May your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless. (1 Thessalonians 5:23 NLT)
You see that God never takes our
will away, nor our mind, nor our heart. Some people expect God to
come and do all their choosing for them, and all their desiring
for them, and all their deciding for them, while they are simply
to be poor things picked up by God and put into things which He
desires and wills. God never does that. He is developing a
humanity. Were we spirits I do not know how we might act; we
might act spontaneously. But we are not. God has created a kind
of being with a rational mind. The three-fold element of spirit,
soul and body is still to be found, yet not now in Adam, but in
Christ. God is developing the Christ mind; how He thinks, judges,
understands, and when we see the Lord's mind we see how very
different it is from our own natural mind; and our own natural
mind is beside the mark altogether, and we must repudiate it.
This is spiritual understanding, the mind of the Spirit.
The same thing applies to our
feelings and our desires. They may lead us all astray. There is a
new outfit in Christ for our hearts, but there is always the
necessity for our standing with the Lord in what is of Himself.
Passivity may be a most ruinous thing. In all the values of
Christ risen there has to be a taking of that risen Life for the
equivalent need of mind, heart, will; of spirit, soul, and body.