Spiritual Debt

Rom 8:1-6 There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.

How do we get into spiritual debt, and more importantly how do we get out? It helps to first understand how the spiritual economy works. Everything in the spiritual world is made up of word and spirit. Word gives things structure and form. Spirit gives things life and motion. When anything is passed from one being to another the transaction happens through spirit. When words are shared in conversation, prayers are offered to God, emotions are felt, ideas are planted in a mind, all of these things are spiritual transactions either made up of spirit entirely or carried by spirit to the other entity. The currency for each transaction is spirit. Spirit moves from one entity to the other.

When we’re born God packs us with a lot of spirit (Gen 2:7). That isn’t only our breath of life that we live by, but also the spirit that makes up our personality and conscience (Act 17:28). We are free moral agents, able to choose what we want to think, feel and act. Every thought, feeling, emotion and action is made up of spirit or is driven by it. This is the spirit by which we make every single spiritual transaction.

We, like every other creature, were each created with only holy spirit. Once Lucifer perverted his spiritual body evil spirit came into being. Evil spirit is essentially holy spirit twisted so that it no longer provides any life value, but rather it drains life. When that happened God stopped providing spirit to him and every other angel that chose to pursue evil rather than holy. The holy angels followed suit and had no more interactions (spiritual transactions) with the evil angels. The only place they could beg, borrow or steal more spirit to extend their life was mankind, the only other creature that had life and the free moral agency to choose between good and evil. Over our lifetime evil angels have tempted us to give them some of our spirit. When we buy into an idea they plop in our mind, whatever amount of time and effort is spent on that idea is the amount of spirit we owe them in return. That is our spiritual debt. Under the Moses law God provided animal sacrifices to pay the debt owed to evil angels. The spirit of life of the animal was given to the evil angel as a substitute for the amount of spirit the human owed him. Today instead of animal sacrifices God does the same thing with mercy. Mercy is spirit that can be spent to pay for the spirit owed for ignorant sins. We can also cast out evil spirit using grace to pay for the evil and balance our spiritual ledger. Our goal is to cast out all of the evil spirit that makes up our old man and continuously build up our accounts of holy spirit that make up our new man so that we are no longer in debt to any evil angel.

When we put money in a savings account we hope that the amount of interest we receive will keep up with the rate of inflation so that our money doesn’t lose value over time. If we put our money in a checking account or keep it at home it doesn’t gain interest and as inflation grows our money becomes worth less. The same idea is true spiritually. If we don’t exercise our spiritual body it won’t continue to grow and it won’t keep up with the burn rate of our life. The amount of spirit of life we have at any given time is finite because every moment we live a portion of our spirit is spent to keep us alive physically. We can choose to invest our time to grow more spirit or spend it on other things. We invest to add holy spirit to our spiritual accounts by exercising righteousness, studying God’s word, pressing in to draw more spirit from God, meditating on godly ideas and a whole host of other things. This is above and beyond refusing to engage the temptations that evil angels present to us. It isn’t just keeping our debt clear, but also building up our holy accounts. On the other hand, we can spend too much of our time on activities and ideas that don’t produce more spirit. When we do that we become farther removed from God and everything holy becomes less accessible to us. When this happens we are not standing still, but going backward because we are not keeping up with the rate that our life is being spent and our account decreases. We want to stay out of spiritual debt by not engaging ideas that detract from our life and we want to invest enough time and effort to growing more holy spirit so that we become spiritually strong and resilient to evil.