It was great to have Tony and Robin back with us on Sunday morning. Tony expressed his thanks for the encouraging notes and prayers that were sent over the course of the last week. Answers to prayer, even partial answers, are encouraging. Take a moment or two before you leave this little newsletter to spend some time with the prayer list in the left-hand column.

Guys Night Friday, May 7, at 7:00pm @ the Galieti Home Plan on bringing something to grill!

Last Sunday's ABF Recap:What does the Bible say about us (pt. 2)?
rg & tg

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

So God created man in his own image,
     in the image of God he created him;
     male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26-27

The Bible says a lot about God. It also says a lot about Man, and we spent this past Sunday continuing where we left off in the early part of April. There have been some really, really good Sunday morning lessons/discussions over the past months. This Sunday's ABF time was simply great. We were given a strong dose of spiritual philosophy and it was wonderful to simply sit in the room and be fed. The LORD was at work delivering a message that He wants us to internalize, and a summary can be read here:

To review...

1. God is a triune being: Father, Son & Holy Spirit
2. He created us as triune beings: body, soul & spirit
3. God is a person, and we are persons. The Essentials of Personhood are
   1. Intellect - reason, what we use to judge between right and wrong
   2. Emotion
      1. Sensibility - what we'd like to do
      2. Conscience - What we ought to do
   3. Will - what we're going to do
4. Three predominant theories re: man's body
   1. Greek/"Masochistic" view - body is evil
   2. Roman/"Hedonistic" view - body is everything (soul ignored)
   3. Biblical view - I Corinthians 6:19 (...body is a temple of the Holy Spirit... you are not your own; you were bought with a price... honor God with your body.); Romans 12:1 (...offer your bodies as living sacrifices...); Philippians 1:20 (...Christ will be exalted in my body...); 2 Corinthians 5:10 (...all appear before the judgment seat...receive what is due...things done while in the body...)

Recapping the week:
A brief outline of our most recent discussion would consist of: God's intention for man, what happened to man after sin, and what happens when we receive Christ.

Now to get into the specifics, we'll turn to Tony's analogy. Think of man as a building consisting of three floors. The bottom of the building interfaces with the world, and above the building is God. The first floor is the Body, as this is the aspect of man that makes contact with the physical world around us. The Body is the "world-conscious" aspect of man. The third floor is the Spirit, as this is

Where does the mind fit into this? I Corinthians 2:11 It is connected with the Spirit, but this has the potential to become a rabbit hole. We established the fact that we used an analogy to the extent that it makes the point of the morning, understanding that analogies break down at some point.

the aspect of man that interfaces with God. The Spirit is the "God-conscious" aspect of man. The second floor is the Soul, as this is the "self-conscious" aspect of man. Don't think of the Soul so much as, "I have a soul," but rather, "I am a soul." Genesis 2:7 says, "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (KJV)" In the Adam analogy, man was created to have pure connections and input from each of the aspects of the triune as well as with the world around him and with God who created him.

But then sin entered the picture. Genesis 3:1-5 says,

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"

The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "

"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

A ploy of Satan is this: he tries to get us to work for what we already have. In this passage he told Eve, "you will be like God..." But we were already like God in many respects because of the nature in which we were created: in His image, with God-perfected interaction with Him. But Eve took, and then Adam took, and the floors of our building caved in. Our harmony with God, the pure connectedness between the three aspects of our beings, all of the perfection that God had created in us and for us to be came crashing down. The upper floors fell, and the first floor, our bodies, were introduced to death. I Corinthians 2:14 says,

The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.

Pretty depressing. But through Christ, man can be regenerated. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

1 Corinthians 15:51-54 says,

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed- in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

Supernaturally, God creates and suspends a new floor above our bodies. This new floor is our new spirit. It allows us to receive inputs from God that we didn't have before because of our bondage to sin, and these inputs pull our soul out of the broken circumstances our bodies inhabit. Referring back to the Essentials of Personhood, this new spirit enables us to practice the three Essentials in a Godly way. No, we don't practice the Essentials with perfection, but we are called to do so, and we have an enabler, the Holy Spirit, to help us along the way. Even better, the Holy Spirit promises to transform our bodies entirely at the second coming.

The applications:

• Someone met us where we were at (Fallen Man)... we need to meet others where they are.
• We ought not view ourselves as the broken building, but focus on the supernatural spirit floor that God has given us.
• The spiritual disciplines keep the spirit maintained... the spirit is the engine that lifts our souls out of worldly influences. As human beings that have "had our buildings restored," we ought to pursue maintaing our spirits by immersing ourselves in the spiritual disciplines.

This Sunday! Our Next Observation Verse: Galations 2:20 Print it out and mark it up by following the Reading the Word for Maximum Impact technique from late 2009

Have a great end to your week. Send an encouraging e-mail to a friend.

RG