How Sons Exercise Their Spirit:
A Practical Guide for Kingdom Entrepreneurs

(Intro Video) Most Christians have never been taught how to exercise their human spirit. We study Scripture and pray with our minds, but Hebrews 5:14 reveals something we’ve missed:

Heb 5:14 – Solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained their senses
to distinguish good from evil.

The Greek for senses, aisthētēria, means an organ of perception. Your human spirit is the organ that:

• • Hears from God so we can say what he is saying (Jn 12:49) and
  • Sees what Father is doing so we can do it with Him, Jn 5:19)

Your spirit is developed by using it, otherwise it’s dormant and we are deaf. If you’re running a business feeling disconnected from God’s voice, it’s not because Father isn’t speaking. Your spirit—the organ designed to hear and see His communication—hasn’t been activated and exercised.

 

#1: Get Activated — Baptism in the Holy Spirit

Romans 8:16 says, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit.” This is Spirit-to-spirit communication. But this channel remains dormant for many believers who’ve never been baptized in the Holy Spirit.

This isn’t about salvation—it’s activation. When you’re baptized in the Spirit, the communication channel opens. Speaking in tongues becomes normal—the most direct exercise of your spirit bypassing your conscious mind. When you pray in tongues, your spirit prays what your understanding doesn’t know (1 Cor 14:14).

Ask Father right now: “Fill me. Open the channel.” Then begin speaking with your prayer language from your spirit, not your mind. This is the foundation.

 

#2: Ascend to Heaven’s Courts and Council

Once activated, your spirit needs a place to exercise. Psalm 23:5: “You prepare a table before me.” John 14:2-3 reveals Jesus prepared a seat with your name on it. The Council of Heaven is where sons receive Living Words from Father, Jesus, and the Seven Spirits. Traditional prayer becomes conversations instead of wish lists.

• For the Courts:Your spirit brings accusations before the Judge. Every lie, every disqualifying accusation, every stronghold—presented where the blood speaks a better word. You learn to discern when an accusation is canceled versus when your mind is making you feel better.
• For the Council:Start the conversations with, “Father, What is on your heart?” Wait for what your spirit perceives. Take notes on what you hear and see.

This is your seer gift developing—your spirit distinguishing Father’s voice from your thoughts. Take advantage of our Court and Council Toolkit.

 

#3: Get Clarity on Purpose — Write Your Purpose Profile

Your spirit needs specific focus. In business, this means getting clear enough on Father’s purpose to write it in a Purpose Profile.

Ask Father in the Council: “What is the purpose You’ve written in my heart for this business?” Write what you perceive—not what sounds good, but what your spirit hears.

This becomes your North Star. You’ll receive specific revelation: your market, your metron, and how you fit in the Reformation of People, Businesses, Cities, and Nations Father wants. Your Purpose Profile is your spirit’s download in writing.

 

#4: Live by Every Word from Father’s Mouth

Matthew 4:4: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Not has proceeded—proceeds. Present tense. Ongoing conversations in the Council are with Father, Jesus and the 7 Spirits. Your business doesn’t run on last year’s prophetic word. It runs on the Living Words your spirit receives today from Father’s mouth.

This is mid-course correction in real-time. The Spirit of Wisdom shows you the negotiation strategy. The Spirit of Understanding reveals the hire. The Spirit of Might activates courage. These aren’t principles you apply—they’re Living Words your spirit receives and your business implements.

The exercise: “Father, what are You saying about this decision?” Your spirit learns to perceive the answer before your mind tries to logic its way there.

 

#5: Cast Down Arguments in the Courts

Your spirit doesn’t just receive revelation—it engages warfare. 2 Corinthians 10:4-5: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.”

These arguments are strongholds—belief systems that seem logical but contradict what Father revealed. They’re defended by accusations, argument, and pretensions: “You’re not qualified.” “This won’t work.” “You’re foolish to try.”

The Courts is where your spirit brings these arguments and accusations before the Judge. Not to debate them, but to present the blood of Jesus as superior evidence. Your spirit exercises its authority: “This argument is demolished. This accusation is canceled. The blood speaks louder.”

This isn’t positive thinking. It’s your spirit engaging the legal reality of what Jesus accomplished and applying it to the specific lies holding your business captive.

 

The Pattern: Constant Use

Hebrews 5:14 says maturity comes through “constant use.” Your spirit is strengthened by exercise, not information.

The article that follows explains the biblical framework for what your human spirit actually is. But understanding the framework doesn’t replace exercising the organ.

Start today:

• • Get baptized in the Holy Spirit (activate the channel)
  • Go to the Courts and take accusations to the Cross (exercise discernment)
  • Go to the Council with business questions (exercise perception)
  • Write down what you receive, bring it to Earth (make it concrete)
  • Implement what you heard (co-labor with Father)

Your human spirit is the lamp of the Lord (Proverbs 20:27). It’s the perceptual organ that makes co-laboring with Father possible. But like any muscle, it only grows through use.

Stop trying to run your business from your mind alone. Start exercising your spirit to perceive what Father is already saying. Use your wisdom and initiative after you have heard Purpose from Holy Spirit, Strategy from the Spirit of wisdom, and Tactics from the Spirit of Understanding.

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Take the Next Step:

Progression to Sonship – Your Kingdom purpose and redemptive stories form the basis for your personal identity, purpose, value creation, and your business offer. Becoming your authentic self is the Father’s non-religious key to flow and fruit in business and life. We offer practical and prophetic coaching to help you get there, flowing with your Father (co-laboring) instead of fighting circumstances and resistance alone. Is this You?

Read the book and chat with John about Kingdom Business Coaching.

 

 The Human Spirit: Our Organ of Perception

The Starting Point — Hebrews 5:14

The author of Hebrews gives us an unexpected biological metaphor: “But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained their senses to distinguish good from evil.” The Greek word translated “senses” is aisthētēria — perceptual organs, the faculty of discernment. It is used only here in the New Testament, and it is a deliberate anatomical analogy. Just as the eye perceives light and the ear perceives sound, there is a spiritual faculty — an inner perceptual organ — that, when trained, distinguishes the things of God from the things that merely resemble them.

This is the anchor for everything that follows. The human spirit is not a metaphor for religious feeling. It is a faculty — a specific capacity for perception that operates in a dimension the body and the reasoning mind cannot access on their own. Like a muscle, our spirit is strengthened with exercise.

Defining the Human Spirit from Scripture

1. It is the deepest and most inward dimension of personhood

Paul’s clearest statement is in 1 Corinthians 2:11: “For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” The structure of the sentence is deliberate: the human spirit stands in analogous relationship to the human person as the Holy Spirit stands in relationship to God. Just as only God’s own Spirit has full access to God’s depths, only a person’s own spirit has access to the depths of that person. The spirit is not one layer among many — it is the innermost dimension, the place that even other people cannot reach without divine access.

2. It is the God-breathed animating faculty — distinct from mere biological life

Genesis 2:7 records that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” The Hebrew neshamah — divine breath — is what distinguishes the human creature from the rest of creation. Job 32:8 draws the implication: “But it is the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding.” The spirit is not merely what keeps a person biologically alive. It is what makes a person capable of receiving understanding from God. It is the point of contact between divine breath and human capacity.

Zechariah 12:1 names the human spirit as something God himself actively forms: “The LORD, who stretches out the heavens, who lays the foundation of the earth, and who forms the human spirit within a person.” The same Creator who ordered the cosmos forms the human spirit. It is not an accident of biological development. It is a specific act of creation.

3. It is the perceptual faculty for spiritual reality

1 Corinthians 2:14-15 draws the sharpest distinction: “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things.” The Greek for “discerned” here is pneumatikōs anakrinetai — spiritually examined, spiritually perceived. The faculty required to perceive spiritual reality is the spirit itself. This is Hebrews 5:14 in practice: the trained aisthētēria is the capacity that makes spiritual discernment possible.

Proverbs 20:27 makes the same point from the Hebrew wisdom tradition: “The human spirit is the lamp of the LORD that sheds light on one’s inmost being.” The spirit is the instrument God uses to illuminate a person from the inside. It is a lamp — a perceptual and revelatory organ — through which divine light searches and reveals.

4. It is the point of direct communication between the Holy Spirit and the human person

Romans 8:16 is the clearest description of the interface: “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” The Greek is summarturei — co-witnesses, testifies alongside. The communication is not the Holy Spirit speaking to the mind or the emotions directly. It is Spirit-to-spirit: the Holy Spirit addresses the human spirit, and the human spirit receives and registers the testimony. This is not a metaphor for religious feeling. It is a description of a specific channel of communication between two spirits — one divine, one human.

John 4:24 establishes why this is the only viable channel: “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” Spirit communicates with spirit because they share ontological category. The body cannot receive what is spirit. The rational mind, operating on sensory data and logical inference, cannot access the frequency on which divine communication travels. Only the human spirit, being itself spirit, is tuned to receive it.

5. It can be in varying conditions — broken, contrite, renewed, strengthened

The spirit is not a static thing. It has conditions. Psalm 51:17: “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite spirit you, God, will not despise.” The spirit can be crushed. Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” The spirit can be renewed. Ephesians 3:16: “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” The inner being — the spirit — can be strengthened. It is a living faculty that grows, atrophies, is wounded, and is restored.

The Heart as the Housing of the Spirit

The human spirit does not operate in isolation from the heart. They are not identical — the spirit is the faculty of God-ward perception; the heart (kardia / lev) is the integrating center of the whole inner person, the place from which all action flows (Proverbs 4:23). But in Scripture they are functionally inseparable because the spirit operates through the heart. The heart is the chamber; the spirit is the faculty housed within it.

Romans 5:5 locates the communication precisely: “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit speaks to the human spirit (Romans 8:16), and what is deposited arrives in the heart. The heart is where Living Words land and take root — where revelation becomes motivation, where the testimony of the Spirit becomes the governing desire of the person.

Proverbs 4:23 follows from this: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” The heart is not merely the emotional center. Because it houses the human spirit — the perceptual organ through which God speaks — it is the well from which all of life is drawn. Whatever conditions the heart conditions the spirit’s receptivity. A hardened heart (Mark 3:5) is a heart whose perceptual organ has been closed. A pure heart (Matthew 5:8) — “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” — is one in which the organ of perception is unobstructed.

Hebrews 4:12 describes the Word of God as penetrating to the exact boundary between soul and spirit: “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” The fact that the Word must divide soul from spirit implies that in ordinary experience they are entangled — the spiritual perception is mixed with soulish emotion, desire, and rational processing. Maturity in the spirit is the increasing ability to distinguish what the spirit is perceiving from what the soul is projecting.

Distinguishing the Human Spirit from Conscious and Subconscious

The secular framework divides the inner person into two layers: the conscious mind — the rational, deliberate, aware dimension — and the subconscious (or unconscious) — the deeper, non-rational repository of memory, habit, belief, and emotional pattern. This framework, developed through Freud, Jung, and the cognitive sciences, is useful for describing psychological function but is fundamentally inadequate as a map of the inner person because it is a closed system. Both the conscious and the subconscious are entirely human in their contents and their operation. They receive input from the senses, from experience, from culture, from memory. They have no faculty for receiving communication from outside the human system itself.

The comparison looks like this:

Paul didn’t trust his own conscious – His conscious and subconscious feelings and opinions were not necessarily from God. Neither are ours! We have to discern or judge what is in our own hearts. He didn’t trust other people, or even himself, to make those calls.

1Cor 4:3 –  I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed,
I do not even judge myself.
4)    My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.
5)    Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes (speaks).
He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart.
At that time each will receive their praise from God.

 

Exposing The New Thought Bias

New thought philosophy makes exactly this substitution (confusing the human spirit with subconscious): it relocates spiritual reality into the subconscious. The subconscious is treated as the “god within” — the creative power, the seat of abundance, the source of destiny. Visualization and affirmation are techniques for “reprogramming” the subconscious, which then produces the desired external reality. The language is spiritual; the mechanism is entirely psychological. There is no actual God in the system — only the human psyche with spiritual vocabulary overlaid on it.

The biblical framework is categorically different. The human spirit is not a deeper layer of the human psyche. It is the faculty through which a human person interfaces with a God who exists independent from them. The communication is not self-generated. It cannot be triggered by technique. It is initiated by our ascension to the Council or promptings from the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:16; John 16:13), received by the human spirit (1 Corinthians 2:10-12), and deposited in the heart (Romans 5:5; Jeremiah 31:33) where it becomes the governing motivation and the wellspring of action.

The practical distinction: New thought says, “train your subconscious to generate what you want.” Scripture says, “train your spirit to perceive what the Father is already saying.” One is the person speaking to themselves at a deeper level. The other is a person with a perceptual organ tuned to a voice that is not their own.

 

The Trained Organ — Back to Hebrews 5:14

Hebrews 5:14 is now fully intelligible. The aisthētēria — the perceptual senses of the spirit — can be trained through constant use. Maturing spiritual discernment by Listening in the Council in Heaven and to Holy Spirit on Earth is part of the growth process for Sonship. Just as the eye becomes more discerning with practice, just as the ear of a musician learns to hear distinctions that others miss, the human spirit develops in its capacity to distinguish the voice of God from the noise of the soul, the genuine from the counterfeit, the Living Word from the self-generated thought.

This is why ascending to the Council is a practice, not just an event. It is the ongoing training of the spirit’s perceptual faculty — the aisthētēria — until the son consistently hears what the Father is saying, brings it back, and speaks it into the hearts of the people around him. Not because he is spiritually gifted in some unusual way. Because the organ has been trained.

PS: We use this graphic as a primer in workshops to help people learn to capture the 9 conversations (new Truths) and anything that might be hindering our ability to hear (old pretensions).