Term Paper "The Spiritual Man" by Watchman Nee Pt. 1

Please keep in mind that this and all the studies contained within this website are my own personal studies, they do not necessarily represent my Church's views or my Pastors'... Be blessed!

This study is part one of three. This is not for the faint hearted! You will learn alot but not without a cost. The format I have chosen here is straight & to the point! There's no indenting, nothing to make this easier to read, but if you do take the time to read it I'll guarantee you that you'll be blessed by it! Go read the book too, it's about 1000+ pages! Be blessed in all you do and say! Your brother in Christ, Richard P. Duffield

Port Harcourt, Nigeria

May 1, 1998
Term Paper : "THE SPIRITUAL MAN", Part 1 By: Watchman Nee
This term paper for some reason has not been easy in coming, I sense an uneasiness in my spirit as I begin to type these words, I’ll begin never the less and see where we get as the words flow forth. First off I must begin by saying that this book has so far had a tremendous impact on my life, it is a compilation of things I’ve read and studied over the last few years and some things I’ve not encountered before in their totality as brought forth in this treatise , but all in one comprehensive volume and it has had a profound effect on me personally! It is very hard to put into words all that I’ve gleaned from these pages and even more important the truths that have become part of me now as a result of reading this book. I’ll begin with the most pertinent truths directly from the book in outline form and hopefully (prayerfully) in the end of this work, I’ll reveal the workings that same has effected in my life. First off we find that man is a three part being, (see 1 Thess.5:23) comprised of the spirit, the soul, and the body. We find that God created man’s body from the earth (Gen. 2:7) and breathed life into his nostrils which made man a living soul! With this we can see that this "breath of life" which became man’s spirit, (the principle of life within man) and as it combined with man’s body became man’s soul. At this point I must interject that there is a difference between man’s spirit and the Holy Spirit, as Romans 8:16 clearly shows, the two should not be confused although they both originate from the same source (God) however they couldn’t be more dissimilar! Right from the beginning the Word of God warns us by using the plural Hebrew word chay when it refers to this "breathe of life" which God breathed into man, thereby showing us that this inbreathing produced a twofold life, soulical and spiritual. I might now say that man (much like God) is a trinity, well isn’t that what the Word says, "and God created man in His own image". (Gen. 1:27) The soul comprises the intellect, and the emotions, it belongs to man’s self and reveals his personality. Appropriately it is part of man’s self- consciousness, the spirit on the other hand is the part of man by which we commune with God and with which we apprehend and worship Him, it is appropriately labeled as the element of man’s God- consciousness. The soul is the meeting point between man’s body and spirit and as such stands between both, yet it belongs to both. The soul is the part of man where free will is manifested. The spirit cannot act directly upon the body, it needs a medium, that medium is the soul. Of the three, the body is the lowest part, it is the part which contacts with matter. The work of the soul is to keep the other two in the proper relationship, whereby the highest (the spirit) governs the lowest (the body). Before the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, the spirit controlled the entire being through the soul! The soul was completely under the dominion of the spirit up until man committed the original sin in the Garden of Eden. This very same soul after the fall of man found itself in control through that part of man called the will. Man, even in his fallen state has at his disposal a discerning organ called the conscience, this distinguishes right and wrong, not however from the knowledge man has stored up in his mind but by a spontaneous direct judgment and this organ belongs to the human spirit. The human spirit also has a sensing organ called the intuition which involves a direct sensing independent of any outside influence. The revelations of God and all the movements of the Holy Spirit are known to the believer through this same organ! Communion with or worship of God is made ONLY through this part of man called the spirit, it is without doubt the highest part of man’s being! Herein we see that the spirit, much the same as man (and God) is triune as well, conscience, intuition, and communion. We therefore deduce that the relationship of these three parts are as follows; conscience judges according to intuition and intuition is related to communion or worship in that God is known by man intuitively and reveals His will to man only in the intuition. No measure of deduction or expectation brings forth the knowledge of God! Before a believer is born again, his spirit is so suppressed by his soul that he loses the ability to discern whether something is emanating from the soul or the spirit, from Satan or from God! Thus we can see the importance of there being a dividing between soul and spirit after he is regenerated. We can now look a little closer at the soul, it makes up man’s personality, his "self consciousness". The main parts of this "personality" is volition, mind, and emotion. Volition is the instrument for our decisions, our power to choose. The mind is the instrument for our thoughts, our intellectual power. The emotion is the instrument for our likes and dislikes. These three together make up the very phenomenon which we label the life of man. (Life meaning the natural life that animates man or in Greek, Psuche ) However we can also understand that there exists a higher life than this life of which I’m speaking, the one called in the Greek Zoe. This is the spirit life! Having said all of the above, for the reason of not wanting to make this paper longer than the book itself, I’ll cut to the very meat of this book. Man was created by God whereas the spirit was in absolute control but through disobedience and sin the order was changed and the soul, that part which is governed by outside stimuli and therefore the devil, assumed command of the ship! MUTINY! Satan reached man through the body, (lust of the flesh) then soul, (lust of the eyes and pride of life) and finally the spirit as it in disobedience followed the other two. (Gen. 3:6, 1 John 2:16) After this fall, the soulical life of man had become abnormally developed! God made a provision through His most wonderful Son, the sinless Lord Jesus to restore man’s fallen state and this was accomplished at Calvary’s cross! Without going into detail here, Jesus paid a debt He did not owe, we owed a debt we could not pay! Acts 10:9 and John 3:16 & 36 and countless other scriptures show us what needs to be done to restore our personal relationship with God through our Lord’s atoning blood, however now comes the important truth revealed in this first part of this wonderful book, when we accept Jesus’ sacrifice and are born again, we have been positionally placed on the cross with Jesus and have died to sin with Him, notwithstanding what happens at new birth happens entirely within the spirit, it has no relation to our soul or natural body!!! Having said that, remember, at rebirth the Holy Spirit indwells us and becomes the life of man’s spirit, the spirit thereby becomes the life of man’s entire being thus the spirit, soul, and body are restored to God’s original intention in everyone who is born again! Once man is born again of God, he can never be treated by God as not having been so born of Him. Sounds great, HOWEVER, with the soul having been in command for so long, it is not so easily put down and does not easily give up! Thereby we now get to the point, there are two kinds of born again Christians, spiritual and soulical. The spiritual is the one who has submitted to the Lordship of the Holy Spirit which indwells him and therefore his spirit, by the power of the Holy Spirit, controls his entire being. The soulical is born again into God’s life but instead of overcoming his flesh, (soul and body) is overcome by his flesh!! There is quite alot said about flesh, in order to keep this somewhat brief it’ll suffice to say that man is born and all that he inherits at birth (all that indeed man is at birth and later develops into) is considered flesh and there is nothing that man can do to not be flesh. God looks upon flesh as utterly corrupt (Gen. 6:3, Romans 7:18, 8:8 & 13, etc...) therefore there is only one possible conclusion that we must form, that flesh must die, it must be put to death! Anything less is utterly insufficient! In regeneration (the born again experience) flesh is not transformed, in fact the process exerts no good influence whatsoever on the flesh itself. Flesh remains as it always was... God, in His never ending mercy, does however give us His Spirit and imparts His life into us to educate and train our flesh. In fact, His life is imparted into us to enable us to overcome the flesh! Keeping in mind that the sins which derive from our flesh can generally be divided into five groups, those being: 1. sins which defile the body (immorality, impurity, licentiousness, etc...), 2. sinful supernatural communications with satanic forces (idolatry, sorcery, consulting with mediums, spiritualists, etc...), 3. sinful temper and it’s peculiarities (enmity, strife, jealousy, ungodly anger, etc...), 4. religious sects and parties (selfishness, dissensions, party spirit, envy, etc...), 5. lasciviousness (drunkenness and carousing) , all of these are clearly delineated by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatians, Chapter 5, verses 19 - 21. The indisputable evidence of their presence in our everyday lives is the fact that we can see their workings in us to some degree, whether bountiful or in a small measure! We can easily see the need to not just conquer this force called our flesh, but it must be summarily put to death! Anything less than death is utterly insufficient. Therefore having said all the above until now, we can ascertain this truth, that the born again experience is the means in which we are enabled (by God’s abundant grace) to be reconciled to God whereas without same we could never please Him and are doomed to eternal damnation, but in itself it is the minimum we can receive in our spiritual life. We must receive as well the absolute Lordship of His Eternal Holy Spirit to enable us through our spirit being so empowered to put to death this flesh and soulical ways and receive all that God has for us while walking as truly Spirit led children of Jehovah God. This process is a daily dying to self! The Apostle Paul said it well in 1 Cor. 15:31. This was not something he arbitrarily decided to do, it is a prerequisite to pleasing God and fulfilling all that He has planned for us! (Gal. 5:16 - 18) All of the above might seem disheartening, however God’s Word promises in Gal. 2:20 that we have already crucified this flesh! It is already dead in the spirit, now what lacks is our making this truth a working, experiential and ongoing action in our daily lives. The trick here is to believe God’s Word fully and without reservation, knowing (experientially) that all has already been accomplished for us by our Lord Jesus and the next step is for us to begin to look at our flesh with God’s eyes, with His viewpoint we must approach our flesh! We must through the Holy Spirit which indwells us, despise the flesh and all that emanates from it! Flesh as well can do good things! We can get off into all kinds of works (albeit dead works) in our flesh, and do all levels of decent and wonderful things in our flesh, all of which are rubbish before the Most High God! Furthermore, we can find that natural love can and will stumble us, (Luke 14:26) didn’t it cause Peter to receive the Lord’s rebuke in Matt. 16:23! Love being a part of our emotions comes from the soul or flesh! Yet love often times appears as such a chivalrous action, even so, it is controlled by the soul! Many times we are quite willing to put to death the things that are apparently contrary to God’s Word, it is often the inconspicuous things that ensnare us! Unless we see ourselves with the eyes of God, we can so easily be deceived! And deception always causes a downward spiral towards destruction! We must therefore petition the Holy Spirit to reveal to us that which is of the spirit and that which is of our flesh! Remember that God created us that way originally, (with the spirit leading the soul and body) prior to Adam’s fall, and recreates us as such in the new life through His Son, the difficult part is to enact the actual change in our everyday lives! This takes choice and action on our parts! We see in the Garden of Gethsemane the Lord Himself proclaiming that the disciples’ spirits were indeed willing, but their flesh was weak! (Mark 14:38) We must learn to not put any trust in our "self", we must learn to be totally dependent on the Holy Spirit to lead us in every decision, in every circumstance! When He (the Holy Spirit) is in complete control, He will overthrow the power of the flesh and manifest Christ as our life. This is the goal we are seeking, to be conformed to the image of Christ Jesus! (Rom. 8:29) In order for this principle to work in our lives, no longer can we trust in our cleverness, we must deny everything originating in ourselves, what we are, what we have, what we can do, and move entirely by Him, daily apprehending the life of Christ through the Holy Spirit. What we have to see here is that Jesus’ principles never change, (John 12:23,24) death brings forth life, by putting self, (flesh, soulical life) to death, we gain life and that life in abundance. Thus being said, we understand that gaining spiritual life is conditional on our suffering loss! The soul life must be brought to the cross and crucified unto death so that the power of the Holy Spirit alone may operate all the parts of the soul, without interference from our natural life. Having stated what we need to do, let me further explain what it is we need to be rid of and suggest a method to effect same. Our enemy here is the old man (our old carnal, sinful nature)... Even though the Word states that the old man has been crucified (Rom. 6:6) if we are born again from above, we must understand that he delights in sin, he condones sin and bends to it, (after all he was slave to sin for as many years as we existed prior to coming to Christ) and he instigates the body to sin. The body serves as a puppet and then practices said sin. The biggest problem most Christians have is not understanding the completeness of Romans 6:6 and Gal. 5:24, they somehow do not experientially know and believe this truth of God’s Word. The biggest hindrance to their believing this truth in it’s entirety is the lack of revelation! Without revelation, they cannot experience it’s freeing power. Faith comes through revelation! Romans 6:11 tells us that we must reckon ourselves dead to sin, that is an action required from our part, God has already accomplished this fact and does not need to do more, we must choose to believe, obey, and act on God’s instruction here in His Word! He doesn’t say in the following verse (vs. 12) that we should try not to let sin reign, He says DO NOT let sin reign. Obedience is essential once we are saved, we can ascertain that if we persist in holding on to something that God wants us to relinquish, sin shall have dominion over us, what we are doing is resisting God and His Spirit, thereby giving dominion of the spirit and body to the soul or flesh! (Old man). Much the same as with our resurrection life, (the dead being raised) the old man even though dead, awaits the power of the soul to resurrect him and overthrow the spirit once again. The soul as we said before is still alive and well, even though our old man is crucified, remember that the soul is our natural life, that power that preserves us alive in the flesh. Again and again I must repeat, we must look at what comes from our natural life as sin laden and abominable, something that cannot ever please God and as such it needs to be put to death! We must remember that Satan does not care if people pray or love the Lord, as long as it’s done in their natural self and energy, he knows that anything that is done in the natural is not done by faith and such being the case, the same cannot please God and is in fact sin! (Heb. 11:6, Romans 14:23) One very penetrating truth revealed in this book is that the higher our knowledge and more profound our experience, the more hidden shall our soul life be, and consequentially the harder to detect and thereafter detest! This one strikes close to home! We can only look to God’s Word for assistance here, see Heb. 4:12! The deeper the Word penetrates, the deeper works the cross and the further the Holy Spirit completes the union of the life of our spirit with the Lord Jesus. God’s Word must lay bare more and more of our natural life so that the work of the cross can probe deeper and deeper. We have to remember that Lot’s wife didn’t go back, she only looked back! Does the world still hold our interest? When the soul life is genuinely crushed nothing of this world can again move the believer’s heart! GUILTY! I am quite guilty of looking back much more than I care to admit! It quite frankly sickens me at how little control over this wicked flesh I have if I truly look at everything I say and do through the Spirit of God! One thing I am happy about though, I can see the depravity of my flesh, I am very aware of it’s presence, I know what I must do, I only wait for God to give me the power to effect the necessary execution! I have since the middle of this first section been brought almost to being sick by the absolute wickedness of my flesh, (without having outwardly sinned to any bystanders) I just relate so much to the Apostle Paul in Romans 7:19! I realize that I must allow God to operate in me that my heart can be severed from everything pertaining to the world and be totally released from the sin of Lot’s wife! The book says, "Earthly things truly represent an acid test for soul life." How do I rate myself in the light of James 4:4 and 1 John 2:15? I REPENT! Help me please Holy Spirit! Much as Jesus said, my spirit is willing..... What can we do to see victory? We must obey the Lord and everything He teaches in His Word, we must renew our consecration and offer ourselves to God without reservation. We must be willing to have our soul life committed to death in order that the Lord that dwells in the Holiest may finish His work! We must genuinely and earnestly desire in our hearts a separation of soul and spirit, petition the Lord to show us where we’ve become mixed in spirit and soul, and yield totally and specifically as the Lord determines. We need to bend our will continuously and incessantly towards God and actively choose to do and be what He determines we should. The Holy Spirit needs our cooperation, He will not force us in any issue, we must live according to the spirit, walk according to the spirit, and to do so we must recognize the working of the spirit and follow it! The biggest help we can give in accomplishing all the above is to persevere in earnest prayer! (1 Thes. 5:17, Eph. 6:18) This is our best means of communicating with God and our strongest weapon against all that is contrary to Him. Like our spirit is, so shall our soul too be indwelt and regulated by the Holy Spirit of God. Our mind, emotion, and will (components of our soul) shall be filled by Him. What we have maintained by faith in the spirit we now know and experience in the soul, nothing lacking and nothing lost! His glory can and will govern everything, if we only agree to same! Were we to deliver our natural energies to death and capitulate entirely to the Lord, our soul, though so nervously sensitive, would rest in the Lord and not misunderstand Him. We do not rely upon the soul to execute God’s will, rather we perform His will from the soul, that is, with the whole heart! We can actually lose our self in God!! In fact we should lose our self in God! When this principle is working in our lives, our soul genuinely clings to the Lord! No longer is there independent action, but full surrender to Him instead! This surrender is done by gladness, not by compulsion. We begin to henceforth hate our life and wholly love our Lord! The fact is, if the Lord is not magnified in the soul, nowhere else is He truly magnified either. If we truly pour out our soul life and commit our spirit to God, we too shall know the power of resurrection and shall enjoy a perfect spiritual way in the glory of resurrection. Thus my outline and comments being completed, I look forward to the following Parts 2 & 3 and the truths they will reveal in and through my life. I thank God for this Author and this Bible Institute for pointing me towards his works, over and over I’m challenged to more and more offer my utmost for His highest... I realize that being static in my Christian walk is in fact backsliding and these courses have been an absolute blessing to me in these trying times here in Africa. I thank God continuously for you all at Calvary Bible Institute and make mention of you always in my prayers to Him.

May the Lord abundantly bless you even as you bless others!

Ricky Duffield

I pray that somehow this has inspired you, helped you, or at least made you ponder the wonders contained within God's Word! If you made it through this Part 1, make sure to read Parts 2 & 3, they are essential to your growth in Christ! Please make sure to send comments or suggestions if you have any! They are welcome!

Remember, God doesn't need people who've already arrived, He needs common sinners, saved by His grace, like you and I!

Be blessed!

In His service,

Richard P. Duffield