Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

by John Ortberg

“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

To focus on my soul means to look at my life under the care and connection of God. To focus on myself apart from God means losing awareness of what matters most.

You are only able to live in a way that really helps and loves others when your soul feels its worth.

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.

My soul becomes shallow when my interests and thoughts go no further than myself.

The world conspires against our souls by blinding us to the depth and glory of their God-given design and tempting us to be satisfied with immediate gratification.

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 soul’s problem, however, is not its neediness; it’s our fallenness. Our need was meant to point us to God. Instead, we fasten our minds and bodies and wills on other sources of ultimate devotion, which the Bible calls idolatry. Idolatry is the most serious sin in the Old Testament, leading one scholar to conclude that the primary principle of the Old Testament is the refutation of idolatry.

If your soul is devoted to something that becomes more important to you than God, that is your idol.

What the soul truly desires is God. We may try to fill that need with other things, but the soul will never be satisfied without God.

Our soul begins to grow in God when we acknowledge our basic neediness.

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

We will always take the most care of that which we value most deeply.

A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances.

The soul seeks God with its whole being. Because it is desperate to be whole, the soul is God-smitten and God-crazy and God-obsessed. 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.

All God has ever wanted is to be with you, with me.

God wants to make every moment of my life glorious with his presence.

As soon as I became aware of my self-centeredness, I surrendered my thoughts back to God and enjoyed his presence again. That’s just how God works with us — he relentlessly pursues us because all he has ever wanted is to be with us.

Being hurried is an inner condition, a condition of the soul. It means to be so preoccupied with myself and my life that I am unable to be fully present with God, with myself, and with other people. I am unable to occupy this present moment. Busy-ness migrates to hurry when we let it squeeze God out of our lives.

I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul. I cannot rest in God with a hurried soul.

My brokenness, like yours, is very complex. Parts of it have to do with my wounds and my scars and my disappointments, but at the core is my natural inclination toward sin.

I watched him and thought of what a redeemed soul can be: • To be able to say yes or no without anxiety or duplicity • To speak with confidence and honesty • To be willing to disappoint anybody, yet ready to bless everybody • To have a mind filled with more noble thoughts than could ever be spoken • To share without thinking • To see without judging • To be so genuinely humble that each person I see would be an object of wonder • To love God