“Welcome to Torah Today Ministries, and the beginning of a new series that I’m entitling Body, Soul, and Spirit. Back in August, just a few months ago, Robin and I had the privilege of traveling up into Wisconsin to present some teachings to a wonderful collection of brothers and sisters up there. We made some really great new friends.
And I did this four-part series there. And ever since, I’ve been really looking forward to presenting these same four teachings to you and Torah Today Ministries. Of all the series I’ve done so far, and I think at last count, I’ve done about 194 or 195 teachings here at Torah Today, I think this series is maybe the most important one I will have done.
It’s so foundational. And yet, there is so much misunderstanding about this topic. I talk to believers all the time, and they’re all familiar with what the body is.
I don’t have to educate you on that. But there seems to be a lot of confusion about what is the soul? What is the spirit?
And I’m talking about the Holy Spirit. I’m talking about your spirit and my spirit. What’s the difference?”
“And if Yeshua came to save our souls, shouldn’t we know what it is? He came to save? So I am hoping that this series will help answer questions you have, bring clarification.
And in this first episode, we’re just going to introduce the concepts. And then later on, I’ll tell you what we plan to accomplish in episodes two, three, and four. So let’s just jump right in.
We’ll begin with 1 Thessalonians 5.23. Paul closes his letter to the Thessalonians and he says, Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our master, Yeshua, the Messiah. May your whole spirit and soul and body.
Now, to understand these three parts, we go way back to Genesis chapter two, and let’s take a look at how God made Adam. It says, Then Adonai God formed the man of dust from the ground. So this would be entirely physical.
So there’s this pile of dust. He shaped it into the body of Adam, but it’s still lifeless. It’s still just physical material.
And breathe into his nostrils the nashama of life, the breath of life. Now this is utterly spiritual, nothing physical about this part. So the spiritual, the breath of life, which comes directly from God, is breathed into the nostrils of this pile of clay that’s been fashioned into the shape of a human body.
And when the two connected, man became a living soul. So here we see the physical. Here we see the spiritual. And then we see the soul.
I think the best way to picture this is like this. I’m gonna take two hoops. And let’s let this one on the left be the physical. So God forms Adam’s body. Is that showing up on the screen? Okay, good. He forms Adam’s body out of the dirt. And then God breathes into his nostrils the breath of life.
So over here on the right, this will be the spiritual. And when the two came together, man became a living soul. Spirit and soul and body all operated as one. You couldn’t really distinguish between one and the other. There was no war between the flesh and the spirit at this point.”
“Now later, the enemy comes along in the form of the serpent. He tempts Adam and Eve, and they sin. And God told them, for the day they ate of that fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, He said, dying ye shall die, mot yamut, dying ye shall die, and death began.
And this is what happened. The spirit and the body began to pull apart. And so now we see three parts.
Now over here on the left is the physical. Over here on the right is the spiritual. And when finally we breathe our last breath, these separate and we are dead.
But as long as these two are connected, we’re alive. I want you to notice something. Notice this middle part.
The more the flesh comes in alignment with the spirit, the larger the soul gets. The soul is the part where they overlap. But the more we allow our flesh to walk out of step with God’s Spirit, the soul shrinks.
I want my soul to be as developed and large as possible. Yet I know people whose souls are so small, their capacity for enjoyment, their capacity for joy, their capacity for satisfaction, their capacity just to be still, their capacity to enjoy silence, is so shrunken that they’re just grasping and clawing all the time for some kind of pleasure.
But when we walk in the spirit, when we bring our bodies, our actions, our words, more in alignment with God’s will, look what happens to the soul.
This is what’s called abundant life. And someday we’ll get new bodies, we’ll get spiritual bodies. And so the body, soul, and spirit will all be one.
There will be no misalignment whatsoever. Now keep that in mind. So, on the left, I put the body, and on the right, I put the spirit.
And one of the reasons for that, and we’ll be seeing this more a little bit later in the lesson, whenever the scriptures use left and right, you’ll always find that the left is in reference to the body, and the right is always in relation to the spirit or spiritual things. This does not mean the body, the left, is bad, and the right is good. It’s just that the left is physical, the right is spiritual.”
“We’ll see some examples in a moment. But let’s define what the soul is. Now, hear me very carefully on this.
You are a soul. That’s what you are. That’s what I am.
I am not a body, though I have one. I am not a spirit, though I have a spirit. What I am is a soul.
In a number of places in Scripture, it will refer to the number of people, but instead of saying the number of people, it will simply say the number of souls. A soul is a person. A person is a soul.
But we have flesh and we have a spirit. But what you are is a soul. Make sure we always keep that in mind.
And it’s through the physical, through the body, I have five senses that are sensitive to the physical environment in which I live. I have sight and hearing and smell and taste and also touch. But our spirit is what a spirit is sensitive to the spiritual realm, or at least it should be.
Unfortunately, our spiritual sensitivities are very stunted. We can see very clearly, but do we see in the spiritual very clearly? We can feel things physically, but are our spiritual sensitivities just as sharp?”
“This is part of what spiritual growth is, to where we become more and more aware of the 99% realm, the spiritual realm. And that will come along and strengthen and merge with what we sense in the physical realm as well. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s discuss what the soul is. You’re a soul, I’m a soul. And the soul, we could say, is made up basically of these three things.
And if you can think of a fourth or fifth thing, great. Add them in. I think these are the three biggies.
First of all, the mind. This is really where I live. You know, you can change my body.
My body can get older. It can be heavier or lighter or stronger or weaker. You can lose parts of your body, but your mind is still your mind.
Your mind is who you are. And this is where your personality exists. It’s where you make decisions.
And though my body will tip me to do physical things that are in violation of the spirit, and the spiritual has desires or contrary to my physical desires, I make the decision in my soul. This is where I choose.”
“My soul is almost like a rope in a tug of war. And I have the flesh pull in one direction, I have the spirit pull in the other direction, but I’m a conscious, sentient rope. And I can decide which side to go with. I can lean into the physical more, or I can resist the physical and lean towards the spiritual.
This is also where our emotions dwell. Our emotions, our feelings. And for some people who are not very spiritually developed, they think their emotions are the highest part of their being.
And so when they feel something strongly, they act on it, and they’ll even think this is God’s leading. It isn’t. It’s just their emotions.
And emotions are a wonderful thing. God has given them to us. God has emotions, and being made in His image, He has given us emotions.
But emotions were never given to us to direct us in our walk with Him. What our emotions allow us to do is connect with others. This is why the Master tells us to weep with those who weep.
Because as we experience our sadness with them, our souls can connect with them. We can be a comfort and a strength to them. And we’re to laugh with those who laugh, rejoice with those who rejoice.”
“Our emotions allow us to connect with people. But our emotions aren’t given to us to direct our actions. We are to walk in the Spirit, to walk in the truth that God has given us through His Word.
Because sometimes our emotions can scream, no, don’t do this. Can you imagine what it was like for Abraham and Isaac walking up Mount Moriah? Where Abraham knew he was going to offer his son, he was going to slay his son, where Isaac knew he was going to lay down his life?
Neither of them wanted to do that. But they didn’t walk in their emotions, they walked in obedience. Think of Yeshua in the Garden of Gethsemane, and how he knew what the next 24 hours held for him.
And he prayed, Father, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. I’m not going to cave in and follow my emotions, I’m going to do your will.
We must learn to conquer emotion. We need to enjoy our emotions, laugh with those who laugh, weep with those who weep. And emotions were given to us so we can express our souls. They’re not given to us to direct us.”
“And I’m starting to preach, so we’re going to move on. Now, let’s look at this passage in Romans 8, verses 5 through 9.
Now, six times Paul uses the words flesh and fleshly, and six times uses the words spirit or spiritual. And remember our diagrams. The flesh is over here, the spirit’s here, and where they overlap is the soul.
And keep that in mind as we read this passage, Romans 8, verses 5 through 9: For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on fleshly things. But those who live according to the spirit set their minds on spiritual things. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, because God is spirit after all, isn’t he? For it does not submit to God’s Torah, indeed it cannot.
Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the spirit if in fact the spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the spirit of Messiah does not belong to him.”
“Now you’ll notice I did not capitalize the words spirit and spiritual, because for most of the passage, Paul is talking about our own spirit, not talking about the Holy Spirit. And this is where it can get very confusing.
You can think of your spirit as being like the Holy of Holies, and God’s spirit being like the cloud and the fire that descended into the Holy of Holies. But His spirit dwells within our spirit, the two become one. But you have your own spirit, and we’ll be seeing this more as we go.
And even as Paul said, he prayed that their entire spirit and soul and body could be kept holy and kept complete and preserved until the coming of Messiah.”
“Galatians 5, 16-17 is very similar to the passage there in Romans 8. And Paul writes this: But I say, walk by the spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh. For these are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things you want to do.
Who’s the you? The you here is your soul.
Because if you’re a believer, in your soul, you want to please God. You want to do what is right. You want to do what’s moral. You want to do what is scriptural. You want to do what is best for the kingdom of heaven. That’s what we want.
But we have this fleshly body that says, don’t get up and pray. Hit that snooze alarm and stay in bed for another ten minutes, and another ten minutes, and another ten minutes.
We want to be strong to do God’s will, but then the flesh says, go ahead and have that second and third and fourth helping of ice cream and pie. You get the idea? You know. And the spirit says, spend some time with the Word. Take some time to study.
And the flesh says, oh, but your game is on. Your favorite show is on. And the wrestling match begins.”
“And if we walk in the flesh, we don’t do the things we really want to do. And after we’ve walked in the flesh, after we’ve eaten too much or slept in too late or wasted our time in pursuing things that don’t matter, there’s a feeling of guilt and of loss and of waste.
So we need to learn to walk in the Spirit and not fulfill the lust of the flesh. These two are at war with each other.
Now, I mentioned before that in the Scripture, whenever you see left, it’s referring to the physical. When you see right, it’s referring to the spiritual. Let’s look at some examples of this.”
“In Ecclesiastes 10:2, it says, A wise man’s heart is to the right, but a fool’s heart is to the left.
Now, your translations may try to cushion this or pad this so it tends to make more sense, but it makes perfect sense the way it is if we understand how the Hebraic mind uses the terms left and right.
Genesis 48:14: And Israel stretched out his right hand and laid it on the head of Ephraim, who was the younger, and his left hand on the head of Manasseh, crossing his hands, for Manasseh was the firstborn.
So, if you recall the story here in Genesis 48, Joseph has brought his two sons, Manasseh the oldest and Ephraim, and he’s placed Manasseh over here at Jacob’s right hand and Ephraim the younger over here at his left hand, so Jacob could just reach out and bless them. But Jacob crosses his hands.
He puts his right hand on the younger Ephraim and his left hand on the older Manasseh. Why? Because he recognized that the younger Ephraim would be the one who receives the greater spiritual inheritance.
And you can read the story to see what I’m talking about. But as you read the whole account here, not just this one verse, you begin to see the emphasis that Joseph and Jacob put on right and left, on spiritual and physical.”
“Proverbs 3:16: Long life is in her right hand, and in her left hand are riches and honor.
Who’s the her? It’s actually referring to the Torah.
You know, in our Torah services at Beth Tikkun, or in any synagogue for that matter, at the end of the Torah service, the Torah is opened, so there are at least three columns of print seen. It is lifted up, and the person turns their back to the congregation, so the congregation can see the columns of print. And then this, and a little bit more, is read from Proverbs 3:16.
It says, Long life is at her right. Now, life is spiritual. Life is a gift from God. God is the author of life. We’re to choose life.
But in her left hand are riches and honor. Now, these are physical things.
But it’s saying with the Torah — Torah which restores the soul — we get the best of both worlds. We get spiritual life and length of days. We also have riches and honor. Our days are going to be filled with blessing.”
“Matthew 25:33, Yeshua says, And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. This is at the judgment.
The sheep represent those who have lived lives in accordance with God’s word, and done those things which are right in his eyes. The goats represent those who have not.
So where do the goats go? They go to the left. Sheep go to the right.”
“Matthew 6:3: But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
In other words, when you do alms, when you give to the needy, when you do a mitzvah, you do something good. Don’t let the left, the physical, get all involved with what’s spiritual.
Don’t let the left be in the spotlight. Do things in such a way that they’re hidden from the eyes of others. When you’re doing something that could bring praise to yourself, don’t do it to bring praise to yourself.
That’s fleshly. Now, we are to let our light so shine among men that they may see our good deeds and give glory to our Father in heaven. But there are other times we can shine our light in such a way that they give honor to us.
That’s letting the left hand get involved with the right. Don’t do that.”
“Isaiah 48:13: My hand laid the foundations of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens.
Now, this is what’s interesting. We see the right hand of God mentioned many times in the scripture. But his left hand is never, ever mentioned. Not a single time. Because God is Spirit.
But look how he dodges the mention of a left hand. He says, my hand — we can imply it’s the left hand — laid the foundations of the earth. That’s the physical.
And my right hand spread out the heavens. That’s the spiritual. So we know that God has to have a left hand because we’re made in His image, and He’s given us a left hand. And if He didn’t have one, we wouldn’t either.
But God’s essence is spiritual. And so the things He accomplishes, the eternal things He accomplishes, the emphasis of everything He does is to the right hand, the spiritual.
God is very definitely right handed. This is not in any way to denigrate those who are lefties, but God’s right handed, and the right is the spiritual. I’m going to hear that one. We’ll hear more about that, I’m sure, in the emails.”
“Now when we look at the land of Israel, there we see the north at the top, west on the left, east on the right, south at the bottom.
And when we look at the land of Israel, and if you’ve been there, you’re aware of this, but in Israel, everything down here to the south, from about here down, is hot. This is the Negev down here. This is the desert. This is the wilderness area down here in this part of the land.
But up here in the top part of Israel, it’s green, it’s lush. You’ll find fields of grain and vineyards and trees and palms, and it’s just a beautiful area. There’s a saying in Israel that people, when they go to Israel, they go to the north to play, and they go to the south to pray.
And up here in the north, you’ve got the Sea of Galilee, which is the largest body of fresh water in the Middle East. But down here in the south, you’ve got the Dead Sea. It’s called the Dead Sea because nothing lives there. That water is nine times saltier than ocean water.”
“So there’s nothing much down here in the south to bring pleasure to the flesh, whereas up here it is. It’s beautiful.
But where did Yeshua go to spend time with God for 40 days and to be tempted by the enemy? He went to the south. Where did David go when he was penning many of his Psalms? It was in the south.
And sometimes God takes us through what might look like a physical wasteland to meet with us spiritually. And for 40 years, we know Israel wandered in the wilderness. Now, it wasn’t this silt wilderness. It was the wilderness further south.
But this place of desert, this place of stark emptiness, he took them there so that he could teach them and grow them spiritually. Because until they had grown spiritually, they were not ready to enter into his promised land.”
“So you’re looking at this, and you’re thinking, Okay, Grant, you’ve told us that the right is the spiritual, the left is the physical. So why in Israel is it the top is the physical and the bottom is the spiritual?
That’s because we’re looking at the map wrong. This is how modern maps are oriented with the north at the top. But in ancient times, in Israel, maps were oriented with north at the left and south at the right.
And if you do a little research, you don’t have to go far. You’ll find the ancient maps of Israel oriented this way.
In fact, there are at least two names for east in the Hebrew scriptures. Two names for south, two for west, and two for east, north, south, east, west. They each have a pair of names. But I want to point out the names here that really align with what we’re talking about.”
“One of the words for east in Hebrew is the word kadim. And kadim means in front of.
And one of the words for west is the word achor, which means behind. So which way are we facing? We’re facing the east.
Maybe this helps answer a question you’ve had. You know, the tabernacle and the temple always faced the east.
In other words, they always are facing ahead. And you could picture as God would be in the Holy of Holies, his presence there, and as he looks through the paroket, the curtain, out the east door, he’s viewing ahead where the sun comes up.”
“Viewing from God’s point of view in the Holy of Holies, the menorah would be on the right. This is the source of light, spiritual. The showbread would be on the left. This is the source of physical food, physical satisfaction.
And then the word for south — sometimes it’s just the word negev in Hebrew, but other times just the word yamin, which means right hand. Benjamin, Jacob’s son, ben yamin, son of the right hand, yamin, right.
And the most common name for north, I think, is Zaphon. But sometimes the north is referred to as s’mol, which means left hand.
So again, we know that down here in the southern part of Israel, from about here down, is where the desert is. You think of this as being the spiritual side, the spiritual end of Israel. And over here in the north, this is more where the physical pleasures are.
And right here along the dividing line, we find Jerusalem.”
“Getting the picture? Well, let’s finish up with just a few more examples of spirit, soul, and body. We find these three concepts in all kinds of things.
Let’s look at music for a moment. Now, the left column, of course, represents the physical. The right column, the spiritual. The center column, the soul.
Music is made up of three parts. You have the rhythm, which of course is physical. People who love music but don’t have much of an ear for music sometimes are the ones who play the drums. Now, not across the board, but I know some people who love music and they’re drum players, but they can’t carry a tune. But they’re very good drummers.
So rhythm is very… Oh, I’m going to hear more emails from that one too. I should probably go back and do this whole thing over because I feel like I’m probably offending people. I’ve offended lefties and I’ve offended percussionists, so maybe we can offend everybody by the time this is over.
But anyways, rhythm is utterly physical. Utterly physical. It’s the beat, the boom, boom, boom. It’s like the car that pulls up next to you at the intersection. They’ve got these massive speakers going, and you feel your breakfast jarring around inside of you. These are very physical people.
But the melody, the melody is the spiritual part. You can hum a melody, whistle a melody. You can sing a melody. And without the melody, the harmony and the rhythm, they have nothing to support, because rhythm and harmony play supporting roles to the melody itself.
And harmony, of course, this is the most intellectual part. You know, if you listen to Baroque music, not broke music, but Baroque, B-A-R-O-Q-U-E. I hope I spelled that right. It’s music from the mid-late 1600s on up to just the early 1700s. This is when Bach and Handel and Scarlatti and others produced music.
It’s very complex harmony. Very complex. It’s amazing how they could have countermelodies running in in support of the main melody. It’s very mathematical. It’s very technical. And you can tell there’s a lot of intelligence and brilliance went into making these harmonies.
Whereas the melody could be quite simple and lovely, these harmonies, they just went all out on this. This is when they started building pipe organs that had like three keyboards and then a whole set of pedals. And they could run all these different harmonies at the same time. It’s just incredible.”
“So rhythm is the physical part of music. Melody is the spiritual part. And harmony is something that plays a supporting role to enhance the melody.
Now let’s take another example: enjoyment.
On the left side, in the physical area, we have pleasure. Pleasure is something you can have whenever you want it. Just eat another ice cream cone, take another nap, whatever it is.
You can just have pleasure. But pleasure by itself does not last very long, and often leaves a residue of damage, emptiness, and kind of a death to the soul.
Happiness, on the other hand, is a function of the soul. Happiness can happen when there’s no physical pleasure. You can be happy because you see someone else who is happy. You can be happy because your spouse or your children are happy. You can be happy because your team wins.
There’s no real pleasure in that. You’re not experiencing anything physically, but there’s happiness because of things going on around you.
But joy is a fruit of the what? It is a fruit of the Spirit.
So: pleasure is for the body, happiness for the soul, joy for the spirit. And if you have real joy, if you have this gift of joy, this fruit of the spirit joy, you’re going to take happiness in more things. You can be happy for the sake of others, not just for yourself.
And then every pleasure that God’s ever created takes on an added and deepened and more wholesome nature. It’s a way to live.”
“One of the things I want you to notice too: God works from the inside out. God works from the inside out.
But the enemy wants to work from the outside in. When you look at how the serpent approached Adam and Eve, and then you read what the result of that was, it says, first of all, she saw that the tree was good for food.
Now, food is a physical pleasure. It’s for taste. It’s for the body.
But it’s also a desire to make one wise, clever. That’s the soul.
And if Satan could have gotten Adam and Eve to worship him, which is a function of the spirit, then it was game over.
But since the body and the soul were used by the enemy to lure mankind into sin, God chose to use the spirit to bring people to himself. And so, how do we come to God? God works from the inside out.
He gives us the Gospel, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to our souls. There’s nothing to give us pleasure, but there’s something deep in our spirit when we hear the Gospel, something inside of us leaps.
And when you read 1 Corinthians, the opening chapters, he talks about the kind of people who follow God. It’s not the wise. It’s not the powerful and the mighty. It’s the weak things.
It’s the foolish people, the weak people, the people that nobody pays attention to. These are the ones who hear the Gospel and something inside of them leaps because they know this is true.
And when God comes into our spirit and takes up residence there, the way we think changes, the way we feel changes. And then eventually, the way we look might change, the way we dress might change, and our health will change.
God works from the inside out.”
“When you look at the temptations that the enemy used against Yeshua there in Matthew, what was the first one?
Turn the rocks into bread. Physical.
What was the second one? Just leap off the top of the temple and they’ll all see you floating down. You can avoid all the shame and the pain and the rejection. So he appealed to his emotions, to his soul.
But what was the third temptation? Just worship me. Just worship me. No one needs to know. And I’ll give you the whole world.
And worship is a function of the Spirit. We know this because when Yeshua speaks to the woman at the well, he says, God is Spirit, and he seeks those who will worship him in Spirit and in Truth.
Worship is a function of the Spirit.
And this is why — and I know I’ve shared this before in other teachings — but this is why a little something kind of goes off in my mind when I hear people refer to worship teams, worship bands.
There’s no such thing as a worship team. No such thing as a worship band. Praise teams, praise bands, because praise is physical. Praise is where we clap and sing and dance and jump and, you know, we can really express ourselves.
But worship is spiritual. Worship, there’s no physical pleasure in worship. In fact, the word worship in Hebrew, the word chava, means just to go prostrate, just to go on your face, get the flesh out of the way.
In other words, the flesh is just made to be totally, utterly still, so that our spirits can really connect with God. Now, out of true worship, joy can come, and a sense of fulfillment, a sense of the presence of God, and then it flows on out to where we begin to sing and to praise Him.
But I think there’s far too much praise and far too little worship in most redeemed communities today. And that’s why the praise gets louder and louder, but emptier and emptier.
But I’m starting to preach again. Now I’ve offended all the musicians in the churches, so let’s just make everybody mad and we’ll call it a day.”
“The Books of Solomon. Solomon wrote three books.
He wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, and what’s the phrase we find over and over and over? Under the sun. Under the sun. What’s under the sun? Well, that’s just the physical world.
And he talks about the vanity and the emptiness of all the things to be offered here just under the sun.
But then he writes a book for the soul. That’s the book of Proverbs. This is where he tells us how we can make wise choices. We can use our wills in a way that aligns with God. How we can be wise.
The Song of Songs — he seems to be talking a lot about agriculture. But you begin to realize that all the agriculture and all the birds and the bees that are referred to there are really a picture, an imagery of the physical union between a husband and a wife, which in turn is imagery to express the oneness of God and his people.
So he talks about agriculture to describe something that’s more intimate physically, which in turn is used to describe something that is utterly spiritually intimate between God and his people.”
“And in the Book of Proverbs, Solomon describes three kinds of women. He describes the woman of folly and warns us against her.
She’s a knockout. On a scale of one to ten, she’s about a twelve. She’s beautiful.
He says that the person who, the guy who’s lured to go into her door, he’s found himself at the gates of hell.
But then he talks about lady wisdom. Doesn’t describe how she looks. So we can assume she’s a plain Jane.
And she’s also in the streets calling to people. But she’s saying, I don’t have physical pleasures to give you, but I can give you wisdom. I can tell you how to live. And I can give you long life.
And she is appealing to people’s inner best. To their inner desires, not the fleshly ones.
But then at the end of Proverbs, in chapter 31, he describes a spiritual woman — the woman of valor. The woman of valor who’s one who walks in the steps of the lady of wisdom.”
“So, I hope that you’re getting the idea that the scriptures are utterly infused with this theme of spirit and soul and body. That you see that when the scriptures refer to the left, you’ll find a lot of other passages. It’s referring to physical things. Not bad things, just the physical world. And the right is a picture of spiritual things.
But what are we? We are souls. We are to elevate the physical to the holy, to the spiritual.
I want to close with this last picture.
When the Israelites came out of Egypt, they brought with them lumber and cloth and jewels and silver and gold and hides and dyes and all kinds of stuff. They were just loaded up with wagons full of stuff. And they come into the wilderness.
And then God calls Moses on top of the mountain, and then God gives Moses something utterly spiritual. He gives him the blueprint for the tabernacle. And he says, I want you to make a tabernacle for me so I can dwell among you or within you.
And he says, I want you to make according to the pattern in the heavenlies. So, all the stuff that was used to build that tabernacle, that house of God, all that stuff came out of Egypt. But the plan, the blueprint came from the heavenlies. It’s spiritual.
And when they submitted all that physical, raw material, when they submitted it to the authority of the blueprint from God, what was created? A house where God’s presence could dwell among them.”
“In this life, we have a physical body. We have the talents and gifts God’s given us. We have the physical possessions that He has lavished upon us. We have all this raw material, and He’s given us time as well.
But He also wants us to submit this and yield it to the authority of the blueprint. That would be His Torah, His Word, which is utterly spiritual.
And when we submit the physical to the authority of the spiritual, we become a house of God, so He can live within us and express Himself to the world through us. He does that individually, but oh, what glory it is when He does that corporately as we come together as a group.
So, hopefully you’re getting the picture.”
“Now, I told you what we’d be talking about the next three episodes. And the next three episodes, we’re going to discuss the next one. It will be the body-soul connection.
The body-soul connection. The third episode will be about the soul-spirit connection, which is going to be a lot of new material, because this connection we’re kind of familiar with. This one is a little foggier.
And then in the fourth episode, how is it we go from being a fleshly believer to a soul-ish believer to a spiritual believer? Because those are terms Paul uses in the opening chapters of 1st Corinthians. We don’t want to be fleshly believers, but we don’t want to be soul-ish believers either, but most believers are soul-ish believers.
God wants us to become spiritual men and women. And again, I haven’t arrived, but I have the map. And I want to share the map with you.
So, until next time, may God bless, and I wish you Shalom.”
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SESSION 1 – Introduction
1 Thessalonians 5:23 Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Master Yeshua the Messiah.
Genesis 2:7 Then Adonai God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.
Romans 8:5-9 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on fleshly things, but those who live according to the spirit set their minds on spiritual things. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s Torah; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the spirit, if in fact the spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the spirit of Messiah does not belong to Him.
Galatians 5:16-17 But I say, walk by the spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.
LEFT = Physical & RIGHT = Spiritual
Ecclesiastes 10:2 A wise man’s heart is to the right, but a fool’s heart is to the left.
Genesis 48:14 And Israel stretched out his right hand and laid it on the head of Ephraim, who was the younger, and his left hand on the head of Manasseh, crossing his hands (for Manasseh was the firstborn).
Proverbs 3:16 Long life is in her right hand. In her left hand are riches and honor.
Matthew 25:33 And He will place the sheep on His right, but the goats on the left.
Matthew 6:3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
Isaiah 48:13 My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and My right hand spread out the heavens…
REFERENCES:
Deuteronomy 33:2 He said, “Adonai came from Sinai and dawned from Seir upon us; He shone forth from Mount Paran; He came from the ten thousands of holy ones, with flaming fire at His right hand.”
Judges 5:4 “Adonai, when You went out from Seir, when You marched from the region of Edom, the earth trembled and the heavens dropped, yes, the clouds dropped water.”
Habakkuk 3:3 God came from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran. Selah. His splendor covered the heavens, and the earth was full of His praise.
“Self-control is at the heart of all spiritual growth, and it is developed by the discipline required to obey. By contrast, when one acts spontaneously there is no resistance to overcome; the action is relatively easy, and so it has relatively little potential for growth…But there is more here than meets the eye. When you act spontaneously, you are expressing yourself. That may be a great thing, but it can never be greater than you are… But when the source of my command is outside myself, I express that source when I act … we join in a partnership that expresses us both.” – R’ Akiva Tatz
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