Soul Keeping

by John Ortberg

  ENEMIES OF THE SOUL

  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. I’m not likely to speed if I see a squad car; I’m not likely to play video games at work if my boss is watching; I’m not likely to sin while God is present to my mind. It is not just that God is always watching and always knows the condition of our hearts; it’s our knowing that he is there.

  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.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE SOUL NEEDS A FUTURE

  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. “There’s no future in it” is the main reason people give for leaving a relationship, or a job, or a home. We cannot help this about ourselves. “In the day of my trouble . . . my soul refused to be comforted,” says the psalmist.

  The soul needs a future.

  This is a problem, because we are not just souls, we are enfleshed souls, and we know what happens to flesh.

  A prophet named Isaiah made an observation to the people of Israel thousands of years ago when they were suffering under an oppressor named Babylon.

  A voice of one saying, “Cry!”

  One said, “What shall I cry?”

  All flesh is like grass, and all its glory is like the flower of the field.

  The grass withers, the flower fades . . .

  But the word of our God stands forever.

  A voice (God) says, “Isaiah, tell people: ‘All flesh is like grass, all human glory is like the flower of the field.’ ”

  Temporary. Disposable.

  This is true whether you believe the Bible or not.

  As a young lady, Violet Asquith met Winston Churchill at a dinner party, where he ignored her most of the evening. When he finally turned to her, it was to ask her an unexpected question: “How old are you?” “Nineteen,” she said. “And I,” said Churchill despairingly, “am thirty-two already. Older than anyone else who counts, though.” He then launched into an impromptu commentary on Isaiah’s observation: “Curse our mortality! Curse ruthless time. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it. We are worms, all worms.”

  And then, with Churchillian confidence in his own transcendent uniqueness, “But I do believe I am a glowworm.”

  No human being — not even Churchill — can out-glow mortality. In fact, the whole point of this text is, don’t put your hope in human ingenuity.

  When Isaiah spoke, people living in the wealth and power and ambition of Babylon knew the glory of Babylon would last forever. It did not. Babylon is long gone. Of course — we’re different. We’re smarter than Babylon. We have technology.

  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.

  This is not a popular truth. I thought one time at the church where I work I would help people remember it by developing a new liturgy where I would say: “Your flesh is like the grass”; and the people would respond: “We are grass indeed.” It didn’t go over so well.

  ETERNITY IN OUR HEARTS

  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.

  There is a cave in New Zealand where they have literal glow-worms; the inside of the cave is lit up by thousands of these phosphorescent little creatures. They spend most of their lives as larvae. When they finally hatch and get their wings, they have no mouths, no way to feed — they only live for one single day. They have one day to fly, explore career opportunities, attract a mate, get married, have children, and then die.

  On the other extreme, guess how old the oldest living thing in the world is? It’s called Posidonia Oceanica — a clump of Mediterranean seagrass. Scientists date it at one hundred thousand years old. When Isaiah said those words, this living thing had already been alive for more than ninety millennia.

  All flesh is as the grass. Life spans can range from a day to a hundred thousand years. Yet all these living things will die, and it doesn’t bother them at all. They don’t need a future.

  We are different. We have a radar for eternity. Human beings have an instinct that life does not end with the grave. And we have a hunger this world cannot satisfy. Again, you don’t have to believe in the Bible to see this. Look at the pyramids. Visit a nursing home.

  God has placed eternity in the human heart.

  The Bible says the reason God has done that is that we were made for an eternal existence with him. And the most important thing we are doing in this life is preparing for the life that is going to come.

  My old boss from Chicago, Bill Hybels, was studying the Bible for a sermon in a restaurant one time. A young woman looked over and asked, “Why are you reading that?”

  Bill looked back and said (this is an exact quote): “Because I don’t feel like going to hell when I die.” Bill has a little problem expressing himself assertively sometimes.

  She retorted, “There is no such thing as heaven or hell.”

  Bill thought, This is gonna be interesting. He turned. “Why do you say that?”

  She said, “Everybody knows that when you die, your candle goes out . . . poof!”

  “You mean to tell me there’s no afterlife?”

  “No.”

  “So that means you must be able to just live as you please?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Like there’s no judgment day or anything?”

  “Right.”

  Bill continued, “Well, that’s fascinating to me. Where did you hear that?”

  She said, “I read it somewhere.”

  “Can you give me the name of the book?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Can you give me the name of the author of the book?”

  “I forgot his name.”

  “Did that author write any other books?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it possible that your author changed his mind two years after he w
rote this particular book, and then wrote another one that said there is a heaven and a hell? Is that possible?”

  “It’s possible, but not likely.”

  Bill: “All right, let me get this straight. You are rolling the dice on your eternity predicated on what someone you don’t even know wrote in a book you can’t even recall the title of. Have I got that straight?”

  She looked back. “That’s right.”

  Bill summarized, “You know what I think, my friend? I think you have merely created a belief that guarantees the continuation of your unencumbered lifestyle. I think you made it up, because it is very discomforting to think of a heaven. It is a very discomforting thought to think of a hell. It is very unnerving to face a holy God in the day of reckoning. I think you made it all up.”

  The conversation got a little edgy after that.

  God has put eternity into your heart. Every one of us has those moments when we hear it. When our first child was born, the very first moment of her life, I took her from her mom and held her in my arms. Something happened that I did not expect and had never experienced: It was like I could see a whole span of a life in an instant. I said to Nancy, “This little strand of red hair will turn gray and then white; this soft rosy skin will grow wrinkled and mottled; this pliable little body will grow bent with age. She will grow old, and then we’ll die and be gone, and then she’ll die and be gone.”

  Nancy said, “Let me hold the baby. You’re gonna creep her out.”

  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 is one of the titles that John uses for Jesus. The Word here means Jesus, the Son of God, the expression of God, the incarnation of God.

  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.”

  PAIN COMES, THEN JOY

  The soul needs a future. God planted eternity in our hearts so that we would not stop seeking life beyond ourselves. Jesus tried to speak of this to his disciples not long before he died: “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.”

  Their confusion is so great they pester him with questions, and he tries again:

  A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. In that day you will no longer ask me anything.

  A woman giving birth to a child has pain; but when her baby is born she forgets the pain. . . .

  Really?

  When our first child was born, we went through a class called Lamaze. In those days they would not use the word pain, because “pain” sounds like kind of a downer. They said the mother-to-be might experience some “discomfort.” Husbands were to be “coaches”; I was to coach Nancy so that she didn’t have pain. Coaching mostly consisted of telling Nancy to breathe. The goal was to use no drugs or pain medication, just cleansing breaths. It wasn’t clear to me how my telling Nancy to breathe — which she had been doing pretty much her whole life — would prevent pain when an object the size of a bowling ball was coming out of her body.

  Nancy was in labor twelve hours. They had to give her Pitocin several times, which made it much more intense. The baby was turned the wrong way so that the hardest part of her skull pressed against the most tender part of Nancy’s spine — I remember the nurse said the baby was “sunny-side up,” which sounded cheery to me, but didn’t perk Nancy up at all.

  For eleven hours I massaged her lower spine with a tennis ball and encouraged her to breathe. I was bent over; my back was aching; my hands were sore; I never complained. She will never know what I went through to have that baby.

  The worst moment came when the doctor reached inside my wife’s body and physically wrenched the baby 180 degrees. Nancy let out a yell I will never forget. I was the coach, and I knew I had to do something. “Nancy, are you experiencing some discomfort?”

  She actually still remembers that.

  Jesus’ point is not that a woman can’t bring the pain to memory. His point is that the joy of giving life outweighs the pain of giving birth. What starts in pain, ends in joy.

  The disciples say, “What does he mean? What does all this ‘in a little while’ stuff mean?”

  Jesus says, “I will tell you. Here’s how it is in this world now that I have come . . .”

  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.

  This characterized the church. Followers of Jesus were beaten and rejoiced; they were put in prison and sang songs; they lived in poverty and were joyfully generous.

  Jesus was right — no one could take away their joy.

  The soul needs a future, like Winston Churchill’s wonderful glowworm comment. He lived maybe the most remarkable life of the twentieth century. But all flesh is as the grass.

  He died.

  They held his funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral. When it was done, a bugler went up in the Dome of St. Paul and played “Taps,” the tune that signifies that the day is done, that darkness has fallen. Time for sleep.

  Everyone thought that was the end.

  When the last note died out, on the other side of the dome, another bugler played “Reveille” — time to get up; time to get up; time to get up. We know where his hope lay.

  In his “In a little while” speech to his disciples, Jesus made a promise that’s so wonderful it’s hard to believe. It has to do with question-asking.

  The disciples were always pestering Jesus with questions: “Hey Jesus, can I sit at your right hand? Hey Jesus, how many times do I have to forgive this guy? Hey Jesus, why was this man blind from birth? Hey Jesus, what’s this parable mean? Hey Jesus, shall we call down fire from heaven to blast the Samaritans? Hey Jesus, what do you mean in a little while?”

  When we had a child, we were totally unprepared for the constant barrage of questions. Why? Why? Why? One time in the car, when Laura was about two, I decided to turn the tables. I suddenly bombarded her with questions: “Hey Laura, why is grass green? Hey Laura, why is the sky blue? What makes the car go? Where do babies come from?” Laura looked terribly confused; her lower lip began to tremble. Nancy, who had to handle the questions fulltime from Laura every day, was thrilled that the shoe was on the other foot. “Keep going,” she said to me. “Make her cry!”

  I wonder if Jesus ever got tired of all the questio
ns.

  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.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE SOUL NEEDS TO BE WITH GOD

  If you read through the Bible, you get the sense that the soul was designed to search for God. The Hebrew Scriptures — which might be thought of as the Great Soul-Book of human literature — are almost obsessed with this thought. The soul thirsts for the Mighty One (Ps. 63:1). It thirsts for him like parched land thirsts for water (Ps. 143:6). Like a laser it focuses the full intensity of its desire on him (Ps. 33:20). It lifts itself up to him (Ps. 25:1), it blesses him (Ps. 103:1 – 2, 22), it clings to him (Ps. 63:8), and it waits for him in silence (Ps. 62:1). “Indeed, the soul lives in God.” 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.