CHAPTER TEN
In the past messages we have covered many crucial aspects of the wonderful, all-inclusive, life-giving Spirit. But one deeper aspect remains to be touched, an aspect hidden in the New Testament revelation.
In Ephesians 3:16 Paul prayed that the Father would grant us to be strengthened in our inner man. In this verse Paul unexpectedly uses a strange but particular term: the inner man. This term is very significant. Here Paul does not speak of the spirit or of any other organ; he says that our inner man needs to be strengthened so that Christ may make His home in our hearts. We need to read Ephesians 3:16 and 17 very attentively, noticing the matter of the inner man and then the matter of Christ's making His home in our hearts. Within us we have an inner man, which we did not have before we were regenerated.
Human beings have their being, or their man, in their soul, not in their body or in their spirit. For this reason, the Bible often refers to man as a soul. For example, Exodus 1:5 says that "all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls," and Acts 2:41, speaking of those baptized on the day of Pentecost, says that "there were added unto them about three thousand souls." According to the Bible, a person is a soul because his being, his man, is in his soul. The Bible reveals that man is a tripartite being, composed of the spirit within, the body without, and the soul between the spirit and the body. The soul is the being, for a person's personality is in his soul. In other words, human life is in the soul. The body is an organ to contact the outward world, and the spirit is an organ to contact the spiritual world. Therefore, a human being, a person, with his personality in his soul, has both a body and a spirit as organs. Neither the body nor the spirit is his personality. This means that the personality of a human being is neither in the body nor in the spirit, but in the soul. Hence, the soul, and neither the body nor the spirit, is the person. Before we were regenerated, our body was our outward organ and our spirit was our inward organ. Being an inward organ, the spirit has no personality in it.
When we believed in the Lord Jesus and were regenerated, Christ as life entered into our spirit. Prior to this, there was no life in our spirit, for the spirit was merely an organ without life. Our human life was not in our spirit; it was in our soul. A human being is in the soul; that is, the soul is the human being. But when we were regenerated, Christ came into our spirit to be life there. This caused our spirit to no longer be an organ. The coming of Christ into our spirit makes our spirit a new being, which the Apostle Paul called the inner man. Formerly, our spirit was merely an organ, and there was no man, no personality, in it because there was no life in it. But by coming into our spirit, Christ has made it a being with life. Now in our spirit we have another being, the new being, the inner man.