Connecting the Body, Soul, Heart, and Spirit

In this episode I want to walk you through one of the most foundational teachings we have at Bride Movement. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 says, "May the very God of peace sanctify you wholly, and I pray your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Three components. Body. Soul. Spirit. And then in Hebrews 4:12 the Bible adds a fourth: the word of God divides asunder soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Here is the problem. Paul tells us we have been raised up and seated with Christ in heavenly places. We hear that, and we say, "So what? I still hate myself. I deserve this. If God loved me, things would be different." We have the infomercial. We bought the vacuum cleaner. We unpacked the box. We are pushing it across the carpet. And it does not work. Why? Because no one ever told us to plug it into the wall. Today I am going to help you plug it in.

Your body is your physical nature. It is the part everyone sees. Ephesians 2:3 says we walked in the lusts of the flesh. 1 Timothy 4:8 says physical training is of some value, but godliness has the promise for this life and the one to come. We are not meant to despise the body. Jesus is going to give it back to us glorified at the resurrection. But the body carries trauma. The body holds the record. When somebody has been through severe abuse, the body can have abreactions and re-experience pain even before the soul connects the memory. The body matters.

The soul is best understood as mind, will, emotions, and intellect. Hebrews 10:39 says we believe to the saving of the soul. The soul is the part of us that takes the journey of sanctification with God. Some believers do not want to commit to a process of maturity. Go ahead, leave your vacuum cleaner unplugged. I am here to help you plug it in. Romans 12:2 says be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Without the Word, you will struggle. Period.

Now here is where most teaching stops short. Some say the heart is the spirit. That cannot be right. In Ephesians 3, Paul prays over Christians at Ephesus that Christ would dwell in their hearts by faith. Why would Paul be confused about that if Christ were already in their hearts the second they got saved? When I studied the Hebrew word for heart, leb, and the Greek word kardia, all the definitional characteristics relate to the function of the soul. So I understand the heart as the lowest component of the soul that interfaces with the spirit. Romans 2:29 literally reads "circumcision of the heart in the spirit." The heart is a gateway.

The heart is also a territory. It can be divided. The parable of the sower says the enemy snatched up the seed from the wayside ground, and Jesus called that ground the heart. The heart is the primary real estate of the spirit realm, because the spirits that rule the hearts of men rule the societies that occupy the geographies on this planet.

The heart is your subconscious. You do not have direct access to it in your waking hours, which is why preachers can yell "stop sinning" and nothing changes. The CPU is buried below the surface. There are three main ways to program the heart: revelation, repetition, and trauma. The kingdom of darkness loves trauma because it is fast and brutal.

Picture a three-year-old being belted to a pulp. There is no physical escape. There is no safe person. So the child goes away in their soul. They draw back. They distance their consciousness from the event. But the mind cannot fully abdicate. So a part of the soul stays in the moment and gets to own the identity "abused, raped, worthless, hated." Then the event stops. The part that escaped comes back and says, "Excuse me, I do not know you. You are not part of my life." That is an amnesiac wall. That is dissociation.

What this means is that there are parts of a person carrying lies and beliefs in their heart that run background programs. Anyone know what happens to a computer running ten thousand background programs? It slows down. It gets laggy. That is the Christian life for most believers. Isaiah 61 says Jesus came to bind up the brokenhearted. Brokenhearted is not just sad. Brokenhearted is parts of the heart split off and stuck. He has come to make us whole.

The spirit is the transdimensional component of your design. By design it is able to occupy both your body and a position in heaven in Christ at the same time, spanning dimensions. That is how 1 Corinthians 6:17 makes sense: "He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him." Many Christians spend their entire lives living out of their soul. Everything is a soulish response. Soulish Christians get really good at being fake Christians. But your true identity comes from your spirit, and assignment is woven into the very fabric of your spirit. If you are disconnected from your spirit, you cannot find your true purpose. You can only make one up.

I learned to talk to my own spirit. One day I sat in my office and said, "Daniel's spirit, I invite you to come forward." I felt so small. And the first thing out of his mouth was a statement of identity. He started speaking everything I had been arguing with God about in my prayer journal. "God, no way. God, that is too good." My own spirit just spoke it back to me. I realized I was not only arguing with God. I was arguing with my own spirit who agreed with God.

Then I learned the spirit comes in facets. Isaiah 11 lists the sevenfold spirit of God. We are made in His image, so we have a sevenfold spirit as well. Romans 12 lists the gifts of the Father: prophet, server, teacher, exhorter, giver, leader, mercy. These are not just abilities. They are components of your design. When all seven facets are aligned and released in Christ, you walk in a whole new dimension of capacity for relationship with God and execution of your assignment.

This is what we mean when we say healing has to travel. The body, the soul, the heart, the spirit. Every layer matters. Every layer needs Jesus. Get the vacuum cleaner plugged in.