Racing Death

“So teach us to number our days, That we may get us a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:12 (ASV)

In the mid-1920s, Nee became seriously ill with tuberculosis. He was in his early twenties, a young man who had expected decades of ministry, and suddenly he faced the real possibility that his life would be short.

He did not stop working. He threw himself into writing the material that became The Spiritual Man, a large and complicated book, partly because he feared he might not live to teach it any other way. You can feel the urgency in how dense it is.

The book's big idea is that a human being has three parts: spirit, soul and body. Nee built it on verses like Paul's prayer, “may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire.” In his map, the body connects us to the physical world; the soul is the mind, the emotions and the will; and the spirit is the deepest part of us, where conscience lives and where we have fellowship with God.

Many readers have found this genuinely helpful. It names something real: not every strong feeling is the Holy Spirit, and a clever argument can come from pride rather than from God. Nee wanted Christians to ask not just whether something looks Christian, but where it comes from.

But the biography is honest that the map has limits. The Bible uses words like soul, spirit, heart and mind in overlapping ways. Mary sings, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour,” and nothing in that suggests her soul was the problem. Jesus wept. Paul wrote with anguish and joy. Feelings and thinking are not the enemies of spiritual life. Treat Nee's scheme as a map, the biography says, not as the territory itself.

The illness also taught him something no book could. Paul once wrote about carrying “the sentence of death within ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead.” When your strength simply runs out, depending on God stops being a slogan. Accounts describe a remarkable recovery from the tuberculosis, and he prayed for it. But he never built a teaching that said faithful Christians won't get sick. The biography adds that health is a gift, healing can be sought, and medicine can be used.

There is one more thing here, and it matters for you. Nee wrote long before modern medicine and psychology understood things like anxiety, depression and trauma. Anxiety can make your body feel things that seem like spiritual warnings. Depression can flatten your emotions. None of that proves you are unspiritual. If your mind or your mood is struggling, that is not a failure of faith. Tell a safe person: a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a doctor, or a crisis line where you live. God often helps through people like that.

Nee didn't choose his illness, and neither do we. But mortality has a way of making you ask what you will do with the time you have. “Teach us to number our days,” says the psalm. That isn't gloomy. It's clarity.

Notice the order in Nee's life. Before he became a famous teacher, he was being taught. Before he wrote about resurrection life, he faced his own death. That is part of why his best teaching has weight: it had already been tested in a real body.

One thing to do this week: when a strong feeling hits you, name it honestly (“I'm anxious,” “I'm angry,” “I'm lonely”) and bring it to God in one plain sentence. Don't obey it blindly, and don't pretend it isn't there.