I Corinthians 2:11-12

You see now the comparison. The reason the rulers of the world did not understand—did not put into the proper perspective; did not grasp what they saw in the Lord of glory—was because God had not revealed to them who Jesus was, what He was doing, or why He was doing what He was doing. The reason is because those things cannot be discerned by physical means—eye, ear, nose, mouth, the senses—but rather these things have to be revealed. There has to be a spiritual miracle that takes place for a person to understand and to see these spiritual things.

God created us physical and mortal. He created us very good, but He also placed within us a spirit. That is really the key to this entire sermon. We are building on the understanding that we have been given a spirit. That spirit is not an immortal soul. It is not the man. It is a non-material element within the man that imparts to the man the power of intellect so that he is able to grasp, to understand, the physical things of this world. It is what separates man from an animal. Though an animal may have a brain that is similar to man's, the animal does not have a spirit. It did not have imparted to it a spirit giving it the intelligence, the intellectual capacity, which a man has. Man is different from those other physical beings that also have life.

This non-material element does not possess life of itself. The Bible very clearly says that our life is in the blood. (It says that a couple of different times.) The spirit did not impart life to us—the spirit is dependent upon the body for use or for carrying out its functions.

The spirit cannot see on its own. It cannot hear on its own. It needs the eyes, it needs the ears, and it needs the brain to sort all of these signals out in order to make use of them.

There is a very simple way this can be proved. If a person's eyes do not work, the spirit cannot see. If a person's ears do not work, the spirit cannot hear. This is necessary in order to carry out the other functions of the spirit as well as we are able to understand it.

The illustrations that I use here may not be entirely adequate to the situation, but the spirit does impart to the human brain the power of intellect, but it needs the brain. It cannot function without it. But it has an additional capacity in that it is able to use the brain to be a receptacle for the information that it processes—and apparently also be of use to draw upon that information—that is, our memory—and then use it.

I have read in news magazines, other publications—things entirely apart from the church of God—that seem to indicate (at least this was the conclusion that these experimenters reached) that by prodding different areas of the brain with small charges of electricity they were able to induce the person to recall things that were stored in the person's memory. Their conclusion was that the brain never forgets a single thing that ever happened in your life.

We see two clear functions that apparently are functions of the spirit in man. One is to impart the power of intellect using the human brain and the other organs of the body; and the second is to facilitate the brain in recording the experiences of life so that they can be recalled. We need desperately to be able to recall. If we cannot recall, what good is information? Both functions are absolutely necessary.

God therefore not only created us mortal, but He also created us with a spiritual capacity. In fact, understanding this in the light of Genesis 1, we can begin to understand another angle why He used the term "very good" and that is that we were incomplete. We were good as far as we went, but there was much more to come. We were incomplete because we understand from other parts of the Bible that man needs another spirit joining with his spirit so that he can then have the capacity to make use of, to see, to comprehend spiritual things as well as the things of a man.

This is what I Corinthians 2 is explaining as … . . .

I Corinthians 2:10-16

Now, in I Corinthians 2:10-16, Paul writes about the Spirit of God teaching spiritual things, which he says are the things of God, something the natural man, the carnal man, cannot receive or understand. They are beyond comprehension for just the normal human mind still clogged with sin. The Spirit that God gives us helps us to make moral and spiritual godly judgments because it enables us to have the mind of Christ. That is where Paul ends up there at the end of that chapter, I Corinthians 2:16.

There is something we need to understand, this is something that the Protestants get totally wrong. They do not understand this process. They think that if they confess their sins and they come up saying, "Jesus saved me. I've been saved. God's given me His Spirit," they are lying to themselves. But they go from there and do nothing. I may be being a little absolute in that statement, but generally, the teaching that they have been given is that they do not have to do anything. Because God Christ has done it all for them. And so a good majority of Protestants do not change at all. They get saved when they are 12 or whatever when they do their altar call, and then they do nothing. They rely on that one emotional time when they said they accepted Jesus Christ into their heart and do nothing.

So yeah, we have been given the Holy Spirit of God. Christ resides in us. Right? But that does us very little good if we do not exercise it, if we do not use it. We remain immature babies in the faith if we are not using God's Spirit to grow, to become teachers, as he says there in Hebrews. To be someone others younger in the faith look to as an example of living the way of God. The mind of Christ is not grown in us unless we use it, unless we practice the logos that has been given to us, unless we are working on keeping ourselves unspotted from the world and helping those others who have need.

We cannot be like the Protestants and count on our altar call, if you will, count on accepting Jesus Christ into our hearts. Because that is just the beginning. God wants us to do more. We cannot be passive as Christians. God wants us to be out in it, if you will. Not only practicing it for ourselves, but setting a good example to those who are in the church and to the people of the world as a witness. If we hide it, we are going to end up like the Hebrews, babies, unskilled in the word of righteousness, because we have not tried to do it. Or if we did, we stopped because maybe it was too hard. Maybe we got scared. Maybe we were standing out like a sore thumb. But those are just excuses. Those are just justifications for spiritual laziness. We must exercise the Spirit of God within us and grow. God wants to see maturity.

I Corinthians 2:9-13

Because of the action God took upon the sin of Adam and Eve—Adam and Eve being cut off from the Holy Spirit—all of the cultures of mankind have been built on reasoning that is apart from God's Holy Spirit. You might say that man has been doomed to produce those kinds of cultures that are based on his own reasoning, because access to the Holy Spirit was cut off, and therefore there was a dimension missing in mankind's reasoning processes.

Therefore, the separation can only get wider, unless God acts to heal the breach. Unless God bridges the gap, mankind is unable to do it because (as we just read in I Corinthians 2) spiritual things are not physically discerned; eyes, ears, nose, mouth—they do not discern spiritual things. So mankind is trapped—he is doomed in that regard. Even though mankind was created with a spiritual capacity, it is so limited that it cannot find the true things of God, and therefore man is very easily overpowered by Satan.

I Corinthians 2:9-14

Words are the verbal communication of thoughts, and since God designed His truth to be accurately expressed in human language, He inspired the words used in Scripture which are contained in both the Old and New Testaments. He was meticulous and detailed in His inspiration of the words so they would accurately express the laws and principles He intended to communicate. Paul knew that the human spirit could only understand the things of the natural world. But once God gives the Spirit of understanding, spiritual things become very clear. So although the world can read the Bible and get some good qualities out of it, even if they, on the surface, keep the Ten Commandments (or most of them), they are going to be blessed for it, but they cannot understand the depth of it without God's Spirit.

I Corinthians 2:10-12

If it is seen and if it is understood, then life begins to make sense. We begin to be able to see ourselves - this single, unique individual, us, I, me - as a part of the whole, the awesome plan and purpose that God is working out! Then, being able to see God gives direction to our life. So your eye has seen and your ear has heard, and it has entered into your heart the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.

Those three verses prove that we are predisposed by God's calling to see Him. Not only to know His truth, but to know who His servants are, as well. So we can know. We may not know perfectly; but what we know is a great source of comfort, security, hope, and direction.

I Corinthians 2:9-12

Here is what begins to happen: God begins to call you and He begins to show you things. Maybe, at first, you start to notice that this world is not running right and this is not the right way to live. You are not happy. "Something is wrong with my marriage, something is wrong with my life," and you start to think and look, and all of a sudden God begins to get your attention. Very slowly He brings us to the point where we begin to see things. We are being guided by God the Father, by His Spirit. We are called and we are baptized, and from that time on God's Spirit takes over.