We take our initial paces out of Darkness into Light. We must make our feet move, one in front of the other. The capacity to walk is in the feet and legs, mostly. The capacity for acting in the Spirit is the in heart. In biblical terms, the heart has no connection to emotions, as we tend to think here in modern Western society. Rather, the Bible associates the heart with the human capacity for decision, the will.
Scripture offers a model for human nature. Keep in mind a model is not the real thing, but a conceptual prototype which allows us to examine some of the characteristics of the real thing. Human nature is far more complex than any human mind can fathom, but we do have a working model for our purposes. New Testament writers refer to the body, though often they use the word "flesh" to describe both the body and the weaknesses inherent in it. The spirit we have mentioned already, as either dead or alive. In the middle is the soul. The model further suggests we can think of the soul as having intellect (mind), emotions and will.
The place of spiritual activity is in the will. Especially at first, the mind and emotions want to run away with the will, frustrating the spirit's action. We spend our entire lives after spiritual birth teaching our will to hear from the Spirit first. On the one hand, we teach our will the emotions do not vote at all, but are there to celebrate or sorrow, to give full meaning to decisions and consequences. However, the intellect must be trained to accept input which is not entirely logical, to accept decisions from the spirit. Instead, the intellect rightly brings clarity to decisions.
Clarity is the work of redemption, daily whittling away at the crust of emotional baggage and neuroses infecting the mind. There is within us by the inheritance of our spiritual birth a bedrock of being, of decisions already made in Eternity. We could call them "convictions." These are the commitments we cannot walk away from. We hold opinions; we are held by convictions. While the intellect can evaluate opinions by logic, convictions hold the will by the higher power of God. Once born in us, we defy convictions at great cost in spiritual terms hard to define. The work of clarifying tends to bind us to them more tightly. We seek the bedrock of what we must do.
We do not shape convictions, but are shaped by them. They come from God. They are the unique imprint of God on our individual being. It is not a question of which competing convictions are right between two individuals, but both are the same burning imperative at work in different creatures. There must be some overlap because it is the same God, but it will be measured in terms of spiritual commitment to serving God.
Hearing from the Spirit in our spirits is exceedingly difficult until some measure of clarity has come to the convictions. Search your heart and seek to know by God's redeeming power those imperatives for which we would readily face any amount of suffering or death.
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By Ed Hurst
15 February 2009
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