John Ortberg - You Have a Soul: It Weighs Nothing but Means Everything

ZONDERVAN

You Have a Soul

Copyright 2014 by John Ortberg

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ePub Edition March 2014: ISBN 978-0-310-34153-6

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CONTENTS

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 Im looking for a bathroom and I cant 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 humanitys 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. Wolffs 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 souls infinite capacity to desire is the mirror image of Gods 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 souls problem, however, is not its neediness; its 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 Gods 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 dont 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 thats 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 Id 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 dont 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 didnt 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 its .

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 wont 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 youre spending this much on something, you had better enjoy it. Idols always turn us away from our freedom.