Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Have you ever thought about why your soul is hurting and if that could be standing in the way of your spiritual growth? Ortberg writes that once your soul has been properly cared for, you will find your way back to God from hopelessness, depression, relationship struggles, and lack of fulfillment. Jesus said we could find rest for our souls. Ortberg points us in that direction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310341451 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zondervan |
| Publication date: | 04/29/2014 |
| Pages: | 64 |
| Sales rank: | 855,408 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.90(w) x 4.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
You Have a Soul
By John Ortberg
ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2014 John OrtbergAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-34145-1
CHAPTER 1
It's the Nature of the Soul to Need
In the 1991 comedy film What about Bob? Bill Murray plays the title character, a neurotic, phobic, obsessive-compulsive personality with innumerable needs. I quote (from memory): "Problems breathing. Problems swallowing. Numb lips. Fingernail sensitivity. Pelvic discomfort. What if my heart stops beating? What if I'm looking for a bathroom and I can't find one and my bladder explodes?" Richard Dreyfus plays the exasperated, impatient therapist who is stuck caring for him.
Your soul is Bob. You are Richard Dreyfus. It is the nature of the soul to need.
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 meet those needs with the wrong things, game over. Or at least, game not going well.
Needy Man
A great scholar named Hans Walter Wolff wrote a classic study of how the Old Testament writers understood personhood. He said that the word flesh stands for humanity's bodily form with its mortality, physical strength, and limitations. Ruah, the Hebrew word for "spirit," speaks of human beings as they are empowered — human existence with breath and will and inspiration. Wolff's chapter on nephesh — the Hebrew word for "soul" — he titled "Needy Man." Another name for nephesh is Bob. Your soul is a needy man, a needy woman.
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 as if we never have enough is that God is not yet finished giving? The unlimited neediness of the soul matches the unlimited grace of God.
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. 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.
We all commit idolatry every day. It is the sin of the soul meeting its needs with anything that distances it from God.
We have another problem. We often don't know what our souls are truly devoted to. Most people, especially religious people, would probably say their souls are devoted to God or a higher calling or an ideal. We want to believe that's true even as we devote our souls to something else. Consider as honestly as possible the following statements. If any of them even slightly resemble your thoughts, it is quite possible you have discovered the true devotion of your soul:
• I think about money a lot, as in getting more of it. Sometimes I fantasize about winning the lottery or coming into a big inheritance. I have a mental wish list of the things I'd like to buy if money were no object.
• I wish I had more power and control over others. It seems as if my spouse and kids just don't respect me enough. Ditto at work. I know I would handle it carefully — I would just like to be a more powerful person.
• I have missed important family events in order to pursue my career. I justify it by telling myself and my family that this is what it takes to provide for them. I tell myself that if I keep working hard, I will reach a level where I will be able to relax a little and spend more time with the people I love.
• I consider myself an honest person, someone with good values. But I would set those values aside to pursue something important to me if I knew no one else would know about it.
• I have desires that I prefer not to have my spouse know about. If I am confronted by any of those desires, I become defensive and try to justify it.
• I have secrets that I am willing to lie to protect.
• More than once I have had arguments over something I wanted to do but my spouse did not want to do. Or over something I wanted to buy that my spouse didn't think I should buy.
• Aside from my family and others I love, there are things in my life that if they were lost or destroyed, it would crush me, devastate me.
• If my doctor told me I had to give up (alcohol, cigarettes, red meat, salt/ sodium, sugar, caffeine, etc.) because it was seriously putting my health at risk, I would find it difficult to the point of being impossible. I likely would not tell anyone in order to avoid accountability.
• If you asked my family what was most important to me, they would likely refer to my job, my favorite hobby, making money.... They would probably not say it was them.
• I love God, and I want to more closely follow him, but there is one thing that always seems to get in the way, and it's __________.
If your soul is devoted to something that becomes more important to you than God, that is your idol. The soul cannot give up its idol by sheer willpower. It is like an alcoholic trying to become sober by promising to himself that he won't drink anymore. It never works. 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 such as food, shopping, recreation, hobbies, and pleasure can move imperceptibly from casual enjoyment to addiction. I know men who buy expensive boats and then feel compelled to be on the water every weekend, not so much because they enjoy "serial boating," but because if you're spending this much on something, you had better enjoy it. 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." He gives an example: In the book of Genesis, a young man named Jacob meets a young woman named Rachel and tells her father he wants to marry her. He offers to work for Laban seven years if he can marry Rachel. Laban says yes. "So Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her." Jacob discovered time is relative way before Albert Einstein said anything about it. Every single day for seven years Jacob doesn't just show up for work; he does so with a song in his heart. Why did seven years seem like a few days? Because he had an overwhelming positive passion, and that changes everything.
Zacchaeus had an overwhelming positive passion for money. As a tax collector for Rome, he gave up relationships, integrity, and honor for his idol.
Then one day he met Jesus.
"Today I'm repaying everyone I've cheated four times over, and I'm giving half the rest of my money to the poor," Zacchaeus said. What led him to do that? He had a new overwhelming positive passion.
The soul must orbit around something other than itself — something it can worship. It is the nature of the soul to need.
Overcome by the Soul's Need
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. The psalmist describes that need in terms of losing consciousness: "My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD."
As a young associate pastor in my first church, the senior pastor (also named John), invited me to preach on Sunday morning. When it came time for the sermon, I stood at the pulpit, and five minutes into my sermon, I fainted dead away. The platform was made of marble, so I hit the ground hard, with a loud smack. After the ser vice I apologized to John. I felt horrible because this was a Baptist church, not a charismatic church where you get credit for that sort of thing.
"I'll understand if you never ask me to preach again," I told him.
"Don't be ridiculous," he responded, and in a few weeks he asked me to preach again. And I fainted again.
I was certain that I was finished in that church, but he asked me to preach again the following week. He even mentioned he was having the marble floor covered with carpet to protect my fall, just in case.
"I'm going to have you keep preaching until you quit fainting or it kills you."
These many years later, I just received a letter from that church asking if I would preach for their seventy-fifth anniversary. John has long since retired, but the current pastor wrote, "People here still remember you ... I thought that was nice ... as the fainting preacher."
I don't think that was what the psalmist had in mind when he said his soul faints from yearning for God. I laugh whenever I recall those first attempts to preach, but it also offers a graphic reminder of my soul's deepest need. Fainting is a scary thing. My fainting said more about my nerves than my desire for God. I have often wondered what it must be like to want God so deeply that it leads you to faint.
There is another grace-filled memory about that church that still melts my soul. Through that church, I met a woman who attracted my attention. I had always thought if I ever did get married, it would be to a Midwestern girl. But then I met that California girl at this church. She was so beautiful, I never thought a woman who looked like that would ever even go out with me. And as a matter of fact, that particular woman never did go out with me.
But then I met Nancy through that church, and she was even more beautiful. She not only went out with me, but married me. We now have Californian children and a Californian dog and serve at a Californian church.
I am glad God has a sense of humor. It is good for the soul.
Accept Your Soul's Neediness
Sometimes when I talk to my soul, I call it "Bob" to remind myself to be patient with it. Bob's need for God is enormous, but that's okay. Bob's neediness only invites more of God's generosity. He's not going anywhere. Besides, oddly enough, the family kind of likes him.
Our soul begins to grow in God when we acknowledge our basic neediness.
Francis Fenelon was a brilliant spiritual writer and successful cleric who stood up to King of France Louis XIV and allowed himself to be displaced as royal tutor. He lived disgraced in exile. But in obscurity and humiliation, his soul thrived. He understood the condition of his soul:
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.
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.
How do we respond when we understand the neediness of our souls?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from You Have a Soul by John Ortberg. Copyright © 2014 John Ortberg. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
It's the Nature of the Soul to Need, 5,The Soul Needs Rest, 21,
Sources, 55,