A Prosperous Soul
3 John
1:2 NASB “Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper
and be in good health, just as your soul prospers.”
John recognises that the ultimate issue in life, the real priority in
life, is how well our soul is going, not how well we are doing physically, not
how well our material blessings or prosperity. What really matters and what
enables us to weather the storms of life is how well our soul is doing. So we
need to ask the question: What does it take for the soul to do well?
We have to answer three basic
questions. First of all, what is the soul? Second, what is it that destroys the
soul? What is the enemy of the soul? What creates a soul that is not doing
well? Third, what are the resources that God has provided for the soul to do
well, to progress, to have genuine health?
We can learn what the soul is
by comparing a couple of passages, 1 Corinthians
The soul, the real you, is
made up of four elements. The first is self-consciousness, your identity, your
unique personality. You are individually the way you are because of God’s
design, the Scripture says. You know who you are, you have self-awareness. Then
we have a mentality, the ability to think, to reason, to utilise logic, to
understand the things of God. We have a volition, the
decider in the soul. This is the seat of responsibility. When we make good
decisions we reap positive benefits, when we make bad decisions we reap
negative consequences. We have a conscience. This is where the norms and
standards are located in the soul, where our concepts of right and wrong are
located. Everyone has a concept of right and wrong, even if those concepts are
perverted. That is one of Paul’s arguments in Romans chapter two, that the
presence of the conscience indicates a recognition of
personal responsibility and accountability even though the standards in the
conscience may be completely distorted and perverted. These four areas really
interact. We talk about each separate component for purpose of understanding
but in reality these are all interrelated and interconnected and they all work
together as a harmonious whole.
In the original creation Adam
and Isha
were composed of three elements: the human body, the soul, and the human
spirit. The human spirit binds, interconnects and interacts with the four
elements of the soul. These four elements of the soul, then, were able to
interrelate to God. In self-consciousness they were able to realise that they
were in the image and likeness of God, they reflected God to His creation and
they were to represent God to His creation. So Adam’s self-consciousness wasn’t
just looking in the mirror and seeing himself as an independent creature but he
saw himself as a reflection of God. That was his role. In his mentality he
thought what God taught him to think. He thought God’s thoughts along with Him,
so that his mentality was completely dominated by divine viewpoint. In his
conscience he has a divine set of norms and standards. He knew that he could do
anything and there was only one thing that was prohibited to him, to eat of the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So he had norms and
standards that were completely oriented to God’s absolutes. Then in volition,
up until the fall, he had positive volition that was oriented to God.
But once he sinned he became
spiritually dead. What happened? He lost that human spirit, that immaterial
part of his makeup that enabled his soul to understand God and to properly
understand God’s creation. So what we see here is that spiritual death is the
first enemy of the soul and it begins to destroy and erode the soul so that
every human being since Adam is born spiritually dead with a soul in crisis.
That soul is in crisis because lacking a relationship to God, lacking a human
spirit that is able to understand God and able therefore to properly orient to
reality and to his mission in life as one who is created in the image and
likeness of God, he is trying to figure out reality all on its own, trying to
make sense of everything all on its own, while being dominated by a sin nature
that has enslaved it to this rebellious orientation to God. That is why every
person is born with a soul in crisis and the only orientation of the soul is
that of the sin nature—pure autonomy from God and rebelliousness to God—so that
everyone is born disoriented to reality, disoriented from truth, divorced from
God, and are incapable of orienting their thinking to absolute truth, to
reality, and are incapable of understanding God or His revelation due to the
sin nature control of the soul. So every one of us is born in a soul crisis; we
are not healthy. We can’t have soul health if we are missing a human spirit. It
is the sin nature that is the source of the attack and fragmentation on the
soul.
The sin nature is motivated
at its very core by a lust pattern. We have all kinds of lusts—power lust, the
desire to control; approbation lust, we want approval and people to tell us how
good we are; sex lust; money lust, lust to have things where we think that just
by having things that somehow we’ll be happy, chemical lust—and it is these
lust patterns that drive people. For example, if you have a lust pattern
oriented to approval then you want to do what is right because you want
somebody to pat you on the back. So you may have an approbation lust that is
very strong in the area of human good, strong on morality. That kind of person
becomes very religious, He wants to gain the approbation of God, so he is going
to be very strong in the area of doing everything right and will have a
tendency towards legalism and will not have life that is characterised by what
we normally think of as sin. Remember, the Pharisees were the most moral,
upright people in their generation, extremely particular about following every
detail of the law and every detail of their religious tradition. But all of
that was done in arrogance, thinking that they could gain the approbation of
God. So just because you are operating on morality doesn’t mean that it is not
coming from the sin nature.
What are the products of the
sin nature that destroy the soul? The basic orientation of everyone’s sin
nature is arrogance. Every single human being has arrogance. Arrogance is the
idea that somehow I can determine the course of my life and live my life
without being accountable to God or anyone else. That is the essence of
arrogance. Arrogance is seen most clearly in the five “I wills”
uttered by Satan in Isaiah 14, concluding with the statement, “I will be like
the most high God.” It is the desire of the creature to be in control of his
life and determine the course of his life and the values of his life without
any accountability to the creator. So everybody is arrogant and that arrogance
is going to display itself in different ways, depending on one’s lust pattern, on
whether the area of strength is human good or licentiousness. The fact is that
arrogance always leads to destruction; it is always self-destructive. Proverbs
Principles of arrogance: a) Arrogance is subtle. Most people who are operating on
arrogance don’t know they are operating on arrogance. Because it is the basic
orientation of our soul and the sin nature it seems very normal and natural for
us to be arrogant. Arrogance is skilled in the art of self-justification so
that we automatically, without even thinking about it, cloak our arrogance in
all sorts of moral rationales that seem obvious to us in their rectitude: “We
are right. Isn’t that obvious to everybody else?” Arrogance destroys
objectivity. It is only when we get right with the Lord under humility and with
doctrine in the soul that we can have the objectivity to recognise our
arrogance; b) Arrogance is tenacious, it doesn’t want to give up. As soon as we
have identified arrogance in our life in one way and we think we have control
of it, it is going to pop up in another disguise operating in some other area
of our life; it doesn’t give up; c) Arrogance changes its form from one arena
to another. For some period of our life we may be licentious and then we end up
feeling very guilty about something that we have done, so all of a sudden our
sin nature shifts its orientation to asceticism, an emphasis on moral good,
trying to impress God and ourselves, and now we try to control everything
through our religious/moral activity, and our arrogance is now manifesting
itself in another way.
Five arrogance skills: a)
Self-absorption, focus on self, your needs need to be met. The more you focus
on self, the more you want to indulge all your own desires and cravings and
lust patterns, so that leads to b) Self-indulgence. You just give in to every
little whim, every desire and lust in your soul. The opposite of this is
self-discipline. Then you have to develop a rationale to justify all this, so
c) is Self-justification. The more you give in to self-justification the more
you become divorced from reality. You are operating on pure subjectivism. The
only thing that matters is the way it makes you feel and that you can get away
with it. You look at life through your own experience and through your own
grid, and you don’t look at life from any external, objective pattern. You
can’t really love other people because love isn’t selfish, love isn’t arrogant.
So if all you have is a sin nature and you are not a born-again believer
whatever love you have is going to be a qualified love. Now you are operating
on d) full-blown self-deception. You think that the world revolves around you
and everything is based on the way you think it should be. Once you get past
this point then you come to the crowning skill of arrogance, e)
Self-deification. This is exactly what Satan wanted,
he wanted to be worshipped as God. That is where arrogance goes and it is an
endless cycle. The more you are self-deified the more you are going to be
self-absorbed. You become your own god, the source of your own absolutes, the source of your own happiness. Sooner or later there is
something that is going to happen in your life and the little house of cards
you have developed in arrogance is going to come crashing down and you will
come face to face with your own creatureliness. It is
at that point that you have a “teachable moment” where God has an opportunity
to teach you something about grace.
Proverbs
11:2 NASB “When pride comes, then comes dishonor,
But with the humble is wisdom.” It
is only through humility that comes from grace orientation that we can have
genuine wisdom.
Proverbs
Proverbs
Proverbs
Proverbs 28:25 NASB
“An arrogant man stirs up strife, But he who trusts in the LORD will
prosper.”
1 John 2:16 NASB
“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes
and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.”
Arrogance is the modus operandi of the cosmic system.
What else attacks the soul? Bitterness and jealousy. The worsts enemies of the soul are
mental attitude sins. Bitterness and jealousy reflect the whole array of mental
attitude sins which eat away at the soul. Each of these is a product of
self-absorption in the soul and is a response to some wrong or perceived wrong.
Bitterness is a part of an array of sins mentioned in Ephesians 4:31 NASB
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor
and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.” These destroy the
soul.
Hebrews 12:15 NASB
“See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of
bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled.” Why does
the writer of Hebrews juxtapose the grace of God with the root of bitterness. Because when you are oriented to the grace of
God you are going to be oriented in gratitude. You are going to be thankful for
what you have, you are going to recognise who you are as a fallen creature, and
you recognise that you don’t have the right to anything. The only thing we have
a right to from God is eternal condemnation, so everything that we have is from
the grace of God and that should reveal itself in gratitude. If we focus on
what we don’t have then what springs up is bitterness which causes trouble and
it defiles many. This is the Greek word miaino
[miainw] which is related to the uncleanliness and the
unsanitary conditions as a result of poor sanitation in the ancient world, and
it has to do with someone being completely unclean spiritually.
James
Another area which eats away
at the soul is worry, anxiety and fear. They are closely related concepts. We
think that somehow through all of our worries that we can control the situation.
Proverbs
Matthew
1 Peter 5:7 NASB
“casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.”
So health in the soul is
destroyed by the activities of the sin nature. This produces trauma to the
soul. There are three basic attacks on the soul: a) the outside pressure of
adversity. Everyone goes through adversity, different categories of adversity,
but adversity is one assault and the issue is how we handle the outside
pressure of adversity when it depends on our volition and whether or not we
will use the Word of God and the promises of God and the spiritual skills; b)
there is the inside pressure that is cased as a result of trying to handle
outside pressure of adversity through the sin nature; c) temptation from the
sin nature. Temptation always comes from the sin nature. There may be some
external occasion for temptation but temptation always comes from the sin
nature.
Adversity is the outside
pressure of adversity on the soul and stress is inside pressure on the soul.
Adversity is what
circumstances do to you; stress is what you do to yourself. You can’t control
adversity but you can control your response to adversity.
Adversity is inevitable but
stress is optional. How you respond to adversity is up to your volition.
Stress is what happens when
you attempt to handle the outside pressure through human viewpoint techniques.
Stress is the result of the
sin nature-based attempts to handle crises through self-reliance instead of God
dependence.
Psalm 7:1 NASB
“O LORD my God, in You I have taken refuge; Save me from all those who pursue
me, and deliver me,
Psalm 6 is another example
of this kind of lament. Psalm 6:1 “O LORD, do not rebuke me in Your
anger, Nor chasten me in Your wrath.” In other words, he recognises that there has been some faults in his life. He has probably confessed
his sin at this point, and then he cries to God for mercy. [2] “Be gracious to
me, O LORD, for I {am} pining away; Heal me, O LORD, for my
bones are dismayed.” He is physically miserable from the mental attitude sins
in his life. [3] “And my soul is greatly dismayed; But You, O LORD—how
long?” The word here for “trouble” is the niphal
(passive) of bahal—dismayed,
terrified, alarmed, completely bewildered. It is a state of being unable to
think clearly because of being overwhelmed by circumstances. [4] “Return, O LORD, rescue my soul; Save me because of Your lovingkindness.
[5] For there is no mention of You in death; In Sheol
who will give You thanks?” He is arguing with God, not in the bad sense of the
term, in the sense of a lawyer presenting a case. He is building a case for why
God should take care of the problem so he can continue to be a witness for God
in the angelic conflict. Notice how he ends in v. 8. “Depart from me, all you
who do iniquity, For the LORD has heard the voice of my weeping.” David is honest
with God about the crisis in his life and in his soul. Then he has confidence,
v. 9. “The LORD has heard my supplication, The LORD receives my
prayer. [10] All my enemies will be ashamed and greatly dismayed; They shall turn back, they will suddenly be ashamed.” We see
the transfer from his focus on his circumstances to his focus on God, and this
is what promotes health to the soul.
Se also Psalm 23:3 “He
restores my soul.” God is the one who is able to give us soul health, the only
one. Psalm 31 where the psalmist talks about the fact that it is God who knows
our soul in adversity and goes on to praise Him for His deliverance. Psalm 42:5
NASB “Why are you in despair, O my soul? And {why} have you become
disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him {For} the help
of His presence.” The word there for “disturbed” is the qal
perfect of the Hebrew word hamah which means to roar.
This is man in internal conflict, he is upset, he is
pressured by everything around him.