Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

by John Ortberg

Good people — especially people of faith — do not like to think of themselves as “poor beggars” who are “sin-sick.” We fill our soul’s desires with everything that counters that image, trying to convince ourselves that everything is well with our souls. It isn’t. Our souls faint and yearn and cry out for God.

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

The main thing you will give your congregation — just like the main thing you will give to God — is the person you become. If your soul is unhealthy, you can’t help anybody. You don’t send a doctor with pneumonia to care for patients with immune disorders. You, and nobody else, are responsible for the well-being of your own soul.

“I didn’t say you should experience total contentment, joy, and confidence in the remarkable adequacy of your competence or the amazingly successful circumstances of your life. It’s total contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday experience of God. This alone is what makes a soul healthy. This is not your wife’s job. It’s not your elder’s job. It’s not your children’s job. It’s not your friend’s job. It’s your job.” The stream is your soul. And you are the keeper.

What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel: “The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son — both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die.

It’s not just that there is a Law of Consequences in the universe. There is a God of Justice in the universe. “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.

The difference between talking to yourself and talking to your soul is that the soul exists in the presence of God. So you will see in the Psalms and elsewhere people speaking to their souls because when you speak to the soul, it naturally turns to prayer because in the soul God is always present.

Not long ago I got really angry at somebody. Finally I literally stopped in my tracks because I was so immersed in anger and said, “Soul, why are you so angry?” Something interesting happened. I found that I just began to pray, and it was like God saying to me, “John, you are not your anger.” It’s like my soul had a place to stand with God, and we could talk sensibly about my anger, even as it ebbed from my soul.

The psalmist wrote that blessed people are like trees planted by rivers of water, which yield their fruit in season, and whose leaves do not wither; they prosper in all they do. In the ancient Middle East, trees were rare. Rain was scarce. Deserts were plentiful. But if a tree were planted by a river, it was no longer dependent on uncertain weather or the surface conditions of the soil. It could flourish at all times because its roots allowed the water to stream into each part of the tree to bring it life. You couldn’t see the roots, but no one could miss the green leaves or fresh fruit. Just as in the little parable that started this book, our soul is like an inner stream of water that gives strength, direction, and harmony to every other area of life.

Our souls are on loan to us. One day, God will review with us what our souls have become. That is what will matter from our lives.

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.

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

We live in a world that teaches us to be more concerned with the condition of our cars, or our careers, or our portfolios than the condition of our souls.

I keep my soul carefully because I want to bring life and not death to those around me.

Jesus said, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body . . . rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

why all of a sudden is he telling us to be afraid? Because the stakes are so high — the body eventually ages and wears out, but the soul lives forever. And how you live determines the destination of your soul. We don’t like to think about this, but the Bible teaches that we will one day stand before God who is the judge of our eternal destiny. If you live your life in deliberate violation of his will and his ways, your soul will eventually be destroyed by being completely separated from God. That was the essence of Jesus’ warning: Protect your soul. Guard it. Make room in your life to care for it.

“Arrange your days so that you experience total contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.

Gordon MacDonald once wrote about how what he called the “sinkhole syndrome” happens in a human life. It may be triggered by a failure at work, a severed relationship, harsh criticism from a parent, or for no apparent reason at all. But it feels like the earth has given way. It turns out, MacDonald wrote, that in a sense we have two worlds to manage: an outer world of career and possessions and social networks; and an inner world that is more spiritual in nature, where values are selected and character is formed — a place where worship and confession and humility can be practiced. Because our outer worlds are visible and measurable and expandable, they are easier to deal with. They demand our attention. “The result is that our private world is often cheated, neglected because it does not shout quite so loudly. It can be effectively ignored for large periods of time before it gives way to a sinkhole-like cave-in.

As I mentioned earlier, the New Testament book of James uses a fascinating word to describe this condition. It’s often translated “double-minded,” but the Greek word is dipsuchos — we might think of it as double-souled, or split-souled, or the un-centered soul.

A soul without a center has difficulty making a decision.

People whose souls are rooted in a center find it brings clarity to their decisions.

When the soul is not centered, one is never sure what temptations are worth resisting or what sacrifices are worth making.

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

A soul without a center lacks patience.

When I am with my children in a line at the grocery store, or in the car on a crowded freeway, my soul does not have to be tapping its toes and drumming its fingernails. If I am always in a hurry to be somewhere else, it’s an indicator that my soul has not yet found its home.

The soul without a center is easily thrown.

“There are twelve levels of difficulty on this bull,” he explained. “It might not be all that easy, but the key is you have to stay centered, and the only way to do that is to sit loose. People try to clamp on too tight. Don’t do that. You have to be flexible. If you think you can be in control of the ride you’ll never make it. You have to follow the bull. You have to keep moving. Shift your center of gravity as the bull moves.

The soul without a center finds its identity in externals.

My temptation when my soul is not centered in God is to try to control my life. In the Bible this is spoken of in terms of the lifting up of one’s soul. The prophet Habakkuk said that the opposite of living in faithful dependence on God is to lift your soul up in pride.

When we reach out to God, we are lifting our souls up to be nurtured and healed. A soul centered in God always knows it has a heavenly Father who will hold its pain, its fear, its anxiety. This is spiritual life: to place the soul each moment in the presence and care of God. “My soul cleaves to you, your right hand upholds me.

We feel honestly the pull of many obligations and try to fulfill them all. And we are unhappy, uneasy, strained, oppressed, and fearful we shall be shallow. . . . We have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! . . . We have seen and known some people who have found this deep Center of living, where the fretful calls of life are integrated, where No as well as Yes can be said with confidence.

A very simple way to guard your soul is to ask yourself, “Will this situation block my soul’s connection to God?” As I begin living this question I find how little power the world has over my soul. What if I don’t get a promotion, or my boss doesn’t like me, or I have financial problems, or I have a bad hair day? Yes, these may cause disappointment, but do they have any power over my soul? Can they nudge my soul from its center, which is the very heart of God? When you think about it that way, you realize that external circumstances cannot keep you from being with God. If anything, they draw you closer to him.

There are two main enemies that lead to a soul disconnected from its center. One is sin. Sin cannot coexist with a soul centered on God. If I choose to live in bitterness, or to indulge lust, or to deceive my wife, I am choosing to keep God out of my thoughts. Conversely, when I center my soul on God, I am less likely to sin.

The other disconnect is what might be called the “troublesome thought.” This soul-enemy is actually much more pervasive. It’s not necessarily a sin. It’s simply a way of thinking that does not take God into account. The troublesome thought begins with any normal concern you might have. For example, you open your quarterly statement from your 401K and notice that instead of gaining, your fund lost a few hundred dollars. Certainly reason to be concerned, but then you begin a succession of thoughts that practically consume you: Will I have enough to retire? What if the next quarter posts another loss? Should I pull my money out of this fund? By entertaining these thoughts, you are allowing something to squeeze God out of your life. It’s one thing to pay attention to your retirement account, but when you leave God out of the equation, your soul loses its connection. I do this all the time. I get disappointed about how a talk went — and then have a series of thoughts about how I’m not being successful enough and am therefore not leading well enough, not serving my people well enough. Or I sit down at my desk and am so overwhelmed at all that needs to be done that I fixate on how hard I’m going to have to work, how I may have to work through lunch, how it seems like all I do is work.

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. The soul cannot be centered without God.

Other creatures can live happily for today and not think about tomorrow. But not us. Our blessing and our curse is our ability to extend ourselves into tomorrow.

The soul needs a future.

All flesh is as the grass: you don’t have to believe in the Bible. Just look around. The fastest athlete in track will eventually be defeated by arthritis. The most beautiful supermodel in the world will not be on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue when she’s ninety-seven years old. Even wealthy, powerful CEOs get betrayed by their bodies and die.

The soul needs a future. This is so because there’s another truth about the human condition: “[God] has also set eternity in the human heart.” This is where we’re different than grass: The grass doesn’t know it’s here today, gone tomorrow.

Dallas Willard puts it like this: You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. He used to encourage me to write this down and read it out loud as a reminder of my true identity: God did not plant death in the human heart. Death came because of sin. That includes my sin. Human self-sufficiency can’t get me out of this one. If I don’t have a hope that is eternal, I don’t have a real hope at all. But God made a way.

Isaiah said, “All flesh is like grass . . . , but the word of our God stands forever.” The gospel of John says that one day — “The Word became flesh.

The Word — which is eternal — became flesh. And all flesh is as the grass. Which is temporary. Disposable. Dies. Jesus humbled himself. Jesus took on the very nature of a servant. Jesus lived among the poor. He washed feet. He was struck and would not strike back. He was hated, and he loved back. He was condemned, and he forgave back. In Jesus, the Word became flesh. They whipped him ’til he bled; they put him on a cross; they hung him ’til he died; they laid him in a tomb, and they sealed it with a stone. All flesh is as the grass. But God will do anything to keep the soul alive. The psalmist speaks about God rescuing the soul from the jaws of death, allowing it to escape the sword and doom, delivering it from the threshold of destruction. “In whose hand is the soul of every living thing.

To paraphrase a line from a movie: There will be great pain, and there will be great joy. In the end, joy wins. So if joy has not yet won, it is not yet the end.

Jesus is crucified. The pain is overwhelming — not the end. Jesus is risen — the joy is overwhelming.

I wonder if Jesus ever got tired of all the questions. Underneath them all was the great question of every human heart: Why? We all have this one great question: Hey Jesus, why does a little boy have a brain tumor? Hey Jesus, why do hungry children keep dying and wars keep breaking out? Hey Jesus, why did my child run away? Why did my marriage fall apart? Why did my father suffer from a crippling depression? Jesus said one day: In a little while — I’ll be gone. Things won’t be right. You will see terrible things: Illness. Hunger. Injustice. Sexual depravity. Massive deceit. Corruption in high places. Then, in a little while — it will seem like a long time to you, but in eternity it’s only a little while — I’m coming back. I will set it all right. Joy wins. Indeed. “In that day you will no longer ask me anything.” That’s the promise. The soul needs a future.

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.

The garden God created represents God’s great desire for “being with.” For the soul to be well, it needs to be with God.

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

God was also with Joseph — and here’s where “with God” starts to get interesting. Joseph ran into a really hard stretch in his life, and we learn that “the LORD was with Joseph” in slavery, and then, in prison. In other words, God is not just in the garden anymore — he shows up even in the most painful and difficult places. That’s good news for anyone in trouble, and a hint of the Good News to come.

Jesus makes this staggering claim in John 15: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” I am the vine; you are the branch. Bearing fruit means that we will do wonderful things in our lives for God and his kingdom, but we don’t really have to try all that hard. Instead, we are to make sure we are “with God.” That’s what it means to “abide in the vine” — live intimately with Jesus from one moment to the next. “If you don’t do that,” Jesus says, “nothing much will come out of your life.” It’s kind of like he invites his followers into an experiment because they’re just very ordinary people. How much can an ordinary person do in life on this earth with God in the ordinary moments? And how can I really make sure my soul is with God all the time?