Beloved, this is an article that was emailed to us by a friend and we like to share it with you. The Author is unknown. Please read and be edified. Rev. Kola Ewuosho.

The core of the current reformatory work of the Holy Spirit in His Church is that people must become more Christlike in the quality of their commitment to the divine will, as they yield their lives as holy habitations for the Lord, providing Him with gates into the earth as the latter is aggressively invaded with heavenly order, dispelling all forms of lawlessness and rebellion, thereby repossessing it and reincorporating it into the Kingdom of heaven, in effect bringing this fallen age to a quick and effective close.

A very important anchor of the current emphasis of the Spirit is that proper, biblical definition is being given to the subject of SALVATION. Over the years, much of the church, due to the activities of very wise and powerful spirits of deception, has lost touch with this reality of the deep dimensions of this all-important issue. Salvation and the power which flows from it, has been regrettably watered down and reduced to people merely making certain mouth confessions at so-called ‘altar calls’ that they have accepted Jesus Christ as the Lord over their lives, an activity which is usually greeted by thunderous ovation at church meetings. Almost immediately afterwards, we even attempt to ‘teach’ our converts how to speak in tongues so that these largely unsanctified vessels will not be lacking in any of the ‘Pentecostal credentials.’ They soon dissolve and blend into our congregations as ‘born-again Christians,’ becoming familiar with all of our ways and rituals: the language (‘christianese’), the clichés, all of our titles, the prayer patterns, the ‘praise and worship’ songs and choruses, our orders of service, the daily, weekly and annual ‘church programmes.’ They know the days, time and patterns of vigils, deliverance services and the conventions; they know all the various types of fasting- dry, wet, not-so-dry, etc and the routines of their observation. Also, over the time some become workers, sunday school teachers and counselors, deacons or ‘pastors’ in their various local church assemblies.

However, several years down the line, most of these people although have been baptized into a “RELIGION” called “CHRISTIANITY,” which they loudly profess, remain largely unsaved, not coming into the understanding and revelation of God’s purpose for Creation and Redemption and how their own lives fit into it. They have been made to see God erroneously as having saved them primarily to meet whatever they perceive to be their needs and so they remain yoked with and dependent on other peoples’ anointing to solve their limitless lives’ problems. All this due largely to the fact that their nature and lives have not been regenerated, redeemed, renewed and restored through the power of a transforming personal relationship with the Lord.

The bible, in Revelation 14: 3, 5, talks about a company of people who have ‘been redeemed from the earth … (who) kept themselves pure … (and) were purchased from among men and offered as firstfruits to God and the Lamb.’ This is a picture of true salvation, and the grace of God that brings it, has been made available to men (Titus 2:11).

Who then may we say is truly ‘born-again’? What is God’s concept of salvation? What precisely was in the mind of God as His objective for creating the species of being called ‘man,’ and for redeeming or repurchasing him when man fell or, as the bible puts it, ‘came short of the glory of God?’ To where is the salvation or redemption journey supposed to lead those traveling that road? What is the way of life called Christianity all about? This space and effort may be too small to do adequate justice to this subject but Jesus’ remarks in John 3:3, 5 is a good premise from where to start. The Lord predicated the sighting of or entrance into the Kingdom, first on being born again and then, on being ‘born of water and of the Spirit.’ The two processes are one and the same; Jesus merely used one to emphasise the other. They both produce the same result. And this signifies the washing effect of the word of God (water) by the activities of the Holy Spirit on our soul (the seat of our will, intellect and emotion) after our spirit must have first contacted the light of salvation.

It must be emphasized that salvation is a thoroughly spiritual process exclusively supervised by the Holy Spirit. Some issues must be vehemently clarified in the light of the points that would soon be established regarding the deeper dimensions of salvation. This has to do with the fact that a thorough salvation process in Christ Jesus culminates in the subjugation of the human will to the will of God, i.e. where the will of God actually becomes the very life that a human lives. This in reality translates into spiritual empowerment for the man under God. There is a great need for care here. Satan the devil, who always counterfeits the pure things of the Kingdom with a view to deceiving people to depart from the true way of the Lord, has inspired some pseudo-spiritual, mystical/religious groups especially of East Asian origin to also embark on unclean spiritual activities which bear some similarities to the divinely ordained process. Those who subscribe to these {metaphysics and soul exploration} embark on processes which involves the rigorous training of their minds, and by the exertion of their will, they are able to establish some form of control over themselves. They employ the use of meditation and rigorous self-denial of bodily pleasures to accomplish this. To ordinary, lesser mortals, these people appear to possess super human traits as they come away with some pseudo-spiritual abilities. Most of them actually draw and get inspiration through communication with unclean spirits. The whole reason for this is Satan’s desire to counterfeit spiritual realities and seduce or lure man permanently away from his God and therefore his purpose in creation.

The battle of salvation cannot be won by the exertion of the human will or intellect but by faith in the Lord Jesus. Those who have true faith in the Lord Jesus will invariably go on to develop a secret, personal relationship with God and cooperate with the Holy Spirit to exert the demands of the Kingdom on them. This is a process necessary to change their nature and produce a new human suitable for the Creator’s need. This is the process which also takes us beyond the status of ordinary believers and change us into PRIESTS, and of course, SONS of God, born not of natural descent or blood, not of human decision or the will of a husband, but truly born of God (John 1:12-13). It also makes it possible for us to stop being controlled by the sin nature ( Rom. 8:5-11).

At a point, most of the church became so obsessed with numbers that we lost sight of the deeper dimensions of salvation. True salvation, with its root in our apostolic foundation, is a process of going from a point of ignorance, through spiritual education, to maturity in the things of God. There is therefore a strong discipleship dimension to genuine salvation (“…till Christ is formed in you.”) While it is true that the bible says to ‘believe in the Lord Jesus and be saved,’ Jesus was also quoted as saying that only ‘he who endures to the end shall be saved.’ Salvation therefore is both an immediate occurrence and a continuing experience. The latter takes us through an effective, relevant discipleship into maturity and continuing growth till we attain perfection and/or immortality. Any salvation experience that makes us into static, religious, church-going, dependent, purpose-ignorant believers is a joke and a lie. The best that kind of thing is capable of making us is a more confused and dysfunctional humans than we were before. Such an experience lacks the power within it to bring about in us a definitive change of nature that enables us to truly see God as, and be able to sincerely call Him our Father. The fact that most of us, after our so-called ‘born-again’ experience still feel more strongly about our attachment to our earthly family members than we feel towards our spiritual family in Christ is a clear indication that we still do not have a adequate revelation of the Body of Christ, the household of faith in Christ Jesus. The fact that we still feel strong emotional affinity towards our biological parents whereas our so-called sonship of God remains largely in the realm of mental ascent or ‘faith’ as we like to put it, is due to the fact that our salvation experience is still very shallow. We have been saved into a church, we do not know the Kingdom of God.

In addition, the reason why most of us still mark and celebrate, with a lot of fanfare, the day our fallen and unregenerate selves were born, as our birthdays is because the reality of the new birth and the revelation of true salvation which occasion a definite change of paternity, have not dawned on us!

Landmarks - (The Spiritual Man)
Certain decisive points or milestones usually mark this process or the journey of salvation as we move on. It leads to a gradual renewal of our minds, and very importantly, to Christ (His nature and character) being formed in us. We also need to realize that as we are progressively being saved, an important turning point for everyone is to become a spiritual being. The spiritual person is a God-centered person. He is unlike a natural person, whose life is solely centered on self (often times an unbeliever, 1 Corinthians. 2:14) and/or a carnal person (who may or may not be a believer in Christ). He has given himself totally to the demands of faith in the Lord Jesus. He accepts fully the constraints and weight of the rule of God/the Spirit (i.e. the Kingdom) on his life. He is controlled and ruled by the Spirit of God exclusively and not by the passions of the flesh. A lot of the times, he cannot predict what he will do due to the total influence of the Spirit on him (John 8:3). He is not controlled or dominated by his sense of reason (intellect), the force of his will or his feelings (emotion). He does not respond to things which appeal to man’s lower nature (i.e. the flesh or the sin nature inherited as a result of the Fall), including gospels which seek to gratify the natural needs of man (e.g. prayers for business, prosperity, career, etc).

The spiritual man is the only Christian approved of and recognised by God, because he is the only type that can meet the need of God for sending Christ. What we see nowadays being paraded as the christian life is largely a contraption of man produced over the years through compromises with the devil and the world. Humanistic ideas and principles that suit human convenience have been courted and allowed to pollute and colour the true gospel of the Kingdom of God. This has greatly eroded in the mind of the people the Lordship of Christ, denied the power of the Cross, and succeeded only in producing people who are neither here nor there; a people of mixed or even lost identity (a sort of spiritual Samaritans).

For the avoidance of doubt, genuine spirituality (rather than affected spookiness or mere sentimentality and other forms of pretensions) has the inherent power to reverse the consequences of the Fall of man at Eden, thereby restoring the spiritual essence of the original human created by God in His own image and likeness.

The Order of a Fallen Age
The Fall refers to the experience of the first man, Adam, when he was cut off from the Life and Power of God which were the very source of his own life; and from which he sourced not only the authority to fulfill his regency role on his Creator’s behalf but also to enable him rule over and have precise answers to the challenges, circumstances and questions which life would definitely confront him with. Only in this way would his life have any real MEANING in the context of the original idea behind his creation. A consequent of the Fall is that our nature and constitution was also altered in a fundamental way. For the original man, the first Adam and later, Jesus Christ who is the last Adam and our perfect standard/model, the spiritman was distinct from the soul. The spirit (which is the only part of man that God relates to directly) was the dominant part totally in control of the man’s soul and body. This put the man (a spiritual being) effectively under God’s control. Following the Fall, the dominating spirit shrunk and collapsed right into the soul which now gained control of the man. Man then became soulish and came under the control of himself and the “gods” of this earth (i.e. fallen spirit beings).

The Fall also means that we all came into this world not really in the image and the likeness of God as Adam was before he fell (Gen. 5:1), but in the image and likeness of a fallen, degenerate man (Gen 5:3). That is one who had lost his spiritual senses and identity, and had collapsed into a material, soul-based, natural life only able to perceive things when they can be seen, touched or felt, smelled, tasted and heard (see Isaiah 59:10). The power of perception lying beyond these five physical senses had been lost. And when the bible talks of the image of God, what is meant is not God’s physical attributes or features but His spiritual essence. God is spirit and not matter. This spiritual essence or nature is the IMAGE transmitted to us at creation, which we lost following the Fall and regained in Christ through the finished work of the Cross. The grave implication of this loss of God’s image for man was that he effectively lost touch with His God who is spirit; and with it, all the vital spiritual resources he needed to live life successfully. God is a spirit and not matter. True worshippers are those who have regained or recovered this spiritual inheritance in God coupled with the ability to present the entirety of their lives to God as a spiritual offering.

As a result of the Fall man became very limited and begin to think and act in the context of a limited world. Life was not designed to and cannot be lived meaningfully by fallen humans (i.e. outside the divine blueprint. The original man was created to succeed in life only as a spiritual being intimately yoked and dependent on God. Life apart from his God was to and will always be nasty and short, filled with such problems as uncertainties, frustrations, misconceptions, bad judgments, disease, pain, sorrow, grief, sweat, discouragement, murder, adultery and other forms of immorality. The short spells of happiness and short-lived joy depend on man’s ability to continually reach into himself for the invention of means to cushion or manage the effects of the problems occasioned by the alienation from the source of his power. Since life has to be lived anyway, man has had to or has been helped by the gods of this earth to devise all manner of means to get around the challenges of living. That explains man’s obsession with or dependence on music, for instance, to massage his stressed soul. The search for a way out of life’s frustrations has also led to the dependence on such activities as sports, social clubs and other forms or recreation. He has also managed to devise how to concoct marriage and live in it (having lost the original blueprint); how to keep the environment safe for habitation and how to co-exist with his neighbours. There began to emerge social/psychological thoughts and ideas on interpersonal relationships; diplomatic ideas on how nations can peacefully co-habit; economic ideas to allocate scarce resources for production purposes; educational, social and philosophical ideas to enhance humanity and improve its well-being; democratic ideas and principles to govern society, keep law and order and prevent descent into chaos; recreational ideas (especially sports, social clubs, etc) to manage boredom, weariness, stress, etc. All these point to one fact: that humanity now sustains itself on management and humanistic principles. These are all attempts at managing the effects of the Fall and the limitations the latter impose on humanity, without the capability to reverse it. Sadly enough, much of the visible Church still exist or thrives on these management and humanistic principles despite all pretensions to spirituality. The enemy sold to the Church a gospel which proclaims Christ but denies His power. Until the true essence of life is located, however, life will only continue to be lived on the fringes of true comfort by these ‘management principles.’

A further manifestation of the limitation the Fall imposed on humanity is that man began to institute various rival cultures expressible only within the context of his limited environment. And that is why people identify themselves passionately in terms of earthly systems of culture and values (nations, states, people groups, racial and ethnic groups, etc.) which blur people’s memory to the fact that they belong to a Kingdom with its distinct culture that have roots in the realm of God. You hear people revel in what they call the cultures of “our people.” And these represent various perverted ways of viewing the world, life and the meaning to attach to it. It must be stressed here that the culture of the Kingdom of God bears no relation to any earthly culture, whether it be Swahili, Chinese, Ibo, Kurdish, Yoruba, Arabian, European or American. It is a distinct culture which man lost touch with and to which he must be reconciled through the instrumentality of salvation in Christ Jesus.

We came here dead, blind and utterly distorted in nature, completely bereft of the capacity for righteous actions and to attain the peak of our creational essence and potential. We lost the nobility of nature that Godliness confers and became lower grade humans, debased and depraved. The spiritual elevation from which we fell is a higher life form. The natural life to which the Fall plunged us is base and low grade. It reduced us to a fearful awe-stricken lot, conquered and defeated by the elements, constantly harassed, supplanted and enslaved by spirit beings which we were created to dominate and rule over.

The Intervention
Salvation (soteria) is heaven’s saving strategy to redeem or buyback humanity, to build and enthrone a new Age different in form and content from the current one. An age which will also be sustained by power (that of God) and built around the soul/mind of man. However, inspite of this, the gods of this earth have perfected time-honoured strategies to ensure that, even as so-called Christians, we never get to avail ourselves of the full potential of the salvation that our Lord Jesus Christ mediated. The true meaning of salvation became almost totally lost on most of the people who are called by the name of the Lord. The image of Christ that conveys the totality of God’s intention and reason for redeeming and saving man became blurred in our minds. We descended into a morass of religious activities substituting a life-transforming way of life with the evil that is religion.

The enemy got us busy with distractions masquerading as church practices and traditions. We fail to understand that a crucial goal of our walk with God should not be what we call “making heaven” (especially in the sense in which heaven is popularly conceived), but being restored to the ‘Eden’ condition, although in the likeness of a brand new, God-preferred Adam- our Lord Jesus Christ (1Cor 15:45), fully equipped to fulfil our purpose for being. And that will be a valid heavenly experience rather than waiting for some astral flight to some strange land of the unknown. . Heaven, to be sure, is not a physical location or place but a spiritual one. It is the realm of God’s existence. It actually exists in God and therefore God is our destination. God is the Heaven to which we are going, if you like. The Book actually tells us that we as the redeemed of the Lord “…will inherit (Matt. 5:5) and reign on (Rev. 5:10) the earth.” However, we will need to be “heavenly” to be able to reign and rule in this way.

Salvation, as the Lord conceived and mediated it, is a revolution in terms of how it totally overhauls and renews the human capital or nature. It accomplishes what no leadership training or seminar, self-help or character development programme or even any educational pursuit, no matter how qualitative or sophisticated, can bring about, i.e. sanctification (which describes the manifestation of a life produced by the power of the Spirit of God). It fixes every anomaly associated with the natural, fallen nature and restores “wholeness” to our being. It fixes susceptibility and vulnerability to sicknesses of the body and soul; it fixes our pride and bloated ego, including all manner of prejudices (tribal, class, race, etc). It corrects our involuntary mood swings and the anxieties, all of the crookedness and inconsistencies, hypocrisies, addiction to lying and lack of transparency in dealings. It fixes our inclination for gossips and self-righteous posturing, our selfishness, greed and lusts, anger and malice and all other manner of incorrigibles. It corrects our lack of confidence and the loss or lack of self-esteem. It replaces soul-based confidence which is superficial and breeds pride with the unassuming boldness and confidence of the Spirit.

It adjusts and purifies our focus and priorities, the reason or motive for which we do all we do in life, by aligning them with the will of God. What that means in simple language is that we always settle it in our mind whenever we set out to do embark on anything or any enterprise, that it must be in or further His interest/purpose alone. If all it serves is our own personal interests, then we don’t do it. Indeed true salvation ensures that we don’t do anything or set any agenda for ourselves except such are initiated or at the very least, approved by our Lord. This is what cleanses or sanctifies our desires, motives and values; indeed our very life. It also properly aligns our lives and enables us to find true joy in, and meaning to life.

The Process
Every person is a tripartite being, made up of spirit, soul and body (1Tessalonians 5:23).

The first area of our human components to be affected by salvation in Christ is our SPIRIT. It takes a longer while and a little bit of efforts for the power of salvation to affect and fully envelope our SOUL which is the part of us between the spirit and the body. Why this is so is not because of any limitation on the power of God to save at this level. Rather, the Lord has ordained that this level of salvation which restores “godhood” to humanity and elevates him beyond the boundaries of the activities of principalities and powers, allowing him to live life at full spiritual crush, must happen by the choice made by the individual. It carries a price and God will not force anyone into it.

The salvation of the soul really entails the return of a clear division between the spirit and the soul, i.e. the spirit breaking out from the clutches of the soul and regaining its dominant position over the life of a human. This division is accomplished by the word of God – the Living Spirit, as we follow its dictates. This is the clear lesson of Hebrews 4:12. The most powerful force (Personality) in the universe- the Holy Spirit must be invited and allowed to exert His influence upon our soul (consisting of our will, intellect or mind and emotion). This frontier of salvation is a crucial turning point for us all as what happens there determines whether the salvation of our spirit would be allowed to alter our nature for operational purposes.

What we see now and often is that for most who purport to come to Christ, their salvation is restricted to their spirits and although they claim to be followers of Christ, they are still very carnal and worldly as those described in 1Cor. 3:1-3. This is because almost nothing has changed in the way they conduct their lives. Jesus does not truly become the Lord in and over our lives no matter how much we proclaim that until He becomes the Lord over our souls. When He gets our souls, He gets us. He can then pour Himself into us. Our personality {the soul} is immersed in Him and takes on His own identity and all the benefits of a full, successful and meaningful life in Him can be reaped. The struggle within the soul can be a titanic one but can be won. The Lord Jesus showed us how. The reason why most never win it throughout their christian pursuit can be due to ignorance and also because it tasks all of our patience, our obedience and commitments. It is not possible to rule and reign in life or exercise the right of dominion and sonship on earth, and therefore come into the possession of all of the promises contained in the book of life, except a human survives this frontier of salvation. This also is the reason for the church’s apparent lack of power to subdue the world and make the latter look up to it as the only means of solution to its numerous problems.

Salvation at the level of the soul brings about true conversion. It has the capacity to take out of us the depths of the root of the world and worldliness. It will be impossible to touch the power that salvation brings (with which to conquer life’s circumstances) if all one claims to do is give life to Christ but not converted at the soul level. The importance of this level of salvation is underscored by the emphasis of our Lord on the salvation of the soul. The evidence is contained in the following scriptural references: Matt 10:28; 11:28-30; 16:26. See also Psalm 23:3; 42:1; 103:1 and 1Pet 1:9. In one particular case in Luke 21:19, the unmistakable emphasis is on the need for us to regain or the mastery over our souls rather than continue to be ruled by it: “In patience, possess your soul” (KJV); “By standing firm, you will win your soul” (NLT); “By standing firm, you will regain life” (NIV).

Sometimes, the soul is also referred to as the “mind” as in Romans 12:1. The only way to know the will of God either for yourself or for the whole of creation is to have your soul renewed or restored or regenerated. A regenerated soul (or a renewed mind) leads to a changed personality, because the soul is the personality. The personality or one’s individuality is formed by a process described briefly in 2Corinthians 3:18. As a person gazes on or reflects on the image of Christ (i.e. reading, prayerfully meditating on and practicing the values He embodies as encoded in the inspired written word we call the Bible), one’s personality begins to be transformed or reflecting the glory of Christ’s nature. A human becomes what he gazes on or what his soul reflects all the time. ‘Gazing’ means feeding information into our soul (the seat of our will, intellect and emotion) through such body gates as our senses of sight, hearing, and taste and possibly touch. And of course, reflecting and meditating with our mind’s eye on the pictures painted or conveyed by all such information or data. Gradually, almost unwittingly, these ideas begin to be expressed in our actions. In our world, ideas and values are projected through the various learning processes- formal schools, reading and other training modes; through films, music and other socio-cultural interactions. These are all tools of shaping the human personality.

Unknown to many however, these tools are being controlled and manipulated by spirit beings or spiritual forces to tighten their grips on humanity. All values, thought processes, ideas, response systems and world-views are only physical manifestations of spiritual realities. In other words, spiritual powers are the forces behind values, ideas and outlooks to life that we see different people, races cultures, etc manifest. Whatever a soul is soul exposed to sufficiently, begins to shape such a soul. The soul is like a mirror which reflects anything it is constantly exposed to. The individuality of a person, the cultures of a collection of people – cultural and racial groups, social, professional and intellectual groups, are all formed by this process.

The challenge for everyone who lives in this “hostile” environment then is to deliberately regulate and sift what he/she allows his/her soul or mind to feed on, since you become what you “gaze” on. Also, if you “gaze” constantly on or feed your mind on the wrong literatures or books and teachings produced by Christians whose spiritual values and sight are poor reflections of the true nature of Christ, you may end up being a confused, double-minded Christian, or even as some pseudo-spiritual person. What could alter this course is if by the Lord’s gracious intervention a detour occurs by possible exposure to the true gospel of God’s light. Well over half of the books supposedly written by Christians and teachings from pulpits belong to the category described above (including those of most self-styled ‘motivational preachers’).

Activation
That is why the manual for life and living counsels us to guard our hearts diligently because all of our inclinations in life - thought processes, response systems, ideas and values proceed from it (Prov. 4:23). How this can be done is to, in the spirit of Rom. 12:2 choose not to act exactly as they act or love the things they love, in the world around us (ideas picked from cultures, films, literatures, songs, etc). In other words, we must deliberately choose to follow the dictates or leading of the Holy Spirit. “Put to death (mortify, deal with ruthlessly, by a personaldecision and action) therefore whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lusts, evil desires and greed…You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander and filthy language….Do put on the new self, which is being renewed in Knowledge in the image of its Creator.” (Colossians 3:5-10) (NIV). Romans 8:12- 13 describes to us how to practically mortify the flesh or deal with the problem of sinful habits (lusts, greed, gossips, malice keeping, offence taking, grudge holding, responses to personal hurts, had-heartedness, anger, pride, etc.). We must depend on and follow the Holy Spirit’s leading all the time.

In other words, we get a lot of help from the Holy Spirit as we remember and promptly follow what the word of God says or as He gently prods us in our innermost beings each time we are confronted with a temptation to misbehave or respond to the cravings of the flesh (i.e. the sinful nature).

Our motivation and reasons for doing the things we do must be different from what drives them in the world. We must also resist temptations to yield our bodies to perverted acts just because the body makes such demands, as they do in the world. We must not be controlled by the desires of the flesh but by the Spirit of God. The means for getting our own values for living is the written word of the Lord. This contains the values of the Kingdom which we seek to be part of. The word of God is the agency for converting the soul.

The route back to spirituality is largely activated by channeling all of our prayer energies into meeting the need of God in and through our lives. As a person constantly studies and meditates on the written word of God; as he puts his faith