Spirit and Spiritual

God is sovereign, and may accomplish his purposes through whomever he chooses, often including men and women whose actions are not consistently in harmony with his Spirit. That is to say, there is a vast difference between being used by the Holy Spirit of God from time to time and being a spiritual person. Obviously, the second state is preferable to the first by orders of magnitude, and the Christian who aspires to anything less than being a spiritual person is selling him- or herself short.

The writers of the New Testament use the adjective “spiritual” in a couple of slightly different senses.

Spiritual in Origin and Energy

The first sense is obvious and common. A spiritual gift is a gift given and empowered for use by the Holy Spirit. The gift itself is spiritual in terms of its origin and energy, but the presence of such gift tells us nothing about the spiritual state of the person using it. The Christians in Corinth were “not lacking in any gift”, yet Paul says to them, “I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.”

Anonymous Asks (115)

“What’s the difference between being spiritual and being religious?”

The answer to this question very much depends on whether we come at it from the perspective of the man in the street, or from that of the scriptures.

The Man in the Street

The man in the street thinks a mystic is spiritual and a priest religious. He sees the religious person as a cog in the ecclesiastical machinery, observing traditions and doing his duty as part of a larger religious community. The “spiritual” person, on the other hand, is someone operating outside institutional religion; thought to be in harmony with the natural order, and communing with the universe or some such. The religious person would always be in church on Sunday (or Saturday), while the “spiritual” person may or may not.