Zechariah 12:1 shows us that in the eyes of God there are three great things in this universe: the heavens, the earth, and man. In the universe God pays attention to the heavens, the earth, and the spirit of man. Therefore, do not despise yourself. You have a spirit within you, and your spirit is ranked with the heavens and the earth. God needs the heavens and the earth, and even more He needs your spirit. If we see how important our human spirit is, we will be very excited.
Why does God consider the human spirit as important as the heavens and the earth? It is because the human spirit is a vessel to contain God. The heavens are for the earth. Without the heavens, the earth could not survive. The things we enjoy on earth, such as sunshine and rain, come from the heavens. Furthermore, the earth is for man. Things brought forth by the earth, such as crops, are suitable to meet man’s needs for his survival. But the most precious thing in man is his spirit. The human spirit is for God; it is used to contain God. The heavens are for the earth, the earth is for man, and man is for God.
Man has a spirit. Many people, including even Christians, do not know that there is a spirit in them. We must pay attention to the spirit of man. To eat food, you cannot use your eyes, ears, or nose; you must use your mouth. The mouth is the organ for eating. In order for man to eat, God created the eating organ, the mouth, in a marvelous way: the lips for sucking, the teeth for grinding, the tongue for pushing, and the saliva for mixing; all are for eating food. The Lord Jesus said that He is the bread of life. By this we see that God Himself is our food. Then which organ do we use to eat the Lord? The spirit! The human spirit is the organ for us to eat the Lord. God created a spirit for us that we may eat Him, enjoy Him, and receive Him into us. Hallelujah! We have within us a stomach to contain physical food and a spirit to contain spiritual food, which is God Himself!
What is the spirit? Where is the spirit? This is hard to explain. It is even difficult to know our heart. How many hearts do we have? We have a biological heart and a psychological heart. Not only is God a mystery, but even you and I are mysteries. Some of the most precious things are very mysterious. For example, electricity, life, and atomic energy are mysterious and even invisible, yet they are real. Within us the most mysterious thing is the spirit.
What really is the spirit? It is hard for the mind to understand; we can know the spirit only by experience. For instance, many times our mind reasons out a certain matter and our will is also in agreement, but deep within us there is something troubling us. That something is a mysterious thing, which is unexplainable, and that is the story of the spirit. Take another case: When a man is poor, all he needs is clothing, food, and shelter, and all he thinks about is how to make money. After he becomes rich and all these material necessities are fully supplied, then he feels the need for recreation and amusement, such as music and sports. Yet after all these needs have been met, he still feels an emptiness deep within him. Then one day he calls, “O Lord Jesus!” It is then that he is satisfied within. This deepest need is neither physical nor psychological but spiritual. Only God can satisfy this need. This need is evidence that we have a spirit within us.
Now let us talk about prayer. There are at least two kinds of prayer. The first kind is to pray with the intellect or the mind. The words of your prayer may be correct, but because you pray with the wrong organ, your prayer is not effective. If you ask a professor of psychology to pray, he might pray and pray, going round and round in his mind; eventually he may even pray God away. This is because the human mind cannot contact God, just as a piece of wood cannot make electrical contact. If one is willing to call, “O Lord,” then the Spirit will come, and he will touch God. Therefore, the second kind of prayer is to pray with the spirit. We all must exercise to make our spirit strong.
Christianity teaches people to pray to an objective God, a God who is high above on the throne, begging Him to have pity on them and to do things for them. This kind of religious prayer by religious teaching is altogether in the mind. True prayer is to pray with your spirit in order to contact the subjective Lord, who is in you and with your spirit. Today He is not only sitting high above on the throne, but He is also dwelling in your spirit in a lowly way. Therefore, when you pray to Him, you should not only make requests of Him, but you should touch and contact Him. This kind of prayer for contacting Him is to pray not with the mind but with the spirit.
The Lord said that He is the bread of life and that we have to eat Him. How do we eat Him? It is not by considering Him with our mind but by calling “O Lord!” with our spirit. Suppose your husband or your wife or a brother or a sister insults you, provoking you to anger. This will stir up your mind to think, “How unreasonable this is! How can he do this to me?” Then your whole being will be usurped by the mind, and even though you pray, you will not be able to touch the Lord. Therefore, we must learn how to contact the Lord with our spirit. The Lord is Spirit. To contact Him, who is Spirit, we must use our spirit. He as the Spirit is in our spirit. In our spirit there is a mutual fellowship and a mingling of the two spirits.