Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

by John Ortberg

“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

“Being right is actually a very hard burden to be able to carry gracefully and humbly. That’s why nobody likes to sit next to the kid in class who’s right all the time. One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.”

“The most important thing in your life,” Dallas said, “is not what you do; it’s who you become. That’s what you will take into eternity. You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.”

“You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. That’s the most important thing for you to know about you. You should write that down. You should repeat it regularly. Brother John, you think you have to be someplace else or accomplish something more to find peace. But it’s right here. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are. Your soul is not just something that lives on after your body dies. It’s the most important thing about you. It is your life.”

“The only thing I can depend on with my body is that it will fail me. Somehow my body is mine, but it’s not ‘me.’ ”

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.”

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,” Dallas explained. “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 world diverts my soul-attention when it encourages me to think of myself more as a victim than as a human. I am so wrapped up in the hurt I have received that I do not notice the hurt I inflict.

Idolatry, according to author Timothy Keller, is the sin beneath the sin.

“You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.”

“People in churches — including pastors — have been crushed with guilt over their failure at having a regular quiet time or daily devotions. And then, even when they do, they find it does not actually lead to a healthy soul. Your problem is not the first fifteen minutes of the day. It’s the next twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes. You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing total contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.”

The stream is your soul. For it to flow freely, the keeper of the stream must clear it of anything that becomes more important than God.

You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.

My mind may be obsessed with idols; my will may be enslaved to habits; my body may be consumed with appetites. But my soul will never find rest until it rests in God.

This God — this God of the Bible — is a God who wants to “be with.” Our souls were made to walk with God.

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.

Blessing is not just a word. Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another.

The paradox of soul-satisfaction is this: When I die to myself, my soul comes alive.

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.

What matters is the work of helping people know that God is alive and present and loves them; that this reality that Jesus called the kingdom is among us and available; and that life is precious, yet is wasted with terrible ease.