In an interview this week on PBS’ Religion & Ethics Newsweekly program, Sen. John Kerry discussed his Catholic faith.

Correspondent Kim Lawton reported: “He spoke of a long time of searching after he had lost the faith of his youth. I asked him to describe the spiritual revelation that he says brought him back some years ago.”

Kerry then explained, “It was tangible. I mean, you could really sense a kind of input that really surprised me. I don't know where it came from. You know, people can describe how those things come.”

The reality is God doesn’t relate to humans through inner impressions, feelings, hunches, etc. He works through the reading of His Word, period.

“It comes in first through your spirit,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill. (www.graceimpact.org) . “You have a spirit, a soul and a body, and your spirit is the mechanism whereby light from God’s Word can come into your inner man. Light isn’t going to come in through your emotions. It isn’t going to come in through your feelings and your physical praying.

“You ever hear anyone say, ‘We just feel the presence of God here tonight’? No, you didn’t. You didn’t feel God’s presence.

“The spirit of God doesn’t walk up and down the aisles; the spirit of God lives within those who believe. And He is the resident agent of the Godhead who indwells you, and one of his functions is to work with your spirit.”

A person’s inward man is made up of two parts—spirit and soul. Information from God’s Word comes into the mind through the spirit and God’s Spirit, through the Word, actually contacts your spirit.

Now, other spirits can come into a person’s mind, too, which are most definitely not from God. Paul tells us there’s the “spirit of the world” and there’s the “spirit that works in the children of disobedience.” (Eph. 2:2)

A critical passage in Paul’s epistles to fully grasp is I Cor. 2:12-16, which says, “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.

“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.

“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

Jordan says, “Think about how that other spirit affects people. People go to church and swear they’ve had an encounter with God. That’s what they’ve been taught all their lives and when they bow down to the idols of their church, they feel a sense of the presence of God. Why? Because they’ve been taught that’s how you sense God.

“Then you have what’s called the ‘spirit of camaraderie.’ It’s like at a hockey game. You can create a spirit in a crowd and a feeling, but that isn’t how you get in touch with God. Those spirits are created in your emotions and in your senses. They’re real; they’re just not from God.

“You didn’t contact God; you contacted your senses, your feelings, your flesh. To contact God, it comes through the Word of God. God’s Spirit through His words go into your mind, into your thinking, when you know the things that are freely given to you of God.

“It’s at that point that you can make a choice of faith. Faith is just a positive volition toward sound doctrine. Not just Bible doctrine, but the Word of God ‘rightly divided.’

“You can’t by faith be water baptized in today’s dispensation of grace. You can’t by faith speak in tongues in the dispensation of grace. You can’t by faith ask God to heal you of your cancer. You can’t by faith ask God to give you a job. That isn’t what God’s doing today—none of that.

“You can’t do it by faith in God’s Word, but you can do it by error. So if you have error in your mind, and your faith transfers it out of your mind into your soul, that information’s going to stick. If you’ve transferred it into your heart bad doctrine, what’s that going to do for you? You’re not going to be very stable.”

A person’ soul has four components or functions—heart, conscience, will and emotions. The heart is the mentality of the soul, or the thinking process of the inner man. It’s the will that, through a positive volition, chooses to say, “This information is true and I’ll depend it. I’ll believe it and trust it; I will commit myself to it.”

Says Jordan, “You take it out of what you know and you make it a part of you; you transfer it out of your spirit. Now your spirit is not just located in your head like your mind is. Your spirit’s all over you. Your spirit is not a physical entity you can bottle up and put in one location. But it is a true entity. It’s what gives you and me the ability to rationally and thoughtfully and perceptibly communicate back and forth.

“You’ve got a lot of things in your mind you never make a part of yourself. That’s why people can know a lot about the Bible, a lot about doctrine, a lot about this and that.

“You know how you say to your kids, ‘You know better than that’? You say to yourself, ‘I know better than to do that.’ But, you see, to make doctrine operate—to make anything operate in your life—it has to be in your soul. And then you have to access it, and then by faith, choose to operate on it.

“Now once you move it out of your spirit into your heart (‘For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,’ Proverbs 23 says), that’s the mentality of your inner man. ‘Here’s not just what I know, here’s my frame of reference. Here’s the way I evaluate life. Here are the things I believe are true.’

Paul says in Romans 12 ‘God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.’ We’re to store this information up in our inner man. We’re building up a house of sound doctrine. It’s called education. As I put that information into my inner man, in my heart, I take out the old corrupt files and put the new files in.

“With the old corrupt information, I say that’s error, throw it away and put truth in its place.

“In Romans 2:15, Paul talks about the ‘law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.’

“In your inner man, your conscience is a function. It’s a neutral thing. It functions on the information you have there, but it’s an involuntary function of your inner man.

“Humans have two types of actions they take. Cognitive actions are the ones you do on purpose. You make a choice to move your hand. You don’t sit there and say, ‘Beat heart, beat heart, beat heart.” Your heart just beats. That’s an involuntary motion. You can’t think about it and make it happen. Breathing is another one.

“Your will functions when you choose; you make a conscious choice. But your conscience doesn’t ask your permission. It takes your conduct, and takes what you’re doing, and evaluates it on the basis of the information you’ve stored in your inner man.

“It either says, ‘Okay, looks pretty consistent,” or it says, ‘Uh-huh, wait, wait, wait—that isn’t what you think about that. You’re not doing what you really think.’ So it accuses or excuses. It’s a function.

“I Cor. 8 talks about a defiled conscience. Some other verses, like in Romans 14, talk about a weak conscience. The Believer’s conscience functions based on the level of maturity a person has and the level of positive volition. If it doesn’t have a lot of the Word rightly divided, it’s weak.

“A lot of folks feel guilty about things they ought not be feeling guilty about, all because they don’t have sound doctrine in their inner man.

“Now, a defiled conscience is a conscience with error in it. It works perfectly, it’s just that the information is bad. It’s the lie program.”

In I Tim 4:2, Paul warns about people “speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron.” In Eph. 4:17-19, he refers to Believers operating as lost men even though they’re saved.

He writes in admonishment, “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind,

“Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:

“Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But ye have not so learned Christ.”

Jordan explains, “When he talks about people walking in the ‘vanity of their mind,’ vanity is nothing. It’s empty. The piece of furniture in the bedroom is called the vanity. It’s the makeup table.

“Now if you have the vanity of your mind, that means that in between your ears there’s nothing. It’s empty. That’s how unsaved people walk. They have nothing of any value in their thinking.

“Think of a ball with nothing in it but air. So what happens—human viewpoint comes by, error goes by—and that stuff is sucked right in. What error does is it compounds the problem.

Paul says, ‘Don’t walk in the vanity of your mind as other Gentiles do, drawing in human viewpoint, self-absorption, mental-attitude sins—just being negative toward sound doctrine.’

“You know what being positive toward sound doctrine does? It keeps your mind from being full of that mush—full of that nothingness. You want to get some victory in your life? The first thing you need to do is get some verses in your mind that you can use to deal with what you’re facing. And if you don’t know anything yet about what you’re facing, just get in some verses and deal with not knowing what you’re facing. Just get in some verses about who you are in Christ.

“Give yourself some information your faith can latch a hold on and that you can put in your soul and, when you do, that information brings life.

“Paul’s saying don’t walk around like a bunch of lost people who don’t know anything abut truth, having their understanding darkened. For them, it’s a complete blackout, ‘being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is them because of the blindness of their heart.’ They’re cut off from the plan of God. Just a blackout in their inner man, in their soul, and that’s what Luke 11 is talking about. Blindness and darkness inside because the light’s not on.

“They’re completely negative toward sound doctrine to the point that they’ve developed a cataract on their eye so that the light can’t come in, and now they’re blind. The blindness of their hearts. They get that callous. They’re past feeling, they’re past being touched by an understanding of sound doctrine, of who they are in Christ. They give themselves over—completely and totally betray themselves.

“In II Timothy Paul says, ‘They oppose themselves.’ They completely live their life the opposite of who they really are. There’s just a frantic search for happiness on their own. They have all of it in Christ but they’re out there still looking for it. Their past having the truth of God’s Word reach up and impact them.

“That term ‘past feeling’ describes the result of a seared conscience. To sear something is to burn it, and when you burn something, you get scar tissue. The characteristic of scar tissue is that it has no feeling to it.

“How did they get there? You listened to their words, you listened to those doctrines of devils; you chose to believe those doctrines and take them out of your mind and your will place them down into your heart, and you chose to believe the Lie and it's there in your inner man.

“It sears your conscience, it takes your conscience—that thing in Ephesians 6 talks about ‘the fiery darts of the wicked one.’ What do you think that is? That isn’t launching Scud missiles at somebody. That’s aiming the darts of the wicked one—the bad doctrine, the doctrines of devils.

“That Lie program gets inside and you begin to take it to heart. You begin to take your frame of reference, your worldview, the attitudes you have toward your situations and the details of your life, and you have this edifice of human viewpoint, and the wisdom of the world, and that wisdom of the world controls your thinking, controls your heart.

“When you have computer, and you’ve got all this information on your hard drive, every now and then you have to ‘defrag it.’ Your hard drive gets so fragmented that it slows down and it just won’t work. If you want to speed it up, defrag it. Get it all together. Well, you Christian life can happen that way.

“Paul says ‘learn Him.’ Learn who God has made you in Him and stand in that and say, ‘That’s what’s true about me. That’s who I really am, not all this other stuff.’ II Corinthians talks about ‘perfecting holiness.’ II Tim 3 talks about how the Word of God ‘makes you perfect, throughly furnished unto every good work.’

Paul talks about renewing your mind, re-educating your mind. You take the old information out and puts new information into your files. Then you develop a new frame of reference.

“The buzz word today is a ‘new worldview.’ You get a new perspective on life, a divine perspective. And now when you’re looking at the details of your life, you begin to learn to look at it through a new way of evaluating. Just like growing roses, you water, trim and fertilize the rose bush before you ever see a rose. It’s a process—a growing process. How do you know? You read the instructions.

“God has structured you in your spiritual makeup in such a way that light is designed to come from His Word through your spirit into your soul by your faith. You will by a positive choice believe that truth. It says you are to be ‘filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom, all understanding.’ Not just have a form of godliness, but have the power of that life living in you and as you grow in that maturity.

“When Paul uses the word ‘perfect’ in Philippians 3:15, he’s not talking about, ‘Don’t ever commit a sin.’ He’s talking about those of us who are mature. Those of us who have an occupation with the mind of Christ and the things of God. Those of us who have reached a level of spiritual maturity, applying God’s Word to the details of life.

“You know what happens as a result? You never quit growing. You need to be fat on the inside. Have a big fat soul. As you grow in the fruits of righteousness, you master the details of life. In being able to handle the details of life as Christ would, there’s the peace and the joy and the real true happiness. It’s being filled with the love of Christ.”