THE SAVING OF OUR SOUL


THE SAVING OF OUR SOULS

                “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus.” 1 Thess. 5:23.

                I grew up in a prophetic church, so we knew prophecy quite well and a part of that included a fairly thorough understanding of the Sanctuary.  (The Tabernacle of Moses)  We knew all of the furniture and the compartments and how they represented justification, sanctification and glorification, but what I was never taught is that the Tabernacle displayed the three parts of man. In other words, man is made up of three individual parts... spirit, soul and body. Even less did we realize that these three parts are saved separately and that each part must be saved complete, as this text in 1 Thessalonians tells us.

                It is only in this saving of all of man that we are saved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord.

                Now, picture with me if you will the idea that in the process of our salvation, we come from the outer court towards God, while God comes from the Most Holy Place towards us. If we don’t understand this we will be left scratching our heads, for while we first offer our bodies as a living sacrifice and we are justified by faith in that instant, it is nevertheless, our spirit that is saved and not our body. In other words God comes to us through our spirit and He saves our spirit first.

                This salvation of our spirit is instantaneous and forever. The Baptists are right. We are saved once and for all. That is to say that when we are born again our spirit is quickened by the Spirit of God and we become new eternal creatures. He who has the Son has life. Our spirit receives eternal life the moment we accept Jesus as our Savior.

                But like a baby that is born into the world, so is the baby that is born into the kingdom of God. Our spirit has now been saved and God now dwells in our spirit and it cannot sin and it cannot die. John tells us about this saying:

                “And the witness is this; that God HAS given us eternal life and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; He who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God in order that you may know that YOU HAVE ETERNAL LIFE.” 1 John 5:11-13. He did not say that we will have, but that we have eternal life.

                 And since Jesus has promised that He will never leave us or forsake us, our eternal life is secure. This is the salvation of our spirit and it cannot be lost and it will never end. Eternity has been placed in us when we are born again.

                So we are born into God’s kingdom as babes in Christ, we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice to God and we are washed with clean water and then what? We then enter within the first veil into the Holy Place which represents our soul. And whereas salvation of the spirit is instantaneous, the salvation of the soul, (Called Sanctification) is a process. It is a lifelong process of dying to the flesh, which we have laid upon the altar of burnt offering, and serving the spirit in which Christ now dwells.

                So now, while our spirit has been saved instantly by the indwelling Spirit of God, our soul must be saved as a process. Our soul contains our mind, will and emotions and we all know that when we are saved, we don’t instantaneously become mature in our faith serving only the Spirit and never the body. It is a growing process in which the Holy Spirit sheds light upon the Word of God and we grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.  Our soul is washed by the Word (represented by the table of unleavened bread) and we have communion with God by way of prayer, which is represented by the altar of incense and you will notice that the altar of incense is right in front of the veil between soul and spirit. That veil is only removed in Christ.

                So our soul hangs out between our flesh and our spirit and we daily make choices whether we are going to serve the flesh or the spirit. The resurrection life of Jesus abides in our spirit and in our spirit Jesus lives out His life in us.  And as we can see, the works of the flesh profit nothing. It is only the work of the Spirit that gains eternity for the soul… not by our own goodness, but by the goodness of Christ who is our new life.

                But what about the born again person who gets saved and from then on serves the flesh and rarely ever serves Jesus Christ through his spirit? When he dies, his spirit will go back to God who gave it, but his soul will be lost. So with this in mind, let us read a few texts concerning the soul that will now make sense.

                “Therefore putting aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness in humility receive the Word implanted, which is able to save your souls.” James 1:21

                “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Christ from the dead… (this is the salvation of the spirit) who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time… obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls.” Do you see it?

                I have skipped along here, so read the whole chapter. But here we clearly have the instantaneous saving of our spirit, but later, as the outcome of our faith the saving of our souls. Parts of 1 Peter 1:3, 5, 9.

                Again in 1 Peter 1:22, 23 Peter says: “Since you  have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again, not of seed which is perishable, but imperishable, that is, through the living and abiding Word of God.”

                “Therefore, putting aside all malice and all guile and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babes long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation. 1 Peter 2:1, 2.

                So we see that though the spirit is saved immediately and eternally, our soul is saved, or should I say, being saved, as we learn to let Jesus be our new life. And that is what Paul is talking about in Galatians 2:21, where he says that he has been crucified with Christ (altar of burnt offering) nevertheless I live, (Holy Place or soul) Yet not I, but Christ lives in me (spirit) and the life that I now live in the flesh (body and soul) I live by faith in the Son of God… (Who now dwells in my spirit.)

                “For it is God who is at work in your, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” Phil. 2:13. This speaks of the spirit controlled life in which our flesh can take no credit, for it is God who both causes us to will and to work His pleasure.

                “Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works WITHIN US. Ephesians3:20

                In other words, if we live by the Spirit and truth (That is the Spirit and the Word) we have an infinitely powerful resource from which to draw where the power is all from Him and not from ourselves.

                The problem today with this fake grace, is that there are millions of Christians who got saved instantaneously in their spirit, but they are doing nothing for the saving of the soul, which is accomplished by living by the Spirit rather than by the flesh.

                A read recently that about 60% of Christian men are hooked on internet porn and they go on presuming that God understands and they are saved by grace and so it doesn’t matter anyway. Whaaaat?

                But Peter gives us a warning in 1Peter 2:11 saying: “I beseech you as sojourners and pilgrims to abstain from fleshly lusts, WHICH WAR AGAINST THE SOUL.” In other words, Satan is in an all-out onslaught to prevent the saving of our souls.

                Now, as for our body, we know that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. This body is not going to heaven. We await new resurrection bodies at the coming of the Lord. However as good stewards of these bodies, having become the temple of God, we bring them into subjection of the Spirit and we offer them as living sacrifices unto God.

                It is a part of the training of our soul to bring the body into obedience to God, for we are fearfully and wonderfully made. God has given us a wonderful house to live in and so we must glorify God in our bodies because He has created us. But our new body will be eternal and so the old will be swallowed up by the new. After all, most have already died and they would not want to be resurrected in their old corruptible bodies, but in eternal glorified bodies.

                The problem as I see it is that we have millions of “Christians” waiting to be raptured out of here, who have done very little to bring either their souls or their bodies  under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. What is God going to do with all of these baby Christians? Their spirit might make it to heaven, but they will certainly not be prepared to reign with Christ in His millennial kingdom.

                Paul says something in 1 Cor. 5:5 that makes absolutely no sense unless we understand it just like I have now explained it. He said: “I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.”

                You see… our soul with its mind, will and emotions, is of the flesh and it will die with the flesh unless it is saved by living by the Spirit and Truth. We obey God’s Word (Holy Place or soul) and we live by the Spirit (Most Holy Place or spirit)

                Jesus wants to save us complete, body, soul and spirit at His coming and that is why we are learning to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh.

                Listen friends, our salvation is a complete package in which we surrender our entire being to God. We surrender all of our members to Him and He is able to sanctify us entirely and completely beyond all that we can ask or think, but we must yield every part of our being to Him.

                This is the lesson from the Sanctuary that I didn’t learn as a youth growing up and to a certain extent we are all victims of either legalism or false grace. We do not diligently seek Him. We do not daily offer our bodies as a living sacrifice to Him. We do not walk by His Spirit and His Word as we must. Instead we play church and pretend that everything is alright inside and we try to fool ourselves and God with our empty rituals and worship, but judgment is coming to the house of God first and I have a feeling that a large number of Christians are going to be shocked.

                It is not a harsh control of either our body or our mind that accomplishes God’s will for us. It is not a set of doctrines and countless details over which we obsess. Jesus said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength and we shall love our neighbor as ourselves.”  Mark 12:30,31a. And here in this text we see all of the members of our body, soul and spirit coming into conformity to Christ as His love is shed abroad in our hearts.

                The problem is that a large part of the church that calls itself “saved” has never brought body, soul and spirit into the discipline and love of Christ. We have never taken every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and we have not even conformed to the Word. Our thoughts are wild and our lives out of control in everything from gluttony to anger issues to lust, to pride, to addiction and what have you.

                We literally need tribulation and persecution to purify God’s house. He wants to save us but we are still covered with pig slime… and unlike the prodigal son, many have not repented and come home.  Unlike the prodigal son, they want the Father to come to them instead of them coming to the Father. This is why judgment must first come to the house of God.

                I know this is a tough one and I don’t mean to place any burdens on you. The truth is, Jesus does it all, from beginning to end, it is Him that causes us both to will and to do His good pleasure. But HE can’t do a thing for us, unless we repent and surrender our lives to Him. This we must do on a daily basis.

                Only He is righteous. He is our righteousness. Our works are like filthy rags. So when we come to Him, we let go of everything. We let go of our good and we let go of our bad and we receive His perfect life in the place of our sinful lives. We enter His death, by faith… death to all that we have ever been both the good and the bad of it and we receive His life as our own. And from that point on, we learn how to live by His Spirit rather than by our flesh. This is the message of the entire Bible.

                “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:2

                “For whom He foreknew He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son that He might be the first-born among many brethren and whom He predestined, these He also called; and whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified. Romans 8:29-30.


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