From your inmost being,
rivers of life will flow

I experienced it long before I had the words to describe it.

And also, I had words long before I realized what they described.

I grew up in a church culture that taught: “We’re all just sinners, saved by grace.” Church leaders regularly assured us that “the flesh is hostile toward God,” and that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”¹

Scripture told me about the Holy Spirit, and he was teaching me about himself, but no one wanted to talk about him. Though Scripture also talks about the human spirit, no one ever mentioned that.

No sermon ever helped me explore the passage in Romans 8 that describes how the Holy Spirit and the human spirit relate to one another and together overcome “the flesh.”

The consensus seemed to be: “You have been made new in Christ, and in heaven you’ll see that it’s true! In this life, though, you will always be a sinner at your core, still in your essence opposed to God. You will always have to deny who you really are and what you really want, to please him.”

All of which left me very confused.

Spirit, soul and body

In early adulthood, I read The Release of the Spirit, by Watchman Nee.² I liked that Nee talked about living by the Spirit, and was especially intrigued by what he said about the human spirit and soul.

Life flowing forth

The Greek thinking that we in the West often embrace sees people as two-part beings – body and soul. In this view, soul and spirit are different names for the inner, intangible person.

Nee saw people as spirit, soul and body. He taught that spirit and soul are different aspects of the inner person, and that our spirit is our innermost person.

Scriptures like these suggest the same thing:

We pray that God himself, the God of peace, will make you pure, belonging only to him. We pray your whole self – spirit, soul, and body – will be kept safe and be without wrong when our Lord Jesus Christ comes. (1 Thess. 5:23 ICB)

See, the Word of God is alive! It is at work and is sharper than any double-edged sword – it cuts right through to where soul meets spirit. (Heb. 4:12 CJB)

… penetrating to the dividing line of the breath of life (soul) and [the immortal] spirit. (AMPC)

Nee wrote:

Among those who possess the life of the Lord can be found two distinct conditions: one includes those in whom life is confined, restricted, imprisoned and unable to come forth; the other includes those in whom the Lord has forged a way, and life is thus released from them.

The question thus is not how to obtain life, but rather how to allow this life to come forth.

In answer, Nee pointed to this picture in Scripture: “If the alabaster box is not broken, the pure spikenard will not flow forth.”³ He wrote:

Without the breaking of the outward [soul], the inward [spirit] will not come forth.⁴

Soul yielding to spirit

I didn’t know it then, but Andrew Murray also taught much about the human spirit and soul.⁵

In The Spirit of Christ, Murray wrote:

When God created man a living soul, that soul, as the seat and organ of his personality and consciousness, was linked, on the one side, through the body, with the outer visible world, on the other side, through the spirit, with the unseen and the Divine. The soul had to decide whether it would yield itself to the spirit, by it to be linked with God and His will, or to the body and the solicitations of the visible.

In the fall, the soul refused the rule of the spirit, and became the slave of the body with its appetites. Man became flesh; the spirit lost its destined place of rule, and became little more than a dormant power … a struggling captive.

The moment we receive Jesus as Lord, his Spirit indwells us, and our human spirit is quickened. And thus: “The one who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him” (1 Cor. 6:17 CEB). Murray wrote:

The spirit [our inmost being!] now stands in opposition to the flesh, the name for the life of soul and body together, in their subjection to sin.

The “breaking” that allows Spirit and life to come forth in our lives involves pain, but not futile self-effort. It has nothing to do with relentlessly checking enough of the “right” religious boxes, nor with relentlessly trying to force “the flesh” to knuckle under.

Seeing in a whole new light

Two decades after I read The Release of the Spirit, a friend handed me Blessing Your Spirit, by Sylvia Gunter and Arthur Burk. I had just passed through seven very painful years and was trying to process and to heal from all that had occurred.

As page after page of blessings propelled me toward healing, the brief introductory teachings on spirit and soul prompted me to explore what Scripture says. Suddenly, a jumble of random puzzle pieces fell into place.

I saw those seven years in a whole new light.

Already I knew: I had followed God where I did not want to go. Staying there year after year did not feel good, at all; did not make sense, at all. Again and again, I complained and cried out, asking God if I had missed him and if I could leave. Again and again, I heard only silence. Yet, inexplicably, I experienced his presence deep within me. I had grace to stay in that hard place, until he himself told me it was time to move on.

Now I realized: All that time, in that place, the Lord was working in me to release his life.

One phrase, tucked away in Leviticus, seemed to capture what he had required from me again and again: Humble your soul.

Putting out of the way entirely

The Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, is a high holy day in the Old Testament. It is the one required day of fasting in the Hebrew year. The Day of Atonement paints a picture of what Jesus would do for us, in his dying and rising again. It also paints a picture of a key response our Lord requires of us.

A time to humble yourself

Interestingly, when God explained this day in Leviticus and Numbers, he did not use the word “fast.” Yet repeatedly, he instructed his people to spend that day doing what we often associate with fasting. His words are rendered differently in different translations:

You must deny yourselves.
You must humble yourselves.
You shall afflict your souls.

Literally, the Lord said:

You shall humble your souls.⁶

When we fast: We deny ourselves a genuine need, for a set time, with a specific purpose.

Pondering all that, I began to see those seven years as a fast. God had called me into an extended time of intense self-denial, to teach me to humble my very prideful soul.

A lifestyle of self-denial

The New Testament calls to us: Humble yourselves. Deny yourselves. As a way of life.⁷

Jesus himself said:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

For those who want to save their life [literally, soul] will lose it, and those who lose their life [soul] for my sake will find it. (Matt. 16:24-25 NRSV)

Whoa. Jesus equated denying myself with “losing” my soul. In so doing, he used a stunningly strong Greek word. It does not mean “to misplace.” It means, “to put out of the way entirely; to destroy.”

Jesus also announced that, as I accept the decisive breaking required to follow him, I avert real self-destruction. And I embrace the “whole self” God created and redeemed me to be.

Similarly, Romans 8 calls me to deny whatever in me opposes the Spirit (and so also opposes my truest self).

Do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (v. 4 NAS)

We have no particular reason to feel grateful to our sensual nature, or to live life on the level of the instincts. Indeed that way of living leads to certain spiritual death. But if on the other hand you cut the nerve of your instinctive actions by obeying the Spirit, you are on the way to real living. (Rom. 8:13 Phillips)

A pathway to real living

The Spirit gives life.
(Rom. 8:10 NIV)

If Christ lives in you …
your spirit is alive.
(Rom. 8:10 AMP)

Spirit-to-spirit, our Lord makes the impossible possible.

• He breathes into each of us deep affirmation of the person he created and redeemed us to be, spirit, soul and body.
• He shows us how profoundly we stifle, rather than release, our new, true self, when we live according to the willful demands our soul and body can team up to make.
• He gives us grace to cooperate with him in such a way that our soul is continually being humbled, broken, put out of the way entirely – and raised to walk in newness of life.

Your part, and mine?

Instead of redoubling our own efforts,
simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. (Rom. 8:4 MSG)

Acting on your spirit’s yes

Learning all this, I wrote:

The deepest part of me, my spirit, is in hot pursuit of God – deeply loving him; accurately hearing him; eagerly desiring to know him, honor him, follow him.

My redeemed soul wants to do the same thing. Yet, on its own, my soul cannot discern or choose the right way. However, when my soul is subject to my spirit and my spirit is filled with the Spirit of God, I willingly, joyfully, make right choices.

Ah, but my soul loves to play the usurper. It does not want to deny itself, or wait, or feel pain. It wants to be in charge. It thinks it knows best. It assures me it can discern accurately and choose wisely. It boasts that it is protecting my own best interests when in fact it is sabotaging me.

Again and again, my soul will “figure out” a situation and instruct my body to act on its wishes, all the while telling my spirit to sit down and shut up.

Yet by itself, my soul cannot discern between needs and desires. It cannot discern which desires are healthy and holy, and which are not. And what my soul urges me to do, to fulfill legitimate needs and godly desires, only pushes them further away.

BUT GOD saw my constricted spirit, crying out to honor him. He saw my confused soul, sabotaging the very things it wanted to do. The Lord put me in a position where obeying him required choosing to act on my spirit’s YES when my soul was screaming NO.

Continued obedience required clinging to God, spirit to Spirit – and trusting that even when my grip failed, he was holding me – while my afflicted soul used every means in its power to get its way.

Every time I chose to side with my spirit, I grew stronger in spirit – and humbled my soul a little more.

Rivers of living water

To my delight, a new dynamic emerged. As soul and body defer to spirit, here’s how that can look:

Your spirit hears and reverberates with the Holy Spirit,
echoing his wisdom, his love, his holiness, power and truth.

Your spirit does not reject information bombarding you from the physical realm,
but rather sifts and rightly processes that input, in light of what it sees in the spiritual world.

Your spirit does not reject the reasonings of your mind or the cries of your emotions,
but rather evaluates them by the Spirit of God.

Thus, your Spirit-filled spirit informs and instructs your soul and body,
guiding mind and emotions, beliefs and behavior, into line with what is true.⁸

Jesus once stood and cried:

“Whoever puts his trust in me, as the Scripture says,
rivers of living water will flow from his inmost being!
(Now he said this about the Spirit.)⁹

May your spirit be released, and rivers of living water flow, as you cooperate with the Spirit to humble your soul.

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I published the original version of this post August 6, 2012. Eight years later, I revised and republished it. Then, May 6, 2024, I edited a bit more and updated the headings.

See also

• Dear weary one, can we talk about the Spirit realm?
• Living by the Spirit
• Our Spirit-to-spirit birthright
• Inhaling the life and breath of God, and other posts in the Life and Breath series
• Going with God
• He restores my soul: Resting in God’s unforced rhythms
• Truth, desperation, spirit, life

Footnotes

1. The last two quotes in this paragraph are from Romans 8:7, 8 NAS. See Romans 8:1-17 to find how very much these statements were taken out of context. ↩︎
2. So you’ll know: I do not agree with Watchman Nee’s views on submitting to human authorities, as expressed in the book, Spiritual Authority, published in 1972 by Christian Fellowship Publishers. See my post, The people I quote. ↩︎
3. See Mark 14:1-3. ↩︎
4. Watchman Nee, The Release of the Spirit (Sure Foundation Publishers, 1965), 11-12. ↩︎
5. Watchman Nee gleaned from Andrew Murray, as well as from Jessie Penn-Lewis and many other Christian authors. To see a list, scroll down on this page, that tells about Nee’s life and ministry. ↩︎
6. See Leviticus 16:29, 31; 23:27, 32. The literal rendering quoted is from New American Standard 1995 version. ↩︎
7. See, for example, James 4:10; 1 Peter 5:6. ↩︎
8. Quoted from Return to Your Rest: A Spirit-to-spirit Journey, © 2016, 2019, p. 51. ↩︎
9. John 7:38 CJB. ↩︎