Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing, a biblical faith-filled vision for your life. Because God celebrates, so can you. Today's blessing is grounded in the refrain of Genesis chapter 1, and God saw that it was good. God saw it was good. After each day of creation, God celebrated his own handiwork.
Though the creation hadn't been completed, God erupted in joy at the conclusion of each day's progress. How, unlike most of us, we tend to wait until we finish the task, earn the degree, reach the mountaintop before we celebrate. I'd like to bless your soul. for celebration. Here's today's blessing.
You haven't arrived You haven't finished it all, but your soul is ready to celebrate anyway. You haven't checked off every box, you haven't swept every corner. But your heart is ready to rejoice. Yesterday's history, Tomorrow isn't here. But today, this very day, I bless you to find cause for joy.
I bless your eyes to see the tiny delights. I bless your ears to hear the quiet giggles. And I bless your mind to see what God has done, not what you wish He'd done. Your Father celebrates every day, and He's ready to bring you into the party. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright.
There is not in God's design of the human being, the human personality. There's not a conflict between intellect and spirit. There is designed to be a unity between intellect and spirit. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light.
I'm Daniel Britt. Excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, Word and Spirit: The Beauty of Balance, as presented at Renolda Church in North Carolina.
Now, if you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.
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More on this later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. Are you ready for some good news? When you walk in the Spirit.
I mean, when you're really full of spirit. It doesn't turn your intellect off. It doesn't take your mind and make it mush. The Holy Spirit and you living by the Spirit. heightens your intellect.
You're wisdom and your creativity. I want to talk to you today. about living the life of both spirit and intellect. The balance of spirit and intellect. And I want to begin in First Corinthians chapter 2.
I'm just going to read a couple of verses. And then In the message, we're actually going to walk through verses 1 through 16. But I want to just start at sort of the key text for us today. Oops. 1 Corinthians, it's chapter 2, verse 14.
1 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 14. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God. for they are folly. to him. and he's not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
The spiritual person judges all things. but is himself to be judged by no one. For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. In the body of Christ, There are those that you'll meet who value It seems principally the mind and thinking deeply.
and doing theology and understanding the word and mentally wrapping your mind around the great truths of God. And then you'll meet others who it seems that their central passion is worship, spontaneity in the spirit. The manifestations of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit, the presence of the Holy Spirit. And the way to real Christian growth is not one or the other, but both. There is not in God's design of the human being, the human personality.
There's not a conflict between intellect and spirit. There is designed to be a unity between intellect and spirit. And spirit The Spirit of God communing with our spirit. is the means by which the mind is designed to know the truth and gain wisdom. An insight.
and creativity. And understanding and revelation. And I just somehow in my Christian life, I got the idea that the way that I was going to grow as a Christian was going to be primarily pursuing understanding with my mind. And yet there was always something within me that was yearning for The freedom, spontaneity, passion, and power that I saw of those people that were seen to be so much more full of the Spirit. And yet I figured that there was some sort of conflict.
In fact, it seems so silly to me now. but I distinctly remember feeling. That if I were to really invite God's Spirit to take over and yield to Him and my life and just live a Spirit-filled life. where worship became passionate. where the spiritual gifts became manifest in my life.
Where I lived with that sense of immediacy, of God's presence. I had this idea, silly as it seems to me now. That if I were going to do that, that I was going to have to leave my intellect at the door. You've heard people say things like that probably before. It's like, well, sometimes you go to church, you just need to leave your mind at the door because God's in it.
And I was a little bit afraid that my mind was going to turn to mush, and I was going to just become this. kind of foolish seeming person. And so I was reluctant. But I came to a time in my life where I just wanted to know God. deeper than I knew him.
I just wanted to really experience these things I read about in the Bible. I wanted to have his supernatural presence in my life, and I wanted it so much that despite this conflict in my thinking. I just finally said, okay, God. I'm going to just go ahead and just yield to you. Just come on in.
Just come take over. Even if it means my days of really having my mind be sharpened and all that's gone, I'll just become one of these bozos, but just, you know, come on in. Yeah. And what I have found, beloved, is that the exact opposite took place in my life. That the more that I am flooded with the presence of the Spirit, The more my mind is energized, clarified And the creativity that God has designed for my brain to have works.
and understandings about life and relationship and people. and just wisdom itself. In other words, the Spirit communing with the Holy Spirit within. The Christian's Life brings about a heightening of the intellect. I want to walk you through what Paul's saying in this chapter because it's absolutely, it's just.
Marvelous what he's saying. And I am riveted. Every time that I go back through this chapter and longing to understand it more deeply, but I hope that I could give you, as we step through this verse by verse, a sense. Of what Paul means by the time we get to verse 14 and 15, I want you to understand what. I think he means by the natural person and the spiritual person.
But in order to understand it, let's walk right through this, okay? At chapter 2, verse 1, when Paul says, I came to you, brothers, when I came, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech and wisdom, for I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. Paul is not saying that the only thing that I ever talk about is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. We know that that's not the case at all because Paul wrote most of the New Testament and we see he's talking about many things.
So what does he mean when he says, I resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ? He's saying, I came. And every piece and part and parcel of the message that I have to share with you is absolutely centered in the finished work of Christ, His crucifixion on the cross, and His resurrection from the dead. In other words, beloved, here's the way to look at it, is that you never, as you grow as a Christian, you never move beyond the cross, you just move deeper with the cross. You never move beyond the fundamental truths of the gospel, the kerygma, the proclamation of God's finished work.
You never move beyond that and say, oh, I've got that down. I got that whole justification by faith thing down, and I'm going to move on to some other things. No, what happens in Christian growth is that you revel in it, embrace it. and drink of it more deeply. That's what happens.
And so every message. is a gospel message for Paul. And so he's saying, I resolve that this is what I know amongst you. He says at verse 3, I was with you in weakness, in fear, and much trembling. My speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
So here is Paul, who once was named Saul of Tarsus. Who both secular and Christian historians would all affirm was one of the most erudite scholars of his day. He had studied under a very famous scholar, Gamaliel. And he was, by every historian's agreement, an intellectual and had superior understandings not only of the Scripture, but of the discourse of his day and of all of the philosophies of his day. But what Paul's saying here is that I didn't come to you as the way the Greek philosophers would come to you.
I didn't come simply trying to out-debate or have a more clever-sounding philosophy than someone. He said, but I came to you proclaiming Christ and him crucified. And in the proclamation of the gospel, God performed signs and wonders that affirmed that gospel. And I came to you this way because I never wanted you to have your faith built merely on the fact that Paul came and sounded so smart and had such clever things to say. Because if your faith is just founded on something like that, then you don't have any substance to your faith at all.
So he seems like he's almost saying something anti-intellectual here, but read on, he's not. Because at verse 6 he says, Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom.
So he's stopping here to say, I didn't come with just trying to lay out all this philosophy and my wisdom and human wisdom, so you'd be impressed. Instead, we came with God's power. But then he quickly says, but we do teach wisdom. But he says it's not wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age. And he says, this is wisdom for the mature.
So he's saying here that as you grow in Christ, That which began in you by the miraculous revelation that God is real, that Jesus died for you. that he's been raised for you. And all the ways that God by His glorious presence would convince your heart of this. You have your whole life rooted in the substance of the gospel, but there is ever-increasing wisdom for the mature. There is revelation.
God wants to teach you things that you could have never ever dreamt up on your own. And he's saying that this is a wisdom that's not of this age or the rulers of this age. In other words, The people that put Jesus on the cross? and any demonic force or principality that conspired to lure people into such deceptions. All of that, the wisdom of this age, would have never ever put Jesus on the cross if they'd really known the wisdom of God.
None of the rulers of this age, verse 8, understood this, for if they had, they did not crucify the Lord of glory. For the very fact that they didn't understand what was going to happen at the cross meant they didn't understand the redemptive love of God. And this is what he says at verse 9: But as it is written, what no eye has seen, no ear has heard. nor the heart of man imagined what God has prepared for those who love him. These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.
So what he's saying is that Your natural eyes and natural ears. And even your heart's capacity to imagine things could never ever apprehend the fullness of the massive inheritance that is yours in Jesus Christ. There is no earthly way that you could ever, by simply reading about it with your eyes or just simply hearing about it in a natural sense, would ever be able to really be able to grasp the nature of the depth and height and width and breadth of the love of God. These things are spiritually imparted to you. And this is the case that Paul is building here.
He says in the second half of verse 10, the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the Spirit of that person which is in him.
So also, no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Have you ever had a time in your life where your own mind doesn't understand your own mind? You ever had a time like that? It's like you're a little anxious about something and you don't even know exactly why you're anxious. That you need some kind of revelation even to figure out why am I anxious?
Or maybe you've been sometime you've been upset or angry about something disproportionate to whatever's happened. And you go, Why am I feeling this way? There are times in which you might, on the opposite end, have a peace that passes understanding or a joy that you can't give anybody a reason for. There are ways in which you have thoughts that your own mind can't understand. But as a spiritual being, there is a way in which the Spirit searches out all of your thoughts.
And in this same way, Paul is saying, by analogy, he's saying, so it is with God's Spirit. Because God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, but three persons. And the Holy Spirit knows the heart of the Father because the Holy Spirit is God and He's been with God. And so when you become a Christian, And you receive the Holy Spirit in your life, which is the inheritance of every single Christian. Every single Christian is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
If you accept Christ, you're a temple of the Holy Spirit. It's your design. It's who you are. You're no longer an ordinary person. You are the inhabitation of the Most High God.
The Holy Spirit within you is God Himself who has searched out all of the affections and designs and intentions of the Father. And so He lives in you. And what Paul is saying, He who has searched out these things knows you and knows the Father. And he continues on with this. At verse 12, now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.
What a marvelous statement. What good news is this? He is saying, the things that God has freely given us. Every part of your spiritual inheritance, every promise of God, every fruit of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit, life everlasting, the opportunity to ever increasingly know yourself as one who's been authorized by God to be the head, not the tail, to be a light in a dark world. Every single thing in your inheritance, what the Holy Spirit is doing, Paul says, is revealing to us what God has freely given us.
See, as soon as you become a Christian, an amazing thing starts happening. God not only says, okay, check, you're saved, get to go to heaven one day, but no, the journey's just begun and the Holy Spirit takes up residence in your life. And he begins to communicate with you, you're a child of God. The Holy Spirit bears witness to our spirit that we are children of God and then begins to teach you if you're a child of God, you're also an heir. And if you're an heir, you're a co-heir with Christ himself.
So the Holy Spirit has this as his central task. When he comes into your life, he is revealing to you the things that God has freely given us in Christ. Listen, spiritual growth is not about you doing something to impress God so that he'll do something for you. Spiritual growth is about the Holy Spirit revealing to you the things that have been freely given to us by God in Christ. He's already laid up an inheritance that's beyond what any eye could see, or ear could hear, or any heart could imagine.
But you have the Holy Spirit living inside of you, communing with your spirit, so that your mind can begin to apprehend the glorious riches that are yours in Christ. This is extraordinary news. And he says at verse 13, and we impart this. We share this. We share this in sharing the gospel, in sharing our teaching.
We impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit. Interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
Now we come to verse 14. Where this is our key text for this. And I lay all that in the context so you can see. that Paul is building here towards an invitation to live according to the Spirit. and to have your mind be heightened as it is subservient to the things of the Spirit.
In order to understand what Paul means by the natural person in verse 14, And what he means by the spiritual person in verse 15, I need to... talk to you about two really important Greek words in the New Testament. And I'd like you to remember these words. The word for mind. is interchangeable with the word for soul.
So the word for soul or mind is the same word. And that word in the Greek language is suké. If you were going to transliterate this into English, You know, Greek has a very different looking, different alphabet, and we bring words over into English and we try to spell them in a way that would make sense to us, transliterate it, you would recognize this word because you would spell it P-S-Y-C-H-E, psyche.
So in Greek it looks like psuke. Psyche. That's the word for soul. That's the word for mind. And you can remember that because psychology is the study of the mind.
The word For spirit in the Greek language. Is a word pneuma. If you were to bring this over, usually we put a silent P in front of it: P-N-U-E-M-A, NUMA. And what is interesting in the study of the New Testament is that while there are a lot of commentators and theologians Who would say that God has made the human design such that we are soul and body, and that whenever you see soul and spirit, those words mean the same thing? There are others, and I'm one of them, that would say that it seems much more convincing to me that the New Testament gives a picture of the human personality, of the human being, as tripartite, spirit, soul, and body.
And part of the reason that I base this is because of a very important verse in Hebrews chapter 4.
Now we won't turn there. But in Hebrews chapter 4, the writer is speaking of the amazing power, clarity, and incisiveness of the word of God. He's talking about how sharp it is, like a two-edged sword. And he begins to speak here of the Word of God as if it is something like maybe if they'd had laser beams in that day, he might have said it's like a laser beam. Whatever you could imagine, the kind of scalpel that could separate the most narrow of margins.
And he says, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, and then says, is able to separate even unto bone and marrow, or joint and marrow, depending on your translation.
Well, bone and marrow are, in one sense, the same because they're one, right? But the marrow of the bone is different than the bone. And so in the same way, he then turns and says, and Abel. to separate even spirit and soul. Mm.
Alan Wright, and today's teaching spirit and intellect in the series The Beauty of Balance. We've got more with Alan in the studio here in just a moment. Stick with us, more insight on what we've just heard, and today's final word. In Blessings for Moms, Pastor Alan leads mothers in a four-week journey of daily blessing. 20 Blessings Tailor Made for Moms and What They Need.
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Alan, I love where you're going here, spirit and intellect. And I believe this, and I hope that this is what is being conveyed here to everyone that's listening: it's not either or, right? You're not just so spiritually minded that you can't use your brain, or you're so intellectually that you squelch the spirit. And I think there could be listeners who are like I was, Daniel, that I used to think that if I were to really surrender through the spirit, if I were to allow the Holy Spirit to move in my life with gifts and wonders and power and take over my heart and all, I thought, for some reason, I thought, oh, I've got to shut off my mind. And I don't know exactly why all those impressions that we might have, but what I have found, and this is what I want to say to the listener who is someone who loves to think.
And you've had this concern: the Holy Spirit heightens the intellect. He is God. And I promise he is far more intellectual than we are. He is wisdom, he is intelligent, he's everything. And so, what you find is that when you relinquish yourself to God in worship and prayer and Really have that sense of what we say when you let go and let God, it doesn't mean, oh, and therefore I'm going to turn off my mind.
He's going to turn on your mind by the truth. Right. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
