Lesson 10: Man’s Need For A New Spirit

Getting started: in Ephesians 2.3 the apostle Paul declared that when we “lived in the passions of our flesh” we “were by nature children of wrath”. What do you think Paul meant by that?

When reviewing some of my old sermons on the Holy Spirit, I concluded that they weren’t very good. They weren’t unScriptural, but neither were they completely Biblical. They fell short of simply acknowledging what the Bible says regarding the Spirit: we receive the gift of the Spirit (Acts 2.38). I’m saying this in order to acknowledge that my understanding of the Spirit has grown, and I hope will continue to grow. However, for my understanding of the Spirit to grow, so must my understanding of the Scriptures. This class is an attempt to grow our understanding of the Spirit by looking at the Scriptures. Even then, our understanding of the Spirit may be limited, because if God hasn’t revealed something to us then it isn’t for us to know (Deuteronomy 29:29). So, let it be enough for us to ascribe to the Spirit the attributes and the work that are credited to Him in the Scriptures.

So far in our study we have traced how the Spirit’s activity has been involved in forming and leading God’s people, and is how God’s presence is with His people. That was not only true of Israel in the Old Testament, but as the gospel accounts make clear, would be true of God’s new people as well. In this lesson we start looking at how the Spirit forms the new people of God, but we must first look at why people who were created in the image of God (Genesis 1.26-27) need to be reformed in the first place.

Our Spiritual Nature

We are spiritual beings. Yes, we have physical bodies, but we are flesh AND spirit. It’s biblical to say that the “real you” is a spirit, just note these parallels found in Scripture:

1. The spirit is synonymous with heart. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17, ESV). Note also Exodus 35.21 and Hebrews 4.12.
2. The spirit is synonymous with mind. “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel,” (Philippians 1:27, ESV).
3. The spirit is the inner man. “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being,” (Ephesians 3:16, ESV)Note also Romans 7.22.

Gnostics in the 2nd and 3rd centuries perverted this truth to justify sinful practices in the flesh, reasoning that since we are really spirit, then any sinful activity is a product of the flesh and has no effect on the spirit. However, the Lord made clear that the sinful actions of our flesh originate from our inner man, “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.” (Matthew 15:18–19, ESV)

Our Need For A New Spirit

The importance of man being a spiritual being reaches back to the Creation account. In Genesis 1 we read how Creation culminated with the creation of man in God’s own image (vss. 26-27). Jesus stated in John 4.24 that “God is spirit”, thus for us to be in His image, we must also have spirit. It seems that this spiritual creation is what is described in the fuller account of man’s creation in Genesis 2: “then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” (Genesis 2:7, ESV)

However, being created in God’s image has moral implications. God is holy (Leviticus 11.45), righteous (Psalm 89.14), faithful (Exodus 34.6), etc., so for man to have been created in His image would entail him having the same moral nature. Indeed, everything God created was “very good” (Gen. 1.31). Yet, as we know man did not remain very good. Because of his sin, unholy man was separated from holy God. The very nature of God’s creation had changed!

Paul makes it clear that what was begun by Adam and Eve has been repeated by God’s creation since the beginning. And man is experiencing God’s wrath because “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:19–20, ESV) Paul said that God can be known through His creation, and while our mind might go to the heavens or the magnificent vistas on the earth, nothing shows His “divine nature” more clearly than man. We are truly without excuse because God’s nature is evident in us, but since each of us have chosen to “not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him” (Romans 1.21), we “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23).

The course of human history has been one of each man and woman engaging in sinful practices, with terrible consequences for each individual. “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” (Ephesians 2:1–3, ESV) Through our own sins we have corrupted our nature into that of “children of wrath,” not that of children created in God’s image. We, each of us, needed a new spirit; we needed to be born again.