Watchman Nee's landmark book, The Spiritual Man, was written while he was dangerously ill with tuberculosis. He considered that he might die of the disease, as had many of his countrymen, and he wanted to produce a sort of detailed handbook of the spiritual life. As he wrote in Issue #3 of The Present Testimony, "This book puts particular emphasis on spiritual reality." Years later he shared that a few times during the period of writing he visited a doctor for an X-ray of his chest. One day the doctor told him not to come back, showing him another X-ray, saying, "You are in worse shape than this man. He died last week." But after the book was finished Watchman Nee was miraculously healed, and outlived that doctor by many years.
The whole book takes up volumes 12-14 of The Collected Works of Watchman Nee, and this first volume contains three of the ten sections. The first section and its four chapters is so foundational to spiritual experience and progress that it ought to be required reading for every child of God. I cannot let God down by failing to provide a very brief summary of this section, titled "An Introduction Concerning the Spirit, the Soul, and the Body."
Before I first heard ministry based on this book, I had no idea that there is a human spirit. I knew only of evil spirits and the Holy Spirit, though we usually called Him the Holy Ghost. Practical spiritual life for me began when I learned these important facts:
- Based on 1 Thessalonians 5:23, we have "…spirit and soul and body…".
- The body is all our physical parts and deals with the external world, as directed by the soul.
- The soul includes primarily mind, emotion, and will, and deals with psychological matters, using the body as its instrument or tool kit in the external world.
- The spirit includes primarily intuition, fellowship, and conscience, and deals with divine and spiritual matters. If we permit (and how to do so is a major subject of this book), our spirit leads and directs our soul, so that we can live "in spirit".
I purposely listed the parts of the soul and spirit in parallel to emphasize that, for example, the intuition of the spirit interacts with the mind of the soul, so our mind can be renewed. Thus we read in 1 Timothy 1:7, "God has not given us a spirit of cowardice, but of power and of love and of sobermindedness": "power" because the conscience empowers our will to choose righteousness, "love" because the fellowship part of our spirit enables our emotion to love God and His people, and "sobermindedness" because the intuition supports our mind in every way so as to be fully sane, sober and sound, able to properly interpret the things of God.
For me this is key: we can only know God by using our human spirit. If we do not know the spirit, we only know soulish matters and techniques. A soulish Christian is described in 1 Corinthians 2:14, "But a soulish man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him and he is not able to know them because they are discerned spiritually." Numerous modern sects are founded on experiences of the soul, whether mental, emotionally ecstatic, or duty-bound (willful or "fundamentalist"). None can please God! We must learn to use our human spirit!
This book details the condition of a Christian under many circumstances, and tells how to learn spiritual reality to cope with every circumstance. Thus the rest of this first section illuminates the relationship between the spirit and the soul; explains what happened when Adam sinned, leading to partial numbness of the spirit; and shows the way of salvation from a spiritless life and living.
The second and third sections deal with "The Flesh" and "The Soul", in uncomfortable detail, perhaps, because brother Nee certainly knew how to drive a point home. These sections' goal is for us to hate our flesh, not only for its sins, but even for things that seem good but are fleshly; and that we would cross out our soul-life (see, for example, Matthew 10:39). Whether we are crude or cultured, if our soul is not subject to our spirit we cannot properly serve our dear Lord Jesus.
I had read only portions of The Spiritual Man in the past. Now, embarking upon reading it in its entirety, I find it challenging but also emancipating. Two volumes and seven sections to go.
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