Man is spirit and flesh. We think we know what flesh is: we can weigh it, scan it, and bury it. But what is a spirit? Can it be detected? How can one spirit fill another person? And what does it mean to be filled with the Spirit of God?
What a spirit is
Jesus gave the plainest definition after His resurrection: “a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). A spirit is real and personal, but not made of matter. The Hebrew word ruach and the Greek pneuma both mean breath or wind: invisible, yet known by what it does.
You have one. God “formeth the spirit of man within him” (Zechariah 12:1), and breathed into Adam “the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). Your spirit is the part of you that knows you are you: “what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?” (1 Corinthians 2:11). How spirit differs from soul is set out on Soul & Spirit.
How a spirit exists
Scripture’s picture is simple: the spirit lives in the body the way a person lives in a house. Paul calls the body “our earthly house of this tabernacle” (2 Corinthians 5:1), and Peter speaks of “putting off this my tabernacle” at death (2 Peter 1:14). The body is the dwelling; the spirit is the one who dwells there. “The body without the spirit is dead” (James 2:26). At death the body returns to dust, “and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7).
So a spirit is not located the way an object is. It is not a smaller body tucked inside the big one. It inhabits: it gives the body life, and it uses the body’s eyes, hands and voice. That is why a body can be occupied, and why it can be filled.
Your spirit has an origin. “The spirit shall return unto God who gave it”: it came from Him. “The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life” (Job 33:4); He “formeth the spirit of man within him” (Zechariah 12:1). “Return” does not mean it lived with God before birth; it goes back to the One who gave it. Whether God creates each spirit directly or it passes down through the parents (Hebrews 7:10), Christians differ, and Scripture does not settle it.
Is a spirit energy?
It is a natural guess, but Scripture never says so, and the difference matters. Angels and our own spirits are created, just as energy is. God made “all things… that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible” (Colossians 1:16); He “maketh his angels spirits” (Psalm 104:4), “formeth the spirit of man within him” (Zechariah 12:1), and is “the Father of spirits” (Hebrews 12:9). Only God Himself is uncreated Spirit.
But created spirit and energy belong to two different sides of creation. Energy is part of the visible, physical order: it can be measured, stored, and converted into matter and back. Spirits belong to the invisible order. And energy knows nothing, while a spirit knows, chooses and loves.
A better way to put it: spirit is not a kind of energy; spirit is the source of power. Christ upholds “all things by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3), and “by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17). When the Spirit comes, power follows: “ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you” (Acts 1:8). The effects can be physical, even measurable, but the One causing them is not a force. He is a Person.
What a spirit is made of, Scripture does not say. It tells us what spirit is and does, not its ingredients. Bishop Wilson’s phrase is as close as language gets: “a dimension of substance that transcends matter.”1 Real substance; not matter. The talk of “energy” you hear in New Age teaching turns God into a force with no face (see The Universe Has a Face).
Can a spirit be detected?
Not by instruments. Science measures matter and energy, and a spirit is neither. But you cannot put your own mind on a scale either. A brain scan shows activity; it never shows the experience of being you. You know that from the inside, and it is the most certain thing you know.
Scripture says spirit is detected the way wind is: by its effects. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh… so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). When the Holy Ghost fell on Cornelius’s household, Peter’s companions knew it had happened “for they heard them speak with tongues” (Acts 10:46). The sign was heard by others.
What spiritual beings are there?
- God, uncreated and infinite: “God is a Spirit” (John 4:24).
- Angels, “ministering spirits” (Hebrews 1:14). See Angels.
- Evil spirits, which the Gospels call unclean spirits and devils.
- Man, a spirit made to live in a body.
All of them can think, choose and speak. None is limited by matter as we are: the risen Jesus stood among His disciples “when the doors were shut” (John 20:19), and then “vanished out of their sight” (Luke 24:31).
Is there another dimension?
Scripture never uses the word, but it shows an unseen realm right beside ours. When Elisha prayed, his frightened servant’s eyes were opened, “and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire” (2 Kings 6:17). They had been there all along. Elisha already knew it; the sight was for the servant, and its form was chosen for him. Spirits have no need of horses that eat or chariots that roll. The city was surrounded by an enemy army of “horses, and chariots” (6:14), so heaven showed him an army he could understand, and a bigger one. Angels appear in many forms for the same reason: as men at Abraham’s tent (Genesis 18:2), as strangers entertained “unawares” (Hebrews 13:2). The shape serves the message. Paul was caught up into paradise, “whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell” (2 Corinthians 12:2-4). “The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).
Bishop Nathaniel J. Wilson calls it “a ‘higher reality’—a dimension of substance that transcends matter,” and describes the believer as “living life in two dimensions simultaneously.”1 Think of a creature living on a flat sheet of paper: a ball passing through its world would appear as a circle from nowhere, grow, shrink, and vanish. That is a picture, not a proof, but it helps.
Can another spirit use a body?
Yes, and the Gospels show it plainly: a man in the synagogue sat quietly until Jesus taught, and then the spirit in him “cried out” through his mouth (Mark 1:23). The body and the voice are instruments, and a spirit other than the owner’s can take them up.
I am no expert. Another spirit used my body at least twice: twice that I know of, because both times it did something I can point to. There may have been other times I never knew about.
The first time, I invited it. I said in my thoughts, “Devil, if you’re real, show me.” I remember nothing after that until I woke up in a hospital with my mother beside me, wondering how I got there. She knew nothing either. My friend Ron told me the rest: I had said, “We’re going to the Coronado Inn,” and driven there by a way I would never go and in a way I would never drive, speeding on purpose, running every stop sign, then speeding up to run a red light and slam into another car.
The second time was at an altar in 1972, the first time I ever heard repentance preached. As I began to repent, for one second I heard a voice come out of my mouth that was not my own. Then nothing, until it was gone.
I never felt it come in. My body was used. I was not there.
— Reider Waage · the full testimony →
Notice what that means: a spirit can be at work in a person without that person knowing. It was detected only by what it did.
Two more things stand out. First, there was a door: “Neither give place to the devil” (Ephesians 4:27). Judas was already stealing before “Satan entered into him” (John 12:6; Luke 22:3). Second, most sin needs no spirit at all. When Peter opposed the cross, Jesus said “Get thee behind me, Satan,” because “thou savourest… those that be of men” (Matthew 16:23): it was Peter’s own thinking. “Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust” (James 1:14).
How can God’s Spirit fill a person?
The body was built to be lived in: it is “the temple of the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 6:19). And spirit does not compete for space the way matter does. Two stones cannot occupy one place, but light can fill glass, fire can fill iron, and breath can fill lungs.
God’s Spirit joins the human spirit without dissolving it: “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit” (Romans 8:16). And the Spirit who fills is not a stranger. He is “the Spirit of Christ” (Romans 8:9), “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). Jesus promised, “he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” (John 14:17-18). Bishop Wilson: “Upon being Spirit-filled, every dimension of humanness is the temple of God, beginning with the human spirit.”2
Two voices through one mouth
Possession and the Holy Ghost can both speak through a person’s mouth. There the likeness ends.
Even in tongues the person stays present: “he that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself” (1 Corinthians 14:4), and “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets” (14:32). God does not take you over to fill you; He leads you, and makes you more yourself.
Nor does He always come with a feeling. When the Holy Ghost fills a person, the sign is often heard by others first, as it was at Cornelius’s house (Acts 10:46).
It is promised to you
“If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” (Luke 11:13). Peter told the first crowd how: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38).
1 Nathaniel J. Wilson, Apostolic Pentecostal Theology, 2nd ed. (2025), pp. 190, 317. ↑
2 Ibid., p. 294. ↑