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
23May God himself,
the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul
and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. -1
Thessalonians 5:23 (TNIV)
The
first time that God created man on the sixth day, what we do not know is that
man is made of three aspects. First is the body, which made out of dust. Second
is the soul, which is the living soul whom God gave the breath of life. These
first two are the aspects of man, which were being born after our physical
birth. The last but not the least aspect is the Spirit, which is not yet on us
until we accept God in our lives. The Spirit is always in communion with God.
To
further understand these three aspects, let us made an illustration.
Our body is just a slave of what
our five senses dictates. It is like a hardware of a computer wherein we input
data. What are the things that we input? – What we see, what we hear, what we
smell, what we touch and what we taste. Soul on the other hand is like a
processor of a computer. It processes the information that it gets from the
body. This is what conceives our mind, our will and our emotions. When we see
somebody who has a good life or who has a good job, we suddenly want to be that
kind of person and dream is being born. When we smell good food, our mind
transmit to the soul that we are hungry and we want to eat. When we hear good
music it suddenly become transmitted to our emotion, the peace and serenity.
Those are just some of the examples of what the soul does in response to what
our body intakes. Our body has no capacity to think, but the soul can. The
problem is, the soul only process information that it gets but it has no
capacity to understand and filter things in life from what is good or bad. It
decides only base on appearance, feelings and anything that is pure physical.
Example, when we see people who appear beautiful on television or movies, we also
want to become a star and we dress according to our idols on televisions. We
even copy their hair styles. In taking our course in college, we often choose
business courses because people say (what we hear) that we can earn more money
someday if we have white collar jobs. However when we are being burn out (what
we feel) we suddenly want to shift course. People say that bitter gourd
(ampalaya) has a bitter taste and we don’t want the feeling when we first taste
something that is bitter so we don’t eat it anymore. Without a source of good
information, the soul will decide base on the body intakes, but since the body
is a slave and it neither know no better then the result will be a chaos.
The
Spirit is our channel to God. It is a mediator. It is like the microchip of the
motherboard of a computer. It is the one who has the capacity to understand
things and to filter what would be beneficial from not, and what would be good
from what is bad. However, it is not yet being born from us. In order for our
Spirit to gain wisdom and attain blessing, it needs to be born again. How?
Let’s
go back first to the body and soul. Our body is an information gatherer. The
soul is the dreamer and the thinker. If the Spirit is not yet born, have you
ever wonder where does soul ask when he wants to have a good life? Of course it
ask the body who is a slave of what it feels, see, hear, smell or taste. If the
body only see and hear poverty, will the soul have a good life when it only
process what it intakes?
The
only repercussion for us to help the soul break loose from being slave of the
body is to focus on the Spirit. The Spirit is our channel to God who provides
us wisdom to decide better and who give us provisions in our daily life.
Focusing on the Spirit means concentrating on God. Concentration requires
faith, and to have faith is to trust on the benefits of living for God. Faith
is the assurance of things hope for and the evidence of things unseen (Hebrews
11:1). To have faith does not stops on trusting or believing on God, it is a
daily communion with God and having a relationship with Him. Through that, our
Spirit is being conceived. The moment it is being born and be upon us, in that
moment we will finally understand the will of God to our lives. Suddenly, our
dreams, goals and directions in life will have more clarity. The Spirit is our
key to good life. When it is born, that is the time when we are genuinely being
born again. Suddenly we will have a change of heart and a formation of
character. The Body is not the “us.” Who we are is the Soul plus the Spirit. As
the Spirit is being unveiled to us, we begin to live the life that God first
created us to be- His own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26), and that is when
our new life begins.
Practical Questions:
1. What
are the three aspects of man? What are the differences of these three aspects?
2. What
aspect manifest to your life the most? The least?
Memory Verse:
“And God said, ‘Let us make man
in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of
the sea, and over the fowls of the air, over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” –Genesis
1:26
Practical Application:
What you have learned in the
lesson?
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