Living in the Freedom of the Spirit - Week #16

Joan Frazerhurst has once again written the blog for this week. Thank you, Joan!

Nita Steiner will be back next week to blog on the next chapter - Chapter 23.

Chapter 22

Relating Spirit and Soul

The author has indicated that the Holy Spirit communicates to our spirit and that our spirit communicates to the soul, which in turn, affects our body as well. The word of God speaks to the spirit through direct intuitive knowledge, and to the conscience regarding good and evil, and in our worship and communication in response to His word.

I keep asking, “how do we encourage our spirit to be in a place to receive that word from God?” Which then leads to “how does this relationship between my spirit and my soul take place?” The author states if the human spirit is the means to pass on the knowledge that the Lord speaks to us, to our soul then it must be able to relate to the soul in some way.

There are characteristics of living in the spirit. The knowledge received in our spirit is meant to rule over the reasoning of the mind, and conscience is to direct and control the decisions of the will, and the communion of our spirit rules the emotions.

An interesting note is the author is reminding us that even as the Holy Spirit lives in our spirit, He will not go against our consent and desires; that this is how quenching the Holy Spirit takes place. The closed areas of our life would have to be opened to be able to access the help, knowledge, and wisdom that would be accessible by our spirit from the Holy Spirit. The author also points out that the Holy Spirit, with His vulnerable love, can be grieved, provoked, joyful, inhibited, and have freedom to act depending on our response to Him.

So how does all this happen? The author gives us some principles: One principle would be that as the knowledge from God comes to us, it is a revelation…it is received intuitively in the spirit. As this happens, we are faced with stepping forward with faith, or backing off in unbelief. Faith links our spirit and our mind.

Often, I have thought that faith is out of nothing…just blind faith…but even in the words of Heb 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” But, as I looked at this verse again, substance and evidence usually means that something is there; it is this direct intuitive knowledge from God…yes, unseen, but there all the same.

The author again goes on to say that as we do respond in faith and we trust that intuitive knowledge, “the power of the Holy Spirit is released from our spirit into our mind and beyond.” When we respond in unbelief, it is a rejection of that knowledge and we really stop the flow of the Holy Spirit in our lives. It seems we all could make quite a list of times when we “heard” God but, seemingly, could not step out in knowing and faith that it was true. Seems we could use a little experience in being able to respond in faith to what we “know” is God’s word. What is the phrase we all heard some time or another, “Obedience precedes revelation.”

Spiritual intuition is another principle that is at work. The author explains how a child can sum up a person intuitively because he does not have much intellectual knowledge as yet, and he reacts and responds by what his intuition tells him. The walk in the Spirit in the realm of the mind is to be like children…to trust the divine knowledge we receive, or it seems, we cannot understand the ways of the kingdom of God.

Actually, I remember a time my children displayed this intuitiveness. The intuition in a certain situation that involved other people was a rather negative one, hesitant. At the time, I thought them to be “judgmental”. Years later, their intuition proved to be correct. I have thought of that incident over and over again and hopefully I have learned more about this intuitive nature we have been given.

Or, as the author states, we can reject the knowledge that comes into our spirit and miss an opportunity to pray for someone, or give a word of encouragement and hope to someone. Our mind seems to want to take that intuitive knowledge and rationalize it. But with faith, we can disregard that sense knowledge, because we have had access to a higher knowledge…the knowledge of God’s will and God’s ability in the area of what He has spoken to our spirit.

The principle of the mind is very important to us in that we cannot treat it as a hindrance to the human spirit…the function of the mind is to receive the revelation knowledge from the spirit in words, or propositional statements, so we can use and actually appropriate what we have received and then share it with others. This is what we speak, not in words, taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words (I Cor. 2:13). So often we cannot explain an “illumination” from God. The author states something so very practical: “Whenever inner illumination comes we need to say, ‘Lord, now I want to understand it in words, so I can obey it, and so I can pass it on to others.’

Our mind needs to be in a continual place of renewal for a purity to discern these intuitions of the spirit. As we walk in trusting, in faith, in God's word that comes to us, we develop a habitual response and the mind becomes “controlled by the Spirit.”

Concerning spiritual gifts
“A spiritual gift is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit to the human spirit, then from the human spirit to the mind.” So, we can see again the place of faith in the gifts operating. So often, we become fearful of the gifts of the Spirit in operation…I know that I have faced that many times. But, I think we can understand afresh this need of faith so that we can respond to what the Lord shows us and only to what we have received from the Lord. We can cut the communication of that spiritual gift too short or we can overextend the gift where it becomes just words from our own mind. The author stresses the importance of responding only to the word given us. He uses the prophet Elisha as an example of one who knew when he did not have a revelation from God…. Leave her alone! She is in bitter distress, but the Lord has hidden it from me and has not told me why. (II Kings 4:27)

Let’s pray for the fulfillment of the whole counsel of God being expressed in our lives to an effectiveness of the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ to reach those that we are in contact with. The Lord’s richest blessings!

Living in the Freedom of the Spirit - Week #15

Joan Frazerhurst joins us again this week to blog for Nita while she is in Thailand.

Chapters 19-21

Chapter 19 – Subverted Man
I was curious about the author’s choice of the word “subverted” and looked at the thesaurus regarding it and it became clearer as to why he used this word. The related words are: undermine, challenge, threaten, weaken, destabilize, and sabotage. It sounds so all-encompassing of the treachery, trickery of the Evil One. Even considering the words weaken and destabilize…what a picture of today’s world and a world without having access to real Wisdom.

The previous chapter clearly defined that the source of wisdom is not within us. We have access to wisdom through our spirit to God’s wisdom. As Eve was deceived by Satan into believing she could gain that wisdom from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the boundary was crossed. The boundary continues to be crossed each time we attempt to get wisdom in any other way than through the wisdom of God. If we did, we wouldn’t need God and we certainly can see the results of folks denying God, wanting to use their own “wisdom.”

When Satan lied to Eve, he indicated to her that she could have this same wisdom independently of God when she ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Actually, the wisdom she sought became the very thing that kept her, and all humanity following, from receiving from the tree of life. This tree of life is Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” When He died on another tree at Calvary, He provided us with the opportunity of life again, and with it, the wisdom from God. Without that redemption, we embrace ‘wisdom’ that is earthly, foolish, without the spirit, and demonic, as James 3:15 tells us. This leads to the crucifying afresh the Lord of glory.

The spirit dethroned
The turn-a-bout in what was lost to humanity is devastating in that being cut off from God, the divine order in our nature was ruined due to losing the power and authority in the spirit. Without the power and authority in the spirit, our soul powers and physical appetites become inflated. Just think, all from choosing to want to be God-like and to have the same power and wisdom without Him. Sounds so basic, why would they choose that? But we can see, and we know all too well, how something seems good to eat. It fits well with the scripture, For all that is in the world—the lust of he flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. (James 2:16)

The proof that neither soul nor the body was ever meant to rule stares us in the face everyday. Let us be ever so watchful to allow the Holy Spirit to communicate with our spirit for the control of the soul and body.

As the author states, the unregenerate person still has a functioning human spirit, therefore, can have spiritual experiences which would not be of the Spirit of God. These experiences are related to a demonic activity seeking a person’s spirit to “suck it dry”.

Chapter 20: Converted Man
Through the experience of the new birth, each human spirit is created afresh and restored to a life-relationship with God, or in other words, put right side up again. As the author states, “God the Father is the Father of the spirit of each one us and it is this spirit that is ‘…created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness’.” (Eph 4:24). I love that statement, or should I say, I love these words of life to us.

Along with restoring us to a life-relationship with God, the spirit is restored to being over the soul and body again. The soul must come to the cross to yield its claim to rule...then it is liberated.“When the soul-life loses itself……., and the human spirit is filled with the Holy Spirit, the power of the Spirit is released from within the human spirit to sanctify and harmonize the faculties of the soul and to heal the body.” (pg 188)

A Catholic charismatic movement uses the term ‘the release of the Spirit.’…and it indicates the all-pervasiveness of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. The power and authority of the Holy Spirit is to be mediated to us in a certain order: To our spirit, then the soul, then the body.

The Spirit is alive. The mind is life and peace. Life is given to the mortal body.

So the next chapter and on helps us in “how this truth can be translated into actual experience.”

Chapter 21: The Functions of the Human Spirit
Tom Marshall, through the baptism of the Holy Spirit became aware that he had a spirit that was different than his mind. I find this so encouraging. He describes knowing the soul, not because I am aware of its functioning as mind, emotion and will; but, I think, I feel and I decide…that is when we are living out of our soul.As others state, when you are laughing at something, you aren’t analyzing it at the same time…it can’t be done. It is the same with the spirit. When we are aware of certain functions or when we are doing them, we are living out of the spirit, such as:

In Knowledge:
This knowledge is a direct knowledge and comes intuitively, and not from our rational or deductive ways. We do not know with our minds, we know with our spirit and then understand from our mind. The author explains that this is the way the great inventors used their faculties…it is from intuition and then the mind takes that to bring order into the intuition. Such as a sculptor, he “sees” an image in a large piece of granite or stone, and with his soul and body, he produces that image in the stone. The same could be said of writing a book…the concept comes into our spirit, the mind bears upon it and brings order to all the intuitive ideas, etc that come into our spirit. This allows us to write it into a readable book or article, etc.

The author indicates that women are more familiar with this type of knowledge. As others have taught us, it is the feminine side of our being that is the intuitive and receives wisdom and creativity from the Lord. The masculine side of our being brings the order and the ability to make it happen. We are all masculine and feminine to various degrees and therefore many men have great intuitive and creative strengths and the power to make it happen. As well, many women have the ability to bring something into being after receiving the intuitive idea. It seems this is the way that we have balance as individuals…both men and women.

Knowledge of God:
We can only know someone directly and intuitively by the spirit. We relate to God in this same way…in this personal relationship.To understand why we really don’t “know” each other, it is because we aren’t reaching the spirit of the other. It is this same way with God. It comes by this same direct and intuitive way. Often we can’t “explain” things, but we “know” them. And so with God, we just “know” that He has spoken or revealed something to us and we may not be able to explain it. No doubt we all have experienced this in many ways as well. The disadvantage to not realizing this, is that we can miss “hearing” a word from God that would give us the wisdom, etc. needed.

I have to agree strongly with the author’s statement: the tragedy is that we have made the Christian faith so much a matter of head knowledge that these experiences of the human spirit have been almost totally neglected. The mind cannot receive life, it can only handle information or data. Only a person’s spirit is able to receive life. It is the only way that it can.

We share life when our spirit connects with another’s spirit…and as God shares with us, we experience this life, eternal life.

Conscience:

Conscience is a function of the spirit and God speaks to our conscience. We begin to “see” general moral truths:

• 
  The conscience form tells us when we are doing right and when we are doing wrong.
• 
  The content of the conscience tells us what is right and what is wrong.

When the Holy Spirit awakens our conscience about a standard of holiness or love, isn’t it wonderful that He also points us to Calvary to deal with guilt and then to speak the peace that is so needed.

Obedience is absolutely fundamental as it makes our conscience ever more sensitive and able to grow into purity.

The conscience also bears witness to the truth and this truth gets received into the conscience, not the mind. The illustration that when we hear something stated as “true”, but inside we “know” as not true, is so practical because we learn to trust that part of our spirit to see/hear truth. I thought it was interesting that he stated that the apostolic preaching was directed not at the mind but to their conscience. That is a good lesson for us. Truth does not have to be proven…just declared and the conscience validates it. I think we find this so true in our relationships with others…we don’t have to prove it but, in love, we can share truth, trusting the Holy Spirit to reach into that other’s spirit to reveal that truth.

An ongoing clear conscience (clean by the blood of Jesus) is the only way to accurately bear witness to the truth. The author mentions that in all the heresies that have been stated, we would find a defiled conscience of that person, and he would be unable to discern right from wrong.

Communication

This essentially is worship or communion. God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and truth. (John 4:24).I really appreciate these thoughts that we communicate through our spirit…to others and to God and there is no real communication if we don’t reach the other’s spirit. This is something to ponder and reflect upon deeply so we can become aware as to how to reach another’s spirit.

Tom mentions reaching out to a child’s spirit in this way and I couldn’t help but reflect on childhood. My mother had great difficulty in communicating in words, especially, but she was also tied up in her ability to reach me by her spirit. I have come to realize over the last number of years that this lack of ability on her part to reach my spirit caused some difficulties in my relating to people…seems I didn’t feel understood, etc. So this section helps clarify this area of my life. I’ve sensed it, but this has opened up this area in a deeper way.

God is always reaching out in His spirit to us: The Holy Spirit ‘goes out from the Father.’ (John 15:26) Even in prayer, if we don’t reach out in our spirit, there is no communication…we are just “saying” prayers. This is so helpful. How often do I find myself wondering if my prayers are effective, etc. But when we sense that we are praying out of our spirit, we can know that there is an effect from those prayers. Really neat.And, as the author states, we don’t even have to use words in order to reach out in our spirit. I really like that one!!…even though I would like to be adept at “words.”

Essentially, if we are not willing to give ourselves to the other person, we cannot give him Christ.

Next week, let’s read chapter 22. Blessings on your week! - Joan

Living in the Freedom of the Spirit - Week #14

Nita Steiner is in Chiang Mai, Thailand, visiting missionaries who are interested in prayer ministry. She is also waiting on the Lord in prayer to sense His heart for Asia. She mentioned that she would love to have prayer backing for her trip, so if you have a few moments you could spare to pray, I’m sure she’d really appreciate it!

Joan Frazerhurst, a friend of ours who is a Bethany College alumna, has agreed to help us with the Blog by writing her comments on our readings while Nita is gone. Thank you, Joan!

One more thing…Nita wanted me to mention that the next book we will read is Wounds That Heal by Stephen Seamands. - Susan Shetler

Chapter 18: Living Out of the Spirit.

To live successful (whole, victorious) in our Christian life is amplified in Galatians 5:16-18: So, I say, live by the spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.

How often do we keep checking inside to see if this or that is giving in to the “flesh”? This constant look inwards leads to a debilitating introspection, or it can lead to a relativistic life that is so common today and eventually leads to living in the sinful nature.

The author suggests that we are to live in the spirit. We, through the Spirit, are being invited to the Spirit-led life without focusing on being dragged down into the desires of the flesh. As we live this way, then the flesh has no drawing power. The author also suggests that very little is taught regarding this walk in the spirit, let alone the “How to” aspect. How true and how sad that is.

The “How to” can be found in the right relationship between the spirit, soul and body. We can read again the two accounts of the creation in Genesis. In Genesis 1:27 we read that God created man in His own image (using the Hebrew word for “created” as meaning out of “nothing”, and in Genesis 2:7, we read that God formed man from the dust of the ground…out of substance that already existed. To quote Tom Marshall: “…God formed that first human body out of an existing substance, and into it He breathed mankind’s spirit that He had created out of nothing…when this spirit entered Adam’s body, his soul-life came into being.” He goes on to state that the human spirit and the soul are essentially different. He goes on to explain this.

The two-fold role of this human spirit in being created in the image and likeness of God is:

• To receive life. The interesting thing is that this “life” is for relationship with God and others, not for existence. Relationship with God is life, therefore, to be cut off from that relationship is death. How truth is so refreshing and yet contains with it the ability to be comprehended. It’s priceless when we come across these jewels.
• To receive wisdom. This wisdom can only be received from God’s Spirit into our spirit. Put it another way, to receive it in our heart, not our head; or in our spirit, not our intellect or education.

I wonder if this is why we tend not to wait for God’s wisdom, because we think we must be able to figure things out with our intellect and learning. That’s what we were taught, weren’t we? How often did we forget to wait and listen and receive the wisdom from God, or from above? There is no harm to wait on the Lord for His word and wisdom in a given situation, and for everyday life, for that matter.Why do we, as the Christian church, not always realize that true wisdom only comes from God and we are to have access to this divine wisdom in order to have our life ordered and directed by God through His Spirit.

The thing about cleverness and intelligence is that we have seen endless leaders and intelligent people use their intellect, etc., but if the intellect/mind is not ruled by the wisdom received from God, it can lead to so much destructiveness in this world. The list is endless of these leaders, let alone the effect of “lack of wisdom” in our own lives. “If we live in the Spirit, we will not gratify the desires of the flesh.”

As the author gives us a chain-event in being God-centered…His Spirit rules over our spirit, our spirit rules over the mind, and the mind rules over the body. He indicates that many have lost touch with the spirit as the governing center of our life, and with it, to realize the presence of the Holy Spirit as our creative center and the balance in the corporate life of the Body.

Role of the soul:
What have you been taught about the “soul” in the deeper life teaching you may have received? Give it some thought.Some of the author’s thoughts brought back many memories of any talk of the soul.

• When we have an emotion (good or bad), it is called “soulish”, therefore unworthy, sin, or evil…no place in a Christian life.

• Some want to avoid the “soulish” realm altogether and just live in the spirit…not too possible.
  

The function of the soul is to relate a person’s inner spiritual being to the outer flesh-and-blood being. The spiritual life is incarnated into our body. The soul links the spirit and body and brings the realities of the spiritual realm into the realm of the natural. What an incarnation that is!
We, as humanity, are unique in this that we have both the spiritual realm and the material realm. When humanity sinned, God was committed to those that were made in His image and He went through great lengths in joining with fallible creatures and then die in order to redeem them. The soul life was finally done perfectly in a body. As John says: “…we have seen His glory….” John 1:14.

In reality, this is what this blog is about…attempting to receive the wisdom of God into my spirit to affect my soul (my mind for one area) to the actual writing of this blog.Or, in other words, the intuitive or being part of us receives the wisdom, creativity and then the soul takes that “wisdom” and uses the body’s action to make it happen.

The contrast in the following verse gives good reason to have a strong desire to have the Holy Spirit of God ruling our human spirit:

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic. For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. James 3:13-17

Let us reflect deeply on this Scripture. Blessings on gaining wisdom upon wisdom.

For next week (#15), please read Chapters 19, 20, 21. These chapters are quite short.

Living in the Freedom of the Spirit - Week #13

The Lord is with you! His Spirit is breathing on His people these days - praise Him!

For the next couple of weeks I will be away visiting Chiang Mai, Thailand, and someone else will be filling in for me, for which I am very grateful.

Meanwhile for this week, we read chapters 16 and 17 about the "liberation of the self" and the "liberated self."

In the chapter on the liberation of the self, Marshall presents God's answer to self-centeredness or selfishness, and that answer is a cross. An important truth he underscores is that the cross deals with self-love or selfishness: "It is not the self as self that is the problem: it is selfishness...From being a means for us to express love, the self has become the goal or object of love. It is this fixation of love on the self as an end or object that has to be dealt with, in order that we can be free to love the self the way it was meant to be loved...Jesus makes it plain that only something as drastic as a cross can break that fixation of love of the self..."

It's so important to understand what the cross deals with or else we will be denying and trying to put to death the wrong things. Self-acceptance (in other words, healthy agreeing with who God has made me to be in Him) is a virtue that is necessary in order to love others and God rightly. I like to think of self-acceptance as self-forgetfulness. In other words, lack of self-consciousness which is a wonderful liberty!

The cross of Jesus is where self-centeredness is dealt with. The author explains that on the cross Jesus' individual humanity became a corporate humanity. So that all that happened to Him incorporated all who would believe in Him. A holy exchange took place according to II Cor.5:21 - Jesus took on Himself our sinfulness (not merely our guilt but the attitude of independence behind all acts of sin), and in exchange we "become the righteousness of God."

"When on the ground of Calvary, we disown the right of the self to rule us, we can become free of its binding power. Thus the self must come to the cross, not to be destroyed, but to give up its illegitimate claim to rule." Tom Marshall goes on to say that to apply the cross to this, there must be an act of renunciation, in which we disown the self as the goal of our affections and the ruling center of our life. And there must be an act of recognition, in which we appropriate the work of Calvary to accomplish this deliverance...The cross is absolutely necessary to break the power of self-centeredness over me - I have no power to do this.

As always, the work of the Holy Spirit is necessary along with the work of the cross: He enables us to make Jesus Lord, and He pours out the love of God within our hearts.

When the self is in its proper place, it "will become what it is ideally fitted to be: a channel for divine love to flow through, in an unending stream."

Please read carefully chapter 17 about the liberated self. This teaching on the cross and the work of the Spirit applied to the false self, coupled with inner healing of wounds inflicted on us at the hand of others, leads us to a place of beautiful freedom to be ourselves...no longer trying to live up to the expectations of others or of our own wrong expectations. There's nothing more wonderful than to live in the freedom that comes in biblical self-acceptance and the fullness of the Spirit where the human soul is aligned with the Holy Spirit who indwells the human spirit!

At the end of last week's posting, I wrote about the power of "contemplating" the Person of Jesus, and chapter 17 ends by focussing on this. The self, being a "goal-directed mechanism" will produce whatever it focuses on: "Fixed on Christ, it will work day and night, consciously and unconsciously, by any and every means, to reproduce in us the likeness of Jesus...God not only chose the goal for our lives, He created the ego with the capability of bringing His purpose about. Our only requirement is that we keep it directed towards Jesus." (II Cor. 3:18)

"We become like Him just be being absorbed in Him. As we concentrate the core of our life on Jesus, as we contemplate His actions and meditate on His words, we - without being aware of it - are being changed into what we are focused upon."

Praise the Lord for how He has created us and for His redemptive power to bring us back into right order so that we can fully enjoy being who He made us to be! Holy Spirit, come and continue Your loving and thorough work in our lives, for the sake of the Lamb and many others who need to know the love and grace of God through us.

For next week please read chapter 18, Living Out of the Spirit.

Living in the Freedom of the Spirit - Week #12

A blessed New Year to you all! I had the joy of being at the Urbana06 conference to see in the new year, and it was wonderful!

The chapters for this week were 14 and 15 which address the self and the importance that we be free to be ourselves.

Chapter 14 "Freedom to be Ourselves"
In this chapter Tom Marshall teaches on some core issues that are important if we are to have a healthy posture toward the self. First he talks about "the created self":

• "...the Bible declares that people were made to be loving beings." We know this because we were created in God's image, and He is love.
• "Genesis makes it clear that human beings were created as selves or egos (Gen.2:7)...if God made the self, He is not going to blot it out or eliminate it...God is not turning out spiritual Christians in batches of ten, all thinking alike, praying alike, believing alike, worshiping alike. That is a human method of mass production, not God's creativity at work. (Eph.3:10 shows us the diversity that God loves.) For this glorious harmony God needs our individuality to be fully expressed, yet held in harmony with each other's individuality.
• One of the most wonderful discoveries I have made about God is that somehow everything He does and everything He commands always ends up being for our benefit. Often we think God's commands are in order to extract something from us, but they are always in order to give (Deut.10:12,13)...When He commands us to love Him, it is for our benefit, not His...it is we who need both to love Him and be loved by Him...

Marshall goes on to finish this chapter by saying that God's way of sharing His love-nature with us was to create the self as a "goal-directed mechanism", meaning that whatever the soul focusses on, it reproduces in human nature:

• It (the soul) works consciously and unconsciously, waking or sleeping, to produce in us the replica of what it is occupied with. In Adam God meant the self, directed towards the tree of life, to produce the likeness of Christ in human beings.

Chapter 15 "The Fallen Self"

The author now explains what happened to the human self in the garden of Eden. He says of the fallen self: "Human nature seems like a machine that has toppled off its stand, but with the motor still running, wheels still spinning, pistons pumping, levers flailing. It gets nowhere, accomplishes nothing, and is a danger to itself and everything around it."

Marshall says that the first sin of humans was that of injustice in that Adam and Eve took something that God said was His alone (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). God gave them free access to all other trees but that one, and they would not accept that there was something they couldn't have for themselves..."The hardest lesson a child has to learn is not obedience but justice. 'You cannot keep that; it does not belong to you', or 'You cannot have all the sweets for yourself; some of them are for the other children.'"

The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil seemed to offer fulfillment for the basic God-given needs within humans: life, love, wisdom. But the deception was that these were not in that tree but in the tree of life, Christ (Jn.1:4; Eph. 5:2; Col. 2:2,3). To eat of the tree of life meant that Adam and Eve must love God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength, and it was in this choice - whether to give love to God or invest it in themselves - that they failed.

Marshall goes on to give six radical effects the fall had on human nature:

• Deep investment of love on the human self/ego..."from being an ego, we became egocentric."
• Humans lost fellowship and relationship with God, cut off from access to the tree of life..."Their future access to the tree of life could now only be secured by the way of another tree, the tree of Calvary."
• Humans were also cut off from true knowledge of God since they no longer had fellowship with Him..."Human beings made in the image of God now make gods in the image of human beings...focused on these distorted gods, people increasingly reproduce the same distortions in themselves (Jer.2:5)"
• Humans have lost the capacity to love others in a truly disinterested, unselfish way..."We love other people merely so that they will love us and meet our need for love..."
• The self as a goal-directed mechanism is cut off from its true goal, which is the tree of life. "It still functions the only way in which it can - it seeks a goal and reproduces that object in its nature." The only goal now available to the self is the impressions and feelings and responses that we experience in relation to other people. "This is the origin of the self-image, the concept of ourselves that we acquire first as small children..."
• The self-centered universe that we are now locked into is a fertile source of fear, anxiety and depression. "Anything that appears to endanger or threaten the self induces fear and anxiety, anger or hurt."

At the close of chapter 15 the author addresses the Christian believer saying that in the new birth, we generally experience forgiveness for acts of sin but our conscience usually is not sensitized yet to wrong motives. Since the real problem is the "very deep love investment on the self that takes place in levels below the conscious mind," believers are often not aware of our need for deeper cleansing and healing. And when faced with the possibility of this need, there are 3 primary defenses that we protect ourselves with: rationalization, projection, repression.

But God is vitally interested in cleansing our motivations as well as our actions and after we are born again, "His Spirit begins to probe into the depths of our personality to deal with the hidden streams of motivation..." His work is so thorough that we can know that our motives are pure and not live with self-doubt! The following 2 chapters will deal with the liberated self...

In closing I want to add that what Marshall says about the self being a "goal-directed mechanism" confirms what I've learned about the power of contemplation - contemplation is simply focussing on something (either the right thing or the wrong thing). As I have practiced the presence of Jesus more and more in my walk with Him (in other words, contemplating Him and His beauty and works), I'm being transformed. My self is being changed because of what my focus is. This is what Paul in II Cor. 3:18 is referring to: beholding/contemplating Him, we become like Him, changed from glory to glory.

Let's read chapters 16 and 17 for next week, and that will finish out the section on the self. God bless you this week - know that He is with you every moment and His grace is available to you to fix your gaze on Jesus, the Tree of Life!