Spirit, Soul and Body

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:23

In 1928, gravely ill with tuberculosis and expecting to die, Watchman Nee published his first substantial work. The Spiritual Man runs to three volumes and sets out an anatomy of the inner life that shaped everything he afterwards taught. Its central proposition is that man is not two parts but three.

The threefold constitution

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow. HEBREWS 4:12

Nee read Paul’s benediction in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and this verse in Hebrews as teaching a real distinction between spirit and soul. The body is that by which we relate to the physical world. The soul is the seat of personality — mind, emotion and will; it is what makes a man himself, and it is by the soul that he relates to other people and to his own inner world. The spirit is the innermost part, by which alone a man relates to God. He found the pattern in Genesis: the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground — the body; and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life — the spirit; and man became a living soul — the personality produced by the union of the two (Genesis 2:7). At the fall, he argued, the spirit died in the sense that it lost its communication with God, and man became soul-governed — ruled by his own mind, feelings and will rather than by God through the spirit. Regeneration is precisely the quickening of the spirit.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. JOHN 3:6

Why the distinction matters practically

One might think this a piece of technical anthropology of no use to an ordinary believer. Nee thought otherwise, and his reason is worth understanding.

If a man cannot tell the difference between what rises from his soul and what comes from his spirit, he will confuse emotion with the presence of God, mental clarity with revelation, and strength of will with faith. He will conclude he has been near to God because he was moved, and that God has departed because he feels flat.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. 1 CORINTHIANS 2:14

The word rendered natural there is, in the Greek, the soulish man — the man whose life is governed by the soul. Nee’s contention is that a genuine believer may nonetheless live a soulish Christian life: sincere, active, emotional, intelligent, and yet not walking by the Spirit at all. The remedy is discernment, and the instrument of discernment is the Word of God, which pierces to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit. Only Scripture can make that cut. We cannot make it ourselves by introspection — indeed introspection is a soulish activity and tends to deepen the problem.

Handle with care

Honesty requires a caution here, and Nee himself supplied part of it. Not all Bible teachers accept the trichotomy. Many careful expositors hold that Scripture uses spirit and soul largely interchangeably, that the Hebrews 4:12 passage speaks of the depth of the Word’s penetration rather than of a clean anatomical line, and that man is best understood as a unity viewed from different angles. That position is held by godly and serious readers of Scripture, and a believer who takes it loses nothing essential. Nee later grew uneasy about the systematising in The Spiritual Man. He is reported to have regretted the analytical thoroughness of it, on the grounds that readers were turning a description of spiritual experience into a technique for self-examination — which is exactly the soulishness the book was written to expose. That is the right way to hold this chapter. Take the pastoral insight, which is genuine and valuable: much that passes for spirituality is merely refined human life, and we need God to show us the difference. Leave the elaborate diagrams alone. A believer preoccupied with locating the boundary between his soul and his spirit has already lost the plot.

Three functions of the human spirit

Within his account of the spirit, Nee distinguished three operations, and this part of The Spiritual Man has proved more durable than the anatomy itself. Whatever one concludes about trichotomy, these three are recognisable in Christian experience. The first is conscience, by which God registers His approval or disapproval within us. Nee held that conscience is not merely a socially formed sense of right and wrong but the place where the Spirit speaks most directly and most unavoidably.

Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness. ROMANS 2:15

He taught believers to keep the conscience extremely tender, and warned that a conscience repeatedly overruled becomes progressively silent — having their conscience seared with a hot iron (1 Timothy 4:2). A believer who has learned to argue with his conscience has disabled his most reliable instrument. The second is intuition, by which he meant direct spiritual knowing that does not arrive by reasoning. This is the inward sense that something is right or wrong before one can say why. Nee grounded it in the Spirit’s witness:

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God. ROMANS 8:16

Assurance of salvation, he pointed out, is precisely of this kind. No believer reasons his way to it, and no argument can finally remove it. The third is communion, or fellowship — the capacity by which we actually worship, as distinct from thinking about God or feeling moved by Him.

God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. JOHN 4:24

The practical value of this threefold description is diagnostic. A believer can ask which faculty is engaged. Am I troubled in conscience, which requires confession or restitution? Do I have an intuitive check, which requires waiting? Or am I simply out of communion, which requires returning? Held as descriptions of experience rather than as a map of the soul’s architecture, they remain useful. Held as a system to be applied by introspection, they become the very soulishness Nee was warning against.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask honestly after your next moving worship service: was that God, or was that music? The question is not cynical. It is discernment.

2. Notice this week when you are drawing on mental cleverness or emotional energy in ministry rather than on God. Name one instance. 3. Let Scripture do the dividing. When you want to examine yourself, read the Word rather than turning inward. 4. Resist making a system of this. If you find yourself analysing your inner parts more than you are looking at Christ, stop. 5. Hold the doctrine loosely and the pastoral warning tightly. Be gracious with believers who read these texts differently.

A PRAYER

Father, I do not fully understand myself, and I have often mistaken my own feelings for Your presence and my own reasoning for Your voice.

Let Your Word do its work in me. Divide what is merely mine from what is truly Yours. I would rather be cut than deceived.

Keep me from turning this into a study of myself. Turn my eyes outward and upward, to Christ, in whom alone I am safe. Amen.