Transcript from the Christian Life Coach Collective Podcast:
Episode 168
Okay, so we're with Patty Myers and she is a life coach who really has a passion for identity and purpose, and we're starting a series talking about exactly those things. So I wanted to have her on and actually talk about why we want to do this series, and why we believe so. It's so important to have an understanding of your identity, an understanding of your purpose, and break it down a little bit.
This will be the first episode of the series where we're just going to talk about why we're talking about this and the basics of it, and then we'll dig deeper into each one of these things in the following episodes. So hey, Patty, thanks for being on the podcast.
Patty: Hey Laura, Good morning.
Laura: I just want you to jump in. My listeners know that on the podcast I talk about the difference between the spirit, soul, and body. You and I talk a lot about blessing the spirit to lead the soul and body. That's what I talk about in self-leadership and spiritual and self-growth, all of these things. If they've heard other episodes, they've kind of heard me delve into that a little bit.
I would love for you to give an overview of your understanding of spirit, soul, and body and I know you've got some scriptures to relate to it and your heart behind people, believers, understanding the importance of knowing their identity and God and using that as kind of like the foundation for finding their purpose in life.
Patty: Yeah, that's so good. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on to talk about this. I know I wish that I would have had access to some kind of podcast or teaching like this many years ago. Even as a believer, gosh, I've been saved for over 30 years and just coming to the understanding of our spirit, our soul, and our body, and even chatting about how to bless your spirit to come to the front to lead your soul and your body.
I think until a couple of years ago, to be quite honest, I wasn't even really sure what that meant. It's like what do you mean? My spirit is coming to the front to lead my soul and my body? My spirit obviously perked up to go wow, what is that? I'm not sure I've ever heard that before or, more importantly, I'm pretty sure I've never done that before. I think there's lots of conversation surrounding what is your spirit, soul, and body.
Believers and non-believers, we tend to look at it the way the world looks at it, which is to say, say it exactly the other way around body, soul, and spirit. But the truth is we are this triune, being like the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We have a spirit, a soul, and a physical body so just breaking that down and learning to understand what is my spirit. I listened to a teaching from Christine Potter, who's now gone on to be with the Lord, but you know just the way that she explained her spirit.
Man and the human spirit. The human spirit is the place where you encounter God. Your soul and your body line up according to your spirit. So that's why we talk about blessing our spirit first, because when we get saved and jump in anytime here just to share your heart on this as well, like when we get saved, our spirit, man, is activated.
We have a human spirit, we have a soul where our mind, our will, and our emotions are housed, but we don't want to live out of our mind, our will, and our emotions. When we say yes before the Father, before we say yes to Jesus, we have a human spirit and we have our mind, our will, and our emotions and we have our physical bodies and we've talked a lot about in the past about how which part of that we live out of. Do we live out of our mind, our will, or our emotions? But when we come to know Jesus as our Lord and Savior He inhabits our spirit, so our spirit man is able to hear from and encounter the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. And that's why we call our spirit man to line up, to have preeminence, to take charge over my mind, over my will, over my emotions, and over my physical body.
Laura: Right, yeah, and then I think it's Ephesians 2 that says that while we were spiritually dead in our disobedience, He brought us to life with Christ. It's by God's grace that you have been saved, Ephesians 2. And essentially, before you accept Jesus and jump into a relationship with Him, and invite Him into your heart, you are just kind of walking asleep through life. Essentially, you're living this life with your soul leading and your body leading. The things that your soul and your body want are leading you, but your spirit within you, as you said, there's a lack of God's spirit, so you don't actually operate from a place of a Spirit-led life. That's when we actually say Spirit-led because Spirit-led life and Spirit-led terminology are pretty common in parts of the body of Christ today.
But does anybody actually know what that means to be Spirit-led and the fact that when you get saved, when you call on the name of Lord Jesus, you say, yes, I'll let you be the Lord, I invite you to enter my heart to become Lord of my life. Your spirit is completely redeemed. Your soul is in a restorative process. Your soul is not completely perfect at that point. Your soul just has an opportunity to become led by the spirit within you now. Now you have the DNA of your Father, the blood of Jesus, in your veins, and now that Spirit of God within you can lead your soul and your body. Before, your soul and your body were leading.
Your thoughts, everything you think about, everything you believe in your imaginations, all of your self-will, your emotions, and your brain, which is part of your body, and all of your body, like all of your nervous system, all of those things, everything is leading every decision you make, all of the path that you walk on, the direction you choose to go, is only being led by you.
When you call on Jesus. Now the spirit that you have is actually born. So that's the point of being born again. Now your spirit has become alive and is no longer dead within you, but now able to rise up so you can live a spirit-led life. And it's not just like you and your humanistic spirit leading you, it's the Spirit of God within you, it's the Spirit of your Father, that is now able to operate, and has been given permission because of your belief in what Jesus did on the cross. Now that the Spirit of God has permission and invitation to lead you.
Then you can't just live your life, thinking like He's doing whatever He wants to do, because we have the gift of free will. The Lord told me several years ago in my own battle. One day he said you refuse to acknowledge what a gift free will is. Instead, you want to control it and you wonder why we aren't just made to stop doing bad things. It is like you don't value free will.
That changed a lot of things for me, in my perspective. And because of that free will we have the power to choose Jesus and say I want to be the Bride of Christ. I want to be a Child of God, I want to be co-heir with Jesus as a son or daughter in the Kingdom, I want that. From that place we get to say yes, Lord, then the Spirit of God is immediately dwelling within us. Our spirit is completely redeemed and now alive. We are no longer asleep, which is why when people get saved, they're like suddenly hello world. You know, everything looks different. Everything is different because the spirit that was not alive within you is now alive and has eyes to see, and ears to hear, and everything looks different. But you have to actually, with your free will, choose to be led by the spirit, because your soul and your body have been used to leading you for decades.
Patty: Yes, absolutely.
Laura: That's the habit, your mind wants to just go back to the way it has always been. The Bible refers to the old man. You are a new creation so why don't you go let that new creation lead you, it will always go better for you if your spirit, like you said, comes to the front and we bless our spirit and say, like I want to be spirit-led, instead of being led by the needs, wants, desires and lust of the soul and the body which the Bible is so good.
Patty: And I wanted to just make sure that we all know that our soul has the power to override our spirit. We have a choice like you're saying, this free will that we have doesn't mean that all of a sudden, we're never going to make a wrong decision, because we do actually choose in those moments and everybody knows what I'm talking about in times of frustration. I think what happens is the Holy Spirit inside of us gives us this little hey, you're about to cross the line and choose your soul and that's not what you want to do. And then we either say, oh my gosh, no. Or yes, actually I'm choosing the wrong thing at this moment, and, yes, there's always forgiveness.
We have to understand that the Father, once He comes to live inside of us and inhabit our spirit man, we have a choice every time and it's so important to really put on your spirit blessing every day because there's so much against us out there like the devil, who is just a liar and he’s running around trying to kill, steal, and destroy.
You don't just put on your spirit man, and then you're done. It's like a daily thing and if we don't, we tend to run into trouble and that's where we can find ourselves so often. But it's a choice, a joyful choice, that we should gladly make every morning, actually before we even get out of bed, right?
Laura: Right and it's something that when you're not paying attention, when you're just living life, by default you're just going on throughout the day doing whatever you do, as opposed to being before. You can be led by someone. You have to be aware of them, you have to be able to recognize their presence and their ability to lead you and you have to want to follow them.
The Spirit that we want to lead us is the Spirit of God within us, and so it's an awareness and a value and then an agreement to let Him lead us, to let Him lead our soul and body. But we have to do that on a daily basis and that's, I believe, closely tied to putting on the whole armor of God, taking our thoughts captive, and actually living a life throughout the day. These things are real, they're constant, they're more real than the chair I'm sitting in. But you have to actually become aware that the Spirit of God is speaking and leading If you invite Him to, but He's not going to control our lives.
Patty: That's why it's a great prayer to have intentionality every day and to bless your spirit, to lead your soul and your body to have preeminence and just to ask the Lord. That's when we just become so God aware as believers, you know, I think we, we walk into this maturity when we're becoming more aware. At least that's the way we're supposed to grow. We get to know Jesus. One day we were lost in the muck and the mire and in an instant, when we said yes to Jesus, were changed. But then that whole process is the process of maturing and believing, and some people get there faster than others. But I'm telling you, if I had known about this years ago, I feel like I may have been farther, but at the same time I know where I'm supposed to be.
God's pattern is our spirit, our soul, and our body in that order and not the other way around. And I was reading in First Thessalonians 5:23, where it says may God Himself, the God of Peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Yet a lot of times people often quote that verse, as body, soul, and spirit, like we were talking about a few minutes ago. That's how we've lived our lives, like you said, leading from our bodily appetites and soul satisfactions. And here we have this opportunity to turn and To be kept blameless.
That doesn't mean that we never sin or that we don't walk in the fullness of our calling or identity every single day, but it means that we have the opportunity and we're made aware continually when we bless our spirit-man, we're made aware continually when we need to shift, when we need to say oh no, that's not who I am. I know we've talked a lot about “I am” statements in the past and we use them in those instances when things are about to go south right, “I am a child of God”. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Oh no, not on my watch Devil, my child was not doing that in Jesus' name, because she was called to be a prophetess to the nations. And those are all ways that we can bless our spirit by reminding ourselves of who we are in Jesus.
Laura: I just think the people who have either been taught to think this way or who maybe just naturally, given their personality and way they operate in life, oh, who think, okay, that redemption of my spirit, now my spirit's born again and I'm alive, but my soul keeps choosing things that my spirit wouldn't have me choose, my body still wants things that aren't good for me, et cetera, and just the shame that comes with that, the condemnation that we can heap on ourselves.
We don't need the devil to do that, we are really good at it on our own and so we can just take responsibility for how we envision and interpret that, as opposed to blaming it on the Devil, which means it feels like we can't do anything about it. But when we take responsibility and say oh, the power is mine to not live under the legalistic condemnation, because the whole Bible talks about God's mercy, in that He knows the way of our soul and our body, which is why He offered redemption through the cross. That's why the bridge was built, and He knows that we don't become perfect in our whole body.
At the moment we accept Jesus and the revelation that there is permission because He knows our soul is in a restorative process for the rest of our days. We are on a path to pursuing His Spirit within us, to pursuing a life like Jesus, but not held to this standard where we have no permission to be who we are in the process, and if we are, then woe to you. Just to break that down, a little bit of your soul is still going to be your soul.
Patty: That's so good. I was just thinking while you were talking about that scripture. I mean we have so many. We could read through the whole Bible, through the Old Testament and the New Testament, and we can find people who love God with their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and they're just totally jacked up. And we can look at Paul when he says the things that I wanna do I do not do and the things that I don't wanna do I do? So I mean, right there he's talking about the battle of the soul. Has he invited Jesus to be his Lord and Savior? Oh my gosh, you know he had the experience where he was knocked off his horse and he was blind and the Father came to him and totally redeemed him, but he still went through trial and tribulation. But he kept reminding himself and like David said, I bless the Lord oh my soul, why are you downcast within me? We're just continually having to get it right again, and again, and again.
It doesn't mean we're not good enough. It means we're on the journey and you're right, our soul's being redeemed and we're learning and growing in our maturity as we walk this thing out called life with the Lord.
Laura: Yeah, well, I think we set out to introduce this series and the way it went really deep.
Patty: We did, let's just go in.
Laura: Maybe we'll wrap up this moment. I'm excited to come back in the future and in the next episodes and talk about identity in Christ as well as, your unique original design identity, and also talk about different types of purpose in our life, or our original design purpose, like at its core and its foundation.
We're gonna talk about what that really is and then all of the unique and seasonal purposes in our life that kind of are built on top of that foundational purpose in God. Yeah, I think we're gonna talk about a lot of really amazing things that our listeners understand, not just for themselves, but if they are coaches help them help their clients understand if they are parents be able to share this and sow it into their children, be able to sow it into one another, be mentors to one another with the truth, the word of God, and be able to have the language to explain because there are so many people out there searching for identity and purpose. That's the human question “Who am I and what am I made for right?” So we're going to dive deeper into what we would say as coaches to people searching for identity and purpose and kind of lay the groundwork for that.
Patty: So yeah, I'm really looking forward.
Laura: Yeah, that'll be fun and you're always fun to be on a podcast with!
Okay, listeners, I will just tell you to keep your ear out for the next episode because it's gonna get deeper in here. Put on your pretty tall black boots that are made for walking. Not the boots for digging through the yucky stuff, but the tall black boots made for a nice night out where you're gonna get some wisdom and revelation that you can pass along. We can call those black boots of your high calling.
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Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body. 1 Thess 5:23
But God's mercy is so abundant, and his love for us is so great, that while we were spiritually dead in our disobedience he brought us to life with Christ. It is by God's grace that you have been saved. Eph 2:4,5
There must be awareness of God within us, value and honor for His spirit, and an invitation for His Spirit to lead us.