In the previous message we saw that God wants man to serve Him in spirit and that only the service which is in spirit can enable man to touch Him. Therefore God created man with a spirit by which man may serve Him.
The spirit as the innermost part of man is the kernel of man. Man’s being man lies in his spirit. Man is not for the existence of the body or for the enjoyment of the soul but for the service of God in spirit.
The function of the spirit within man is to enable man to know God, serve God, contact God, and have fellowship with God. Just as man cannot contact God with the five senses of his body, neither can he touch God with the mind, emotion, and will of his soul. Neither the body nor the soul can get through to God; only the spirit of man can. Man can only contact and touch God in, through, and with his spirit.
Because man sinned and became fallen, the spirit in man became dead. When Adam sinned, not only did it cause him to have a record of sin before God and to have the nature of sin within him, but it also caused the spirit in him to become dead. God told him that in the day he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he would surely die. But after he ate of it, outwardly he did not die. Even though outwardly his body did not die and his outward man was still alive, the spirit within him was deadened and lost its fellowship with God. In other words, it lost its function and feeling. From that time on, due to sin, the spirit in man was deadened to God and had lost its function with respect to God.
The spirit within man is deadened and “deflated”; therefore, it has lost its function and its consciousness. This may be compared to the deadness of the ears of someone who is deaf. A deaf person is not without ears. He has ears, but his ears have lost their function and their sensation; thus, his ears have died. Today although there is a spirit in man, it is dead. Originally the spirit within man enabled him to sense and contact God, but now because the spirit has been deadened, it has lost its function and its sense. Therefore, it cannot sense or contact God, just as the ears of a deaf person are unable to sense or contact sound. To a deaf person, it is as if there were no sound. Likewise, to a person whose spirit is dead, it is as if there were no God.
Today, man’s fall not only has caused the spirit of man to lose its sense and function and therefore become dead; it has even caused man not to realize or know that he has a spirit. Man does not know how to use his spirit to contact God, nor is he even aware that he has a spirit. Man only knows that he has a body and a soul with the mind, emotion, and will; he is not aware that he has a spirit. Man realizes that he has a body to contact the physical things and a soul with the mind, emotion, and will to contact the psychological things. He does not realize, however, that he has a spirit to contact the spiritual things, the things of God. Because man does not know that he has a spirit, he basically does not use his spirit to contact God. Thus, he is unable to contact God or sense God. Consequently, he feels and thinks that there is no God. This is similar to a blind person thinking that there are no colors. Although colors exist, he cannot touch them with his hands, smell them with his nose, or hear them with his ears. In his sensation it is as if colors do not exist, because his faculty for perceiving colors has been lost. Likewise, God does exist, but man does not sense God’s existence because man is ignorant of the fact that he has a spirit and therefore fails to use the proper faculty, the spirit within him, to contact God.
The spirit of man has lost its feeling and function, and it has become dead to such an extent that even its existence is not felt. This is due to the fact that man has fallen into sin and lives in sin. Therefore, the Bible says, “You, though dead in your offenses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) and “You, though dead in your offenses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh” (Col. 2:13). Sin causes the spirit of man to lose its feeling and function and to become dead. The more one lives in sins, the more his spirit loses its sense and function and becomes more deadened. The more one lives according to his flesh, the more he does not sense that he has a spirit.