Quotes about Spirit

Andrew Murray once said that what the church and individuals have to dread is the inordinate activity of the soul with its power of mind and will. F. B. Meyer declared that had he not known about the dividing of spirit and soul, he could not have imagined what his spiritual life would have been. Many others, such as Otto Stockmayer, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Evan Roberts, Madame Guyon, have given the same testimony.

The soul seeks to retain its authority and move independently, while the spirit strives to possess and master everything for the maintenance of God's authority.

Here is invariably a spiritual fact: Our spirit is released according to the degree of our brokenness.

How pitiful it must be when the flesh gains dominion. Sin has slain the spirit:

Only if we completely acknowledge that what man requires today is God's life: the quickening of the spirit: will we then perceive how vain is any work performed by ourselves.

Emotion must go through the cross (Matt. 10.38-39) in order to destroy its fiery nature, with its confusion, and to subject it totally to the spirit. The cross aims to accord the spirit authority to rule over every activity of emotion.

power of the Holy Spirit is superabundant.

Suppose, for example, a brother has a brilliant but unbroken intellect. He may come to the meetings of a local church, but he is untouched. Unless he meets someone whose mind is sharper than his, he will not be helped. He will analyze the thoughts of the preacher and reject them as useless and meaningless. Months and years may pass by, and it is impossible for anything to touch his spirit. His spirit is stonewalled by his intellectual mind.

The soul is the seat of the affections, and what a great part of our decisions and actions is influenced by these! There is nothing deliberately sinful about them, mind you. It is just that there is something in us which can go out in natural affection to another person, and which, ungoverned by the Spirit, can influence wrongly our whole course of action.

If man's soul wills to obey God, it will allow the spirit to rule over the man as ordered by God. The soul, if it chooses, also can suppress the spirit and take some other delight as lord of the man.

The first and foremost sign of new birth in anyone is that he knows God intuitively, for his spirit has been quickened.

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.