"Rejoice always, pray without ceasing and give thanks to GOD at every moment. This is the will of GOD, your vocation as Christians.
Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise the prophets' warnings. Put everything to the test and hold fast to what is good. Avoid evil, wherever it may be.
May the GOD of peace make you holy and bring you to perfection. May you be completely blameless, in spirit, soul and body, till the coming of CHRIST JESUS, our LORD; HE who called you is faithful and will do it." - 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
(Do not quench the Spirit. A community such as this with few traditions and written instructions, depended on the intervention of the Spirit. Among these Christians there were some gifted with the charism of prophets: they would receive their communications during the Eucharistic assemblies. That is why Paul asks to profit by these spiritual messages, but not without first examining them as he will remind them in 1 Corinthians 14. This is a delicate situation: the community is subject to the Spirit who speaks through the prophet, but it must--and its leaders must--judge if it is truly the Spirit of GOD speaking.
May you be completely blameless in spirit, soul and body. Neither the Jews nor the majority of Greeks would have agreed with our definition of the human: body and soul. They spoke at the same time of the soul that gives life to the body and deals with material activities, and of the spirit that is capable of truth and justice.
Paul's way of speaking, like the great spiritual Christians, shares this conception. When Paul speaks of the deep life of believers, he does not use the word soul but spirit. We do not face GOD as we do in facing an interlocutor and look at each other from the exterior: to understand better our relationship with GOD, through the Spirit we must think of what unites beings who love each other and in some way live in one another.
According to Scripture, GOD's Spirit can be omnipresent, insinuate itself, adapt itself, become our spirit without ceasing to be itself. Our spirit is not a part of ourselves, it is us, and it is at the same time our access to GOD. Our soul expresses itself in different ways, for example in dreams. We only discover our spirit in the measure of our experience of GOD. Only when we see GOD shall we truly know what and who we are.)
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