Tens of thousands of God’s dear children as yet know little, if any, even temporary experiences of a brighter life than one of never-ending stumbling and rising. To the best part of their birthright as God’s children, to the most precious gift of the Father’s love in Christ – the gift of the Holy Spirit, to dwell in them, and to lead them – they are practically strangers.
So wrote Andrew Murray in his 31-day devotional, The Spirit of Christ.1
Sadly, the situation Murray described in 1888 remains true today.
A South African pastor, Andrew Murray genuinely, gently, lived the deeper Christian life. Though he died a century ago, he is still highly respected; and many of his books, widely read.
I discovered Murray’s writings on the Holy Spirit after the Lord took his own time pressing me toward Spirit-to-spirit living.
For years, God had been working in me in ways I didn’t understand and couldn’t explain. Then, little by little, he began to reveal what he had been teaching me. Prior to finding Murray’s writings, I searched the Scriptures, read a few other authors and wrote several posts describing what I was learning about living by the Spirit. I explored (among other things):
- the difference between the human spirit and the human soul, the way God intends them to work together, and the way sin in us has thwarted that working;
- the interaction between the indwelling Holy Spirit and the human spirit, and how vital that communion is to abundant Christian living.
Many Christians today count such teachings as new and strange. I myself never heard them, growing up in a conservative evangelical church. But they aren’t new. Rather, like many key truths, we’ve misplaced them. Interestingly, 130 years ago, Murray and others noted the same thing.
If we review the history of the Church, we notice how many important truths, clearly revealed in Scripture, have been allowed to lie dormant for centuries, unknown and unappreciated except by a few isolated Christians … For how long a period, even after the Reformation, were the doctrines of the Holy Ghost, His work in conversion, and His indwelling in the believer, almost unknown!2
Spirit and spirit
As Murray also points out: We may know what Scripture says about the Holy Spirit, yet still be strangers to the best part of our birthright.
On Day 1 in The Spirit of Christ, Andrew Murray describes what he believes to be key to knowing and living by the indwelling Spirit (as opposed to only knowing about him). Murray shows us in Scripture the Spirit-to-spirit dynamic God has designed.
First, he quotes from God’s promise in Ezekiel 36:26, 27: “A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you. And I will put my Spirit within you.” Then Murray writes:
In the words of Ezekiel we find, in the one promise, this twofold blessing God bestows through His Spirit very strikingly set forth. The first is, ‘I will put within you a new spirit’, that is, man’s own spirit is to be renewed and quickened by the work of God’s Spirit. When this has been done, then there is the second blessing, ‘I will put my Spirit within you’, to dwell in that new spirit. Where God is to dwell, He must have a habitation.
Other Scriptures also reveal this dynamic. Murray points to three:
David’s prayer in Psalm 51. First, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God! And renew a right spirit within me;’ then, ‘Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.’
Jesus speaking in John 3. What is indicated in the words, ‘That which is born of the Spirit is spirit:’ there is the Divine Spirit begetting, and the new spirit begotten by Him.
Paul writing in Romans 8. So the two are also distinguished [here:] ‘God’s Spirit beareth witness with our spirits that we are the children of God.’ Our spirit is the renewed regenerate spirit. Dwelling in this, and yet to be distinguished from it, is God’s Holy Spirit, witnessing in, with, and through it.
Spirit and soul
On Day 3, Murray explores the difference – and the conflict – between our spirit and our soul.
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; it was now no longer the ruling principle, but a struggling captive. And the spirit now stands in opposition to the flesh, the name for the life of soul and body together, in their subjection to sin.
The soul not submitted to the spirit may even counterfeit the work of the Spirit. The result: We think we’re living by the Spirit when, in fact, we’re doing “Christian” things in the flesh. Murray says:
And now comes the most important lesson, not easy to learn, for the sake of which we have at some length spoken of the relation between the soul and spirit. The greatest danger the religion of the Church or the individual has to dread is the inordinate activity of the soul, with its power of mind and will. It has been so long accustomed to rule, that even when in conversion it has surrendered to Jesus, it too easily imagines that it is now its work to carry out that surrender, and serve the King it has accepted.
In the believer there is ever going on a secret struggle between the soul and the Spirit. On behalf of God, the Spirit seeks to possess and pervade all. On behalf of self, the soul seeks to take the first place, and to assert the right of independent action.
As long as this is the case, and the soul takes the lead, expecting the Spirit to follow, and help and bless what it does, our life and work will be barren of truly spiritual results. Only when the soul, with all of self – its willing and running – is daily denied and laid in the dust for the Spirit to work, will the Power of God be manifest in our service.3
Call to the church
Speaking from the past, Andrew Murray urges us today:
Let us seek above everything to get firm hold of the promise, that God who has given us a new spirit, also gives His own Spirit within us.
Let us labour to bring every believer to a knowledge of this, his [or her] heavenly birthright.
Other key Spirit-to-spirit posts
- Spirit to spirit: A matter of life and breath – and the other posts in the Life and Breath series
- Humble your soul, release your spirit
- Living by the Spirit
- Mastering the language in which God speaks
- Praying for God
- Truth, desperation, spirit, life
