Strengthen the Inner Man - Preaching Manuscript

Introduction

Good morning One Church family!!

It feels good to be standing in front of you all this morning.

Happy 4th of July. Independence Day.

Well, I’m thankful for the opportunity to share the word of the Lord with you this morning.

Thank you to Pastor Bell and Pastor Green, Lady Dez & Lady Tonya for this opportunity.

I don’t take it lightly to have been entrusted w/ this sacred duty of bringing God’s word to his people.

& I am excited this morning because I truly believe that God has something important to share today.

& so what I’m going to do today is I’m going to endeavor to teach.

& in my teaching I hope I don’t bore you.

But I want to share something w/ you that I believe is so important and so instrumental to understanding the spiritual life.

It is something that, I believe, profoundly impacts our ability to access and to connect to our spiritual man.

The Bible tells us that God is spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

So if we don’t understand the nature of our spiritual lives, the way we connect with God, we may confuse things that are going on in other parts of our nature as spiritual activity.

& miss what God is trying to do.

Now some of you may have experienced this teaching before, which is OK, because I believe it is that important.

So we can hear it again.

Because for me as I began to understood our true nature it changed my life because it helped me to understand the realities of our existence.

It helped me understand why sometimes as I tried to connect with God, I was unable to.

Have you ever felt that way? You really want to push through and connect with God, so you put your antennas and your feelers out but you got nothing. Sometimes as you pray and talk to God it feels like you are just going through the motions. This teaching helped me to understand why my spiritual life wasn’t progressing the way that I wanted it to. It helped me understand why my spiritual life was lacking sometimes. And so I want to spend a little time teaching you today because it’s important that we understand our Spiritual Man.

As I teach, I encourage you take notes. We only remember 15% of what we hear. So take notes and then go back and study this for yourself to be sure you agree with it. Don’t just listen to something because a preacher or a teacher told you. Study to show yourself approved.

Alright, If you have your Bibles this morning our key passage of scripture will be Ephesians 3:14-19. Follow me there if you will. I will be reading from the New King James Version.

So as we begin to explore our spiritual nature the thing we really need to understand is, “Who are we really?”. What is our true identity? Everything you do is connected to your identity. Behavior is connected to identity. We see this in nature. Birds fly and get worms for food for their young and build nest because that nature is part of their identity. We can look at plant life and fish life. They all have behaviors that are part of their identity. You don’t expect to see fish fly and you don’t expect to see birds swim, because those behaviors are not part of it’s identity. Whatever they are, they do. Whatever they are they do.

And so the question for you and for me this morning is who are you? What is our true identity?

So we’re going to explore that and once we figure that out we are going to talk about how we get better. How do we get stronger? How do we strengthen our inner man?

So you have your bibles open and we are reading from Ephesians 3:14-19. And it reads:

The New King James Version Chapter 3

14 For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

And so this is the apostle Paul, and he is writing to the church of Ephesus. And he wrote this letter to them while he was in prison. This is what is know as one of the prison epistles. And what he has written to them up until this point is

So what is this inner man? That’s going to be key for us to understand in order to understand what Paul is writing here.

In order to understand the inner man, we have to understand how God created us. Who did God create us to be? How did He design you?

And our key passage is Ephesians 3:14-19, but we may jump around a bit.

Original Design

So how did God design us?

The Bible says that we are created in God’s image. We bear the imago dei. That’s just a fancy way of saying, we bear the image of God. The image of God image is imprinted on us and in us. And this is manifested in a few ways, but I’m just going to focus on one that connects to what we are talking about today and that is this. We believe and we know that God is one. There is only one God, but in God, there is without doubt, three persons. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. And we believe this to be true and each one is distinct and separate yet unified into one being, the only true and eternal God.

And so God in his design He gave us the same characteristics. Just like Him, we are one whole individual, unique in our design. When I see you I see one whole person. When you see me, you see one whole person. Yet behind the scenes, beneath the exterior, like God, we are made up of 3 distinct parts that make up the whole. Turn quickly with me to Genesis 2:7. Reading here from the KJV:

King James Version Chapter 2

7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

And so here we see as God is creating man. This is the creation story. As he is designing man, it says here, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground.” So when God created us he gave us a body. Now I know that’s not ground breaking. Everybody knows we have a body. If you are sitting here today, you know you have a body. If you are watching and listening online you know you have a body. I’ve lost a lot of weight recently, but I used to have a lot more body than I do now. And my kids would remind me of that all them time. They’d walk around the house and poke my belly and go puffy. And every time they do it, I’m like really. So listen kids don’t care. They will shame you and not think twice about it. So I know I have a body because my kids always remind me of it. We have a physical body that God fashioned for us out of the dust of the ground. And this body, you can feel it, you can touch it. It is material. So we have a body.

Then it says, “and then he breath into his nostrils the breath of life.” The Hebrew word used here for breath can be rendered as spirit and so God gave man a spirit. So we can say, “and then he breath into his nostrils the spirit of life.” And so now we see that man has a body and man has a spirit that God breath into him. Man has a body and man has a spirit.

And then the last part of this verse says, “and man became a living soul. So, God formed man’s body and then breathe spirit into him and as soon as the spirit interacted with the body man’s soul was produced. “And man became a living soul.” And this soul is within us. It is us. So when the body was quickened by the spirit, it brought into being a living and self-conscious man.

So, when God created us, He created us with three distinct parts that make up the whole of our person. We are Body, Soul and Spirit. We are a spirit, we have a soul and we live in a body. Another way of saying this is that we are tripartite beings. Three parts that make up a whole.

Body, Soul and Spirit

Let me show you this another way really quickly.

So turn with me to 1 Thessalonians 5:23. And we are back in the New King James Version.

The New King James Version Chapter 5

23 Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So what we see here as Paul writes this prayer to end his letter to the church of Thessalonians, he makes mention of three aspects of our nature. He says, “may your whole spirit, soul and body be preserved blameless.” So here we see all three parts. So we are a spirit, we have a soul and we live in a body. Man has three part. Spirit, soul and body.

Now there is another part of our nature that we don't see mentioned here in this passage. That's because this passage is talking about the parts of us that can be redeemed. So when it says, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely.” It's talking about your body, soul and spirit. Because these are the three parts of you that can be redeemed. “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you”, sanctification is a part of the redemptive process. And redemption is simply a fancy theological term that refers to undoing the effects of sin. When God created humanity he created them perfect. When he created Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden they were created perfect. And then sin crept in and corrupted our nature. And so because of that we now must be redeemed. The effects of sin in our lives has to be undone so we can get back to our original state of what God intend. And what happened, for those that are saved and for those that are believers, was your spirit was redeemed the minute you got saved. Your human spirit has been sealed by the Holy Spirit and will be kept until Christ returns. Your soul has to be renewed. And it is being renewed daily. Your soul is being progressively redeemed. Your spirit was instantly redeemed and your soul is being progressively redeemed. And your body is to be redeemed when Christ returns. So those three parts can be redeemed.

The Flesh

Now there's another part of you that is just as much a part of your nature. But this part will not be redeemed. And that is your flesh.

The flesh is just as much a part of us as our body, soul and spirit. The flesh is the biblical term that is used in the Bible, that is used in scripture to identify the human nature that is resistant to God. It is that part of us that stands in opposition to God. Now when we talk about the flesh, the flesh is not the body. So the flesh in this context is not your skin or your fleshly tissue. We are talking about the sinful nature of man. So the flesh is not the body, but the flesh is connected to the body. And the flesh gives it’s expression to the body. The body is now the form by which the flesh expresses itself. And the flesh has certain passions and desires and proclivities that it wants and needs to act out (Gal 5:24). The flesh is totally and completely depraved. And it’s part of our nature. It’s part of our makeup. No one, for example, has to teach a child to lie or to be selfish. The nature is just there and it will always be there, in all of us, waiting to strike. You will struggle and you will struggle. You will fight all your life with your body reacting to the flesh. Even after we are born again the flesh is with us.

As a believer it’s important to understand we are not in the flesh. Meaning that the flesh does not have dominion over us, so we are no longer forced to follow it’s dictates. So we are not in the flesh, but the flesh is still in us. It’s a part of us. Paul said it this way, he says, “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however are not in the flesh but in the Spirit.” (Rom 8:8-9) So you are not in the flesh, but he says in chapter 7, “for I know nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.” (Rom 7:18) So the flesh is in us and still part of us, but because we are not in the flesh we are not subject to its power.

So the flesh is part of us, but the flesh will not be redeemed. As a matter of fact it can not be redeemed. It cannot be made holy. It will be annihilated upon our death from this earth and the glory that we will have with him in a glorified body.

Body