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Our soul is like a stream of water, which gives strength, direction, and harmony to every other area of our life. When that stream is as it should be, we are constantly refreshed and exuberant in all we do, because our soul itself is then profusely rooted in the vastness of God and his kingdom, including nature; and all else within us is enlivened and directed by that stream. Therefore we are in harmony with God, reality, and the rest of human nature and nature at large. — DALLAS WILLARD IN RENOVATION OF THE HEART
“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.
“I was practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.
“Your eternal destiny is not cosmic retirement; it is to be part of a tremendously creative project, under unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast scale, with ever-increasing cycles of fruitfulness and enjoyment — that is the prophetic vision which ‘eye has not seen and ear has not heard.’ ”
“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.
But Pat said one time, “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.’ ”
“Brother John, why is there such value and mystery to your existence? The really deep reason is because of this tiny, fragile, vulnerable, precious thing about you called your soul. You are not just a self; you are a soul. ‘The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ 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.
In one of his books, Dallas has further explained, 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.
“Anytime you want to care for something, you have to understand it, whether it’s a beagle or a BMW,” Dallas continued. “Take that high-performance automobile you were driving. [Oops! He had noticed after all.] If a car is tuned and fueled and oiled and aligned, it is capable of amazing things — even your car,” he said, smiling. “If you do not understand its parts and how they work — well, we see the result.” Dallas went on to make the obvious connection. He said it is terribly important to understand the “parts” of the inner life. Each one must be healthy and working as God intended it to
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“The soul is the capacity to integrate all the parts into a single, whole life. It is something like a program that runs a computer; you don’t usually notice it unless it messes up.” According to Dallas, 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. Beyond that, the soul seeks to connect us with other people, with creation, and with God himself — who made us to be rooted in him the way a tree is rooted by a life-giving stream.
Dallas helped me understand what I have wondered over the years about the soul. It is the deepest part of you, and it is the whole 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.
Therefore, according to Dallas, an unhealthy soul is one that experiences dis-integration, and sin always causes the disintegration of the soul.
Our world has replaced the word soul with the word self, and they are not the same thing. The more we focus on our selves, the more we neglect our souls.
But psychology has focused on the self, and self carries a totally different connotation than soul. 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.
Martin Seligman, a brilliant psychologist with no religious ax to grind, has a theory that it’s because we have replaced church, faith, and community with a tiny little unit that cannot bear the weight of meaning. That’s the self. We’re all about the self. We revolve our lives around ourselves. Ironically, the more obsessed we are with our selves, the more we neglect our souls.
Self is a stand-alone, do-it-yourself unit, while the soul reminds us we were not made for ourselves. The soul always exists before God. So soul is needed for deep art, poetry, and music.
You are only able to live in a way that really helps and loves others when your soul feels its worth.
On the stage I ask Dallas questions about ministry. His response: “What matters is not the accomplishments you achieve; what matters is the person you become.
How does the world we live in keep us from attending to our souls? Jesus told a story about this. It’s of such importance that this story is the first of his recorded in the gospel of Mark and the one parable he fully interpreted to his disciples. It’s a story about seeds, a sower, and some soil. In a story like this one, it helps to notice what are the constants and what are the variables in order to understand Jesus’ point. The seed is a constant. This is not a good story about good seeds and bad seeds. The seed will take root given half a chance. The seed is a little picture of God’s desire
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It takes a little, just a tiny little bit of softness in the soil to give the seed a chance. The seed is strong — stronger than you can imagine. One tiny seed can break up a sidewalk if it can find a little room to breathe. The hardened soul is more vulnerable to being saved than it knows.
The Shallow Soul. Some of the seed fell on rocky soil. The idea here is not that there was a bunch of rocks, but that there was only a thin layer of topsoil with solid rock underneath.
The world conspires against our souls, keeping our lives superficial. “Superficiality,” said Richard Foster, “is the curse of our age.” The desperate need of the soul is not for intelligence, nor talent, nor yet excitement; just depth.
The soul is the deepest part of you. It is so deep that there are parts to my soul I cannot seem to understand or control. This is why writers in the ancient world, not just in the Bible, would often address the soul in the third person, in a way they would never do with the will or the mind or the body. There is a depth to your soul that is beyond words.
For much of our lives, we live in the shallows. Then something happens — a crisis, a birth, a death — and we get this glimpse of tremendous depth. My soul becomes shallow when my interests and thoughts go no further than myself. A person should be deep because life itself is deep. A deep soul has the capacity to understand and empathize deeply with other people — not just himself. A deep soul notices and questions and doesn’t just go through the motions. A deep soul lives in conscious awareness of eternity, not simply today. It notices and observes and reflects in surprising ways — we talk
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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 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.
We mistake our clutter for life. If we cease to be busy, do we matter? A person preoccupied with externals — success, reputation, ceaseless activity, lifestyle, office gossip — may be dead internally and not even recognize it. And our world has lots of “other things.” You can get them from infomercials; you can buy them online; you can collect them in your garage and put them in your will. It takes a little, such a tiny little uncluttered space to give the seed some room to grow. The cluttered soul is closer to being saved than it knows.
I had always thought that a lost soul referred to the soul’s destination, not its condition. But it’s the condition that is the real problem. If a car no longer works, it doesn’t matter much whether it ends up in a junkyard or the valet parking section of the Ritz-Carlton. We are not lost because we are going to wind up in the wrong place. We are going to wind up in the wrong place because we are lost.
The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can’t admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality.
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). God designed us so that our choices, our thoughts and desires, and our behavior would be in perfect harmony with each other and would be powered by an unbroken connection with God, in perfect harmony with him and with all of his creation. That is a well-ordered soul.
How do I come to grips with the truth about my own soul? Why is it so evasive? Why can I often see other people more clearly than myself? Soul language has to involve sin language. Why? Because sin disintegrates, obliterates, wholeness. Your soul cannot function properly if sin is present. Sin is not just the wrong stuff we do; it’s the good we don’t do.
Unlike our legal system, sins are not weighted by their seriousness. There are no misdemeanors in the realm of sin. Sin is sin, and it is serious because of what it does to the soul.
Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners — of whom I am the worst.” Why does Paul say he is the worst? The late John Stott wrote, “Paul is not saying he did a careful study of every sinner in human history and found out he came in last place. The truth is, rather, when we are convicted by the Holy Spirit, an immediate result is we give up all such comparisons.
This is the language of every sinner whose conscience has been awakened and disturbed by the Holy Spirit. There is real neurological evidence for the power of spiritual reflection to make us aware of our sin. Christians actually use a different part of their brain to self-evaluate than non-Christians. In a study conducted in Beijing, researchers compared which part of the brain people used to evaluate both themselves and others. The study is summarized in an article with the snappy title, “Neural Consequences of Religious Belief on Self-Referential Processing.” Non-religious subjects used one
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Prayer, meditation, and confession actually have the power to rewire the brain in a way that can make us less self-referential and more aware of how God sees us. But these impediments to sin may not come easily.
Ariely goes on to write about how a single act of dishonesty is not a petty act, because it ends up shaping how we view ourselves. We are souls. Everything is connected. That singular deceit determines how far we will allow our standards to slip and still regard ourselves as basically good people. Every act of wrongdoing (sin) leads to the greater likelihood of another act. Start as small as you want. Stand in the express lane in the grocery store with too many groceries in your cart — seventeen grocery items in the twelve-or-less aisle. Try to board a plane when it’s not yet your group’s
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The soul is able to bear only so much truth. Perhaps it’s like having a child: if anyone really knew the cost ahead of time, no one would ever do it. In the same way, if I were to see the depth of my own self-deceit and self-centeredness, I might give up on the possibility of change before I start. But there is hope, for as Francis Fenelon reminds us, “God is merciful, showing us our true hideousness only in proportion to the courage he gives us to bear the sight.” And the prophet Jeremiah bears witness: “I remember my affliction . . . the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my
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Conviction is not just the pain of getting caught or pain over consequences. It means a God-given, really sober sense of remorse over what I ought to feel remorseful about. It’s a God-given ache for goodness.
In the same way the stomach hungers for food, the conscience hungers to be cleansed. It is a God-given ache for goodness.
The will is a form of energy. You can drive and stretch and push the will. The mind has an endless ability to think and feel. You can direct your attention. You can focus and study. The body is your little power pack. You can place demands on your body. You can exercise it, strengthen it, hone it, and force it to run for miles. But it is the nature of the soul to need. The soul is a little like the king on a chessboard. The king is the most limited of chess pieces; it can only move one square at a time. But if you lose the king, game over. Your soul is vulnerable because it is needy. If you
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Thomas Aquinas wrote that this neediness of the soul is a pointer to God. We are limited in virtually every way: in our intelligence, our strength, our energy, our morality. There is only one area where human beings are unlimited. As Kent Dunnington puts it, “We are limited in every way but one: we have unlimited desire.” We always want more: more time, more wisdom, more beauty, more funny YouTube videos. This is the soul crying out. We never have enough. The truth is, 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
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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, 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. You can be an addict and never touch a drop of alcohol or a gram of cocaine. Nice things like food, shopping, recreation, hobbies, and pleasure can move imperceptibly from casual enjoyment to addiction.
Idols always turn us away from our freedom. This is where grace comes in. I cannot replace an idol by turning away from it. I must turn toward something.
As Timothy Keller puts it, “We are all governed by an Overwhelming Positive Passion.
Our soul begins to grow in God when we acknowledge our basic neediness.
In order to make your prayer more profitable, it would be well from the beginning to picture yourself as a poor, naked, miserable wretch, perishing of hunger, who knows but one man of whom he can ask or hope for help; or as a sick person, covered with sores and ready to die unless some pitiful physician will take him in hand and heal him. These are true pictures of our condition before God. Your soul is more bare of heavenly treasure than the poor beggar is of earthly possessions. . . . your soul is infinitely more sin-sick than that sore stricken patient, and God alone can heal you.
