Search
Scripture Reading: John 3:5-6; Rom. 8:16; 1 Cor. 6:17; 2 Tim. 1:7; Eph. 6:18; Acts 6:10; Rom. 8:4
The exercise of our regenerated spirit is a crucial matter in our experience. God is triune to reach us, not as the Father or as the Son but as the Spirit. In order to reach us, He has passed through many processes so that He could be ultimately consummated as the Spirit. The Spirit today is the very consummation of the Triune God; He is the consummated Triune God. It is by, through, and in this Spirit that God reaches us. To receive the Son and the Father requires that we touch the Spirit.
The Spirit is the consummation and completion of the Son and of the Father, that is, the consummation of the Triune God. Although there may not be such terms as the completion of God or the consummation of God in today’s Christian theology, there is such a reality according to the divine revelation. Our God has been completed, consummated, and this consummating work results in a person, the all-inclusive Spirit. This Spirit as the very consummation of the Triune God reaches us. God is with us as the Spirit. In this Spirit is all that God is. When you have the Spirit, you have the Son and the Father. Both the Father and the Son are in the Spirit. Therefore, the Spirit is the consummation of the Triune God for us to touch Him.
God is triune, and we are tripartite (1 Thes. 5:23). We consist of three parts: the outermost part, the body; the middle part, the soul; and the inner part, the human spirit. When demons come to possess man, they always come upon his body, but when God comes to us, He comes into our spirit. On God’s side, the Spirit is the consummation of the Triune God, and on our side, our human spirit is the very center of our being. The very center, the most intrinsic part, of our being is our spirit. Initially, God does not come into our body or our soul but into our very center, our spirit, the most intrinsic part of our entire person. When the consummation of the Triune God, the Spirit, comes to touch us, He touches our most intrinsic part.
This truth has been neglected in Christian theology. Many real Christians do not know that they have a human spirit. When they hear the word spirit, they think of the Spirit of God. Some theologians do not even admit that we have a spirit. They say that what the Bible refers to as the spirit is actually the soul and the heart. Some translators of the Bible also have confused the spirit with the soul, the heart, and even the mind. Many Christians today do not pay any attention to the human spirit. However, if you do not know how to differentiate between the human spirit and the soul, you cannot have the proper spiritual experiences. To have the proper spiritual experiences requires that we realize that we have a human spirit in which the Spirit dwells.
In both the Old and New Testaments, there are two spirits. One is capitalized, and the other is not; the Spirit refers to God, and the spirit is our human spirit. John 3:6, John 4:24, and Romans 8:16 are three crucial verses in the New Testament that refer to the two spirits. John 3:6 says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” The divine Spirit regenerates our human spirit. When we believe in the Lord Jesus, the ultimate consummation of the Triune God touches, reaches, and even enters our very inner being to regenerate our human spirit with the divine life. After this, the Holy Spirit remains and even dwells in our spirit. This produces a union, or mingling. Regeneration is the coming of the Spirit as the ultimate consummation of the Triune God into our human spirit to mingle Himself with our inner being. The Spirit mingles Himself with our spirit to be one spirit (Rom. 8:16; 1 Cor. 6:17). This is what transpires when we call “O Lord Jesus.” Within our spirit we have a union of the ultimate consummation of the Triune God with our inner being. What a miracle this is!
The New Testament stresses the two spirits very much. John 4:24 says, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truthfulness.” Romans 8:16 says, “The Spirit Himself witnesses with our spirit that we are children of God.” The Spirit regenerates our spirit, our spirit worships the Spirit, and the Spirit is now working together with our spirit. By the begetting, worshipping, and witnessing, God and man are joined, united, combined, and mingled together.
Not too long after I was saved, I read some books by Jessie Penn-Lewis concerning our human spirit, including one that deals with the difference between our spirit and our soul. We received much help from her related to the human spirit. Later, Watchman Nee published The Spiritual Man, in which he also differentiates between our human spirit and our soul.
When I came to the United States, I began my ministry with the two spirits. In the summer of 1969 we had a conference in which we spoke of the seven Spirits (The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1969, vol. 2, “The Seven Spirits for the Churches”) and a training in which we spoke concerning the human spirit. These messages are contained in the book Our Human Spirit (chs. 1—6). We have also published a small booklet entitled The Key to Experiencing Christ—the Human Spirit. In the summer training of 1969 we also studied how much our human spirit is related to the divine life. (The messages concerning the divine life from this training are contained in the book The Crucial Revelation of Life in the Scriptures.) Without a proper knowledge of our human spirit, we could never have the adequate experiences of Christ as our life.
When a baby is born, he first exercises his body. After a period of time the child learns to exercise his mind and to speak. Eventually he is able to argue. This is the exercise of the soul. Athletics helps people to exercise their body, and schools help people to develop the exercise of the soul. Philosophy and psychology are a product of the exercise of the soul. Today every school stresses the exercise of the body and the exercise of the soul. The athletic grounds are for bodily exercise, and the classrooms are for the exercise of the soul. There is nothing for the exercise of the spirit. The exercise of the spirit cannot even be found in the Jewish religion or in most of Christianity. No school or religion covers this matter. But in the Bible the development of the spirit is greatly stressed.
Second Timothy 1:7 says, “God has not given us a spirit of cowardice, but of power and of love and of sobermindedness.” Our spirit is related to the three organs of our soul. In our soul we have the will, the emotion, and the mind. The spirit of power relates to the will, the spirit of love relates to the emotion, and the spirit of sobermindedness relates, of course, to the mind. All family, social, and national problems are due to the fact that people use their mind, emotion, and will but not their spirit. They think with their mind apart from their spirit. They love and hate with their emotion without touching their spirit. They make decisions, not exercising their spirit. It is as if they do not have a spirit. Jude 19 says, “These are those who make divisions, soulish, having no spirit.” Actually, they do have a spirit, but it is dead, dormant, and altogether neglected. They only exercise a strong will, unruled emotions, and an unbalanced, biased, and reprobate mind. Such ones are able to do many evil things related to their own person and to their family, society, and nation, for they have no relationship with their human spirit.
The Bible tells us that in God’s salvation the first and central matter is for God to touch our spirit. This is to be regenerated in our spirit with the Spirit (John 3:5-6), to have our dead and dormant spirit enlivened by the Spirit (Eph. 2:5). The first word of the New Testament gospel is repent (Matt. 3:2; 4:17). Repentance is related to the conscience. If our conscience has never been touched and enlightened, we could never repent. Repentance comes from the touching and enlightening of our conscience. When our conscience is enlightened through the preaching of the gospel, repentance issues forth. The more we repent with the confession of our sins before God, the more our conscience is enlightened. The conscience is the greatest part of our spirit (Rom. 9:1 cf. 8:16). In our human experience the conscience nearly equals the spirit.
Before we were saved, we committed sins quite often. When I participated in wrongdoing as a young boy, there was something in my conscience condemning me and telling me clearly that I should not be doing that. Even though there was no one to catch me, there was a deep fear within me. That was the function of the conscience created by God in my spirit. Romans 2:15 says of the Gentiles, “Who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness with it and their reasonings, one with the other, accusing or even excusing them.” Even when we were unsaved, and our spirit was dormant and deadened, the conscience was telling us what was right and wrong and was either justifying us or condemning us. When we heard the gospel and repented, the first part of our being that we used was our conscience. Our conscience, that is, our spirit, was opened to the regenerating Spirit. When we confessed and called on the name of the Lord, the Spirit, who is the ultimate consummation of the Triune God, entered into our spirit to enliven it and to dwell in it, to unite and mingle Himself with our spirit to form a mingled entity composed of the divine God and a human man.
From the time of our repentance, we the regenerated people should walk, live, and have our being absolutely according to this spirit. We should exercise the spirit given to us by God in prayer (Eph. 6:18), in speaking (Acts 6:10), in daily walk (Rom. 8:4), and in function in the meetings. Whenever we pray, our prayer usually begins with the exercise of the mind rather than of the spirit. However, after a few sentences our prayer will spontaneously turn from our mind to our spirit. This is because our spirit, not our mind, is our praying organ. A baby begins to move by crawling on his hands and knees, but because his feet with his legs are the walking organ, his crawling eventually leads to standing and walking. Our prayer by our mind leads us to prayer by our spirit. Moreover, we now know the secret to praying in the spirit. We do not need to start praying by our mind, but we can begin by calling on the name of the Lord—“O Lord Jesus; Lord, I worship You.” In this way we can immediately begin our prayer by exercising our spirit.
In the foregoing fourteen chapters, we have pointed out that the proper Christian experience is to have everything related to us linked with the Triune God. We have also seen that the Triune God is of the riches of Christ, and these riches can become our enjoyment. The major items of this enjoyment—regeneration, being filled within with the essential Spirit, and being filled without with the economical Spirit—are normal yet miraculous. The way to have all these normal yet miraculous things is by exercising our spirit. The development of the exercise of our spirit is practiced mainly in the proper church life that is based upon the Bible. There is not much exercise of the spirit in the denominations. Although a few small groups of Christians have been helped in relation to this matter, it is hard to find some who take care of the exercise of the human spirit. Thank the Lord that this is stressed very much among us.
Even as an elderly person, I exercise my body because I still have to use it. I render much service to my body that it may serve me better. If I do not walk at least half an hour daily, I may become sick. I also exercise my soul very much. I use dictionaries, lexicons, and concordances quite often in order to develop my understanding, my mind. Most of all, I daily exercise my spirit. Often I hear good news. Good news always encourages people, making them proud of their accomplishments. The way to avoid this kind of corruption is to not stay in the mind to consider how much you are appreciated. The more we exercise our mind in this way, the more we will be corrupted. When we hear good, encouraging news, we must turn to our spirit and exercise our spirit. Many times, however, I may hear bad news, news that is damaging, discouraging, and depressing. On hearing this kind of news, one may be depressed and discouraged. The only way to stay away from this negative influence is to exercise the spirit. On calm days when I have neither good nor bad news, I still like to exercise my spirit. I have to pray and get my spirit strengthened, trained, and disciplined. I have to exercise my spirit to pray my entire being into the spirit. If I lived in a common way all day long and came to speak in the meeting, I would not have the heavenly light, and I could not speak such terms as miraculous normality. All the fresh, new terms I have used in these messages came from much labor in exercising my spirit. This is what you also need to do.
I am not teaching you athletics for the exercise of your body. Neither am I teaching you as a professor to understand many things. What I am doing here is uniquely to help you to develop your spirit, to exercise your spirit. After a short time with this ministry, many have been helped to exercise their spirit. To pray-read two verses and call on the name of the Lord early in the morning, to speak the Lord all the day long, and to walk strictly according to the spirit are for the exercise of the spirit. If we do not have such an exercise, our spirit will be weak, and we will be through with the Lord’s move. Then our meetings will be dead and full of vain talk. To keep our meetings fully in the spirit, we need to exercise our spirit.
Today the Spirit is not far away in the third heaven; He is right here in our spirit. When we know how to exercise our spirit, the very Spirit in our spirit works together with us. When we exercise our spirit, He works, moves, and operates. This Spirit is Christ (2 Cor. 3:17; 1 Cor. 15:45b), and Christ is the processed Triune God. How wonderful it is that when we exercise our spirit, the processed Triune God works, operates, and even says Amen within our spirit. With this Amen we have peace, joy, much encouragement, and boldness. Without such an Amen, such boldness, and assurance, I could not speak for very long. But if I speak by exercising my spirit, and the very Triune God says Amen within me, I am encouraged and have the peace, joy, and confidence that I am one with the Triune God. I am speaking, and He is speaking in my speaking. He is really one spirit with me, and I am one spirit with Him (6:17).
If we all experience this, our meetings will be in the third heaven, full of the Triune God, full of Christ, and full of the riches of Christ. We will have an exhibition of all the riches of Christ. No doubt, this kind of meeting will issue in producing and edifying the members of the Body of Christ and even in the building up of the Body of Christ directly through the members. This is what the Lord is doing in His ordained way, which we call the new way.
When you stand up to read a verse, you should exercise your spirit. It is preferable to exercise the spirit and make mistakes rather than to make no mistakes but be full of the exercise of the mind. Do you prefer to exercise your spirit and make mistakes or to be fully right in the mind? We are a spirit-exercising people who make mistakes. If we do not exercise our spirit, regardless of how right we are and how few mistakes we make, our meetings will be dead and will not afford any life supply. If we make some mistakes yet have the exercise of the spirit, people will receive the help in life. I do not care to be a prominent professor, lecturing with the exact pronunciation, accent, rhythm, and voice. I am a spirit-exercising man speaking Christ. As long as I exercise my spirit in speaking Christ, you will get the help. I may make some mistakes, but they will eventually not matter. You do not come to this ministry to listen to a top lecturer; you come to listen to a brother who is speaking Christ to help you. As long as your spirit is touched, nourished, edified, strengthened, and built up with Christ, you will be happy and not care about the mistakes.
When we were young, we studied about D. L. Moody. After one of his gospel meetings in which many people were saved, a man came to him and told him that his grammar had been incorrect. Moody pointed out to him that many have been saved through his speaking with incorrect grammar, and he asked this one how many would have been saved through his own correct speaking. Moody was not a scholar. He was a worker in his uncle’s shoe shop, but he was caught by the Lord to be a full-timer, and I believe that he spoke by exercising his spirit. The spiritual experiences are altogether a matter of the exercise of our spirit.
Second Timothy 1:7 says that God has not given us a spirit of cowardice. This giving is the renewing, regenerating, and enlivening of our spirit. We had a deadened spirit, but God came to regenerate, renew, and make it alive. God has not given us a spirit of cowardice, but of a strong will, a loving emotion, and a sober mind. No one can stay away from their bothering mind, emotion, and will. They are bothering to us, but we cannot live as a human being without them. However, we should keep them under the control of our spirit.
If your spouse looks at you with an unpleasant expression and you exercise your mind, you will be angry with her. You must immediately put your mind under your spirit. The way to do this is by exercising your spirit, and the way to exercise your spirit is by calling on the name of the Lord, which implies praying. When your spouse has an unpleasant expression, you can say “O Lord Jesus.” Do not argue with her. Once you open your mouth with one word of argument, you will be damaged. You will come under the control of your devilish mind. Sometimes you may call “O Lord Jesus,” and the situation will be calmed down. However, after half an hour a devilish thought may call you back to think about what your spouse did and about how you should not be treated like that. The more you think in this way, the more the demonic emotion rises up, and eventually the troubling will rises up also. The only way to overcome the devilish mind, demonic emotion, and troubling will is to always call “O Lord Jesus.” This is why the Bible tells us to pray unceasingly (1 Thes. 5:17). Once you cease to pray, the troubling, demonic, and devilish things rise up.
These things accompany us all the time, even during the meetings. The way to control them is to call “O Lord Jesus,” to speak Christ in the spirit, and to say something about God by exercising your spirit. If you do not do this, while you are sitting in the meeting listening to the testimonies or message, you may criticize everyone. The devilish mind always reminds you of people’s shortcomings, and the demonic emotions always stir you up to love or hate, adore or despise something. Many times in the meetings we have been in our mind, emotion, or will but not in the spirit. Many Christian meetings are meetings with the mind, emotion, or will but not with the spirit. It is only when we exercise our spirit that the Spirit works, operates, and moves. A meeting with the exercise of the spirit is a meeting full of the Spirit. This kind of meeting issues in the riches of Christ and the building up of His Body.
