Living in Spirit-to-spirit intimacy with God requires releasing your spirit.
Releasing your spirit requires humbling your soul.

I experienced it long before I had the words to describe it.

And also, I had words long before I realized what they described.

I grew up in a church culture that taught: We’re all just sinners, saved by grace. Church leaders regularly assured us that “the flesh is hostile toward God,” and that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”¹

Scripture told me about the Holy Spirit, and he was teaching me about himself, but no one wanted to talk about him. And though Scripture also talks about the human spirit, no one ever mentioned that.

No sermon ever helped me explore the passage in Romans 8 that describes how the Holy Spirit and the human spirit relate to one another and together overcome “the flesh.”

The consensus seemed to be: “You have been made new in Christ, and in heaven you’ll see that it’s true! In this life, though, you will always be a sinner at your core, still in your essence opposed to God. You will always have to deny who you really are and what you really want, to please him.”

All of which left me very confused.

Spirit, soul and body

In early adulthood, I read The Release of the Spirit, by Watchman Nee.² I liked that he talked about living by the Spirit, and was especially intrigued by what he said about the human spirit and soul.

The Greek thinking that we in the West often embrace sees people as two-part beings – body and soul. In this view, soul and spirit are different names for the inner, intangible person.

Nee saw people as spirit, soul and body. He taught that spirit and soul are different aspects of the inner person, and that our spirit is our innermost person.

Scriptures like these suggest the same thing:

We pray that God himself, the God of peace, will make you pure, belonging only him. We pray your whole self – spirit, soul, and body – will be kept safe and be without wrong when our Lord Jesus Christ comes. (1 Thess. 5:23 ICB)

See, the Word of God is alive! It is at work and is sharper than any double-edged sword – it cuts right through to where soul meets spirit. (Heb. 4:12 CJB)

… penetrating to the dividing line of the breath of life (soul) and [the immortal] spirit. (AMPC)

Nee wrote:

Among those who possess the life of the Lord can be found two distinct conditions: one includes those in whom life is confined, restricted, imprisoned and unable to come forth; the other includes those in whom the Lord has forged a way, and life is thus released from them.

The question thus is not how to obtain life, but rather how to allow this life to come forth.

In answer, Nee pointed to this picture in Scripture: “If the alabaster box is not broken, the pure spikenard will not flow forth.”³ He wrote:

Without the breaking of the outward [soul], the inward [spirit] will not come forth.⁴

I didn’t know it then, but Andrew Murray also taught much about the human spirit and soul.⁵

In The Spirit of Christ, Murray wrote:

When God created man a living soul, that soul, as the seat and organ of his personality and consciousness, was linked, on the one side, through the body, with the outer visible world, on the other side, through the spirit, with the unseen and the Divine. The soul had to decide whether it would yield itself to the spirit, by it to be linked with God and His will, or to the body and the solicitations of the visible.

In the fall, the soul refused the rule of the spirit, and became the slave of the body with its appetites. Man became flesh; the spirit lost its destined place of rule, and became little more than a dormant power … a struggling captive.

The moment we receive Jesus as Lord, his Spirit indwells us, and our human spirit is quickened. And thus: “The one who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him” (1 Cor. 6:17 CEB). Murray wrote:

The spirit [our inmost being!] now stands in opposition to the flesh, the name for the life of soul and body together, in their subjection to sin.

The “breaking” that allows Spirit and life to come forth in our lives involves pain, but not futile self-effort. It has nothing to do with relentlessly checking enough of the “right” religious boxes, nor with relentlessly trying to force “the flesh” to knuckle under.

Seeing in a whole new light

Two decades after I read The Release of the Spirit, a friend handed me Blessing Your Spirit, by Sylvia Gunter and Arthur Burk. I had just passed through seven very painful years and was trying to process and to heal from all that had occurred.

As page after page of blessings propelled me toward healing, the brief introductory teachings on spirit and soul prompted me to explore what Scripture says. Suddenly, a jumble of random puzzle pieces fell into place.

I saw those seven years in a whole new light.

Already I knew: I had followed God where I did not want to go. Staying there year after year did not feel good, at all; did not make sense, at all. Again and again, I complained and cried out, asking God if I had missed him and if I could leave. Again and again, I heard only silence. Yet, inexplicably, I experienced his presence deep within me. I had grace to take each next step, until he himself told me it was time to move on.

Now I realized: All that time, in that place, the Lord was working in me to release his life.

One phrase, that I found in Leviticus, of all places, seemed to capture what he had required from me again and again: Humble your soul.

Putting out of the way entirely

The Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, is a high holy day in the Old Testament. It is the one required day of fasting in the Hebrew year. The Day of Atonement paints a picture of what Jesus would do for us, in his dying and rising again. It also paints a picture of one key response our Lord calls us to make.

When God set up the day in Leviticus and Numbers, he did not use the word “fast.” Yet, repeatedly, he instructed his people to do what fasting represents. His command is rendered several ways in English translations: “You must deny yourselves.” “You must humble yourselves.” “You shall afflict your souls.” The literal rendering in New American Standard is:

You shall humble your souls.

The New Testament also calls to us: “Humble yourselves.” “Deny yourselves.”⁶

Jesus himself said:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Notice what Jesus said next.

For those who want to save their life [literally, soul] will lose it, and those who lose their life [soul] for my sake will find it. (Matt. 16:24-25 NRSV)

Whoa. Jesus equated denying myself with “losing” my soul. In so doing, he used a stunningly strong Greek word. It does not mean “to misplace.” It means, “to put out of the way entirely; to destroy.”

Jesus also announced that, as I accept the decisive breaking required to follow him, I avert real self-destruction. And I embrace the whole self God created and redeemed me to be.

Similarly, Romans 8 speaks of denying the flesh as a putting to death, by which I fully live.

For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. (Rom. 8:13)

This is not God demanding of me the dehumanization, torment and forced complicity of a slave. It is God teaching me the same impossible lesson the parent seeks to teach the toddler: To learn to choose patience and self-restraint and to yield to wisdom, when I feel like I’d rather die.

The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. (Rom. 8:15, 16)

Spirit-to-spirit, our Lord makes the impossible possible.

• He breathes into each of us deep affirmation of the person he created and redeemed us to be, spirit, soul and body.
• He shows us how profoundly we stifle, rather than release, our new, true self, when we live according to the willful demands our soul and body can team up to make.
• He calls us to cooperate with him in such a way that our soul is continually being humbled, broken, put out of the way entirely – and raised to walk in newness of life.

Acting on your spirit’s yes

Seeking words to express my new understanding, I wrote:

The deepest part of me, my spirit, is in hot pursuit of God – deeply loving him; accurately hearing him; eagerly desiring to know him, honor him, follow him.

My redeemed soul wants to do the same thing. Yet, on its own, my soul cannot discern or choose the right way. However, when my soul is subject to my spirit and my spirit is filled with the Spirit of God, I willingly, joyfully, make right choices.

Ah, but my soul loves to play the usurper. Like a spoiled child, it does not, ever, want to deny itself, or wait, or feel pain. It wants to be in charge. It thinks it knows best. It assures me it can discern accurately and choose wisely. It boasts that it is protecting my own best interests when in fact it is sabotaging me.

Again and again, my soul will “figure out” a situation and instruct my body to act on its wishes, all the while telling my spirit to sit down and shut up.

Yet by itself, my soul cannot discern between needs and desires, nor can it discern which desires are healthy and holy, and which are not. And whatever my soul urges me to do, to fulfill legitimate needs and godly desires, only pushes them further away.

BUT GOD saw my constricted spirit, crying out to honor him. He saw my confused soul, sabotaging the very things it wanted to do. The Lord put me in a position where obeying him required choosing to act on my spirit’s yes when my soul was screaming NO.

Continued obedience required clinging to God, spirit to Spirit – and trusting that even when my grip failed, he was holding me – while my afflicted soul used every means in its power to get its way.

Every time I chose to side with my spirit, I grew stronger in spirit – and humbled my soul a little more.

Rivers of living water

To my delight, a new dynamic emerged. As my soul and body began to defer to my spirit, I looked for words to describe how that looks:

Your spirit hears and reverberates with the Holy Spirit, echoing his wisdom, his love, his holiness, power and truth. Your spirit does not reject information bombarding you from the physical realm, but rather sifts and rightly processes that input, in light of what it sees in the spiritual world. Your spirit does not reject the reasonings of your mind or the cries of your emotions, but rather evaluates them by the Spirit of God.

Thus, your Spirit-filled spirit informs and instructs your soul and body, guiding mind and emotions, beliefs and behavior, into line with what is true.⁷

Jesus himself taught us about the Holy Spirit. On one occasion, he stood and cried:

Whoever puts his trust in me, as the Scripture says, rivers of living water will flow from his inmost being! (John 7:38 CJB)

May your spirit be released, and God’s rivers flow, as you cooperate with the Spirit to humble your soul.

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I published the original version of this post August 6, 2012. Eight years later, I’ve revised and republished it.

Other key Spirit-to-spirit posts

• Dear weary one, can we talk about the Spirit realm?
• Living by the Spirit
• Our Spirit-to-spirit birthright
• Inhaling the breath of God, and other posts in the Life and Breath series
• Mastering the language in which God speaks
• Praying for God
• Truth, desperation, spirit, life

Footnotes

1. Romans 8:7, 8 NAS. See Romans 8:1-17 to find how very much these statements were taken out of context. ↩︎
2. So you’ll know: I do not agree with Watchman Nee’s views on submitting to human authorities, as expressed in the book, Spiritual Authority, published in 1972 by Christian Fellowship Publishers. See my post, The people I quote. ↩︎
3. See Mark 14:1-3. ↩︎
4. Watchman Nee, The Release of the Spirit (Sure Foundation Publishers, 1965), 11-12. ↩︎
5. Watchman Nee gleaned from Andrew Murray, as well as from Jessie Penn-Lewis and many other Christian authors. To see a list, scroll down on this page, that tells about Nee’s life and ministry. ↩︎
6. See, for example, James 4:10; 1 Peter 5:6. ↩︎
7. Quoted from Return to Your Rest: A Spirit-to-spirit Journey, © 2016, 2019, p. 51. ↩︎