Genesis 2:7. then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
On Day 10, we said that we are a body. The Lord God formed our bodies from the dust of the ground. Like a potter shaping clay, God shaped us into the shape he wanted for us. Each of our bodies were formed by God as part of his good creation. Our bodies allow us to image God and our bodies make us who we are.
But we are more than just a body. We are also a spirit.
Now the word spirit is not used in our verse. But Genesis 2:7 says that God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life. This is how God gave Adam a spirit. What is a spirit?
A spirit is the invisible part of us that lives inside of our bodies. A spirit is what makes a body come alive. When you walk, throw, eat, talk, sing, build, paint, or sleep, it is because your spirit is telling your body to do it. When a person dies it is because they have had their spirit removed from their body. If a person is alive it is because there is a spirit living in their body. Every living person has both a body and a spirit, and everyone’s spirit was given to them by God. This is what the Bible calls the “breath of life.”
Job 33:4. The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
Ecclesiastes 12:7. the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
Isaiah 42:5. Thus says the Lord, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it:
Because God loves us he gave us life. Not just biological life, like the plants and animals, but a spiritual life that allows us to image him. God gave us his own breath from his own Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Some people believe that we are no different from the animals. We are just really smart apes. If this is true then everything we think, believe, and feel is just part of a complex chemical reaction inside of your brain. But it’s not true. We aren’t just smarter apes; we are the image of God with his breath of life inside of us.
Now when we say that everyone has a spirit from God, we are not saying that everyone has the Holy Spirit living inside of them. Everyone has “a” human spirit, but not everyone has “the” Spirit. We receive the Holy Spirit when we trust in Jesus to be our savior. When we place our faith in Jesus, we receive the Holy Spirit into our human spirit and our bodies become the temple or house of God. Wow!
The fact that all of us have a spirit living inside of us means that everything we do is “spiritual.” Or we might say that everything we do is an act of worship. Every person is worshiping either God or themselves. When we have the Holy Spirit connected to our spirit we are able to worship God in everything that we do.
1 Corinthians 10:31. Do all to the glory of God.
Without the Holy Spirit inside of us, everything we do will be an act of self-worship. Everything we do will be to show off, or to make ourselves look good. We will do all to the glory of me.
That’s why we need Jesus. Not to make us spiritual, but to give us the Holy Spirit who makes our spirit new. The Bibles calls this “being saved.” Because of sin our bodies need to be saved and so do our spirits. Jesus comes inside of us to give us a new spirit (the Holy Spirit) and one day he will give us a new body too. Then everything about us will be good and perfect once and for all.
Until that day we can do all to the glory of God as the Holy Spirit controls our bodies for Jesus.
Questions: You can’t see your spirit but it is there. Can you think of something that your spirit caused your body to do? What might “Do all to the glory of God” look like at school/home/neighborhood today?
TLICfamily 