Living in the Spirit: Why is this Confusing?

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God… (Galatians 2:20, KJV)

God is spirit, and the Christian life is rooted in the spirit realm. There are scores of scriptures revealing the Father’s will to us to walk in the Spirit. However, there are few things in Christianity more mystical as the concept of walking in the Spirit. How can the very nature of our expected daily life as Christians become a mystery to us? There are certainly many reasons. One of them is that the word “spirit”, as I have teaching lately on our Live Bible studies, is difficult to grasp. However, let me show you another reason why many Christians are still being hindered from truly living in the Spirit.

Please take a look at the verse above again. It says the “life which I now live in the flesh I live the faith of the Son of God.” He was saying that the spiritual life he was living was in the flesh. This is not a paradox. How can the spiritual life be in the flesh? One of the top reasons I have realized is keeping many of us from walking daily in the Spirit is the idea that separates the human spirit’s operation from the flesh. That is, for many Christians, living in the spirit is more of a kind of out of the body experience. They think when the spirit is acting, it means the mind and the body are silenced. For example, worshipping God in the spirit would mean something like it is my spirit worshipping and my mind and my body are not involved. This is a terrible error.

The human spirit lives and operates in the mind and body. You are one being, not divided. You live in the spirit in your daily operation of the soul and body. You do not have to move out of the body to live in the spirit. No! In fact, that is not what God wants. He wants you live in the spirit IN THE FLESH, that is, in your day to day life of the mind and the body. Do not mistake out of the body experiences that the Lord sometimes give us with our daily walk in the spirit. I mentioned during our Bible study that the spirit is an independent being all by itself and this is part of the confusion. This devotional will be too short for me to fully explain this confusing concept. I began a series on the soul during our live bible study 2 weeks ago, which will lay a solid biblical foundation of our human nature and how God created man to be. I will move further to discuss what the human spirit is from next week Thursday.

As always, please study these things for yourself.

MEDITATE

Does living in the spirit mean that we reject or do away with our bodies and minds?

APPLY THE WORD

God’s plan for us is FOREVER to live in a body. Living in the spirit does not mean out of the body experiences. God’s plan for you is to live the life of the SPIRIT in your SOUL and BODY, and not to seek to be out of the soul and body. The Spirit wants to be in control of the way you think, feel, act, talk, etc. Yield to Him!