BECAUSE OF ADOPTION, we can break the power of vexation and have a renewed spirit. Everyone has been given a gift from God. Not only is life itself a gift, but we each have been built with a gift for God to display through us. When the life of God is flowing freely through us, the gift of God operates in abundance. The gift of God flows through our spirit. Not much is taught on the spirit of man. We talk much about the soul, the mind, the will, and the emotions. The Lord tells us by patience to possess our soul (Luke 21:19). However, like the war the people of Israel fought to possess their land, we have a war to fight to possess our soul. The real war concerns one thing: life. God places each of us in a specific time and space where we are meant to experience life to its fullest.
Acts 17:24–27 puts it this way: “God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.”
In this age we must fight to keep those God-appointed times and boundaries. Each day we live is a life-or-death matter. I know that sounds dramatic, but it is true. Every day we fight against the forces that seek to steal pieces of our existence bit by bit. Some days the battle seems minor; on others we war for our very next breath. Our culture would have us believe that life can be compartmentalized and ordered—some areas are worth dying for, while others can fall by the wayside if they do not meet our moral criteria of importance. This is why people can fight for environmentalism, stem cell research, or human rights yet turn around and justify abortion. We value life—at least when it is convenient for us. But life involves the whole person. Therefore, if the enemy can vex one function of our spirit, the possession of our soul becomes fragmented.
Life is not just our physical surroundings or our emotional well-being; for every human being, it is a spiritual matter as well. Natural life has a beginning, but it really has no end. By that I mean that our Maker has established us as eternal beings. Yes, our natural bodies will pass away with the withering of the trees. But our spiritual beings will remain.
There are three aspects to our spiritual beings. The first and most important is endless communion with the God who created us and gave us His Son to redeem us from our self-imposed prison. “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). Through Jesus we can enter boldly into God’s dwelling place. We have direct access to His throne room. There is often, however, a war to get into this place, which we will discuss later.
The second dynamic of our spiritual being is our testimony. How we overcome our tests in life produces a testimony that has impact not only in the natural realm but even more so in the spiritual. As we rely on the mind of Christ rather than on our own understanding, we can testify to His truth. As we find strength in Him rather than our own abilities or fortitude, we bear witness to His power. Abundant life involves discovering the infinite attributes of God and aligning with them through our testimony. And each time we speak out our testimony, we overcome the enemy and seal our abundant life (Rev. 12:11).
Intuition is the third facet of our spiritual existence. We are shaped in the spiritual realm according to how we perceive or discern good and evil. When we intuitively display the mind of God, we walk in victory. As our intuition alerts us to the schemes of Satan before they come to pass, we have the opportunity to thwart the enemy and conquer territory in the heavens and on Earth. That is why there is such a war both over and around us. We are created to have endless union and fellowship with God. Satan wants to create eternal separation from God. Therefore he wars daily to separate us from God and cause our communion with our Maker to cease.
But to possess or occupy our soulish nature with the Spirit of God, our spirit man (where God inhabits us by the Holy Spirit) must not be blocked. Rather, Holy Spirit must be able to flow freely through our spirit, through our soul, out from our body, and into the world. This is what wholeness is all about. The spirit and the heart are interchangeable many times in Scripture. Therefore, to be whole our spirit must stay renewed and fresh.
A CLEAN HEART:
GOD’S REMEDY TO DECEPTION
Psalm 51:10 says, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” In this particular psalm, David had made some big mistakes and was praying for God to get him back on the right path. His mistakes had caused his spirit to break alignment and communion with the holy God. He knew that unless his spirit was renewed, he would not have relationship with God, and everything else in his life would fall to ruin. Every one of us makes mistakes and receives lies at some point. Those lies will conform us to another image. This is called deception. The only way we can stay deceived is through pride. Once we humble ourselves, we break the devil’s plan against our life. David humbled himself and asked for a renewed spirit. We must do the same. However, if we remain prideful, we remain in deception. This is Satan’s plan. In some way, the enemy wants to take our lies and conform us to the way of the world.
Another way we stay in deception is by having an idol in our life that we are unwilling to give up. Idols are linked with worship. Therefore, if we are unwilling to change our form of worship and worship God, we will remain deceived and bound to a lie. This is how idolatry works. Eventually that lie brings you into a different form of worship so you are not worshiping the Holy God who fathered your spirit but rather an idol with a power to vex your spirit. Our Father can sanctify or make us holy as He is holy. However, when we fall to worshiping and being conformed in an idolatrous way to an image we place above God, our spiritual life is infiltrated by the spirit linked with that image.
Another way deception rules us is through self-idolatry. Therefore you have to understand how self speaks to you and how self wants attention and how self wants to be pitied. Several years ago I went through a very difficult time physically. One day I came home from an MRI and just felt terrible. As I was lying on the couch, my wife, Pam, walked by and said the trash had to be taken out. I looked at her and said, “Can’t you see that I’m dying here?” My self wanted her to recognize what a mess I was in.
So she just said, “If you were dying, God would tell me. And He might do that—but not until after you get the trash out!” So, you see, when we rise up past that self-pity that’s in our soul, and we keep moving, even to get the trash out, something happens in us. When you do that, your spirit breaks from passivity and becomes active toward God.
Remember, Satan’s biggest strategy is to bring your spirit into passivity. If he can ever get your spirit passive so it’s not communing and developing a testimony, and if your discernment of spirits is not working and you’re just wandering through life, then he will just fill your mind with lies. He will build an entire fortress of communication with his demonic hordes so that they keep you in bondage and out of freedom. He’ll develop strongholds in your mind. When your thoughts do not connect, you will lose vision and cannot see the full plan that God has for you. Think of a room where stacks and stacks and stacks of materials have accumulated. Those stacks have not been dusted in years. You really don’t know what’s in the stacks. Cobwebs have overtaken the room. That’s what our mind looks like when the devil brings us into passivity. Shake those cobwebs out! Get them out of your brain. We need deliverance periodically in our life because we can so easily fall into places of passivity. It is at these times of passivity that the enemy can deceive us.
Once our minds are infested by evil spirits, or we have allowed a wrong belief system to come into our minds, our salvation might stay intact, but our spirit becomes affected, so it’s not operating properly. The enemy begins to fragment the purposes of God within us. In John 1:12–13 we read: “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right [or power] to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” This actually means He gave us the power and right, or legal entitlement, to position ourselves as His child. That power resides in the Holy Spirit, who lives within our spirit man. The enemy is in enmity with each one of us because he must find a way to block the flow of the Holy Spirit. To do that, he must cause our spirit to be unsettled. Second Peter 2:7–8 says, “[God] delivered righteous Lot, who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked (for that righteous man, dwelling among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds.)” If the functions of your spirit are not operating rightly, then the destiny of your life cannot be completed. These verses show us that our evil surroundings have influence on our spirit. Those evil surroundings and their influence upon us can actually cause our spirit man to be vexed. To vex means “to rage or be violent; to suppress, to maltreat; to destroy, oppress or do violence; to injure; to exasperate; to entreat evil, harm, or hurt.”
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT
The functions of the spirit are intuition, testimony, and communion. Our spirit is what becomes alive to God and must remain alive to God. Though the spirit is invisible and cannot be seen, it is the driving force of our life. That is why the enemy wants to vex our spirit so we cannot operate in freedom. Here are ten qualities of the spirit:
Without a renewed, vibrant spirit, our spirit doesn’t operate in the above. And that’s also why David, in Psalm 51, began to pray, “Make me have a right spirit.” That means, “Bring me back into alignment with You so I’m communing, so I’m gaining testimony, so my intuition is working.” We need to be renewing our spirits as well as our minds. Just as our mind has three parts, which make up the house of our personality— mind, will, and emotions—our spirit also has three functions that we need to understand to come into renewal. These functions are intuition, testimony, and communion.
The sense of our spirit is intuition. This is when you just know something is. Activated by the Holy Spirit within you, intuition includes wisdom, knowledge, discernment, and other such supernatural understandings of what is going on around you. Ordinary senses become aroused through soulish desire. However, the intuition of the spirit comes directly from an inner knowing. In Hebrews 4:12 the soul and spirit are very similar to each other, except the spirit has power and a supernatural ability. Intuition is where God’s anointing arises within us and eventually brings us to spiritual breakthrough.
Communion is worshiping in Spirit and truth. “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). It takes both to produce reality. If a demon force blocks the power and strength that you have to worship, you cannot gain the daily revelation of who God is when you’re worshiping Him. This causes you to be blocked from the strength and the renewal that your spirit needs on a daily basis. Worship and communion should be a daily occurrence because it keeps the flow of God’s Spirit moving through us. Demons will block us from that. We need to pray and connect with God. The method isn’t nearly as important as doing it on a daily basis.
Testimony occurs two ways. You can build a testament within you from the Word of God. That’s where the commandment is written on your heart, as we see in Romans 2:15: “…who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them.” A testament also occurs when you prove God. The word testing is part of testimony. Therefore, when you go through a testing and come out on the other side victorious, He proves Himself to you. This proof of God is then recorded in the memory of your spirit. From that memory, when you come in contact with a situation that you know is contrary to God’s ability, you speak that testimony forth.
What does a testimony do? It overcomes the devil. “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony” (Rev. 12:11). A testimony comes out of your mouth by the Spirit of God and has the power to dismantle demons. That’s why we must allow the testings we go through to become our testimony. If we whine through our testings, we lose any strength in the end to overcome. Whining is a part of the soul; it loves self-pity. When you’re whining, it means that self is trying to draw attention to the circumstances that you’re in. Self wants to capitalize upon our circumstances so attention is drawn to us as an individual and away from God’s purpose. Satan surely doesn’t want the circumstance we’re in to become a testimony. If a testimony occurs, then the overcoming power of God’s nature within us will displace the enemy and overthrow the devil’s strategy within us from that day forward.
THE POWER OF RENEWAL
Once you are a child of God, you can be anointed by God. However, the enemy longs to keep your spirit encased. In Hebrews 4:12 we find: “For the Word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division between soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” By living in communion with God and knowing His Word, we can actually increase in discernment. Discernment is a function in the intuition of our spirit. This is a time when we must discern we are going to be victorious in the earth.
Psalm 103 is a favorite of mine. As we bless the Lord for His goodness, we find in verse 5 that He “satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” When our spirit is renewed like the eagle’s, it ascends into heaven. It’s like a hot air balloon. It’s filled up. We’re soaring. We maintain vision. We have vitality. We have life. I try to find time to come before God so my spirit can remain in a renewed state. Several years ago I went through an experience where I had to seek God over my health. I asked the Lord if I had sinned in any way or done something wrong that He needed to remind me of.
He said, “Do you remember that gift that you gave at the beginning of the year that I asked you to give?”
And I said, “Yes, and I obeyed You.”
He said, “Yes, you did obey Me. But you did not obey Me with joy. And because you didn’t obey Me with joy, you have now lost your strength. For My joy is your strength. You can obey Me all day long, but if you’re not doing it out of joy, you’re not going to receive the strength to proceed into all that I have for you.”
The lack of joy had caused my spirit not to be right. And because of that, it had given access to the enemy in my body as well. I immediately asked God to forgive me for obeying without joy, because that meant that I really wasn’t respecting Him, and I really wasn’t blessing through that gift. Therefore, the blessings of my obedience could not fully manifest because my spirit was not in right relationship with God.
THE WIND OF DELIVERANCE BRINGS RENEWAL
The spirit of man is the empowering perspective of human life. The Holy Spirit brings God’s presence and power. The Hebrew word ruach and the Greek work pneuma can be translated as “wind,” “breath,” or “spirit.” In both Testaments, spirit is used of both God and human beings. Spirit, whether used of God or of human beings, is difficult to define. The kinship of spirit, breath, and wind is a helpful clue in beginning to understand spirit, since the word spirit in the Bible is linked with wind. When you study demons, you find they are spirits. As demons inhabit our soul, they are like adverse winds within us that are set against the movement of the wind of the Holy Spirit. Confess any sin that you might have, and allow the Spirit of God to move freely in you. As He begins to move, declare that the Holy Spirit will blow the adverse winds of your soul completely out of your body.
RECEIVE THIS DELIVERING WIND
OF RENEWAL, AND BE RENEWED
Israel had been scattered because of all their wrongdoing. However, God in all His love and mercy prophesied that they would be renewed. Ezekiel 36:25–27 says:
Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.
Then in Ezekiel 37, we see Ezekiel prophesying to the wind to bring life. The wind of the Holy Spirit coming into our human spirit regenerates and empowers us. This wind has a restoring quality. Where we have grown desolate, the wind of the Holy Spirit breaks the power of desolation and brings life to us. This is how deliverance works. Even though we might be off our path, or our senses seem to be scattered and we feel confused, our Deliverer can come and bring a wind of refreshing. This wind will bring cleansing and restore us to the full walk God has intended for us.