Man Was Created As A Living Soul

When God created man, He took dust from the earth and formed it into the shape of a man (flesh), then He breathed into this man and he became a living soul.
A soul man has a mind.  He has a will and an intellect.  He has an identity and a personality.  He is distinct from all the other animals on Earth.  No matter how much they might seem to resemble him, he is the only one who is an eternal soul. 


A soul is a type of spiritual creation. It doesn't have a spirit as we think of distinct parts of our being. Rather, it is a creature, one of God's creation, made up of the interaction of spirit (the breath of God) and earth. The life of the soul comes from the breath of God and at death when He takes back his breath, the soul goes with it and the body dies.

All men from creation until Salvation are soul in nature. 

The Old Testament uses separate words for spirit and soul but they describe different aspects of the same soulish nature as a breathing creature.  For example:


Soul H5315 nephesh
From H5314; properly a breathing creature, that is, animal or (abstractly) vitality; used very widely in a literal, accommodated or figurative sense (bodily or mental): - any, appetite, beast, body, breath, creature, X dead (-ly), desire, X [dis-] contented, X fish, ghost, + greedy, he, heart (-y), (hath, X jeopardy of) life (X in jeopardy), lust, man, me, mind, mortality, one, own, person, pleasure, (her-, him-, my-, thy-) self, them (your) -selves, + slay, soul, + tablet, they, thing, (X she) will, X would have it.

Spirit H7307 rûach
From H7306; wind; by resemblance breath, that is, a sensible (or even violent) exhalation; figuratively life, anger, unsubstantiality; by extension a region of the sky; by resemblance spirit, but only of a rational being (including its expression and functions): - air, anger, blast, breath, X cool, courage, mind, X quarter, X side, spirit ([-ual]), tempest, X vain, ([whirl-]) wind (-y).


Your soul is given headship over your body and mind. 
Your soul uses knowledge it gains , which it evaluates according to its current understanding and logically reasons an appropriate action.

As we have seen, your soul is who you are when you are born.  You are an entity caused by the breath of God when He breathed into Adam and born in the time indicated by God’s Structured Plan of Design, and in the place and to the parents you were supposed to be born from. 

Your soul is the “pilot” of your being.  He was given dominion over your body in the beginning but because of the curse of sin, he is subject to the influence of his carnal sin nature (see man of sin) which often leads him into wicked ways.

When you are Born Again, you receive a christ (anointed) spirit from The Father.  This makes you a New Creation spirit man.  Your spirit has never been subject to the curse of the Law of Sin and Death.  He is perfect, mature and sinless. (Please read What Happens at Salvation.)

When you are born again, your spirit functions like an umbilical cord that connects a baby to his mother in the womb. The umbilical cord is carrier of the life flow from mother to child, and the spirit is the carrier of the life flow from the Father to the soul.  He is purposed to bring the soul to maturity.

When you are Born Again, you receive a christ spirit (an anointed spirit - pneuma christos) from The Father.  This makes you a New Creation, a spirit man.

1Co2:12-16  Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. 

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.   (The natural man is a soul man.)

For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. (Our spirit man.)

The things of the spirit are often contrary to the things of our natural world so they are hard for your soul to understand.  When you think about them, you filter them through your life experience and they don’t make sense.  it’s only as you comprehend spiritual truths from a spiritual perspective that you can begin to understand them.

 
The Holy Spirit of Wisdom imparts knowledge to our spirit and he ministers these truths to your soul so that bit by bit he is able to grasp them.  When he does, comprehension occurs and it seems like suddenly you receive great insight but it was actually a process of learning to think like God thinks.