PRESENCE PRAYER SOUL AND SPIRIT 

  

The journey of our lives as human beings with a spirit and a soul involves the reordering of the psychikos or soulish self of separation back into alignment with our true spiritual self in Christ through the Spirit of God. We can become transformed from psychikos or soulish to pneumatikos or spiritual. Paul wrote about this to the church in Corinth.

 

And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit because they are `spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:13 )

 

Adam and Eve started that journey by creating a limited human soul.  

The first man Adam became (ginomai) a living soul (psychikos) the last Adam (Jesus) became a life-giving spirit (pneumatikos). But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural psychikos), and then the spiritual.  (1Corinthians 15:45 )

 

God had created Adam’s body from the dust of the earth and then breathed his spirit into that body. Adam now had a created body and a created spirit but then the Bible says a really interesting thing - that ‘man became a living soul’.

That word ‘became ‘in the Greek is ginomai, and it means to cause to come into being, to make or create. God did not form a ready-made soul in us, but he created the capacity for us to shape a soul as a personal entity that was to become the expression of who we are in our inner being. That’s becomes the face of us. Our soul expresses the mind and heart of our unique God created spirit through the journey of our life, embodied by a physical body.

  

Adam and Eve walked in the garden of Eden with God, and they created blameless or innocent souls. Innocence means to not be harmed or hurt – not feeling forsaken. But harm and hurt and forsakenness came into Adam and Eve’s lives through the lie of the serpent. Satan in the form of the serpent deceived them into believing that God had deprived them of the Divine wisdom that they could have if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve then created souls that separated their true blameless selves from God’s presence. Harm and hurt came into their lives and they became harmful and hurtful people and turned their harmless souls into harmful souls by creating protective helper parts in their souls to avoid feeling forsaken again. These soulish parts created a mindset and a heart-set of separation between them and God. This process became the universal human journey of the soul throughout its life.

 

Our souls are the expression of our spiritual self but our souls have created an inferior version of OUR spiritual self because of the psychikos soul’s self-serving needs. It has created parts to it that helped us to get over the problems, to deal with rejection, to advance itself, to be able to establish a reputation, to feel a victim or to be successful. It has become the me-self version of what the God with us self was created to be – God with us – Emmanuel.

When we were very young we made immature decisions in our souls to protect us from having to suffer from these early traumas again. Don’t condemn yourself for doing that as you had no option. You were there as a me-self person not knowing that God was there with you. and you didn't say ‘Lord come and help me here’. We tried to work out a way to work through these things - and we created strategies that ended up not having the wisdom to actually work. We created ‘helper parts’ in our souls. We may have gotten our own way but look what those helper parts have done to our relationships, self worth - our lives. This has resulted in our spirits becoming ‘orphaned’. Jesus said he would not leave us as orphans but that he would send us ‘Another Helper’ the Holy Spirit. (John 14:16-18)

 

The individual uniqueness of every person mirrors the fact that we have each been created with a unique spiritual DNA. That spiritual DNA is contained in the spiritual seed of life of the Word (the Logos) that has spoken our spiritual life into being in eternity. That seed word was destined to be expressed from our spirit into and through our soul and embodied by us as a whole person, spirit soul and body. The journey is about our soul being reordered, not deleted.

James 1:21 … receive with meekness the implanted word (logos seed), which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural (genesis) face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.

 

Genesis in the Greek means original. So our Genesis self is the original unique spiritual self, designed and created by God’s word (LOGOS) before the foundation of the world. (Ephesians 1:4). We discover in the mirror of the Word our true unique spiritual self then we walk away and forget that and get drawn back into expressing our psychikos soulish self again with all its unresolved helper parts.

 

That unique spirit is waiting to be expressed in a saved and healed soul, saved from what we have plunged our souls into because of a mindset of separation from God. That is why we are looking at presence prayer as a pathway of hope and faith and love back into what our souls could truly express as we draw near to God and ask for the Holy Spirit, our New Helpe,r to reveal to us what Jesus is saying to us and what our Father is doing for us.

Jesus is that LOGOS, the seed of life that encompasses the true DNA of everything created, every instinctive response of every living thing designed and upheld by LOGOS (Hebrews 1:3) and his logos seed has been sown into our unique spirit to make us one in Spirit with the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. (1Peter 1:23 )

 

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made

The Greek logos was seen as the universal rational principle of creativity and design by philosophers like Heraclitus and the Stoics. and they revered this concept. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius saw logos as the intelligent omnipotent and omnipresent Divine force that structured and guided all of existence.  But for the Jews the WORD only meant Torah and their relationship to the Word was the fulfillment of the Law.

 

So John in his Gospel would have deeply offended and insulted the Greeks and the Romans by declaring that Jesus, a bearded Galilean, was the one and only LOGOS. And for the Jews calling him the Word (their Torah) claim meant that he was the fulfillment of the law. so they all despised Jesus. And today the world despises Jesus. 

The Bible says that we have been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word (Logos) of God which lives and abides forever (1Peter 1:23 ). This is not only Jesus as the logos seed of eternal life but also as the Word of God as Scripture. *

 

 

Today the world believes that the Word, both as Jesus and as Scripture doesn’t mean anything. There exists a cultural spirituality where the word Universe is used as if it was the source of creative design and blessing – The Universe be with you.

Spiritual does not just mean mystical as opposed to material. Cultural spirituality can include reverencing created things and concepts and reading as many books or doing as many rituals possible to heal our souls. In the same way it also includes the religious and legalistic Christianity practiced today- and this mindset is soulish rather than spiritual. But for many people this kind of soulish spirituality has been a pathway to ultimately being drawn into true spirituality. True spirituality is the things of the Spirit of God in Christ (1Corinthians 2). This is the reality of the Creator God as the Father sending his Son Jesus into the world as human. In doing this God joined Divinity to humanity in one person, Jesus, whose death and resurrection and ascension led to the formation of a New Creation born of both human and Divine seed (logos). *Paul even put the church in Corinth in the category of cultural spirituality and his admonishment still applies to the church today. 

We began today with the words of Paul to the Corinthians in (1 Corinthians 2:13 ).The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. 

Paul was addressing the people of the Corinthian church, not just worldly religious spirituality. Paul was dismayed at the lack of true spirituality amongst them. He said they were psychikos- soulish, not pneumatikos – spiritual. He admitted that they had all knowledge and were upfront in spiritual gifts(1 Corinthians 1:7) but he finally said to them 

I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal (sarkikos –that is worse than psychikos!), as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal?

 

 

God has sent us the Holy Spirit through Jesus, the second Adam, for the healing and salvation of the soul in God’s presence. We can choose to become spiritual (pneumatikos ) people or remai