Like this:

Tim spoke on this to fifty, mainly younger, men at LITs. I got my household group talking about it that night. Then I wrote down this summary. I always find it an inspiring subject.

What is your spirit? Your connection with God, your sixth sense, your conduit of God’s life within, your ‘knower’.

What can you do with your spirit? Your conscience and intuition are faculties of your spirit knowing directly – as Watchman Nee explained, the mind knows about spiritual things but the spirit apprehends directly. And life and power are conveyed via your spirit.

Regeneration or new birth occur when God replaces your dead human spirit with a new perfect one. Dead means unresponsive to God, not inanimate.

Your spirit is connected to the Holy Spirit by your faith, which is itself a function of your spirit. The Holy Spirit is in and alongside you but never robotises you. He is always other, transcendant, not you.

What can hinder your spirit’s function? Noise of natural life in thought or feeling or confusion, noise of reverberation from past or present trauma or stress or sickness, demonic interference, passivity.

What is a defiled spirit? It is like a headlight with mud on it, and the dirt may come from bitterness, or refusal to obey God, holding on to sin, or being deceived.

What is the heart? The deepest part of your soul, closest to your spirit. Whatever state you are in emotionally, mentally or motivationally, you are able to observe and be objective, knowing what is right and wrong. This comes from the new heart and spirit (new heart? spiritually infused and renewed inner motivation, thought and feeling).

The issue of life for a Christian is which way the soul and heart are orientated. If they are turned towards the outward man, that is the body that feeds by nature on the world, and the outer parts of the soul most occupied with natural things, such as reason or emotion moved by worldly and early matters. This constitutes the flesh,  the unspiritual soul, the self centered soul, the carnal man, the being orientated away from God. ‘To set the mind on the flesh is death’ – Romans 8.

The spiritual man (person, to sound PC) is orientated towards God, primarily via the spirit and thence the Holy Spirit. And as God’s life is channelled through your spirit, it quickens, or enlivens the soul and body also. When first baptised in the Holy Spirit, this is a flood of life that later subsides so that one must thereafter seek the flow with the will and heart. The will is the primary faculty of the soul and the lead faculty of the heart, by which the orientation of the person its effected.

To walk in the Spirit is to set the mind, meaning soul led by will and thought, on the Holy Spirit via the human spirit, as opposed to walking in the flesh by pointing the other way.

We can claim cleansing for sin by repentance (turning of the soul) and faith in the power and gift of the blood of Jesus to cleanse the heart and spirit of defilement. We can stir up our spirit and soul to receive God’s life, and we can also stir up gifts and ministry by which we pour out life from our spirit, received intuitively and interpreted and articulated mentally, plus communicated physically. That way your spiritual heart and will command your soul and body, rather than your outer man calling the tune. This is overcoming, victory and the normal condition of a child if God.

This will contain inaccuracies, for which I take responsibility.

P.S. I copied this: According to the Oxford English Dictionary “orientate=orient”. So they are the same. ‘Orient’ is older, being from the C18. ‘Orientate’ is from the C19. The Dictionary says that ‘orientate’ may be a back-formation from ‘orientation’. The past participle of ‘orient’ is ‘oriented’ and of ‘orientate’ it is ‘orientated’.
That said, surely in everyday speech in Britain we use ‘orientate’ to mean , literally or figuratively, ‘to turn in or towards a certain direction’. We don’t use ‘orient’ to mean that here. Both words originally meant ‘to turn to face the East’ but later meant to turn something to a certain point on the compass, before acquiring the meaning of ‘to turn oneself in the requisite direction’ .

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