God Gave You A Mind, Heart, Body, & Spirit. Why?

God gave you a human nature -- a mind and heart, body and spirit -- to grow closer to him.

The Human Mind

The mind houses cognition, where people think about their life experiences, store past learning, plan for future contingencies, and make choices about whether or not they seek God as an intimate companion. 

For all who seek a living relationship with the Trinity, the mind plays a crucial role, capable not only of conversing with God, but of understanding God’s self-disclosure received through the Bible, God’s living and lively Word, which conveys a historical record regarding God’s attributes and expectations about people’s personalities and patterns of behavior.

For good reason Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Ro 12:2). 

The pursuit of God requires intellectual commitment, a hunger to know God interpersonally, and a willingness to develop conceptual constructs in accord with the Word of God and in the person of Christ. To think about God is a good thing, to pray to him even better, asking what matters to him, and what his plans are for one’s life. This takes the discipline, mental focus, and thoughtfulness that only the mind can bring. 

The Human Heart

While the mind plays a crucial role in self-understanding and perceiving enough about God to trust in him, it is the heart, one’s emotional attitude, where God encounters the person.

Whether it is God speaking through the prophets to the Israelites or Christ speaking about what really matters in a relationship with the Father, the heart holds high status in the eyes of the Lord.

“I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart” (Jer 24:7).

Parents want their children to love them. Spouses want to give and receive love. Friends share love through their loyalty and enjoyment of each other. The Trinity desires to experience heartfelt human love, and wants persons to know and trust God's love for them.

Carrying on a relationship with God brings inclusion in the active love flowing between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Though it has received little emphasis in the history of the Church, God is far more interested in people feeling warmly connected to him than he is in all the rites and rituals and rules combined—and not just connected by way of membership in the church, but interpersonally connected to the Lord by way of attraction, excitement, curiosity, delight, and celebration. 

Jesus experienced John as the beloved disciple precisely because John more than all the rest cared for Jesus, treasuring the time they could spend together, the many talks they shared, the good times and frightening times they walked through together as friends, including the Last Supper, where John, alone among the disciples, rested his head on Christ’s shoulder, and at the cross, where Jesus entrusted his mother Mary to John’s tender, faithful care.

The sharing of one’s emotions with God is not limited to love, but within that love, encompasses occasions of frustration, confusion, depression, irritability, complaint, anguish, insecurity, anxiety, loneliness, and even doubt. God, for his part, never turns a deaf ear or tries to change the subject in order to cut short a person’s cathartic release. The Lord draws especially near when one is processing and ventilating human emotion, knowing that some feelings are crucial to express before gaining a larger perspective. David, the Psalmist, a man after God’s own heart, knew this well.

The Human Body

God views the human body as good. He created it. He wants people to cherish it. “Do you not know,” Paul says, “that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” (1 Cor 6:19). The human body—whose tangible bone and tissue, muscle and sinew, brain and spinal cord, central and autonomic nervous systems—is home to that mystery called the human spirit, something that scientists can never explain. Paul declares that the body and spirit are raised together in a personal resurrection that transfigures the corruptible biological body into an incorruptible one like Jesus Christ’s (1 Cor 15:39-44; Ro 8:23).

Yet persons are called by God to live in their bodies in the here and now: touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, moving, dancing, making love, playing sports, walking, running, swimming, exercising, eating, drinking; using one’s hands to express caring, write a poem, create a science experiment, or fold in prayer; lifting one’s arms to embrace another with a hug, carry a load of groceries, shovel snow, or praise the Lord: surely reason to celebrate the body—as does the Son of Man during his time on earth. 

As embodied persons, human beings need techniques for reducing the distraction of body tensions that mount in a stressful day. Teeth grinding, chest tightness, migraines, or lower back pain need attention not only for bodily health, but for finding the source of the underlying psychological stressors; not only for mental health, but for the health of one’s relationship with the Trinity. Relaxing the muscles and deepening the breathing helps the Holy Spirit move through the human body to inspire the human spirit.

The Human Spirit

The spirit rounds out the fullness of human nature, the gift of God to Homo sapiens, a gift that differentiates them from other mammals, bringing a level of awareness, choice, and responsibility unparalleled in the animal or plant kingdoms.

While no field of study can objectively account for the spirit within human existence, we can say that when people are dispirited they are depersonalized, losing the sense of meaning and purpose that would otherwise enliven them. This awareness increases the trend for health professionals, including psychotherapists, to respect and utilize spirituality as a healing force within human nature.

The human spirit is not an ethereal, otherworldly affair, but rather a concrete, embodied dimension of one’s grounding in Christ, the “life-giving spirit” (1 Cor 15:45). While persons can live apart from a relationship with God, they cannot abandon his image within them as the true origin of their existence. They can repress the spirit that comes as part of human nature, or distort it to such an extent that their behavior is far removed from God’s will. But they cannot escape the reality that God loves them and is calling them into his family.

Christ’s entry upon this earth unites the human spirit with God the Holy Spirit, who in turn assists the human spirit to form an intimate, inner connection with God, a connection that generates a conscience, not in the sense of Freud’s rule-shackled superego, but in the sense of a living union with Christ, an inspired yet vulnerable capability to know and do the Father’s will. 

In other words, the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and Son to indwell the person, bearing witness with their spirit that they belong to God. “And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal 4:6). Invited to serve God with the same intentionality that Christ did and the Holy Spirit does, individuals can now learn to do so, not by following the letter of the law, but because God is so loveable. 

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