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The Soul Nobody Knows
You’re a soul made by God, made for God, and made to need God, which means you were not made to be self-sufficient. Ortberg expanded on his conversation with Dallas Willard, “What is running your life at any given moment is your soul. Not external circumstances, not your thoughts, not your intentions, not even your feelings, but your soul. The soul is that aspect of your whole being that correlates, integrates, and enlivens everything going on in the various dimensions of the self. The soul is the life center of human beings.”
If your soul is healthy, no external circumstance can destroy your life. If your soul is unhealthy, no external circumstance can redeem your life.
The will is very good at making simple and large commitments like getting married, or deciding to move someplace, but it is very bad at trying to override habits and patterns and attitudes that are deeply rooted in us. If you try to improve your soul by willpower, you will exhaust yourself and everyone around you.
The Operating System of Your Life
The soul seeks harmony, connection, and integration. That is why integrity is such a deep soul-word. The human soul seeks to integrate our will and our mind and our body into an integral person.
Your soul is what integrates your will (your intentions), your mind (your thoughts and feelings, your values and conscience), and your body (your face, body language, and actions) into a single life. A soul is healthy — well-ordered — when there is harmony between these three entities and God’s intent for all creation. When you are connected with God and other people in life, you have a healthy soul.
Remember what Jesus said about the soul? “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36) Jesus is talking about a diagnosis, not a destination. If we think of hell as a torture chamber and heaven as a pleasure factory, we will never understand Jesus’ point. For the ruined soul — that is, where the will and the mind and the body are disintegrated, disconnected from God, and living at odds with the way God made life in the universe to run — acquiring the whole world could not even produce satisfaction, let alone meaning and goodness.
Ironically, the more obsessed we are with our selves, the more we neglect our souls. All of our language reflects this. If you’re empty, you need to fulfill yourself. If you’re stressed, learn how to take care of yourself. If you’re on a job interview, you have to believe in yourself. If you’re at the tattoo parlor, you must learn to express yourself. If someone dares to criticize you, you have to love yourself. If you’re not getting your own way, you have to stand up for yourself. What should you do on a date? You ought to be yourself.
Self is a stand-alone, do-it-yourself unit, while the soul reminds us we were not made for ourselves.
What Really Matters…
Ortberg claims, “What matters is not the accomplishments you achieve; what matters is the person you become.” Our problem is that this world does not teach us to pay attention to what matters. We circulate résumés that chronicle what we have accomplished, not who we have become.
To focus more on who we are becoming, we need to make small sacrifices. For a college student, this may mean making a vow to wake up and go to breakfast every morning, even if your first class isn’t until eleven a.m. Choose a plain cheese pizza rather than pepperoni. You’ll be surprised how these tiny sacrifices work an interior magic, shifting your focus ever so slightly away from yourself. Once you’re a little bit to the side, God can come to the center.
Somebody said a long time ago that if the Devil can’t make you sin, he will make you busy, because either way your soul will shrivel. Our world will divert your soul’s attention because it is a cluttered world. And clutter is maybe the most dangerous result, because it’s so subtle.
The apostle Peter says, “There are sinful desires inside you, and they wage war against your soul.” Your soul is what integrates, what connects, what binds together your will, then your mind (those thoughts, feelings, and desires going on all the time), and then your body (with all of its appetites, habits, and behavior).
Your heart (that is, your will, your choices), your mind (all your thoughts and desires), your strength (all of your body), and your soul are all to be bound together and focused on love of God, and then the love of all that flows out of this. When your will is consistently, freely, joyfully aligned with what you most deeply value, your soul finds rest. That is wholeness. When you live with half-hearted devotion, your soul is always strained.
The soul’s infinite capacity to desire is the mirror image of God’s infinite capacity to give. What if the real reason we feel like we never have enough is that God is not yet finished giving? The unlimited neediness of the soul matches the unlimited grace of God.
Another View of Idolatry
Idolatry, according to author Timothy Keller, is the sin beneath the sin. Anytime I sin, I am allowing some competing desire to have higher priority than God and God’s will for my life. That means that in that moment I have put something on a pedestal higher than God. That something is my idol. All sin involves idolatry. In many ways, what the Bible calls idolatry we call addiction.
The soul must orbit around something other than itself — something it can worship. It is the nature of the soul to need.
You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God. Here are a few of the indicators when a soul lacks a center. A soul without a center:
- Has difficulty making a decision.
- Feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances.
- Lacks patience.
- Is easily thrown.
- Finds its identity in externals.
The psalmist says that the person who can live in God’s presence is the one who has not lifted their soul up to an idol. When my soul is not centered in God, I define myself by my accomplishments, or my physical appearance, or my title, or my important friends. When I lose these, I lose my identity.
A soul disconnected from its center is like an unplugged computer. It is like a fish left on the banks of a river that would give it life. Eventually it crashes. It dies.
“With God”…
If you read through the Bible, you get the sense that the soul was designed to search for God. Ortberg begins each day by challenging himself this way, “How many moments of my life today can I fill with conscious awareness of and surrender to God’s presence?” He goes on to explain that he’s been trying to make this the goal of his day as opposed to a list of things he has to get done.
The “with God” life is not a life of more religious activities or devotions or trying to be good. It is a life of inner peace and contentment for your soul with the maker and manager of the universe. The “without God” life is the opposite. It is death. It will kill your soul.
Hurry is one of the major barriers that keeps us from life on the vine. Jesus tells us, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened . . . and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Easy is a soul word, not a circumstance word; not an assignment word. Aim at having easy circumstances, and life will be hard all around. Aim at having an easy soul, and your capacity for tackling hard assignments will actually grow. The soul was not made for an easy life. The soul was made for an easy yoke.
Sustenance & Significance
For sustenance, Jesus engaged in the following practices that allowed God’s grace to keep replenishing His spirit:
- He prayed.
- He had a circle of close friends — the twelve who went through life with Him. He shared everything with them; people underestimate the role of friendship in Jesus’ life.
- He engaged in regular corporate worship at synagogue.
- He fed His mind with Scripture.
- He enjoyed God’s creation — mountain, garden, and lake.
- He took long walks.
- He welcomed little children and hugged them and blessed them.
- He enjoyed partying with non-religious types.
We were made to make a difference beyond ourselves. Our lives were meant to be signs that point beyond ourselves to God. Significance is about who we are before it is about what we do.
When we are hurried, we are so preoccupied with ourselves and our lives that we are unable to be fully present with God, with ourselves, and with other people. Busy-ness migrates to hurry when we let it squeeze God out of our lives. Note the differences between the two:
Busy: A full schedule; Many activities; An outward condition; Physically demanding; Reminds me I need God
Hurried: Preoccupied; Unable to be fully present: An inner condition of the soul; Spiritually draining; Causes me to be unavailable to God
Jesus was often busy, but never hurried.
The French writer Blaise Pascal wrote centuries ago: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact,that they are unable to stay quietly in their own room.” In solitude, we liberate ourselves from the pressure of the world. The late evangelist Vance Havner wrote about the soul’s need for rest: “If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart in a while.”
Before giving Moses the Ten Commandments to deliver to Israel, God offered this significant reminder: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” He could have said, “Here is a list of rules and you better obey them or else.” Or he could have said, “I am the Lord your God and I expect you to do exactly what I tell you to do.” Instead, He introduced “the Law” by reminding them: “I am your liberator.” The Ten Commandments were never designed to be a stand-alone list of rules. They come within a relational context. In fact, in Judaism, they are not called the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew term is aseret hadevarim, which literally means “ten utterances” or “ten statements” because they were rooted in things that are meant to be in God’s kingdom. They flow out of how we were designed, who we were meant to be. We read them as “this is what you have to do,” but God was saying, “this is who you are.”
Soul Freedom
How do you get the freedom that your soul craves? This is the great irony about freedom. To become truly free, you must surrender. If you want to free your soul, you acknowledge that there is a spiritual order that God has designed for you. You are not the center of the universe.
Ruth Graham had been driving one day along a highway through a construction site, and there were miles of detours and cautionary signs and machinery and equipment. She finally came to the last one, and this final sign read, “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” That’s what is now written over her grave: “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” Construction today. Freedom tomorrow.
Dallas Willard pointed out that there are two great words in the Bible that describe the posture of our souls toward other people. One is to bless. The other is to curse. The LORD bless you and keep you; The LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Blessing and cursing are not compartmentalized Bible words at all. They are simply the two ways we treat people.
A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul-satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God.
The paradox of soul-satisfaction is this: When I die to myself, my soul comes alive. God says the wrong approach to soul thirst is through human achievement and material wealth. So soul-satisfaction is not about acquiring the right things but about acquiring the right soul. It is not something you buy, but something you receive freely from God.
Paul urges us to practice the very attitude of Jesus as we interact with each other and our neighbors. After listing such qualities as compassion, kindness, patience, humility, and the like, he ends with an appeal for gratitude: “And be thankful. . . sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, whether in word or in deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God through him.” More gratitude will not come from acquiring more things or experiences, but from more of an awareness of God’s presence and his goodness.
Gratitude always comes from a posture of humility. The more you think you’re entitled to, the less you will be grateful for. The bigger the sense of entitlement, the smaller the sense of gratitude. We wonder why in our world we keep getting more and more and more and keep being less and less and less grateful. This is precisely why. My sinful mind can convince me that anything I want I’m entitled to, and if I’m not getting something I want, somebody in the universe must be messing up, and they owe me, and they ought to pay for it.
Gratitude does not always come naturally. You will not always feel grateful. But you can take the time each day to remember the benefits you received, see your benefactor, and thank Him for His benefits.
Awed by the Slowness of God
Modern churches with linear models of spiritual growth and large-scale models for devotional life rarely speak of or help people with the dark night. We are uncomfortable with it because we want to do something — because we sell formulas and steps and programs, and the dark night of the soul is not our program. The dark night is for souls that learn to wait.
Joni Eareckson Tada, who has spent her adult life paralyzed and in a wheelchair, and more recently has written of her own struggle with cancer, heard about Dallas Willard’s bout with cancer and sent him these words from a nineteenth-century writer named Frederick Faber: “In the spiritual life God chooses to try our patience first of all by His slowness. He is slow: we are swift and precipitate. It is because we are but for a time, and He has been for eternity. . . There is something greatly overawing in the extreme slowness of God. Let it overshadow our souls, but let it not disquiet them. We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and the lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and He will come. He never comes to those who do not wait. He does not go their road. When He comes, go with Him, but go slowly, fall a little behind; when he quickens His pace, be sure of it, before you quicken yours. But when He slackens, slacken at once: and do not be slow only, but silent, very silent, for He is God.”
Ortberg noted that when he read that, he was reminded of Dallas’s words to him: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Our redeemed souls can:
- Be able to say yes or no without anxiety or duplicity
- Speak with confidence and honesty
- Be willing to disappoint anybody, yet ready to bless everybody
- Have a mind filled with more noble thoughts than could ever be spoken
- Share without thinking
- See without judging
- Be so genuinely humble that each person we see can be an object of wonder
- Love God
May you care for the most important part of you—your soul—as you shoot for the stars!