

Right? No choice. They're hardwired, you know. It's, you know, the car's out in the Parking lot, except for maybe if somebody's got a hybrid or something, they run on gas. You can't put water in it. You can't put kerosene in it. You can't put white gas in it. And I found out the hard way, you can't put alcohol in it either, straight out and all. Yes, I did that with a go-kart and sat on idle. And that was the end of it, right? So you're going to run it one way, and that's you're going to run it with gas. Gasoline, right? Okay, so now we get to the last page, and we're very much running out of time, so if you hit them fast, you're certainly welcome to do it soon. A little more detail.

The Bible says that God who dwells in the eternal present and the spiritual realm is the basis of and the origin of the physical realm. So that's one thing. is the atheist's standpoint is there is the physical realm, the physical realm is the origin of itself, and there is no spiritual realm. The agnostic says, as far as I can tell, the physical realm explains everything sufficient for me, and so I can't draw any conclusions about the spiritual realm.

I don't know. But then I make this statement, all spiritual error of whatever degree is based in misunderstanding of or denial of the existence of the spiritual realm or the relationship of the physical to the spiritual realm. That's a big statement. All spiritual error is summed up in that one sentence.

When the Bible says that the unbeliever is spiritually dead, it's not that the unbeliever has no spirit or soul, but rather the unbeliever's spirit and soul are separate from God, so the unbeliever is therefore spiritually dead. The next one, since death is separation, physical death as we understand it on this planet takes place when the physical body stops functioning, and the soul and spirit are separated, so the physical body is dead.

As believers, our soul and spirit are then joined to a new body like Christ's resurrection body, which by the way has a relationship to the former body. It's not the same, but it has a relationship to the former body. Next one, the appeal to believers is to have an ongoing intake of the appropriate spiritual food so as to be impacted spiritually in ways we'll be examining in more detail in the weeks and months ahead. So there is a relationship between spiritual food and maturity.

So we'll be taking a look at that. Next one, God will use things that take place in the physical realm to have an impact on us in the spiritual realm. Our perspective on a spiritually insightful response to those physical circumstances can have a big impact on whether God's intent for those physical events and circumstances had the desired spiritual outcome or not. So we'll be talking about that.

Next, our senses in the spiritual realm are intended by God to be fully functional. The functionality of those senses depend upon our fellowship with the Lord along with our intake of and correct understanding of God's word. It's possible for one or more of those spiritual senses to experience a decline or diminished capacity. And finally there, what God is doing in the life of the believer will indeed involve physically based processes and events, but the ultimate intent is for spiritual impact.

We have sitting in our pew racks, most of them, some version of the Word of God, whether it's the New King James Version or the Greek Interlinear or both. which have the capacity to impact us deeply, Hebrews 4.12, all the way to that dividing line between soul and spirit. So for us to be deeply impacted, and so what we want to do is to understand what God's doing in the life of the believer through his word, so that we understand what God is doing, we understand what God's part is, and we understand clearly what our part is. Variations from one church to the next is often a lack of clear understanding of what we're going to be looking at over the next six months. A lot of the churches, this would include Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, a lot of the Reformed churches, have the believer being more responsible for the processes than scripture would allocate. A lot of the Catholic Orthodox, such as in Greek, Russian, Antiochian, Serbian Orthodox churches, a lot of those churches and the Reformed churches frequently have the believer doing more to affect those processes than scripture actually assigns. And it's one of the reasons why we want to say, what does the Bible call this process? What is God's part? And what has God already done? What is God already doing? And then what is my part? Do I have anything to do to keep saved? Now, I don't have anything to do to keep safe. There is nothing to be done.

However, folks in the Catholic Church, well that's called a mortal sin, right? To stay safe, they ought to not do one of those. Right? No mortal sins. Orthodox Church is something similar, right? And the Reformed Churches, the Calvinist approach would typically say, well if you do one of those things, then you weren't saved in the first place. Which I don't believe is what the Bible says. So good luck. Yeah, so good luck with that. And if you're not chosen and elected, there's nothing you can do. So that's why we wanted to say, well what does the Bible say? And not just what does this church say and what does that church say? But what does the Bible say? So that we're neither overlapping in what God's already done or is doing. nor are we stepping away from and being negligent out of ignorance from what God does intend that we do. So we do what God has us do, not more, not less. And actually scripture makes it quite clear, which is really great. Scripture makes it clear that nobody else does. So we're way out of time, so let's pray.

We thank you Lord as we look at this, what an amazing thing to be able to have understanding and insight, to be able to see not only what you're doing in our lives, the processes that you have in place, but how you made us, how we understand that so that We can have understanding in what's taking place.

We know both on the physical side as well as the spiritual side what you're doing and what you intend. And we are made, scripture makes clear, we are made to be like you. And some of that is already complete at salvation. Other things are in process and we want to understand those things clearly. And we just thank you for these marvelous insights that you give to us because you love us and you care for us so much. You love us forever. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.