“For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12
A believer’s greatest need is to get into the Word of God regularly and to go to the Lord day by day, especially in the mornings. Open up to the Lord and begin to pray over the verses. Reading the Bible must be more to us than a routine or academic pursuit. We need to actually contact God while we are in the Word. By getting into the Word in this way, we find it is “living and powerful.” It begins to operate; it begins to speak. A word will stand out, a verse will stand out, or a phrase will stand out, and then you begin to pray with what touches you. That word entering into your heart clears you up inwardly. “The entrance of Your words gives light” (Psa. 119:130). You begin to see that you have been in yourself — in your emotions, in your reactions, in your pride and hardness. You have been in your hurt feelings or in your reasoning mind about someone. You have chosen your own will. Light begins to dawn upon you, and you become inwardly clear about where you have been. You get divided. You begin to see how you have sinned, how you have lived in your soulish life, how you have lived out of your impulses, or how your motive for saying something was altogether impure. The word divides your soul and spirit, and discerns the thoughts and intents of your heart.
With this dividing and discerning, you begin to repent and confess to the Lord your lack of living out from Him. As you confess, your spirit rises to the surface of your being (cf. Eph. 5:18- 19 with Col. 3:16), and everything becomes crystal clear. What originates from your soul is exposed to you, and what originates from your spirit is manifested. There is the realm of the soul and there is the realm of the spirit, and it is the living and active word of God that discovers for us which realm we are living in.