For the word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword,
even penetrating as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and
marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Hebrews 4:12 NASB
This very familiar verse of Scripture points out how God’s message can penetrate deep within us.
Don’t hurry past those words just because you may be familiar with the verse. God’s truths are able to enter into our “soul and spirit,” exposing to us “the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Amazing! As the Spirit ignites the fuel of God’s written revelation, the flame bursts upon us and engulfs us with an inner awareness.
No surgeon can operate on the soul or the inner spirit. That is the invisible realm where God’s Spirit does His work. No matter how brilliant the neurologist may be, with all his knowledge of the brain and nervous system, he cannot touch the spirit within us. That is God’s special abode.
Medical men and women are able to understand gross anatomy—and the study of it is fascinating—but how little they know (and how little we know) of the soul and spirit . . . the inner realm where the Spirit of God dwells. That explains why you can be in the midst of recovery from major surgery and still experience no anxiety, because the Spirit of God is at work within you, bringing about that otherwise unidentified inner prompting of peace.
I hesitate to use this term, but this is all very mysterious. It is one of those examples of divine truth we cannot nail down and dissect with precision; however, we also cannot deny it. Every one of us in God’s family has experienced at one time or another some inner prompting of the Spirit. We call them other things. We call them hunches or intuition. We call them premonitions. We call them flashes of insight. Or we may call them simply a sense of peace.
In reality, however, all these things we identify in human terms are part of His working. Yet we so seldom connect these inner promptings with Him, and we somehow feel strange when we try to identify them. We shouldn’t!
Taken from Flying Closer to the Flame by Charles R. Swindoll. Copyright © 1993 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Deepen your intimacy with the living God by reading Embraced by the Spirit, an updated release of Flying Closer to the Flame.
