Defining the Inner Man

➡ Paul, the voiceover for a ministry called Your Daily Bread, discusses the concept of the ‘inner man’, which represents our spiritual self. He emphasizes the importance of nurturing this inner self, rather than focusing solely on our physical, ‘outer man’. He suggests that as we age, our physical selves naturally decline, but our spiritual selves can continue to grow and strengthen. This growth, however, depends on our willingness to yield to the Holy Spirit and allow it to refresh and renew us daily.
➡ The text emphasizes the importance of living a life guided by the Holy Spirit, making decisions consciously aware of its presence. This spiritual consciousness is achieved by immersing oneself in the word of God, allowing it to influence our thoughts and decisions. The text also encourages spending equal time nurturing our spiritual self as we do our physical self, through studying scriptures and communicating with God. This practice, it suggests, will lead to a stronger inner self and a life more aligned with the Spirit.

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God is Government, called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ’s teaching of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6.11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting scripture, but scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today’s focused discussion will be on defining the inner man. Now, what is the inner man? What are we talking about? Well, we don’t have to get too heavy about this.

The inner man is just the real you, the inside you. Now, we’ve spent a lot of time on the outer man. Maybe that will help you to see the inner man by contrast. Now, you all took good care of the outer man this morning. We all look lovely, wonderful. Some of you took especially good care of the outer man. You got up this morning, and immediately you faced the outer man in the mirror, and you brushed it, and you fixed its teeth, and then you put on its face if you’re a lady.

And if you were a man, you took it off, you’re very concerned about the outer man. And you went immediately downstairs after you had clothed the outer man, and you fed the outer man. And hopefully you did, because it’s good for you to be fed, because then you’re alert, and your mind can function. And you got the outer man wonderfully prepared. And you came here, and now we’re endeavoring to minister to the inner man. The inner man is just the real you. It’s just the spirit and soul part of you. And that’s the thing that needs to be strengthened.

You know, I’ve been thinking to myself a lot lately about this craze we have in America for exercise. And I’ve been realizing that the Bible says bodily exercise profiteth little. Not nothing, but little. And there are some people who are really super preoccupied with that little. They run. They diet. I mean, they wouldn’t miss their protein drink. They are very outer man conscious. And if there was some way we could get them to spend half as much time on the inner man, we could revolutionize their lives. Christians should be preoccupied with the inner man.

The inner man is the eternal part, the spirit, the soul, the real you. Let me show you the contrast of the two by having you notice 2 Corinthians chapter 4 verse 16. 2 Corinthians 4, 16. And here Paul contrasts both. He’s talking here about a situation of persecution, which he was caught in, as was common. He had been perplexed, and he had been distressed, and he had been persecuted, and he had been cast down, and he had been bearing in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus. There was a lot to suffer in his ministry.

Death was working in him, he said. But he says in 16, for which cause we faint not? In other words, even though we’ve got a lot of trouble on the outside, a lot of hassle on the outside, a lot of persecution and so forth, we don’t faint. Though our outer man perishes, watch this, yet the inner man is renewed, or better refreshed, day by day. Now you see, Paul was never preoccupied with the outer man. He says, God delivers fresh strength to that inner man every day. That, beloved, is the process of growth in spiritual life.

Your inner man is strengthened. Your inner man is being revitalized and renewed every day. In 2 Timothy chapter 4 in verse 17, Paul talks about the fact that the Lord came to him in a time of distress and strengthened him, giving him victory over the lions that would have devoured him. Paul was very conscious of strengthening the inner man. Now watch this. The outer man decays, the inner man accelerates and ascends. Keep that in mind. As a Christian, as you get older, your outer man declines. You can’t avoid it, it just happens.

The older you’ll get, the further it declines. And the older you get as a Christian, and the more you grow as a Christian, and are refreshed every day, actually, spiritual growth, leaving the base, say, of your outer man, does not go like this. Spiritual growth does not ascend up like that, it goes like this. Because the outer man diminishes, declines and decays, while the inner man ascends. Which means the older you get in Christ, the older you get as you’re renewed by the spirit, the further away you come from the outer man.

The less concerned you are about it. But you see, the Lord has a way of allowing us, when we’re saved at this point, to then begin to grow away from those things as they descend and we ascend. So Paul says, the outer man, I admit it, is perishing all the time. It’s declining, but in proportion to the decline of the outer man is the renewal of the inner man, so that I ascend in the inner man to Christ and to God. And the more I come to Christ, and the closer I come to God, and the more I’m strengthened in the inner man, the less I’m concerned about the decline of the outer man.

Now, if you’re getting old, and you’re concerned about it, and you’re getting old, and you’re afraid of dying, and you’re getting old, and it bothers you a whole lot, then I would venture to say that your inner man is not ascending in proportion to the decline of your outer man. God has a way of just making that all right. So what are we seeing then? Paul says, our outer man may be perishing. It’s a process he’s talking about here. But our inner man is revitalised, increasing, richer, deeper, stronger every day. Now that’s what he is after.

Now let me say this to you, friends. If this is true of Paul, you say that his inner man was renewed and revitalised and refreshed every day. Why isn’t it true of me? Because simple thingable of the inner man is dependent upon the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit’s work is dependent upon your yieldedness. The New Testament says, quench not the Spirit, right? The New Testament says, grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you’re sealed. Now, if you grieve the Spirit, and you quench the Spirit, you cut off the resource, you cut off the flow of refreshment, then your inner man is not revitalised every day, and you’re not going to experience what Paul experienced.

The key thing then, go back to Ephesians, the key thing here is to start with it, you be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man. In other words, that you allow the Spirit of God to do that revitalising, refreshing, renewing ministry day after day. Now, the inner man’s got to be strong, or you can’t fight the world the flesh and the devil. The inner man’s got to be strong, or you can’t overcome. The Apostle Paul had that battle, didn’t he? In Romans 7, the 7th chapter of Romans, Paul is saying, in my inner man I delight in the law of God.

Romans 7, 22, I delight in the law of God in my inner man. You know, it wants what is right, it wants what is right. But he says, the things I want to do, I, what? I don’t do, and the things I don’t want to do, I do. I have a weak inner man. It has the right desires, but I have this outer flesh that messes it up. And you see, he says, oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death. And then he says, I thank God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

But he just, he doesn’t know the answer yet. He just says, I know it’s in Christ somewhere, but I just don’t know where it is. And then you go into chapter 8, and all of a sudden he discovers the Holy Spirit, and how the Holy Spirit works, and he says, the law of righteousness is fulfilled in me through the walk in the Spirit. Chapter 7, he had a weak inner man. Chapter 8, he discovered the Holy Spirit, and all of a sudden the Spirit strengthened his inner man. Now listen, you cannot experience inner strength, and the Greek there is to be powered with power, to be dynamited with dynamite, to be strong with strength, to be mighty with might.

That’s the idea. You’ll never know that on your own. You’ll never be able to stand firm and solid and unmovable. You’ll never know maturity until you allow the Spirit of God to do his renewing work. Until you allow God’s Spirit to strengthen you, that’s what he wants to do. You say, well, is he there to do that? Oh yeah. If any man not have the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. Romans 8-9 says, every Christian possesses the Spirit, and if you possess the Spirit, Jesus said, you shall receive power after the Spirit has come upon you.

The power is there. The Spirit’s there. It’s a question of appropriation. You say, well, what’s the key? Galatians 5-16, walk in the Spirit and you’ll not fulfill the lust of the flesh. That’s, it’s a simple truth. Walk in the Spirit. The New Testament word walk is the word of daily conduct. Conduct your daily life in the power of the Spirit. Conduct your daily life yielding to the Spirit. Conduct your daily life with the consciousness of the presence of the Spirit of God. That’s basic. We must be Spirit controlled, Spirit filled, Spirit conscious, and that means walking in the Spirit.

You can’t just remember the Holy Spirit every so often. Walk in the Spirit. The walk is the picture of a step at a time, every step taken in the energy and the power and yieldedness to the Holy Spirit. Over in 518 of Ephesians, look what it says, and be not drunk with wine in which is excess, but be filled with the Spirit. The Greek says, be being kept filled. Let it be a constant thing, constantly filled up with the Spirit, constantly filled up with the energy and the power of the Spirit of God.

Now, it’s interesting to note that you will never be able to do that unless the Spirit of God is in your conscious mind. In other words, you can’t, let me reduce it this way, living in the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, being filled with the Spirit, being strengthened by the Spirit, means that you’ve got to be conscious of the Spirit. You get up in the morning and it’s a question of decisions, right? All of life is decisions. You decide whether you’re going to get out of bed or not, and decide what you’re going to eat or what you’re not going to eat.

Decision, decision, decision, decision. The simplicity of walking in the Spirit is simply yielding each one to the Holy Spirit. Yield each decision to the Holy Spirit. You say, well, in order to do that, you’d have to be thinking about the Holy Spirit every time a decision came. That’s right. Exactly right. And you say, well, if I go around thinking about the Holy Spirit all the time, you know, I’d be like the bruised and bleeding Pharisees. You know, there was a group who lived in Jesus’ time that were called the bruised and bleeding Pharisees.

They thought it was a sin to look at a woman. Every time a woman came up, they closed their eyes and they kept running into buildings. We don’t want you to be, we don’t want you to be stumbling around, smashing into the walls. But if you’re going to be controlled by the Spirit, then you must be conscious of the Spirit. You say, well, how do you do that? It’s very simple. Very simple. You fill your mind with the word of God. You see, in Ephesians 5, 18, it says, be filled with the Spirit. A parallel passage, Colossians 3, 16 says, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.

It’s the same thing. You allow the word of God to saturate you. Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against you. As I hide the word in my heart, as it saturates me, it begins to control my thinking processes. And as it controls my thinking processes, then the Spirit of God brings it to mind instantly at the point of each decision. And then when I yield to that, one step at a time, I strengthen my spiritual muscle. Every time I yield to the Holy Spirit, I exercise my spiritual muscle and I get a little bit stronger in the inner man.

Paul said I can do all things through Christ who, what, strengthens me. But I’ve got to yield to him. I’ve got to yield to his Spirit. I can’t do it apart from him. He, Paul, is praying that our inner man would grow strong as we yield to the Spirit. You’ll never do that until you’re in the word of God. We all receive the Spirit. In fact, for some of us, it’s been a long time since we had a good drink. A good drink of the Spirit. We’ve been functioning in the flesh.

If you want to drink in the Spirit of God, systematically study the Scriptures. You might not miss your protein drink, but I wonder if you miss the time in the word of God. You know, if you took just figure this, someday, tomorrow will be a good day. Or maybe today. Today’s probably better because you’ll forget tomorrow. Add up on a little piece of paper the time you spent on your outer man. Okay? How much time did it take you to get your outer man out of bed and dressed and fixed up? And how long did it take to feed your outer man? Breakfast took 20 minutes, lunch took this, dinner took this, and a few snacks in between.

How long did it take you to jog your inner man? Your outer man, rather. And you know, whatever you did for your outer man, how much time did you spend on your outer man? Figure that out. Just do this. Just spend an equal amount of time on your inner man and it will revolutionize your entire life. You say, but how do you do that? Just spend the equal amount of time studying the word of God and intermittently talking to God about what he says in his word. You will literally be revolutionized.

But you see, we don’t do that. We, you know, for us it’s, we worry about that outer stuff and the inner man limps along until Sunday and you come here and say, oh Jim, he’ll give us a good old shot in the arm. We’ll be all right for another week, Mabel. See? I see you’re really not, you’re really not taking. How would it be if you only ate on Sunday? You can’t do it. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of defining the inner man. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong and continue to shine your light in the world.

To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].