Under present consideration on Christianity Clarified is the most important and complex component of your personhood. It is little understood and under-appreciated. Yet, its importance cannot be overestimated. Why is that? It’s because this component is going to go right on living after your physical body dies. Given this reality, we ought to pay very close attention to this immaterial aspect of our being. Its being immaterial is the very reason many dismiss it as nonexistent. Anyone who does, does so to their own detriment, even their eternal detriment. We know this because it is this very immaterial human spirit we all possess that is the object of spiritual regeneration, when one comes to faith and passes from spiritual death to spiritual life.
When a person is saved by exercising faith in Jesus Christ as his Savior from sin, it is this intangible human spirit that is saved. The physical body is not regenerated and not made new in Christ. The human spirit is, and, upon your physical death, your body is buried, cremated, or disposed of in another way, but that immaterial component of your personhood, that is your spirit, becomes absent from your body and enters the presence of the Lord, assuming you are a believer in Jesus Christ. Does this not make the concept of the human spirit exceedingly important? We believe it does. Accordingly, it appears that everything about your personhood that is not physical is spiritual. What is not one is the other. Nobody is neither, and nobody is exclusively one or exclusively the other. Everybody is both. No human is devoid of a human spirit, whether he wants one or not, or whether he believes he has a spirit or not. You have no option. If you are a human being, you have a human spirit, and it is a principle component that establishes your humanity.
Adam received his spirit when, in Genesis 2, God breathed into the nostrils of Adam, and he became a living soul. We do not have that clear of picture as to how we received our spirit, but the Bible leaves no doubt that we each have one. And, again, let’s be clear that we not confuse our human spirit with God’s Holy Spirit, a member of the triune Godhead. His Spirit does, however, bear witness with our spirit that we are children of God, according to Romans 8.
With the issue of our spirit and its needs being so vitally important, according to all of Scripture, it is truly tragic that so many indulge their physical body to such an extreme that they utterly ignore their spiritual self, almost as though they have none. It is of this very danger that Christ spoke when He said in Mark 8, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, yet loses his soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” If soul consists of body and spirit, and we believe it does, Christ is saying that those who would focus on the material alone, exclusive of the spiritual, will, in the end, lose everything, physically and spiritually.
CC-08-15
Published by