Reference: Spirit
American
A word employed in various senses in Scripture.
1. For THE HOLY SPIRIT, the third person of the Holy Trinity, who inspired the prophets, animates good men, pours his unction into our hearts, imparts to us life and comfort; and in whose name we are baptized and blessed, as well as in that of the Father and the Son. When the adjective Holy is applied to the term Spirit, we should always understand it as here explained; but there are many places whether it must be taken in this sense, although the term Holy is omitted. See HOLY SPIRIT.
2. BREATH, respiration; or the principle of animal life, common to men and animal: this God has given, and this he recalls when he takes away life, Ec 3:21. See SOUL.
3. The RATIONAL SOUL which animates us, and preserves its being after the death of the body. That spiritual, reasoning, and choosing substance, which is capable of eternal happiness. See SOUL.
The "spirits in prison," 1Pe 3:19, it is generally thought, are the souls of antediluvian sinners now reserved unto the judgment-day, but unto whom the Spirit preached by the agency of Noah, etc., 2Pe 2:5, when they were in the flesh. Thus Christ "preached" to the Ephesians, whom he never visited in person, Eph 2:17.
4. An ANGEL, good or bad; a soul separate from the body, Mr 14:26. It is said, Ac 23:8, that the Sadducees denied the existence of angels and spirits. Christ, appearing to his disciples, said to them, Lu 24:39, "Handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have."
5. The DISPOSITION of the mind or intellect. Thus we read of a spirit of jealously, a spirit of fornication, a spirit of prayer, a spirit of infirmity, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of fear of the Lord, Ho 4:12; Zec 12:10; Lu 13:11; Isa 11:2.
6. The RENEWED NATURE of true believers, which is produced by the Holy Spirit, and conforms the soul to his likeness. Spirit is thus the opposite of flesh, Joh 3:6. This spirit is virally united with, an in some passages can hardly be distinguished from the "Spirit of Christ," which animates true Christians, the children of God, and distinguishes them from the children of darkness, who are animated by the spirit of the world, Ro 8:1-16. This indwelling Spirit is the gift of grace, of adoption-the Holy Spirit poured into our hearts-which emboldens us to call God "Abba, my Father." Those who are influenced by this Spirit "have crucified the flesh, with its affections and lusts," Ga 5:16-25.
Distinguishing or discerning of spirits consisted in discerning whether a man were really inspired by the Spirit of God, or was a false prophet, an impostor, who only followed the impulse of his own spirit or of Satan. Paul speaks, 1Co 12:10 of the discerning of spirits as being among the miraculous gifts granted by God to the faithful at the first settlement of Christianity.
To "quench the Spirit," 1Th 5:19, is a metaphorical expression easily understood. The Spirit may be quenched by forcing, as it were, that divine Agent to withdraw from us, by irregularity of life, frivolity, avarice, negligence, or other sins contrary to charity, truth, peace, and his other gifts and qualifications.
We "grieve" the Spirit of God by withstanding his holy inspirations, the impulses of his grace; or by living in a lukewarm and incautious manner; by despising his gifts, or neglecting them; by abusing his favors, either out of vanity, curiosity, or indifference. In a contrary sense, 2Ti 1:6, we "stir up" the Spirit of God which is in us, by the practice of virtue, by compliance with his inspirations, by fervor in his service, by renewing our gratitude, and by diligently serving Christ and doing the works of the Spirit.
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After singing the hymn they went out of the city and up the Mount of Olives.
and there was a woman there who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit. She was bent double and could not straighten herself up at all.
Look at my hands and feet, for it is I myself! Feel of me and see, for a ghost has not flesh and bones, as you see I have."
Whatever owes its birth to the physical is physical, and whatever owes its birth to the Spirit is spiritual.
For the Sadducees hold that there is no resurrection and that there are no angels or spirits, while the Pharisees believe in all three.
So there is no condemnation any more for those who are in union with Christ Jesus. For the life-giving law of the Spirit through Christ Jesus has freed you from the Law of sin and death. read more. For though it was impossible for the Law to do it, hampered as it was by our physical limitations, God, by sending his own Son in our sinful physical form, as a sin-offering, put his condemnation upon sin through his physical nature, so that the requirement of the Law might be fully met in our case, since we live not on the physical but on the spiritual plane. People who are controlled by the physical think of what is physical, and people who are controlled by the spiritual think of what is spiritual. For to be physically minded means death, but to be spiritually minded means life and peace. For to be physically minded means hostility to God, for it refuses to obey God's law, indeed it cannot obey it. Those who are physical cannot please God. But you are not physical but spiritual, if God's Spirit has really taken possession of you; for unless a man has Christ's spirit, he does not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in your hearts, though your bodies are dead in consequence of sin, your spirits have life in consequence of uprightness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead has taken possession of you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give your mortal bodies life through his Spirit that has taken possession of you. So, brothers, we are under obligations, but not to the physical nature, to live under its control, for if you live under the control of the physical you will die, but if, by means of the Spirit, you put the body's doings to death, you will live. For all who are guided by God's Spirit are God's sons. It is not a consciousness of servitude that has been imparted to you, to fill you with fear again, but the consciousness of adoption as sons, which makes us cry, "Abba!" that is, Father. The Spirit itself testifies with our spirits that we are God's children,
another, the working of wonders, another, inspiration in preaching, another, the power of distinguishing the true Spirit from false ones, another, various ecstatic utterances, and another, the ability to explain them.
I mean this: Live by the Spirit, and then you will not indulge your physical cravings. For the physical cravings are against the Spirit, and the cravings of the Spirit are against the physical; the two are in opposition, so that you cannot do anything you please. read more. But if you are guided by the Spirit, you are not subject to law. The things our physical nature does are clear enough??mmorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, quarreling, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party-spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you as I did before that people who do such things will have no share in the Kingdom of God. But what the Spirit produces is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. There is no law against such things! Those who belong to Jesus the Christ have crucified the physical nature with its propensities and cravings. If we live by the Spirit, let us be guided by the Spirit.
He came with the good news of peace for you who were far away and for those who were near;
Do not stifle the Spirit.
For this reason I would remind you to rekindle the divine gift that you received when I laid my hands upon you.
In it Enoch went and preached even to those spirits that were in prison,
and if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others, when he brought the flood upon the godless world;
Easton
(Heb ruah; Gr. pneuma), properly wind or breath. In 2Th 2:8 it means "breath," and in Ec 8:8 the vital principle in man. It also denotes the rational, immortal soul by which man is distinguished (Ac 7:59; 1Co 5:5; 6:20; 7:34), and the soul in its separate state (Heb 12:23), and hence also an apparition (Job 4:15; Lu 24:37,39), an angel (Heb 1:14), and a demon (Lu 4:36; 10:20). This word is used also metaphorically as denoting a tendency (Zec 12:10; Lu 13:11).
In Ro 1:4; 1Ti 3:16; 2Co 3:17; 1Pe 3:18, it designates the divine nature.
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And they were all amazed and said to one another, "What is the meaning of this teaching? For he gives orders authoritatively and effectually to the foul spirits, and they come out."
But do not be glad that the spirits submit to you, but be glad that your names are enrolled in heaven."
and there was a woman there who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit. She was bent double and could not straighten herself up at all.
Look at my hands and feet, for it is I myself! Feel of me and see, for a ghost has not flesh and bones, as you see I have."
As they stoned Stephen, he prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!"
and decisively declared Son of God in his holiness of spirit, by being raised from the dead??esus Christ our Lord,
And whatever you have to say or do, do it all as followers of the Lord Jesus, and offer your thanksgiving to God the Father through him.
Then the embodiment of disobedience will make his appearance, and the Lord Jesus will destroy him with the breath of his mouth and annihilate him by his appearance and arrival.
Are not the angels all spirits in service, whom he sends on his errands for the good of those who are destined to possess salvation?
to the solemn gathering of all God's elder sons, enrolled as citizens in heaven, to a judge who is the God of all, to the spirits of upright men now at last enjoying the fulfilment of their hopes,
Fausets
Hebrew ruach, Greek pneuma. Man in his normal integrity ("whole," holokleeron, complete in all its parts, 1Th 5:23) consists of "spirit, soul, and body." The spirit links man with higher intelligences, and is that highest part receptive of the quickening Holy Spirit (1Co 15:47). The soul (Hebrew nephesh, Greek psuchee) is intermediate between body and spirit; it is the sphere of the will and affections.
In the unspiritual, the spirit is so sunk under the animal soul (which it ought to keep under) that such are "animal" ("seasonal," having merely the body of organized matter and the soul, the immaterial animating essence), "having not the spirit" (Jg 1:19; Jas 3:15; 1Co 2:14; 15:44-48; Joh 3:6). The unbeliever shall rise with an animal (soul-animated) body, but not, like the believer, with a spiritual (spirit-endued) body like Christ's (Ro 8:11).
The soul is the seat of the appetites, the desires, the will; hunger, thirst, sorrow, joy; love, hope, fear, etc.; so that nephesh is the man himself, and is used for person, self, creature, any: a virtual contradiction of materialism, implying that the unseen soul rather than the seen body is the man. "Man was made" not a living body but "a living soul." "The blood, the life," links together body and soul (Le 17:11).
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Whatever owes its birth to the physical is physical, and whatever owes its birth to the Spirit is spiritual.
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead has taken possession of you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give your mortal bodies life through his Spirit that has taken possession of you.
The first man is of the dust of the earth; the second man is from heaven.
canceled the bond which stood against us, with its requirements, and put it out of our way when he nailed it to the cross.
May God himself, the giver of peace, consecrate you through and through. Spirit, soul, and body, may you be kept sound, and be found irreproachable when our Lord Jesus Christ comes.
Such wisdom does not come from above. It is earthly, animal, demon-like.
Hastings
The term is applied to God as defining His nature generally (Joh 4:24), and also as describing one element in that nature, His self-consciousness (1Co 2:11). It expresses not only God's immateriality, but also His transcendence of limitations of time and space. In the phrases 'Spirit of God,' the 'Spirit of the Lord,' the 'Spirit of Jesus Christ,' the 'Holy Spirit,' the 'Spirit of Truth,' the third Person in the Godhead is described (see Holy Spirit). The term is applied to personal powers of evil other than man (Mt 10:1; 12:45; Lu 4:33; 7:21; 1Ti 4:1; cf. Eph 6:12), as well as personal powers of good (Heb 1:14), and to human beings after death, either damned (1Pe 3:19) or blessed (Heb 12:23). It is used also as personifying an influence (1Jo 4:6; Eph 2:2; Ro 8:15). Its most distinctive use is in the psychology of the Christian life. The contrast between 'soul' and 'spirit,' and between 'flesh' and 'spirit,' has already been noted in the articles on these terms. While soul and spirit are not to be regarded as separate faculties, yet 'spirit' expresses the direct dependence of the life in man on God, first in creation (Ge 2:7), but especially, according to the Pauline doctrine, in regeneration. The life in man, isolating itself from, and opposing itself to, God, is soul; that life, cleansed and renewed by the Spirit of God, is spirit; intimate as is the relation of God and man in the new life, the Spirit of God is distinguished from the spirit of man (Ro 8:16), although it is not always possible to make the distinction. In Acts the phrase 'holy spirit' sometimes means the subjective human state produced ('holy enthusiasm'), and sometimes the objective Divine cause producing (see 'Acts' in the Century Bible, p. 386). As the Spirit is the source of this new life, whatever belongs to it is 'spiritual' (pneumatikon), as house, sacrifices (1Pe 2:5), understanding (Col 1:9), songs (Col 3:16), food, drink, rock (1Co 10:3-4); and the 'spiritual' and 'soulish' (rendered 'carnal' or 'natural') are contrasted (1Co 2:14; 15:44,46). Spirit as an ecstatic state is also distinguished from mind (1Co 14:14,16), as inwardness from letter (Ro 2:29; 7:6; 2Co 3:6). The old creation
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Then he called his twelve disciples to him, and gave them power over the foul spirits so that they could drive them out, and so that they could heal any disease or illness.
Then it goes and gets seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there, and in the end the man is worse off than he was before. That is the way it will be with this present wicked age."
There was a man in the synagogue who was possessed by the spirit of a foul demon and he cried out loudly,
Just then he cured many of diseases and ailments and evil spirits, and he gave sight to many who were blind.
God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship him in spirit and in sincerity."
The real Jew is the man who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, a spiritual, not a literal, thing. Such a man receives his praise not from men, but from God.
But now the Law no longer applies to us; we have died to what once controlled us, so that we can now serve in the new Spirit, not under the old letter.
So there is no condemnation any more for those who are in union with Christ Jesus. For the life-giving law of the Spirit through Christ Jesus has freed you from the Law of sin and death. read more. For though it was impossible for the Law to do it, hampered as it was by our physical limitations, God, by sending his own Son in our sinful physical form, as a sin-offering, put his condemnation upon sin through his physical nature, so that the requirement of the Law might be fully met in our case, since we live not on the physical but on the spiritual plane. People who are controlled by the physical think of what is physical, and people who are controlled by the spiritual think of what is spiritual. For to be physically minded means death, but to be spiritually minded means life and peace. For to be physically minded means hostility to God, for it refuses to obey God's law, indeed it cannot obey it. Those who are physical cannot please God. But you are not physical but spiritual, if God's Spirit has really taken possession of you; for unless a man has Christ's spirit, he does not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in your hearts, though your bodies are dead in consequence of sin, your spirits have life in consequence of uprightness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead has taken possession of you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give your mortal bodies life through his Spirit that has taken possession of you. So, brothers, we are under obligations, but not to the physical nature, to live under its control, for if you live under the control of the physical you will die, but if, by means of the Spirit, you put the body's doings to death, you will live. For all who are guided by God's Spirit are God's sons. It is not a consciousness of servitude that has been imparted to you, to fill you with fear again, but the consciousness of adoption as sons, which makes us cry, "Abba!" that is, Father.
It is not a consciousness of servitude that has been imparted to you, to fill you with fear again, but the consciousness of adoption as sons, which makes us cry, "Abba!" that is, Father. The Spirit itself testifies with our spirits that we are God's children,
The Spirit itself testifies with our spirits that we are God's children, and if children, heirs also; heirs of God, and fellow-heirs with Christ, if we really share his sufferings in order to share his glory too.
For what human being can understand a man's thoughts except the man's own spirit within him? Just so no one understands the thoughts of God but the spirit of God.
A material man will not accept what the Spirit of God offers. It seems mere folly to him, and he cannot understand it, because it takes spiritual insight to see its true value.
and all ate the same supernatural food and drank the same supernatural drink??for they used to drink from a supernatural rock which attended them, and the rock was really Christ??5 still most of them disappointed God, for they were struck down in the desert.
For if I pray ecstatically, it is my spirit that prays, but my mind is helping nobody.
For if you utter blessings in ecstatic speech, how is an ordinary man to say Amen to your thanksgiving? For he does not know what you are saying.
It is a physical body that is sown, it is a spiritual body that is raised. If there is a physical body, there is a spiritual body also.
It is not the spiritual that comes first, but the physical, and then the spiritual.
in the midst of which you once lived under the control of the present age of the world, and the master-spirit of the air, who is still at work among the disobedient.
For we have to struggle, not with enemies of flesh and blood, but with the hierarchies, the authorities, the master-spirits of this dark world, the spirit-forces of evil on high.
That is why, from the day I first heard of it, I have never given up praying for you and asking God to fill you, through full spiritual wisdom and insight, with a clear knowledge of what his will is,
Through your relation to him you have received not a physical circumcision, but a circumcision effected by Christ, in stripping you of your material nature, when in your baptism you were buried with him, and raised to life with him through your faith in the power of God who raised him from the dead.
It is on account of these things that God's anger is coming.
Let the message of Christ live in your hearts in all its wealth of wisdom. Teach it to one another and train one another in it with thankfulness, with psalms, hymns, and sacred songs, and sing to God with all your hearts.
Are not the angels all spirits in service, whom he sends on his errands for the good of those who are destined to possess salvation?
to the solemn gathering of all God's elder sons, enrolled as citizens in heaven, to a judge who is the God of all, to the spirits of upright men now at last enjoying the fulfilment of their hopes,
and build yourselves up as living stones into a spiritual house for a consecrated priesthood, so as to offer spiritual sacrifices that through Jesus Christ will be acceptable to God.
In it Enoch went and preached even to those spirits that were in prison,
We are God's children. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not a child of God will not listen to us. In this way we can tell what is inspired by truth from what is inspired by error.
Morish
See SOUL.
Watsons
SPIRIT, in Hebrew, ??? in Greek, ??????, and in Latin, spiritus, is in the Scriptures sometimes taken for the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Holy Trinity. The word signifies also the reasonable soul which animates us, and continues in existence even after the death of the body; that spiritual, thinking and reasoning substance, which is capable of eternal happiness, Nu 16:22; Ac 7:59. The term spirit is also often used for an angel, a demon, and a ghost, or soul separate from the body. It is said, in Ac 23:8, that the Sadducees denied the existence of angels and spirits. Jesus Christ appearing to his disciples, said to them, Lu 24:39, "Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have." And St. Paul calls the good angels "ministering spirits," Heb 1:14. In 1Sa 16:14; 18:10; 19:9, it is said that an evil spirit from the Lord troubled Saul: and we have also the expression unclean spirits. Add to this, spirit is sometimes put for the disposition of the heart or mind: see Nu 5:14; Zec 12:10; Lu 13:11; Isa 11:2. Discerning of spirits, or the secret character and thoughts of men, was a gift of God, and placed among the miraculous gifts of the Holy Ghost, 1Co 12:10; 1Jo 4:1.
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and there was a woman there who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit. She was bent double and could not straighten herself up at all.
Look at my hands and feet, for it is I myself! Feel of me and see, for a ghost has not flesh and bones, as you see I have."
As they stoned Stephen, he prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!"
For the Sadducees hold that there is no resurrection and that there are no angels or spirits, while the Pharisees believe in all three.
another, the working of wonders, another, inspiration in preaching, another, the power of distinguishing the true Spirit from false ones, another, various ecstatic utterances, and another, the ability to explain them.
Are not the angels all spirits in service, whom he sends on his errands for the good of those who are destined to possess salvation?