By Bienhome Muivah
There is the new you and the old you. The new you has the mind of Christ and all the abilities of Christ. We have the picture of ourselves in Christ, now we have to finish coloring it. It’s enough to know that there is a new you. You have to have more details before you can actually see what has happened to you in your spirit man.
To get an accurate mental image of your physical features, you look into a mirror or make a photograph or video of yourself. Did you know that when you do that you are using faith? It takes faith to look at a mirror, a photo, or a video and say, “That’s me”. How do you know for sure the image you are seeing is really you?
When it comes to looking in a mirror, most of us have never challenged the validity of what we see. We are seeing a reflection which we, by faith, believe to be us. But it only represents us. It’s not the real us. For instance, we don’t know for sure that we have hair on the top of our head.
Now you may say, “Oh, yes I do. I have seen it in the mirror.”
No, what you have seen is a reflection of the hair on your head.
“Well, I can feel it with my physical hands.”
Maybe so, but you still haven’t seen it. How do you know that what you feel is accurate? One way or the other, you are taking something by faith. The same thing happens when we look at our spirit. We can’t see our spirit in a mirror, so how can we accurately view our spirit?
There are some people who depend upon their senses so much, they can’t accept that there is any realm of reality except what they can see, taste, hear, smell, or feel. Because they can’t physically sense their spirit, they give up trying. “It’s hopeless”, they say. “I don’t really understand spiritual things”. It’s because they are looking in the wrong place.
God’s Mirror
The words that I speak to unto you, they are spirit, and they are life (John 6:63).
In the words that Jesus spoke were spirit and life, then the Word of God is not just a book, it’s a look into the spiritual realm. It’s like a spiritual mirror we use to see spiritual truth. If we want to see if our hair is combed, we look in a mirror, trusting that the representation we see is true. In the same way, if we want to see what our spirit is like, we go to God’s Word and see what God says about us, trusting that whatever He says about us is the way whether we feel it or not.
We may not feel well like our hair is combed, but that really has nothing to do with whether it is combed or not. Someone may be able to convince us with their words that our hair is messed up, when in truth it really is combed. So we can’t go by our feelings, we have to look and see for ourselves and trust that what we see is true. It’s the same thing with the spirit man. You may have read in the Bible, ‘I can do everything through him who gives me strength’ (Philippians 4: 13). You may know that intellectually, but you don’t feel it. So when you come up against a problem, you feel like, “oh, man, I don’t have any power”. But it doesn’t matter what you feel if you are going by what God’s Word says. The truth is that whatever God’s Words says about you is Spirit and it is life-it is spiritual truth.
Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves … James 1:22-25.
James talks about a man who looks in a mirror and sees his natural face, then goes his way and immediately forgets what he looks like. But James also says that anyone who looks into the perfect law of liberty (God’s Word) and continues in it will be blessed. Just as we look in a mirror to see our physical self we look into God’s Words to see our spiritual self. When a person makes Jesus Christ the Lord of their life, there is a transformation that takes place on the inside. Most Christians know this in their minds, but very few of them have ever got an accurate mental picture or perception of who they really are in the spirit. Because they don’t have the correct information about who they are in Christ, they can only operate on the information they do have, and they naturally act out of their old selves. They act out of their old abilities instead of their new found abilities in Christ. This is where so many Christians miss God’s best for them. Most Christians have the desire to do the right things, but they feel unequipped. They feel that they don’t have the ability. We know of many Christians who are praying for faith, power, and all kinds of spiritual gifts. The truth is, according to God’s Word they already have them-all believers have them. Now you may say, “But wait a minute, I don’t have these things. I know because I don’t feel them”. It doesn’t have anything to do with what you feel, it has to do with what you believe.
You are a new spirit
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (2 Cor 5:17).
Identifying who you really are in Christ and living in accordance with that identity is the key to the Christian life. They key to understanding who you are in Christ in recognizing that it is your spirit that got born again. It is your spirit that has changed. I pray to God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ (I Thessalonians 5:23).
According to this scripture, we have three parts-a spirit, a soul and a body. Paul prayed that God would keep and preserve the Thessalonians wholly, or completely, in spirit, soul and body. The body is very easy to identify. It is the physical part of us. The soul is the emotional part, or what most people consider to be their real personality. It includes our thinking processes, our feelings, and our will. Then there’s another part of us the Bible call the spirit, and this is actually the most important party.
In James 2:26 the Bible tell us that ‘as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead too. The spirit is the dynamo of our whole being. It is the life giving force within us. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). When the Bible says God created Adam and breathed into him the breath of life, that word ‘breath’ is the same word from which we get the word ‘Spirit’. God put a spirit on the inside of Adam. So the spirit is the real part of us, and when we get born again we receive a new spirit. And the Lord God commanded the man, “you are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen 2:16,17).
The Lord told Adam that in the day he ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would surely die. When Adam disobeyed God and ate of that forbidden fruit, his spirit died within him. He did not die physically for 930 years, but he died spiritually at the exact moment. That doesn’t mean that his spirit ceased to exist. It was still there. But it ceased to be under the control of the Lord. It was no longer releasing the life of God, which made it incapable of sustaining physical life forever. The spirit of man received the life of God and then disseminates it through the soul and body. When Adam sinned against God and did his own things, the spirit within him was separated from fellowship with God. He no longer had the divine life of God-the Holy Spirit-flowing through him, sadly another spirit stepped in to take its place, which was Satan, who began to pour his death into the human race through the spirit.
The spirit that was within man from Adam until salvation was united with the devil. That’s what Paul was referring to when he wrote in Ephesians 2:2,3 that before we were saved we were by nature the children of disobedience, the children of wrath-in other words, the children of the devil. He meant that until we were born again, our spirit was united with the devil and Satan poured his corruption into us through our spirit man.
As we saw in 2 Corinthians 5:17, when we were born again, we become a new creature or a new creation-old things pass away and all things become new. Just by the process of elimination, we understand that it is not talking about our physical body, because when we were born again our physical body did not change. If we were fat before we got saved, we were still fat after we got saved. That’s not the part of us that changes through salvation.
Neither does our soul change, because as we saw in I Cor 13:9,10 that now we only know in part, we only prophesy in part but when that which is perfect is come, then we will know all things just as we are known. The mental part of us is not saved. If we are ignorant before we got saved, we were still ignorant after we got saved, until we educate ourselves through the Word of God. If our physical body didn’t change and our soul didn’t change, then the only part of us that is left is the spirit. Our spirit was completely, radically changed when we got born again. We didn’t just get improved, we became a totally brand new spirit. The Christian life derives its power from the new birth. When we are born again, God places a new spirit on the inside of us, and we have everything we need to live the victorious Christian life. Our born again spirit has everything, and it will never change. We are the exact same spirit at this moment that we will be in eternity. When we go to be with the Lord, our spirit isn’t going to have to be changed again. We are as complete right this moment as we will ever be in all eternity. That is an awesome thing to think about! We have eternity living inside of us! Be in tune with the spirit always!