This kind of walking according to the spirit requires dependence and faith. We have already seen that all of the good behavior of the flesh is independent of God, rather than dependent on God. The nature of the soul is independence. If a believer wants to walk according to his own thoughts, feelings, and desires, he does not need to spend time waiting on God, praying to God, and depending on God to guide him. "Doing the desires of the flesh and of the thoughts," (Eph. 2:3) does not need dependence. Only when a believer wants to seek God's will, knowing that he is useless, unreliable, and weak beyond repair, does he have a heart to depend on God. If he wants God to guide him in his spirit, he must wait for God in his spirit and not arbitrarily take his own feelings and thoughts as his guide. The believer must remember that whatever is done and can be done without depending on, waiting on, and trusting and seeking God is walking according to the flesh. Only trusting in a trembling manner for God to guide in the spirit is walking according to the spirit.

Walking also needs faith. Faith is in contrast to seeing and feeling. The feeling of the soul is always to demand, grasp, and desire everything that can be seen and felt as a guarantee in order to act and behave. If a believer walks according to the spirit, he does not walk according to the soul. In other words, he walks by faith and not by sight. Therefore, one who walks according to the spirit, on the one hand, will not feel disheartened if there is no help from man, and on the other hand, will also not be moved when there is opposition from man. Because of faith, he can believe God in darkness and not depend on his own resources; he can trust in the unseen power more than his own visible power.

Walking according to the spirit has two parts: one is to begin working and the other is to do this work with power. Many times, the believer lacks the revelation to do certain things in the intuition of the spirit, but he asks God to give him spiritual power to do this work. This is impossible, because that which is born of the flesh is flesh. Sometimes, what the believer does is based on the knowledge of God's will through revelation in the spirit, but then he uses his own power to do this work (see Section Two, Chapter Four). This is also impossible, because what has begun in the spirit cannot be perfected by the flesh. For a man to follow the Lord, he must be broken by the Lord to the extent that he has absolutely no self-confidence; he must realize that no good thought can originate from him; and he cannot have any power to complete the work started by the Holy Spirit. He must forsake all thoughts, cleverness, knowledge, capabilities, and gifts; he must completely depend on the Lord. The world worships and superstitiously trusts those things. But moment by moment, we should confess that we are undone, worthless, incapable, and useless. We dare not do anything before God does command; even in something that God does command, we dare not have the slightest amount of self-reliance.

If we want to walk according to the spirit in this way, we should follow the small consciousness in the intuition in the spirit to begin to work, and we should depend on the power of the spirit to do the work revealed by the intuition. Not walking according to thoughts, ideas, feelings, and tendencies, but only according to the intuition, will cause us to begin well. Not depending on our own talents, power, and abilities, but only on the power of the spirit, will cause us to continue to be perfected. We must remember that as soon as we cease walking according to the spirit, we immediately begin walking according to the flesh and minding the things of the flesh, allowing death to operate in our spirit. Only when we do not walk according to the flesh can we walk according to the spirit. "For those who are according to the flesh mind the things of the flesh...for the mind set on the flesh is death" (Rom. 8:5-6).