Hi, I’m Joe.
I’m joined today by Tom Smith.
And today we’ll be discussing Chapter 5 in Volume 1 of the “Basic Elements of the Christian Life.”
The title of this chapter is “The Key to Experiencing Christ—The Human Spirit.”
Tom, based on this chapter, can you tell us what it means to experience Christ?
The experience of Christ, Joe, is something that we need to realize
needs to be a part of our daily life after we’ve received the Lord.
Colossians 2:6 says this, “As therefore you have received the Christ, Jesus the Lord, walk in Him.”
So as believers in Christ, we need to realize that it’s not just a one time experience.
We need to experience Christ in our daily life.
This isn’t just to “talk the talk,” it’s to “walk the walk.”
It’s to live a life of experiencing Christ.
And to appreciate this we need to realize that God made us,
He created us, in a custom way that we would be able to experience Him.
And to do this, He made us with three parts, so that we have the capacity to experience Christ.
You mentioned that man has three parts and this is related to his capacity to experience Christ.
Can you tell us a little bit more about these three parts?
Well, there’s a wonderful verse that I’d like to make reference to Joe. That is in 1 Thessalonians 5:23
and it says this, “And the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly,
and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete,
without blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
So what we would like to see in this verse is that God made us with a spirit, soul, and body.
And this is very important related to our experience of Christ.
So just to mention, the body is simply our physical body with which we can
contact all the things of the material realm, our most superficial part.
And for this God gave us five senses to substantiate all these physical things.
The second, of course, is our soul.
And our soul just refers to our psychological faculty with our mind, our emotion, and will
so that we can understand, we can enjoy, love and we can choose.
But deeper than that, this verse points out that God made us with a spirit.
And the spirit is the deepest part of man.
If you had a bull’s eye on the wall, it would be the center of that bull’s eye.
So we need to see that to experience Christ we need to come to this deepest part.
It is the spirit of man that God created with the capacity to experience Him, to contact Him.
Okay, so now we’ve covered how man is made with three parts. This is based on 1 Thessalonians 5:23.
We’ve also covered how man’s deepest part is the human spirit.
Can you tell us about how this deepest part is related to the experience of Christ?
The deepest part of man, the spirit of man, is really a key to our experiencing of Christ.
In John chapter 4, when the Lord Jesus talked to this Samaritan woman,
He helped her by saying, “God is Spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truthfulness.”
So based upon John 4:24, we can see that because God in His substance is Spirit,
for us to contact Him we need to use the right organ.
Just like if you want to contact a radio frequency, you need to have a radio receiver.
In the same way, because God is Spirit we need to use our spirit, our human spirit, if we want to contact God.
So this is very important if we were to experience God, experience Christ, we need to use our spirit.
So what we have seen today: First, that man has three parts.
Second, that the third part, the human spirit, is the deepest part of man.
And the third thing we’ve seen is that God is Spirit, and in order to contact God we need to exercise our spirit
to contact Him, to touch Him, and to substantiate Him and even to have fellowship with Him.
Tom, thank you for joining us today.
And thank you all for joining us as well.
In the next two segments, we’ll talk more about the human spirit as the key to experiencing Christ.