2 Spirit, Soul and Body(4)
Introduction
Dear congregation, this is the 4th session of the 2nd spirit, soul, and body. We human beings consist of spirit, soul, and body.
Our body consisting of flesh and bones is tangible with our hands and is the dwelling place for our spirit. The spirit is the essential and actual entity.
We learn about spirit, soul, and body to analyze how you were formed so that you can find about yourself.
When you realize about yourself through the message, you can get the answers to the questions such as “What kind of person should I be?” or “How can I change myself into goodness?” And you can actually gain the strength to change yourself.
You can change to a person who is right in the sight of God and receives blessings and answers to his prayers. I hope you will reflect yourself upon the message and keep it in mind.
I bless in the name of the Lord that you will experience the power of God’s Word that penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and changes you completely.
Body
Dear congregation, members who are attending the service through the satellite all over the country, members of branch churches, branch sanctuaries, Light and Salt mission, Restaurant Mission, members who are attending the service through the Internet all over the world, (children of Sunday school)
I will continue to explain about the flesh aspect among the spirit, soul, and body.
As you have been listening to the messages, the flesh in spirit, soul, and body can have two meanings.
One is the general one that refers to our physical body among spirit, soul, and body that consists human beings. The other is the meaning that is opposite of spirit.
Spirit belongs to God, and thus, it is eternally beautiful and never changing. Flesh is the traits of what is disconnected from God who is spirit, and is the generic term for everything that perishes, changes, and disappears.
After the Fall of Adam, even the bodies of human beings get old, change, die, and become a handful of dust as time goes.
All kinds of untruthful minds and thoughts in men, namely hatred, envy, jealousy, adultery, desires, and anger are all flesh, and the outward actions of these fleshly things are also flesh.
Knowledge, fame, authority, and splendor that men seek are all flesh that is meaningless, changes, and perishes.
We refer everything that is meaningless and worthless as flesh.
I hope you remember and discern these two different meanings of flesh.
In the last session, I said that we should know the purpose of God’s creating human beings and do the whole duty of men.
Some people keep their positions and do their duties well while some others cannot do it well.
This is because of the difference of people’s conscience.
Those who have made good conscience have the ability to follow the way of truth once they realize it is the duty of men and the way of truth.
On the contrary, those who have not made good conscience have stronger desire to follow their lust and instinct, so that it is more difficult for them to fight against their lust and follow the proper way of men.
In our Christian life, those who have followed the voice of good conscience can change themselves with the truth relatively more easily. But those who have not are very likely to change slowly. People form different consciences, because various factors are applied in different ways.
People form different conscience according to what kind of parents they were born of, in what kind of environments they were raised, and how much they tried to have good conscience.
I explained up to this point. Today, let us consider in more detail the things that are necessary in following and doing the whole duty of men while men are growing up.
Dear congregation, men are not born as grown-ups. They are born as a baby and pass the time of suckling, child, puberty, and youth, and finally become an adult.
In order for us to become a complete adult who can do his work as an independent individual, there are processes that we have to pass in our growth.
We have to have appropriate experiences and training mentally and physically, according to the age. We cannot teach a suckling the way we teach a child, and children cannot receive the same education as adults.
Also, if we become a young man missing something that we should have acquired during the childhood, it is not easy for us to gain the experience as children.
It is because there are fixed times for our mentality and body to develop in our growing up process.
Growing process can simply divided into three levels. The first one is the level of seeing.
We simply accept with our instinct all the feelings we get through the five senses – sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste.
Newborn babies do not react to anything with their reasoning. They just react with their instinct. For example, if a baby has a stomachache by drinking spoiled milk, he would cry. But this does not mean he will cry thinking, “I am sick because I drank spoiled milk, I should be careful next time,” or cry with complaining thought to his mother, “Why did my mother give me spoiled milk? I don’t like it.”
He is crying merely in a reaction to his pain.
The baby would just react to hotness, coldness, discomfort, pain, hunger, thirst, comfort, warmth, and so forth only with his instinct.
After the level of seeing, it goes to the level of feeling. We have some kind of feelings about what we experience through our five senses, and put them into our memory with those feelings.
After the level of feeling, it is the level of acting. On the basis of what we saw, heard, and felt, and along with our thoughts and will, we decide something and act it out. For example, a child who got burnt by a hot iron will not touch iron but keep away from it next time using his thoughts and feelings about the previous experience.
However, we cannot draw a clear and distinctive line between these levels.
We can see even at the level of feeling, and we can also see and feel even at the level of acting.
How we saw and felt in each level decides how we act. I will explain about this in detail when I explain about the soul.
Here, you can just remember that we have to experience what we have to see, feel, and act at the appropriate time, at the respective levels.
There are steps we have to take in our growth, and we have to get and receive the most appropriate experiences and trainings.
Some people miss something that they must have experienced at the level of seeing. Some others miss the feelings that other people felt at the level of feeling.
If this is the case, there are problems after these people become adults.
They lack something compared to others.
For example, they might lack common intellectual or physical ability, or they might have different kinds of emotions than other ordinary people.
We call this “the deficiency of the body” as a whole.
For example, those who did not receive the warm love of the mother while they had to receive it are likely to have a nervous temperament or unstable emotions. Those who were abused in childhood may have cruel mind later to maltreat living things or even maltreat themselves.
Also, children share their feelings with or have conflicts with their friends interacting with one another to develop their social skills.
Those who were over-protected by their parents and have not gained adequate experiences in childhood are not likely to have good relationships with others. They tend to form self-centered perspective or selfishness so that they have low ability in interacting with others or are left out by others.
Also, some people get the deficiency of the body due to excessive love from their parents.
If the parents do everything for their children – washing, clothing, and feeding them, the children would be dependent on other people when they grow up.
They want another person to do the things they themselves have to do. Those who develop deficiency of the body in this way are not likely to be successful or to be recognized by others in the world.
For example, ordinary people go to work on time. But those with deficiency of the body get late or even miss the class or work just because they feel a little tired.
While others beat their body and make it their slave to be more capable, these people play around and sleep.
They often do not have the ability to discern other people who try to cheat them.
Because they themselves know they have the deficiency, they lack self-esteem and confidence.
How can these people be recognized by others and successful in the world?
Therefore, developing a deficiency of the body can cause a serious damage to one’s life. Sometimes we see really smart and excellent children who lose their ability because of the deficiency of the body.
As I already told you once, there was a very famous genius boy in Korea.
He learned the “One thousand Chinese characters” and talked in English at the age of 1. He began to learn college mathematics at the age of 3.
Then, the parents did not allow him to mix with friends of his age group. Rather, they made him associate with high school or college students.
They made their child grow up in an environment not for a child but for an adult.
No matter how smart this child was, his physical and emotional abilities were still those of child. He was just a lot smarter than others.
But his parents put him in an environment for adults just because he was smart. Namely, they did not allow their son to experience what he had to experience during the childhood.
What do you think happened?
People expected him to grow up to be a world-famous person to shine the name of the country, but the result was just the opposite. As time went, people began to forget about that genius boy.
If the parents had the knowledge about physical order, they would have let him experience everything in each step of growth while letting him develop his intellectual abilities.
Then, he would have really been a world-famous person. How sad it is!
Dear congregation, if we take each step in the level of seeing, feeling, and acting, we gain the strength to control ourselves according to the right and wrong. We gain the power to control our thoughts and acts to choose the right way. But those who missed some of the ordinary steps and thus developed the deficiency of the body might have problems even in going into the spirit.
To the extent that they have the deficiency of the body, they are not controlled by the spirit but by their soul.
The one who controls the soul is the enemy Satan and the devil.
The more deficiency of the body we have, the more we are controlled by the soul. This means we are controlled by Satan as much. Satan disturbs us from doing what we have to do to accomplish the spirit. For example, knowing well that they have to pray, those who gained the ability to control themselves, if the decide to go to pray at a certain time, do as they decide. If they try to cry out with all their heart in prayer, they can do it easily so that they can pray in deep spiritual depth.
But those who have the deficiency of the body do not feel like going to pray even at the time they fixed.
They keep on delaying the time because they want to watch TV and rest at home a little more.
Also, even when they try to put their heart together to concentrate on their prayers, they cannot help themselves from having idle thoughts.
It is the same with all other things – reading the Bible, attending the worship service, and obeying God’s Word and changing themselves. Those who have no deficiency of the body find all these things easy to accomplish.
When they learn God’s words that tell us not to hate, not to be proud, not to be discouraged, but to love, to be humble, and to be joyful and thankful, they just obey them and go into spirit quickly. But those who have the deficiency of the body find it difficult to obey because they feel like they want to keep their old way of life.
In my case, I did not find it difficult to obey God’s Word since the time I came to believe in God.
It was because I had a good training on controlling myself since childhood.
I did whatever I made up my mind to do.
For example, in my school days, I had to go back to my house and help my parents in the farming work.
I used to make a promise with my parents.
I told them that I would do a certain amount of work for the day and then do my own thing.
I woke up earlier than others, harvested the rice, and finished my work early. Of course, I often kept on helping my parents since they were still working. Anyway, what is important is, I always finished my portion of work for the day.
Because I had this kind of habit since a young age, I could live my life in an orderly and planned manner.
For example, I made plans for each day, week, and month. If I did not keep my plan, I punished myself, for example, by skipping a meal. I tried to control myself this hard.
Because I made myself like this, it was very easy for me to lead my Christian life even after I accepted God.
I could keep God’s words such as “Do this,” “Don’t do that”, “Keep this”, and “Throw that away”, and I could actually practice them.
That is why I could get rid of evil quickly, and my faith grew very fast. Now, can you see for yourself on how you have made yourself through this message?
If you have some deficiency of the body that has been hindering you from acting according to God’s Word, what should you do?
You should never give up saying, “I have this deficiency, and I cannot go into spirit.”
Rather, you have to fill your deficiencies from now on.
What is the most important is that you have to receive God’s grace and strength through fervent prayer.
It is also important that you try to make yourself obey the desires of the Holy Spirit beginning with small things.
When you try first, it might seem you are changing too slowly.
But if you just keep on trying again and again without getting discouraged, you will certainly change after some time.
You will not be controlled by the soul and act as the Satan wants, but your soul and body will be controlled by your spirit so that you can act as God wants.
Conclusion
Dear congregation, no matter what kind of environments you had in the past and no matter what kind of deficiency of the body you came to have due to those environments, you can start trying to change from now on.
You can fill your deficiencies with the grace and strength of God, the help of the Holy Spirit, and with your own efforts.
Mark 10:27 says, “Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.””
It is not just to let you find out your deficiencies that I explained about forming of the conscience in the last session and the deficiency of the body in this session.
For students to get better grades, they have to keep on studying hard and also know in which subjects they have weaknesses so that they can study more on their weak areas.
If their grades in weak subjects go up, their overall grades will increase as well.
In the same way, even if you find some weaknesses spiritually, you can find the short-cut of going into spirit by leaving that weak area to God’s power.
God’s power is the greatest strength in your becoming holy and going into the whole spirit.
I bless in the name of the Lord that you will find out even the smallest things about yourself through the message, ride on the leading flow of spirit, and go into spirit and the whole spirit more quickly.