The human spirit is the deepest part of our being and was created by God to contact and receive Him.
Footnote 1 on Genesis 2:7 in the Holy Bible Recovery Version explains
the meaning of the spirit in this verse:
“Man’s spirit is his inward organ for him to contact God, receive God, contain God,
and assimilate God into His entire being as his life and his everything.”
This ability of our spirit to contact and receive God can be illustrated by a radio. A radio, turned on and properly tuned, can receive the invisible radio waves in the air. This is something a coffee pot or microwave can’t do. In fact, a radio is the only apparatus that can properly receive and interpret those radio waves.
Our human spirit is like that radio, and God is like the radio waves. Our spirit is the part of us that can receive and contact God. Our other parts—our body and our soul—are important, but they function in other ways.
It is only by our spirit that we can contact and know God, who is Spirit.
What makes your human spirit so important?
Our human spirit is very important to God because God desires to fill us with Himself. He wants us to receive Him, and our spirit is the unique “receiver.” Our Christian life begins with our human spirit. Consider what John 3:6 says:
“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
Footnote 2 on this verse in the Recovery Version says this:
“The first Spirit mentioned here is the divine Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God, and the second spirit is the human spirit, the regenerated spirit of man. Regeneration is accomplished in the human spirit by the Holy Spirit of God with God’s life, the uncreated eternal life. Thus, to be regenerated is to have the divine, eternal life (in addition to the human, natural life) as the new source and new element of a new person.”
This means that from the moment we believe into God’s Son, Jesus, His Spirit enters into our human spirit and we are reborn! We’re born of God, we receive His divine, eternal life in our spirit, and we become His children. Our human spirit is the unique place for God’s Spirit to enter into us to make us His children,
and it is also the place from which he goes on to fill our entire being.
Our human spirit and the Christian life
Once we realize that the Lord Jesus lives in our spirit, we need to apply this revelation by practicing to use our spirit to contact Him and receive Him as our life all the time. Here are some ways we can do this:
We can practice contacting the Lord Jesus in our spirit first thing each morning, and then continually throughout the day. We can do this even by simply calling on His name—“Lord Jesus!”
This is like spiritual breathing.
We can use our spirit to contact the Lord in prayer and to pray with God’s Word. Rather than seeking an emotional feeling when we pray or focusing on understanding the Bible in a mental way when we read, we must learn to turn deeply to the Lord who is right in our spirit. Our Bible reading and prayer will then be fresher and full of the divine life. We’ll taste God each time we pray and read His Word, and our hunger for the Lord and His Word will increase.
The human spirit is a component of human philosophy, psychology, art, and knowledge – the spiritual or mental part of humanity. While the term can be used with the same meaning as “human soul”, human spirit is sometimes used to refer to the impersonal, universal or higher component of human nature in contrast to soul or psyche which can refer to the ego or lower element.
The human spirit includes our intellect, emotions, fears, passions, and creativity.
If we don’t believe that what happens to the ‘human’ is spiritually relevant, we won’t bother to improve our behavior or become more inclusive in our thinking. We won’t stop to look at our effect on each other. We won’t bother to worry about human rights, or healing our trauma, or crafting legal and political structures that reflect our sacred significance. Why would we bother to focus on inclusivity and human value if we believe that our experience of God or Enlightenment or Divinity, is not down here among us, but is way up there,
far above the human fray?
Are we human beings living a spiritual experience or are we
spiritual beings living a human life?
‘Spirituality’ has been seen as above and beyond our ‘faulty’ humanness.
I often wonder this when I think of the Rutschilling Family, a family that has experienced more than their fair share of the trials and tribulations of life. From Wilbert living through an accident at a fire, having a teenager with cancer in the family, Mother having a stroke,a daughter having a smile on her face the day after having their house destroyed by the Memorial Day 2019 tornado and Wilbert most recently falling at 91 and
cracking 4 ribs they always seemingly bounce back with a smile on their face.
In The Memory of The Dedicated Walker
By William Kincaid
MARIA STEIN – Though he was blind for most of his life he never utilized a guide dog,
Gilbert Rutschilling perceived the lay of the land and the flora and fauna that inhabit it with extraordinary precision. Simply by listening, a sense he was compelled to hone to compensate for his lack of sight, Gilbert could name a bird by the sound of its song, know when it was safe to cross the road and determine a person’s surname by the way he or she talked.
“He could hear a mouse run through a ditch. He could hear a leaf blow across the parking lot from inside the house,” said his nephew Ben Huelskamp, who lived with his uncle for 21 years. “His brain could focus on his hearing, not that his hearing was any better than yours or mine.”
For instance, one night when the electricity went out in the middle of the night at his chicken house, Rutschilling had to run outside to fetch the tractor to run the generator.
He found it in the middle of a field via echolocation – smacking two rocks together and listening to hear where the sound reflected back, signaling the location of the tractor.
He then drove it back to the chicken house.
“(He) stops it. Shuts it off. Hits two rocks together so he can hear the sound bounce off the building and that’s how he got the tractor to the chicken house so he could hook up his generator to save his chickens,”
Huelskamp said.
He also played a mean game of euchre at the Korner Kafe, ran an egg operation, managed a snack shop in a Cincinnati high-rise building, where he single-handedly thwarted an attempted robbery, and possessed a vast knowledge of the Cincinnati Reds, never missing a game on the radio. “He never allowed his disability affect him whatsoever. He always had a smile on his face,” Huelskamp said. “He was always happy.
He accepted things as they were.”
Rutschilling was perhaps best known for walking the streets of Maria Stein – and well beyond.
The dedicated saunterer would travel up to 5 miles on each of his constitutionals.
“He would walk anywhere from the county line up to 716,” Huelskamp said.
“If it was too windy he didn’t walk because he couldn’t hear the cars.
But otherwise, he walked whenever he could.”
Sometimes Rutschilling would be gone for hours.
People “would stop and talk to him. Sometimes he said he worked his mouth more than he worked his legs,
so many people stopped to talk to him,” Huelskamp recalled.
The man loved to walk as a way to enjoy the world around him. He was also fond of sitting still in the woods, squirrels gathering around to eat the peanuts he had tossed about.
“He could tell me who had the best cornfield or who had the best wheat field because he’d go out there and he’d feel the (crops),” Huelskamp said.
His sharpened sense of hearing, combined with a striking intelligence, a farmer’s grit and a kind heart,
allowed Rutschilling to enjoy a rich, fulfilling life, one that sadly came to an end
after a heart attack at the age of 91 on May 10.
The only thing he loved more than his walks and listening to nature was listening to baseball games, most of the time he would listen to 2 or 3 of them simultaneously. He also loved playing cards with family and friends and seldom missed a chance to play even after being injured by running into the side of a moving van. In some ways when you met Gilbert along the Road side we knew to look out after Gilbert but when he walked down into the ditch we knew he was looking out after us. Never a selfish person, Gilbert donated his body to science.
Presently we will not be able to see him again, but now he can see us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdHrXPJywow