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PaulWest
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Joined: 2006/6/28
Posts: 3405
Dallas, Texas

 Essentials of Mortification: Spirit versus Soul

Would you live this day before the face of God in unbroken communion? Resolve then not to judge the integrity of your relationship with Him by the dictates of soul. If you gauge your communion with Him by the soul, you will invariably receive inaccurate readings and be tempted unto depression. It is essential that a child of God know the difference between the leading of the soul and the voice of the spirit in mortification. As with everything concerning our growth in Jesus Christ, familiarity with the Word of God is the safeguard. The double-edged blade of Holy Scripture is able to separate soul from spirit, the same way a knife separates the bone from meat when filleting a fish. If we allow God to steadily transform us in matters of heart-purity and humility, an eventual awareness between soul and spirit will manifest to our understanding.

The soul is the seat of emotion, intelligence, visceral heightening, of transient pleasure and pain. When unsaved people (and many regenerate people) speak of having a “spiritual” experience, what they usually mean to say is that they had a powerful soul experience. Unbeknownst to them, the soul and spirit are on two different levels. A person might have had a soul experience, while his spirit lay dead in trespasses and sins. The soul reacts to aesthetical stimuli: music, art, touch and taste. The spirit, however, responds exclusively to God’s quickening grace. This being said, the soul’s weather condition can often be an accurate barometer reading of the spirit’s temperature, but this comes with a disclaimer: the soul is within Satan’s reach and can be manipulated and commandeered by the enemy to bring a sense of condemnation and dejection to the child of God.

It falls within the Christian’s duty, therefore, to detect and mortify certain harmful impulses from the soul. The soul is subject to lust (I Peter 2:11; Revelation 18:14), and finding comfort in the excess of money and material possession (Luke 12:19); yet at the same time soul-prosperity can be of a godly source (III John 2), and of godly fear (Acts 2:43). It is able to be anchored in Christ (Hebrews 6:19) to keep from drifting into uncharted waters. The Christian must be able to identify this drifting and mortify it to the obedience of God.

Like an unruly and idle mind, the unanchored soul is a prime target for Satanic acquisition. The relationship between the soul and spirit is unique, for Satan’s great tactic is to usurp the latter with the former. Multitudes of churches are unable to identify this usurpation through their music and preaching. If the spirit is dead in sin, the soul garbed in religiosity can provide a very convincing replacement. Immature believers easily fall for this deception. Praise and worship leaders, for example, will sometimes employ a mantra-like chorus to galvanize the soul, believing they are stirring the spirit unto exhaltion. The music and singing will recite the same phrase, steadily building in intensity and volume, until a frenzied atmosphere is achieved. This is almost always the power of soul, and we should be able to recognize this phenomenon and put it to death upon discernment.

Every mature believer in Christ should be able to discern whether his or her emotions are being pandered to and manipulated. It is important to mortify these occurrences in the soul to preserve our sobriety. God rewards sobriety with grace. The spirit usurped by the soul yields no grace to overcome sin and mortify fleshly temptation. The most dynamic preaching and music predicated upon soul will do nothing for you in terms of victory, because they cannot reach beyond the emotional sector of your psyche. Victory over sin belongs to the exclusive realm of spirit which God alone is able to access and quicken.

- Brother Paul

http://understandingmortification.wordpress.com/


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Paul Frederick West

 2012/1/26 14:06Profile
UntoBabes
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Joined: 2010/8/24
Posts: 1035
Oregon

 Re: Essentials of Mortification: Spirit versus Soul

Quote"
the soul is within Satan’s reach and can be manipulated and commandeered by the enemy to bring a sense of condemnation and dejection to the child of God."
Quote

Okey,But don't you think that this is a bit overemphasized in Christian thought. It seems many in our day are talking about the Devil bringing a false sense of condemnation and accusing the brethren which I do not disagree with, but I think the other thing the Devil does is to bring comfort when comfort is not yet due.
Jonathan Edwards devotes a whole book " Religious Affections" to explain this point.

For example, lets say a believer has committed a sin and the Spirit of God brings a sense of conviction and demands confession, repentence and restitutions made, which may be a costly thing to do, then the Devil comes along with a false sense of comfort accompanied by a couple of verses from the Bible suggesting that it is all under the blood, with a bright figure that resembles Jesus appealing to the emotion and assuring the believer that things are fine.
Don't you think that the human soulish tendency would be to believe the false sense of comfort.
Now, my question is: why don't we hear in the teaching of our day that the Devil is capable of such things as much as we hear that he is capable of giving a false sense of condemnation?


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Fifi

 2012/1/26 23:02Profile
shornlamb
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Joined: 2010/10/31
Posts: 16
Germany

 Re: Essentials of Mortification: Spirit versus Soul

Dear Brother Paul,

Thank you. Your words help me greatly into a deeper discernment.

You wrote: "It is essential that a child of God know the difference between the leading of the soul and the voice of the spirit in mortification."

Would you have any practical tips about HOW to know the difference between the leading (and reactions) of my soul and the voice of my spirit?

And is the voice of my spirit capable of misleading me, if I am not possessed, completely indwelt and controlled by the Holy Spirit?

 2012/1/28 8:01Profile
PaulWest
Member



Joined: 2006/6/28
Posts: 3405
Dallas, Texas

 Re:

Dear brother, you and Unto Babes both bring up very good points. While the soul can bring a sense of false condemation and dejection to the believer, it can also bring the opposite deception, if one's heart is not right with God. The religious trappings of the soul are the number one culprit in convincing people who are not saved that they are saved. This is because religion caters strongly to the soul of man; it revels in experiences, in flash and pizazz, it thirsts after dynamic music and fabulous signs and wonders...and if not overruled by the spirit, it can blind a person to the reality of their actual unconverted state.

This is why Satan has utilized the soul so heavily and has so much candy in this world designed to intoxicate the psyche of man. It can go either way in his hands, depending on how he wishes to deal with the person: an overt dejection and depression as a result of a failing to maintain religious excellency, or a whitewashed chavalier acceptance for unrepentant sin in one's life. Both of these extreme conditions amount from not having a healthy relationship with God and His Word.

Quote:
Would you have any practical tips about HOW to know the difference between the leading (and reactions) of my soul and the voice of my spirit?


The way you can tell the soul from the spirit is by your mind's reaction to earthly stimuli. You'll know it's your soul by how it attempts to spiritulize the input. Let me give you an example. Before I was converted, I was diehard lover of classical music. I still am. In particular, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and other baroque masters. Much of the music they wrote centered around religious themes that would transport me, or so I thought, into the very presence of God upon listening. It would cause an emotional rapture which I and many others interpreted as spiritual, as hearing the very "voice of God".

I was dead in sin. I did not know Christ, I did not obey His gospel - I wasn't even sure God existed. I lived in open rebellion along with the millions of others of university professors and musicologists and atheists who also loved this music and derived the same ecstatic impressions. When I heard this music, my soul became electrified and unilaterally spiritualized these experiences which led to to believe all was fine with me and God (if He existed). If I were down, I'd just listen to some Bach or Telemann and be instantly transported. It always worked. While I acknowledge that God gave these men the talent to write such masterpeices; I know now that my feelings of exuberance and rapture upon hearing the music were the affections of the soul and not at all the Holy Spirit.

When unaccompanied by the spirit, the soul finds scripture dull and academic, but music and art and film and other spiritless forms of stimulization it finds mesmerizing. If not goverened by the spirit of God and subject to mortification, the soul will continue to dictate what is legitimate for a spiritual awakening and what is not. And when Satan gets a hold of the soul for religious purposes, you have grand deception.

Religious cults brainwash the minds of their prey through the soul. The Greek word for soul is where we get our English "psyche" from, as opposed to the Greek word for spirit -- pneuma - which means air. Satan is called the prince of the air, because he is a spirit, not a soul. This explains to so-called power of psychics. They operate using soul-power and yet they are in contact with wicked spirits. These spirits, like Satan, are able to influence the psyche of man to the cause of fear, wrath, sorrow, mirth. In short, the soul has a innate propensity to lend spiritul credence to earthbound sensations, no matter how inexpressibly beautiful they may be. The next time you find this might be happening, ask yourself this one question: will this experience help me gain victory over sin and walk before God with a greater sense of purity and holiness? This, I believe, is the ultimate litmus test test between soul and spirit.

Quote:
And is the voice of my spirit capable of misleading me, if I am not possessed, completely indwelt and controlled by the Holy Spirit?


Apparently, the regenerated spirit can be corrputed just like the soul and body (II Corinthians 7:1; I Thessalonians 5:23). I really don't know how the voice of your corrupted "spirit" sounds; I'm not 100% sure this is what God's Word means when it says "spirit" in this context. This is because in another place (Ephesians 4:23), we are told to be renewed in the "spirit" of our minds. Obviously our minds and our spirits are different entities, for we can still use our minds even though our spirits are dead in trespasses and sin. When our spirits become regenerated, however, we are led by God's Spirit to take dominion over the thoughts of our mind (II Cor. 10:3-5), and the deeds of our body (I Cor. 9:27). In many places throughout God's Word we see spirit and heart and mind and soul being interchanged, with the "inner man" sometimes dwelling in one, and sometimes in the other.

With the light I currently have on the subject (may God grant me more if I am wrong), I would say that the true regenerated spirit in man is the sole product of God, breathed into life by Him and is His point of contact infused into us by His Spirit. Spirit begets spirit. If your spirit man (or inner man) can be corrupted, according to the Word of God, I suppose starvation is one way. Your spirit incessantly cries for food, for communion with God and the holy sustenance of His Word. When his strength ebbs low due to under-nourishment, this is when the mind and soul and body begin to gain the upperhand. This upperhand leads to defilements, corruptions, flesh-frenzies, psychological depression, all sorts of excursions into impurity and a loss of divine intimacy.

Dear brother, may you find something helpful here, and may you be encouraged to dig through God's Word yourself to find even greater answers.

Brother Paul







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Paul Frederick West

 2012/1/28 10:45Profile
ginnyrose
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Joined: 2004/7/7
Posts: 7534
Mississippi

 Re: Essentials of Mortification: Spirit versus Soul

Paul, I do not want to flatter you, but I must say this article is full of meat. I deeply appreciate it.

This is a very important point:

"The soul is the seat of emotion, intelligence, visceral heightening, of transient pleasure and pain. When unsaved people (and many regenerate people) speak of having a “spiritual” experience, what they usually mean to say is that they had a powerful soul experience. Unbeknownst to them, the soul and spirit are on two different levels. A person might have had a soul experience, while his spirit lay dead in trespasses and sins. The soul reacts to aesthetical stimuli: music, art, touch and taste. The spirit, however, responds exclusively to God’s quickening grace. This being said, the soul’s weather condition can often be an accurate barometer reading of the spirit’s temperature, but this comes with a disclaimer: the soul is within Satan’s reach and can be manipulated and commandeered by the enemy to bring a sense of condemnation and dejection to the child of God."

Hebrews 10:39 is powerful: "But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul." Our soul can be redeemed, but it must be like you said: familiarity with the Word of God and allowing the LORD to transform us. This is a lifelong process.

God bless, Paul.

ginnyrose


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Sandra Miller

 2012/1/28 10:59Profile
murrcolr
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Joined: 2007/4/25
Posts: 1839
Scotland, UK

 Re:

Quote In many places throughout God's Word we see spirit and heart and mind and soul being interchanged, with the "inner man" sometimes dwelling in one, and sometimes in the other.

Very true take for example the "heart". Jesus mentioned "understanding with their heart" Jn. 12: 40 Hence, the intellect or reasoning ability resides in the heart. The Bible speaks of the heart possessing emotion John 14: 1. Emotions such as joy, love, and desire are emotions said to emanate from the heart Jn. 16: 22; Matt. 22: 37; 5: 28. The expression "willing heart" is a reference to the will of man being located in his heart Ex 35: 5. The language "pricked in their heart" is an allusion to the conscience or that part of the heart that pains us when we do wrong Acts 2:37.

After these scriptures are gathered and studied about the heart, we can deduce that the heart consists of the intellect or thinking ability; emotions; the will or volition; and the conscience. The heart is the seat, source, reservoir, and instigator of our thoughts, attitudes, desires, character, and motivation. Pr 4:23 Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance and above all that you guard, for out of it flow the springs of life. (AMP)

In the bible the heart is seat of the mind, will and emotions we can also call this the soul…


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Colin Murray

 2012/1/28 11:32Profile
PaulWest
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Joined: 2006/6/28
Posts: 3405
Dallas, Texas

 Re:

I really appreciate all comments, thoughts, objections, constructive hecklings, testimonies. They help spur on deeper meditations and excursions into God's Word. I sincerely pray these writings are used by God to help the body of Christ be perfected in holiness. There is no other motive involved. The ultimate goal is to compile all these writings into a single book: "Understanding Mortification - The Pathway to Victory".

I've dedicated a blog to its contents and I'm waiting on God's will as far as publication goes. If the "green light" ever comes, all my brothers and sisters on SermonIndex will receive a copy upon asking. All proceeds will go to feeding hungry children. O Father God, thy will be done.

Your prayers concerning this project are encouraged.

http://understandingmortification.wordpress.com/


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Paul Frederick West

 2012/1/28 14:23Profile
mama27
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Joined: 2010/11/20
Posts: 1482


 Re:

I am not able to comment at length as I have out of town guests about to walk in the door....but I was hurriedly reading this post as God has had me in the school of mortification for a time now.....I almost posted a prayer request last night b/c an episode with my prodigals had me reeling in my emotions (soul)....that is where the enemy ALWAYS gets me....however, the Lord gave me a pause to see what was really happening - the battle in the spirit world - and I had a measure of victory. I have read your posts with great interest as I seem to be living in either victory or defeat depending on which realm I respond out of (old habits die hard!) - your posts resonate with my spirit and I am so thankful for the meat to ponder (when the attacks from the enemy slow down, that is) :) Wish I had time for more, but wanted to say THANK YOU!

 2012/1/28 15:00Profile
PaulWest
Member



Joined: 2006/6/28
Posts: 3405
Dallas, Texas

 Re:

Quote:
I almost posted a prayer request last night b/c an episode with my prodigals had me reeling in my emotions (soul)....that is where the enemy ALWAYS gets me....however, the Lord gave me a pause to see what was really happening - the battle in the spirit world - and I had a measure of victory.


Keep on resisting the intrusions. God will call for a cease fire and reward you grandly if you just hang on. The only way they can get to you is if you ungird your mind and let them in. This is the responsibility God has given to all His children, and the reason why we are to abide in Christ and depend on the power of His grace.

The loosening of the mind is indeed a habit. Spiritual forces wait to attack when they know the girding is down. Remember, they watch you. They don't know your thoughts, but they can observe your activity and listen to your speech and make inferential judgments based on what they find. Keep filling yourself with scripture. Keep notes on the activity of your mind. Don't let it wander aimlessly and indulge itself too heavily on worhtless subjects that will not strengthen your inner man. Keep yourself fortified.

It becomes very encouraging when you suddenly see these precepts working! Where you once lost your tempter, now you begin overcoming. Things that once caused you to become discouraged and lose your peace now hit a "brick wall" or a shield in your mind and are countered with an appropriate verse. Almost effortlesly the fight is over and you're still standing! What happened! Well, you got a taste of victory - the victory promised by God in His Word which is the birthright for all New Covenant believers in Christ. Can it be repeated? After all, that was just one skirmish.

When you're attacked the next day and again overcome, you'll begin to see a pattern. I always think of Moses' arms being held up by Joshua and Hurr. As long as his arms were lifted, God's children prevailed in the war. It is important to note that as Moses sat on the rock and rested, his arms were propted up by helpers. For the believer in Christ, in the New Covenant, I see these two helpers as the Word of God and the Holy Spirit. As long as I rest upon Christ and allow them to lift my inner man, no enemy in hell can prevail against my mind or infiltrate my heart. But as soon as I allow my inner man to sink, the power of the flesh and the weapons of the enemy begin to advance upon me and inflict damage.

Keep your mind well-girded, feed your spirit with God's Word, extend your inner man's arms as a shield against the forces of darkness, and you will have victory. It is your bithright in Christ.

Brother Paul


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Paul Frederick West

 2012/1/28 15:35Profile
lylewise
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Joined: 2009/2/20
Posts: 494
Celina, Texas

 Re: Essentials of Mortification: Spirit versus Soul

This is Spriritual Plagiarism! Write on Brother Paul.

 2012/1/28 16:00Profile





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