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Transcript - SF507 Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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Holy Spirit, Human Spirit, and Individual Spiritual Formation Part I: The Biblical Theological Foundation

Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit

This lecture is entitled Holy Spirit, Human Spirit, an Individual Spiritual Formation. It’s part one of this unit of the concentric circles—the three concentric circles, the center one, the core of this. It’s the biblical theology foundation for understanding this. The chart there is from the previous lecture as well, and the goal is to work through this particular dimension—this particular concentric circle element.

As we talked about earlier, we’re looking at this from a biblical point of view. Each one of these dimensions has connections from the Old Testament into the New Testament and each has specific New Testament applications for the Christian life and each dimension is inextricably bound up with the other two. This is an important principle because the New Testament writers themselves were assuming when they wrote the New Testament that you had a very full understanding of the Old Testament, which was the actual Bible of the first-century church. So the issue is that we need to build this. We need to make this a whole Bible understanding of what God is doing through His Spirit and transforming us into Godly believers.

Now this Holy Spirit and human spirit has this focus at the core of spirituality in the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the agent of spiritual formation, and one of the main places that He works the focus of his actual work is on the human spirit. This dimension of spiritual formation focuses especially on the significance and power for the Christian life that comes from personal solitude and devotion and meditation. This is a big part of what the Holy Spirit does. It’s only one part, but it is core to the kind of transformation where you’re transformed from the heart on out into the way you live, as Jesus talks about—cleansing the inside of the cup.

Now the human spirit in the Bible is a very important topic, and in my opinion, not talked about nearly enough in our theology

Richard E. Averbeck, Ph.D.

Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Transcript - SF507 Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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and in our thinking. The first point here is that in 40 percent of its occurrences in the Old Testament, the word “spirit”—ruach—means “wind” or “breath.” It does not mean “spirit” as in human spirit or Holy Spirit as we use the term in the church today. The New Testament Greek word pneuma has some of the same uses in this way.

The second thing is we need to recognize that when these words are used they often refer to the human spirit, and certain passages draw out the correspondence between the Spirit of God and the spirit of the human person and the importance of God’s work through His Spirit in that human spirit.

And so I’ve written on this, and I have the bibliography there for this, but I want to walk through some of the main concerns or main passages that help us to understand this big part of what the Bible actually does teach about us as people as a foundation, then bring that together with what God does through His Holy Spirit in the human spirit. First, we have the human spirit, and breath or wind are closely connected. Both the Old Testament word and the New Testament word are used for wind and breath. We have, for example, the word pneuma in the Greek New Testament, [which] means wind or spirit. We have in English the word pneumonia, for example. It comes from that word pneuma.

In Psalm one verse 4, for example, we have this talk about the wicked as they are like the chaff which the wind—ruach—drives away. That’s the same word that would be used for the human spirit or for the spirit of God in the Old Testament.

There’s this very interesting passage in Ezekiel 37. This is that passage from where we get this song “dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.” In this, this is the valley of dried bones, and we have these dead, dry bones laying on the valley, and the Lord says that He should prophesy so that He might put breath and that skin and sinews may come on these dry bones.

Then Ezekiel writes, “So I prophesied as I was commanded” in 37:7-9: “and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, sinews were coming on them, and flesh grew and skin covered them; but there was no breath [ruach] in them. Then He said to me, “prophesy to the breath [the same word for spirit], prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “Come from the four winds [again the same



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word], O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may come to life.”’”

So breath and wind are the same word.

“So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they came to life and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army” [verse 10].

The point that I’m making here comes to its real focus in verse 14.

“‘I will put My Spirit [My ruach] within you and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land. Then you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken and done it,’ declares the Lord.”

So the Lord’s Spirit is connected with this wind that becomes the breath of the people. So there are all sorts of interesting connections that are made in this passage.

And then in John, in the New Testament, John 3—the Nicodemus incident in John 3. We’ll come back to some of these points a little bit later as we develop this more fully, but here we’re just kind of introducing this issue. John 3:5:

“Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.’”

A wellknown passage. If you go down to verse 8: “The wind,” pneuma—the same word as “spirit”—“The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit,” [it’s] the same word as “wind” at the beginning of the verse. It’s a play on words in order for us to understand that these are very closely connected.

We could go back to Genesis 1 and many other passages, but in Genesis 1 the Spirit of God—or the wind of God, was hovering over the waters in Genesis one verse 2. It’s the same word in Hebrew. So we can go back and forth between Old and New Testament. We can see that this word that means “spirit” also means “wind,” or it can mean “breath” [and] various other types of words related to that.

This is important as part of understanding what do we mean when we’re talking about spirit? There is something that’s bit mystical about it. As Jesus puts in John 3:8, we can’t control it. You can’t grab a hold of wind the same way that you can grab a hold of



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something that’s sitting on a table or things like this.

So now, the human spirit in the Old Testament then, talking about that is very important. It’s often used for elements of human vitality of life. For example, in Genesis 45:27 we read this, and this is when Jacob comes to know that Joseph is still alive,

“When they told him all the words of Joseph that he had spoken to them, and when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of their father Jacob revived.”

So you can revive this human spirit. I have quite a number of passages that you can go to and talk about it in this way. And again, this is the same word about which we have been talking.

One other passage I want to look at that I think is worth paying attention to right here is Joshua 5:1, when they are doing the conquest of the land:

Now it came about when all the kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan to the west, and all the kings of the Canaanites who were by the sea, heard how the Lord had dried up the waters of the Jordan before the sons of Israel until they had crossed, their hearts melted, and that there was no spirit in them any longer.

That didn’t mean that they didn’t have a human spirit. It’s just like they drooped. Their spirit, in terms of vitality of life, just drained out of them because of their fear.

First Kings 10:5 is an interesting one. First Kings 10 is Solomon with the queen of Sheba. And in I Kings 10:5 Solomon was talking about all the things and answering all the questions. She perceived how wise he was and the house that he had built and the food on his table and the seating of his servants and just the way he did things. Because of seeing all this and hearing all this there was no more spirit in her.

So there are these connections that are important in terms of spirit as vitality of life. It can also refer to moral and spiritual character. There are many places where one’s spirit has to do with their moral or spiritual character. That will become important in the lectures that are associated with moral character development that Dr. James Grier will be giving.

It also refers to capacities of mind and will. For example, in Job



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20:3 we have this expression, literally “spirit of my understanding.’ It is connected with intellect in many different places. In Psalm 51 there is this wellknown statement that David makes where he says, “Restore to me the joy of Your salvation; sustain within me a willing spirit,” a spirit that has conformed to his will, it can have to do with volitional capacities.

It also refers to various dispositions of the states of the human person or personality. So for example, in Numbers 5, it refers to a suspicious spirit that the man has toward his wife when he thinks that she has been unfaithful to him. Or you can refer to a spirit of anger or resentment. A low spirit is a humble spirit. A high spirit is a pride spirit. It can be referred to as a crushed spirit. It can be referred to as a long spirit, which means the person is patient. A short spirit is one who is quicktempered.

You also have the preacher in Ecclesiastes who says this, “The dust returns to the ground” [12:7] In Genesis 2 it talks about being created from the dust. The dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit—ruach—returns to God who gave it. So this spirit then is very much something that is connected. That’s the part of us to which we have to pay attention in terms of that it endures beyond our human body—[beyond] our physical human body.

Elihu says in Job 34:14-15, “If it were his God’s intention and He withdrew His spirit and breath,” that’s the two different terms, spirit and breath—not the same word, but spirit is this word we are talking about—“all mankind would perish together and man would return to the dust again.” Zechariah talks about God as the one who “forms the spirit of man within him” in Zechariah 12:1.

So when he dies, the spirit naturally returns to him, and we will talk more about that right now in terms of the New Testament. In the New Testament—Jesus and the human spirit—now this is an interesting question to think about: Jesus, the divine Son of God, having a human spirit. But we understand that He is both fully divine and fully human at the same time. So He would have a human spirit even though He is divine as well. It’s hard to completely understand this.

But David expressed back in Psalm 31, “Into Your hands I commit my spirit [my ruach]; redeem me, O Lord, the God of truth.” Now what David is doing there is entrusting his spirit to God for deliverance from death in that particular situation. Jesus



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drew upon this, however, at the point of His death on the cross in trusting His spirit to God in death, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” [Luke 23:46], pneuma, the same word.

There are parallel passages in Matthew and John that talk about how He gave up His spirit. And then in Mark 15 it is very interesting. Verse 37 puts it this way, “Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed His last,” and the word in Greek is exepneusen. That word pneuma is actually in “breathed his last.”

So you can see that for someone who is working in Hebrew, spoke Hebrew, or someone who spoke Greek, they would hear these plays between wind and breath and spirit and they would be very closely connected. You would identify them on some level. That’s important to grasp and understand. Part of the reason that is important is because it helps us to see this close connection between spirit and breath. When the spirit of a person departs, their physical body dies because it no longer has breath. This is the logic of understanding how the spirit is referred to.

In James 2:26, for example, we read this: “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” So you have this connection then where even in life one can refer to the combination of body—soma—or flesh—sarx—and the spirit—pneuma—as making up the whole person. You have body and you have spirit. You have body and you have soul. There are various kinds of combinations, but one of those combinations is body and spirit making up the whole person. You also have other combinations like spirit, soul, and body in I Thessalonians 5:23.

Now a lot of people wonder what is the relationship? What is the soul; what is the spirit; what is the mind, and so on. Well my understanding is, what we have here is the physical body, and you have then the nonphysical part of who we are. We are not just a body but we have a body, and associated with that body is this thing that could be called the spirit, the soul, the mind. Various kinds of terms can be used for it and are used for it in Scripture.

These are different angles, as I understand it, on what is true of us in the immaterial nature of man. So it’s not like they are one piece or another. They are just different angles of how you look at what’s going on in us besides us having a physical body, because there is more to it than that. Jesus made that clear on the cross. Many passages talk about the spirit as going back to God.



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There are ways that this becomes clear in Scripture, even though we don’t completely understand. For example, what is the divide between spirit and soul? I don’t think there is a divide. There are different angles on the same thing, just looking at it from a different perspective.

In the Old Testament we have this spirit as the seed of human character as well as capacities and dispositions. We have already talked about some of that. We have the same thing in the New Testament. In Mark 2:8 it is referred to as the “seed of intuition.” Mark 2:8 reads this way, where Jesus is healing the paralytic and He says, “Immediately Jesus was aware in His spirit that they were reasoning that way within themselves, and said to them, ‘Why are you reasoning about these things in your heart?’” So He knew in His spirit—His human spirit—that they were reasoning in this way.

Sometimes it’s a term for discouragement or internal despair. It can also be a term for joy, intense affection. In John 11:33, we are talking about Lazarus, and it says in verse 33, “When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled.” So this was the expression. Now we also have passages like II Timothy 1:7, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and selfdiscipline.” There are quite a number. I Corinthians 4:21, “a spirit of gentleness.”

The point is that the spirit can refer to the whole immaterial human being or some element of it. We need to pay close attention to this in studying spiritual formation, because the spirit of the person is the place where the Holy Spirit does His prime work—His focused work—in order to transform us. So we need to understand what our human spirit is. He works in that way, in the Holy Spirit, and does indwell us. But that doesn’t mean if we cut open our physical body we would see the Holy Spirit. Somehow He works in us by working in these ways in us in our human spirit. We need to understand that, and then we begin to understand the base of the work of what the Holy Spirit is doing in transforming us through transforming our human spirit at the core—at the center concentric circle.

So what the Holy Spirit does with the human spirit is enliven the human spirit to God. Everybody has a human spirit, whether they know God or not. The issue is whether they are enlivened to God by the Holy Spirit in their human spirit. This is what we



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need to be talking about here. One of the best places then to go is to this passage in the Old Testament, and Ezekiel 36 in the notes here, where we read about this transforming kind of work that the Lord is going to do through the Spirit. The Lord promised to respond to the rebellious defilement of the nation of Israel and their profaning of His holy name among the nations. They had profaned His name amongst the nations, and now the Lord is going to respond to this. He promised to do this, Ezekiel 36:25,

“I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all impurities from all your idols.”

So first we have water here—a cleansing with water. That is the expression that is used. Verse 26, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.” So now we are moving into a new spirit. “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” So He is going to put a new spirit—which means a soft heart rather than a hard heart—where you can’t shape it. So there is going to be this new spirit in them and it is connected with the kind of heart that you have. “And I will put My Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep My laws.” So there is this connection between the cleansing with water and putting the new spirit and, in fact, putting God’s Spirit in you and move you. The effect would be that they would have this transformation that would be working, and He is going to just make it happen. This is what He is going to do. This is what He is saying in spite of the fact that they profaned Him amongst the nations. He is going to make His name holy amongst the nations through this transforming work.

Now there are three main points then about this passage. First, the Lord promised to cleanse the nation from all their impurities and idols, and to do this by sprinkling—actually splashing—the people with clean water. This is one of the main points that come out in this passage.

Second, the Lord promised to change their human spirit by putting within them a new spirit. He is going to change their heart from a hard one like stone to a soft one like human flesh. This is not talking about a sinful fleshly heart. He is talking about just a soft heart here in this context—one that would be responsive to God’s touch.

And then the third point is actually closely related to this second, and that is that the Lord promised to put His Spirit in the midst or



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in them and therefore to move them to keep the Lord’s covenant, which is the whole point of course. It is to transform how they live, because they are transformed in their human spirit by putting His Holy Spirit—His divine Spirit—in them, as it has been talking about in the passage.

Now this passage is very important in the Old Testament, but it also has important connections in the New Testament. Now we go back to John 3:56 where Jesus spoke of this combination of water and Spirit to Nicodemus. When he came to Jesus by night and confessed that He was a teacher from God and that if He was going to do these things He was doing. So Jesus responded immediately and talked about, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again [or, perhaps, born from above],” verse 3. Now this confused Nicodemus, so Jesus went on:

“I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but Spirit gives birth to Spirit” [verse 5].

So now this actually is building off of Ezekiel 36. One of the reasons Jesus got frustrated with Nicodemus later in the passage where he says, “You are a teacher of the Jews and you didn’t understand this?” [verse 10] , is because he should have understood Ezekiel 36 in this context. Water is mentioned first, because purification from impurity and infidelity is a necessary environment for revival of the heart and spirit of people by the work of God’s Spirit. This is already the sequence that we have in Ezekiel 36.

It needs to be remembered that Ezekiel was both a priest and a prophet. The two offices come together in him. John the Baptist is the same. As we know from Luke 1:5, when you come to that passage, talking about “In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest called Zacharias, of the division of Abijah; he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron; her name was Elizabeth.” So he was actually a priest and his wife was from the priestly families as well. And these are the people from whom John the Baptist is born—Zechariah and Elizabeth.

So John the Baptist is actually a priest, and he’s also called to be a prophet. In Matthew 3:14, for example, we can read this:

Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet



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when he said, ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness, make ready the way of the Lord, make His paths straight!’”

Now John himself had a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist; and his food was locusts and wild honey.

[He’s] recalling the whole accoutrements of prophetic office, for example, from Elijah’s days. So as you go on through, of course, he baptizes. This is a water washing. This is something priests were involved in doing. So it is important to understand that you have all this background here for understanding John the Baptist as a priest, but he is coming as a prophet. You get this connection as well.

Now the connection of John 3 back to John 1 is important here. John the Baptist came to prepare the people for the Messiah, and he did this through water purification—a baptism of repentance. In John 1 we read about this, and this is all background to John 3 and understanding what is going on there. This is important to the whole nature of the spiritual work of the Holy Spirit in us. Now in John 1:24 (well, earlier on. Perhaps we should go back to verse 19), “This is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent to him priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who are you?’” Well why did they send priests and Levites? Because John was doing a priestly thing. He was doing a washing with water. This was all part of the Old Testament system of physical purification. It’s a baptism of repentance—preparing people to receive the Messiah. And this is the idea behind it.

Verses 24-28:

Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him, and said to him, “Why then are you baptizing, if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” John answered them saying, “I baptize in water, but among you stands One whom you do not know. It is He who comes after me, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.” These things took place in Bethany beyond the Jordan where John was baptizing.

The point here is that he is doing this baptism. This is water purification. But the Son of God Himself would be the one who would baptize with the Holy Spirit in verses 33-34. John says,

“I did not recognize Him, but He who sent me to baptize in water said to me, ‘He upon whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining upon Him, this is the One who baptizes in the Holy



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Spirit.’ I myself have seen, and I have testified that this is the Son of God.’”

So we have here then this connection specifically to baptism with water—actually baptism of the Holy Spirit. Now I’m not aware of any earlier material before John the Baptist of a baptism of the Holy Spirit. I think, what is actually happening here is that John is coining the term when referring to Jesus. He is coining the term “baptism of the Spirit” off of the fact that he is doing this baptism of repentance.

So the Jewish leaders have sent to these priests and the Levites because that’s the kind of thing they would be naturally inquiring about. So they would want people to know, because John was doing priestly types of things. So John baptizes with water, but Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit. So you have water baptism leading to Spirit baptism. The human body by water is cleansed. The human spirit is cleansed by the Holy Spirit.

This is all connected then to what he is saying. You must be born of water and the Spirit. Because of the background in Ezekiel 36, Jesus expected that a teacher would have understood this. But he [Nicodemus] didn’t. So, He said, “You’re a teacher in Israel and you don’t get this?” He was puzzled about how Nicodemus was so puzzled. We could put it that way.

These have links then in John to chapter 4 with the woman at the well for example. John 4:13-14:

“Jesus answered and said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whomever drinks of the water I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up into eternal life.’”

So you have this water referred to again. But what is this water that never dries up and that springs up to eternal life? Well in John 7:37-39 we have an interesting passage that connects to this. This is, by the way, in the feast of Tabernacles when there would have been water pouring as part of the festival:

Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘from His innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive.



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This is interesting. This spirit then is the water. So he makes the direct connection.

So we have water and Spirit bound together. Then you have this connection made in John 14, which we have already talked about to some degree, where the Spirit is given at the request of the Son by the Father to the apostles and then on to us—this Trinitarian abiding with God. In John 14:10 we read this, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His work.”

So Jesus talks about the father abiding in Him. We don’t completely understand all that, but then we don’t completely understand the Trinity in the first place. Then we have these verses that we cited before.

Verses 16-17: “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.” Then in verse 23, “Jesus answered and said to him, ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and we will come to Him and make our abode with Him.’”

So Jesus and the father abide with us as well.

One of the things that has occurred to me, when I was thinking about this one time and meditating on The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, on a particular chapter in that book, that caused me to turn to this passage again. One of the things that is difficult for us to actually take in is that we have actually been invited as believers in Christ into a Trinitarian kind of relationship with God.

Now we don’t become part of the Trinity obviously, but we have been invited into the kind of relationship with the Trinity that the Trinity has within themselves. We can think of it this way perhaps: the Father is the provider from above. He’s the one that has the whole plan and He provides it all. The Son is a friend. In fact, in John 15, much is made of Jesus as our friend who abides with us. But He is our friend from above. He walks with me and I walk with him. Then the Spirit, He is our helper from above. We usually think of helpers as being under us, but this is a helper that



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is above us from heaven itself. So the idea of understanding that we live with this kind of abiding relationship is what this work of the Spirit and the work of the Father and Son together with the Spirit and through the Spirit is taking place right now. This is a big part of understanding the nature of this spiritual formation that we’re talking about.

Now we move on then to talk about the connection between this passage in Ezekiel 36, which has all these manifestations in the Gospel of John, to look a little bit at the new covenant passage in Jeremiah 31. Again, one of the main things we are doing in building this biblical theology, we will talk about more a practicing of this in the lecture to come. But in Jeremiah 31 and in these passages we need to work on this biblical theology in order to get the foundations right.

We have this new covenant passage. I’ll read through it and I’ll highlight certain things that are actually printed on the sheet. Jeremiah 31:31

“Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and/or the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them” declares the Lord. “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord.... “Put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” Declares the Lord, “For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

One of the things about the new covenant that makes it different from the old Mosaic covenant is that in the old covenant you would just be born into the covenant people by being born into the nation of Israel. This was a natural part of it. This means that as you grow you need to learn to know the Lord. You actually have to be taught to know the Lord in the old covenant context. In the new covenant context the fact of the matter is that you’re not in the new covenant, unless you do know the Lord, because it is the writing of the Law on the heart. It’s the actual knowing of the Lord that is what gets you into the covenant. It’s the nature of the



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covenant. So people in the new covenant do not need to be taught to come to know the Lord. They already do or they are not in the new covenant in the first place.

That’s part of what’s going on in this passage. On the sheet I focus on a couple of major expressions. The Lord declares, “The time is coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” Then [Jeremiah 31] verse 33: “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.” Now this is a particularly important passage, especially as you connect it to Ezekiel 36, which talks in terms of the work of the Spirit in the human spirit and along that line.

They come together in II Corinthians 3:36 in the New Testament. The combination of Ezekiel 36 and 31 comes together there. I have some of that cited on the sheet:

You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. . . . Ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

You can hear the combination. For example, “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God,” that’s from Ezekiel 36. “Not on tablets of stone but on tablets of the human heart,” writing on the human heart, that’s a Jeremiah 30 and 31 expression. “Ministers of a new covenant,” that expression is found in Jeremiah 31; not Ezekiel 36, but then you go on, “not of the letter but of the Spirit,” from Ezekiel 36, “For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Therefore you can see even the connection onto Ezekiel 37 from Ezekiel 36—the Valley of dry bones comes alive. People come alive out of dry bones. The Spirit gives life there in that passage where you have the wind played off against the Spirit of God.

Now these come together. And this is the kind of covenant in which we are engaged. This is the kind of life we are living—one that is written by the Spirit on the human heart. It is a new covenant. It is given life by this work of the Spirit. This is where spiritual formation gets its focus and its emphasis and its motivation and its energy—it is in this.

This comes out, especially in one passage. This is the first passage



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in my study of this matter that caught my attention on this whole matter of the Spirit of God working on the human spirit. This is I Corinthians 2:10-12. We have this passage in which the apostle Paul is talking about the gospel in his message, and that this is the whole point of what he is doing. He is not trying to be wise like the Greeks. He is not concerned about miracles like what the Jews want—signs. What he is concerned about is the gospel and trusting and believing in the gospel.

And then he comes to this point in the second part of verse 10 [and the first part of verse 11 in] I Corinthians 2. [It] says, “The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit,” the spirit of the man, literally, “within him?” So the human spirit of the men knows the depths of Him. And the Spirit of God knows the deep things of God. That’s what it is saying. “In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God” [second part of verse 11]. So it comes back to the Spirit of God at that point.

And then in verse 12, “We have not received the Spirit of the world but the spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has really given us.” Now we are talking about bringing the two together. We are talking about this “Spirit of God” doing its work in our human spirit in ways that are powerful and that actually help us to really grab hold of what God has freely given to us—the gospel, bringing it to bear. God has always been after the same thing for everybody and that is the effect of this transforming work done by His grace. This is a very important passage for connecting the Holy Spirit of God—who knows the deep things of God—with the human spirit—who knows the depths of us—and that bringing the two together and the power that comes from the Holy Spirit acting directly upon the human spirit.

Romans 8 does a very similar connection in one of the most pivotal passages we have on this whole discussion of transformation. Romans 8 has some very interesting uses of this terminology for the Spirit, and it uses human spirit and Holy Spirit together again. So let me just walk you through this a bit. In Romans 8 what we have here, starting with verses 1-2:

“Therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”

Now that “Spirit” in that verse in my version (I’m using the new



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Lesson 02 of 07

American Standard Bible right now) is a capital “S” for the divine Spirit. Verses 3-4:

For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

So this is the contrast between the human flesh, and the work of the Holy Spirit. “For those who are according to the flesh [verses 5-6] set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.” A capital “S.” “For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit [capital “S”] is life and peace.”

If you go on down to verse 9,

“However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.” Verse 10: “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness.”

Now there you have body versus Spirit, which is a common pair. My version has a small “s” there. Some versions make that a capital “S.” It’s hard sometimes to determine whether the word “spirit” refers to the human spirit or the Holy Spirit in this passage. Verse 11, however, goes on, “But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead [the Holy Spirit] dwells in you,” and so on. It goes on like that. So he has given life to your mortal body through His Spirit who dwells in you. So now you have the human spirit and you have the Holy Spirit in this passage. Or at least that’s the way it appears.

If you go over then, verses 14-15: “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery,” you feel like you are a slave before God, “leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption.” Now some versions have a capital “S” there and some versions have a small “S.” I think it’s small because it parallels with spirit of slavery: “of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’”

Then in verse 16 it becomes clear: “The Spirit Himself [the Holy Spirit] testifies with our [human] spirit that we are children of

Transcript - SF507 Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit

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Holy Spirit, Human Spirit, and Individual Spiritual Formation Part I: The Biblical Theological FoundationLesson 02 of 07

God.” It is the direct act of the Holy Spirit that drives spiritual formation. This is pivotal in order to understand what is going on in the whole process of spiritual formation.

Now there is an image that I want to conclude with here is. We have in II Peter 1:21 this expression about how the prophets were carried along by the Spirit of God in their production of Scripture. Acts 27:15 uses the same expression for being carried along by the wind that drives the boat into a shipwreck. This is an interesting biblical analogy. The Holy Spirit is the wind that drives us along, that energizes what we do in terms of living for Jesus.

The wind is a mysterious and powerful force. It can do a lot. However, although we cannot completely understand and control the Holy Spirit, we can draw upon His power. Using the analogy of a ship driven along by the wind, we can put up the sails in our lives.

Putting up the sails begins, above all, with being born of the Spirit into the kingdom of God by grace. It continues through the ongoing work of God’s grace through faith empowered by the Spirit. So we live faithfully doing the kind of works the Lord has called us to do.

The point is this: I could stand on a boat and blow all I want into a sail, but if the wind doesn’t blow, nothing is going to happen. We could have 100 people doing that. It won’t make any effect. We can’t make the wind. We are not the wind. The Holy Spirit is the power and the driving force. But we can put up the sails, and God has told us how to do that. This is what spiritual formation is about.

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