08/08/2026
E W Kenyon writes:
Chapter IX
WITH THE HEART MAN BELIEVETH
FOR years I have been eagerly searching for a satisfactory explanation of Romans 10:10. "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness."
You understand that the word "heart" is used illustratively because the heart is the life center of man. It is the great pumping station that keeps the physical body alive.
We have come to know that when God speaks of the heart, He means the human spirit.
We know that man is a spirit.
He is in the same class as God.
We know that God is a spirit and that He became a man and took on a man's body, and when He did it He was no less God than He was before He took the physical body.
We know that man, at death, leaves his physical body and is no less man than he was when he had his physical body.
We know that man cannot know God through Sense Knowledge.
God is only revealed to man through the spirit.
It is the spirit of man that contacts God.
We know that spiritual things are just as real as material things.
God is just as real a person as though He had a physical body.
Jesus, with His physical body now in Heaven, is no more real than the Holy Spirit or the Father.
I Peter 3:4, our spirit is called the "hidden man of the heart."
In Romans 7:22 it is called "the inward man". This "inward man" and "the hidden man" give us God’s definition of the human spirit. The real man is spirit.
He has a body and a soul.
The soul contacts the intellectual realm, the physical body contacts the physical realm, and the spirit, the spiritual realm.
That explains how "the natural man understandeth not the things of the spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them because they are spiritually understood." I Cor. 2:14.
The first two chapters of I Cor. give us a contrast between Sense Knowledge and spiritual knowledge, or between the senses and the spirit.
You understand that all the knowledge that man has outside of Revelation Knowledge has come to him through these five doors to the mind.
They are the means of communication between material things and intellectual.
The mind can receive nothing unless it receives it through these Five Senses. (The subject is covered more fully in our book "The Two Kinds of Knowledge).
If The Five Senses were destroyed, man would have no means of receiving knowledge.
He could not know himself, nor the material world.
2 Cor. 4:16 "Wherefore we faint not, but though our outward man is decaying, yet our
inward man is being renewed day by day."
Eph. 3:16 "That He would grant you according to the riches of His glory, that ye may be made strong with His ability through His Spirit in the inward man."
When a man is Born Again, Eternal Life is imparted to his spirit, to this inward man.
When the Holy Spirit comes into his body, He comes in to dwell in his spirit.
The Holy Spirit cannot communicate directly with our minds, but He must communicate with us through our spirit which reaches and influences our intellectual processes.
The spirit has a voice. We call that voice conscience, or a hunch, or guidance.
Sometimes it is called intuition. We get a hunch and if we follow it we do not make a mistake. (I do not like the word "hunch" but it is in common use).
We all know that if we had followed an inward voice, we would never have made some of the investments that we have made where we lost money; that we would never have chosen certain people as companions; we would never have gone into business with certain people.
That inward voice seeks to give guidance to OUR minds.
We would almost never make a mistake if we would learn to give heed to our spirit.
One of the greatest mistakes that has been made in our intellectual culture has been the ignoring of the spirit.
Knowledge of our intellects has taken the throne, and our spirits have been locked away in a prison.
Consequently, we are continually making mistakes because our spirit which should guide us is not permitted to function.
Knowledge is something that we acquire through the Senses, through reading, through travel and hearing.
Wisdom is the ability to use the knowledge to profit.
Wisdom does not come through the Senses.
Wisdom comes from our spirit.
James says that it comes down from above. That is divine wisdom, God's wisdom imparted to us. James 3:13-18.
The man who shuts his spirit away and makes a prisoner of it, who never listens to it, never obeys it, becomes crippled and is an easy prey to selfish and designing people.
The one who lets the spirit gain the mastery and influence him at crisis times is the one who climbs to the top.
What does it mean to "believe with the heart"?
It means to believe with the spirit.
We cannot believe with our intellect. That goes without argument.
Faith is a product of the spirit.
This inward conviction, this thing called assurance, is a child of our spirits.
We don't know why we know; we cannot explain it, and yet we do know.
The other day I was unfolding the Word to a woman who had a very painful sickness. As I opened the Scripture step by step she said, "I see it. By his stripes, I am healed."
I said, "How do you know you are healed?" She said, "Because the Word declares that I am."
Sense Knowledge said, "The sore is still in your body and you can feel the pain even now."
Yet she arose above Sense Knowledge and Sense Evidences and declared that she was healed.
As I prayed for her, her faith absolutely drove out the disease. The thing that meant death to her was gone. Why? Because in her heart she believed the Word of God; in her spirit she believed it.
low does our spirit get faith that our intellect cannot obtain—-through the Word.
Jesus said, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Matt. 4 A.
He is speaking of spiritual food. He is using Sense Knowledge terms to convey a spiritual truth.
Our spirits become filled with assurance as we meditate in the Word.
For many years I have walked by faith for our finances, for all my physical needs. Now I have grown to see that the Word is the food that builds the spirit, makes it strong, and gives to it its quiet assurance.
The Senses believe in what they can hear and see and feel.
The spirit believes in the Word, regardless of seeing, hearing, or feeling.
The people who are prayed for again and again but do not get their healing, have Sense Knowledge faith.
They do not have Revelation faith. Thev have faith in man, faith in the anointing oil, faith in someone else's prayer, faith in some person or organization. They do not have faith in the Word.
James 5:14 illustrates this: "Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church: and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up." Then it tells how the prayer of a Righteous man availeth much in its working.
This whole picture is a Sense-Knowledge-faith picture.
If the one who was sick had known that "by His stripes" he was healed, he would have had no need to call for the elders.
But because he did not know it, in his desperation he turned to the Lord and to the elders.
Here is a demonstration of the Grace of God, in meeting man on his own level as Jesus did in the Incarnation.
When the Word was made flesh and dwelt among men, He came into man's Sense-Knowledge realm, so that man could see Him, hear Him, touch Him.
Everything connected with the earth walk of Jesus as far as man could see, was in the Sense realm.
There was no faith in Jesus from a spiritual point of view.
They believed because they saw the miracles and ate the bread.
When He died on the cross there was no spiritual apprehension. They did not know that He was dying for their sins. They thought He was dying as a martyr for His ideals.
Sense Knowledge holds the same conception today.
The scholastic world believes Jesus died for His convictions.
At the Crucifixion Sense Knowledge-faith broke down.
To believe with all our hearts is to believe independently of Sense Knowledge.
Our Spirits respond to our yielding to the Lordship of Jesus. (The key to Biblical faith is the recognition of the Lordship of Jesus by the heart.)
1 Peter 3:15 "But sanctify in your heart Christ as Lord."
"Sanctify" means to "separate' or "set apart". We set Christ apart in our hearts.
When we crown Jesus as Lord of our lives, we crown His Word as Lord of our lives. This gives the Word its proper place.
Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father. His Word is in our hearts.
We give to that Word its place, and when we do faith becomes perfectly natural.
Prov. 3:15 "Trust in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding (or to Sense Knowledge). In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He will direct thy paths. Be not wise in thine own conceit.'
Be not wise with Sense Knowledge which leads us to repudiate the Word or to act independently of it.
2 Cor. 10:3 "Casting down reasonings and
every high thing that exalts itself against the
knowledge of the Word of God, and bringing
every thought into captivity to the obedience of
Christ."
This is very important if we want to walk by faith. The Word must be superior to Sense Knowledge, whether that Sense Knowledge be ours or someone else's.
We want to remember that Sense Knowledge is always limited.
No man has perfect Sense Knowledge.
The Word of God is perfect. This Revelation is His perfect Revelation and it meets every crisis and every need of our lives.
If we trust this Word with all our hearts then there comes a quietness and rest into our spirits.
Believing is knowing. We know that the Word of God is true.
When He says, "And my God shall supply every need of yours," we simply know in our spirits that every need will be supplied and we don't worry; we have no anxiety.
Our hearts take courage as we read the Word. Our assurance becomes deeper.
This is assurance which is independent of Sense evidence. It may contradict Sense evidence as it often does, but we know that spiritual things are as real as material things.
We know that spiritual things are superior to physical things, for God, a spirit, created physical things.
We know that spiritual forces are stronger than physical forces.
We know that "Greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world."
We know that the Greater One is master of disease and weakness.
We trust in Him with all our hearts; He rises up in us and gives our minds illumination which they can get from no other source.
We know we cannot be conquered.
We know because we believe.
The Two Kinds of Faith - EW Kenyon
