Soul Keeping

It’s total contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday experience of God. This alone is what makes a soul healthy.

Easy is a soul word, not a circumstance word; not an assignment word. Aim at having easy circumstances, and life will be hard all around. Aim at having an easy soul, and your capacity for tackling hard assignments will actually grow. The soul was not made for an easy life. The soul was made for an easy yoke.

what a redeemed soul can be: • To be able to say yes or no without anxiety or duplicity • To speak with confidence and honesty • To be willing to disappoint anybody, yet ready to bless everybody • To have a mind filled with more noble thoughts than could ever be spoken • To share without thinking • To see without judging • To be so genuinely humble that each person I see would be an object of wonder • To love God

When my soul is not centered in God, I define myself by my accomplishments, or my physical appearance, or my title, or my important friends. When I lose these, I lose my identity.

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.

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.”

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 like we never have enough is that God is not yet finished giving? The unlimited neediness of the soul matches the unlimited grace of God.

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.

What is the core part of you God made you to be that they will talk about at your funeral? If you’re not clear on this, ask some people who know you well to describe why they think God put you on earth.

God does not recruit like someone from the PTA. He is always intrusive, demanding, exhausting. He says we should expect that the world will be hard, and that our assignments will be hard.

We are creatures with wills, and in every encounter with other people we will what is good for them, or we fail to do so: we will what is bad. We cannot help ourselves.

The goal is not to try to sin less. In all your efforts to keep from sinning, what are you focusing on? Sin. God wants you to focus on him. To be with him. “Abide in me.”

Habits eat willpower for breakfast.

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

You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.”

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.

try our patience first of all by His slowness. He is slow: we are swift and precipitate. It is because we are but for a time, and He has been for eternity. . . . There is something greatly overawing in the extreme slowness of God. Let it overshadow our souls, but let it not disquiet them. We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and the lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and He will come. He never comes to those who do not wait. He does not go their road. When He comes, go with Him, but go slowly, fall a little behind; when he quickens His pace, be sure of it, before you quicken yours. But when He slackens, slacken at once: and do not be slow only, but silent, very silent, for He is God.

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

If your soul is healthy, no external circumstance can destroy your life. If your soul is unhealthy, no external circumstance can redeem your life.

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.

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.

“What matters is not the accomplishments you achieve; what matters is the person you become.”

You are not the center of the universe. You are not the master of your fate. You are not the captain of your ship. There is a God, and you aren’t him.

“If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart in a while.”

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.

Their problem is that they lack the patience that waits for whatever God would give them and when God chooses to give. They must learn spiritual meekness, which will come about in the dark night.

Level one is the week after your honeymoon when nothing is more exciting or complicated than finding a place to store the three blenders you got as wedding gifts. Life never stays at level one. It gets complicated. Stuff happens.

We all commit idolatry every day. It is the sin of the soul meeting its needs with anything that distances it from God.

Human beings around the globe had been suffering a year ago, and I was capable of joy then. Why should I consider my own suffering grounds for a crisis of confidence in God when I don’t react the same way to others?

The main thing you bring home from your work is not a paycheck. The main thing you bring home from work is your soul. Work is a soul function. We’re made to create value.

God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.

“The will is very good at making simple and large commitments like getting married, or deciding to move someplace,” Dallas explained. “But it is very bad at trying to override habits and patterns and attitudes that are deeply rooted in us. If you try to improve your soul by willpower, you will exhaust yourself and everyone around you.”

In solitude we liberate ourselves from the pressure of the world. You don’t do that by going into solitude with a list of things you want to work on. You don’t even approach solitude with the expectation that you will come away with some deep spiritual insight. It’s not about what you’re going to do; it’s about what you’re not going to do. In solitude you rest.

We do not delight in the law of the Lord; we delight in keeping it better than other people, or using it to prop up our sense of being “set apart,” more pure than the rest of the world.

Your soul will never find rest unless it finds its home. We find it in the simple daily discipline of asking ourselves, “Is God here in this moment?” If he is not, he can be.

Abraham Heschel wrote: “Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self. . . .”

“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.’ ”

Your soul cannot function properly if sin is present.

what the Bible calls idolatry we call addiction.

Blessing is not just a word. Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another. We must think it, and feel it, and will it.

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.

“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

Our problem is that this world does not teach us to pay attention to what matters. We circulate résumés that chronicle what we have accomplished, not who we have become.

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.