by John Ortberg
“I brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”
Your freedom is not restricted simply by external constraints. There’s another odd kind of restriction. Your freedom gets limited by an internal reality that is a kind of brokenness or weakness or dividedness inside you. You want to stop drinking, but you can’t. You want to live with a happy, cheerful, optimistic attitude, but you don’t. You want to quit yelling at your kids, but you fail. You want to be the kind of person who manages anger really, really well, but you aren’t. You’d like to think you have become unselfish, but you haven’t. You are not free. The freedom you lack is an internal freedom, and this inner lack of freedom is much more dehumanizing, much more tragic than external constraints.
This kind of freedom is internal, and it is precious. It is “soul-freedom.” Remember that the soul is what integrates our parts. If our will is enslaved to our appetites, if our thoughts are obsessed with unfulfilled desires, if our emotions are slaves to our circumstances, if our bodily habits contradict our professed values, the soul is not free. The only way for the soul to be free is for all the parts of our personhood to be rightly ordered.
When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned by captors, he did not have very much freedom from, but there was a freedom inside him that was much greater than what his guards had. The deeper freedom — the freedom that the soul needs — is the freedom for becoming the person I was designed to be.
The soul sits in its own prison, having locked the door and, to its surprise, thrown away the key.
FINDING FREEDOM FOR YOUR SOUL
How do you get the freedom that your soul craves? This is the great irony about freedom. To become truly free, you must surrender. Surrender is not a popular concept. It goes against everything we think we know about being free. Wars are not won by surrendering — have you ever seen a football team surrender in the Super Bowl? But surrender is the only way to achieve freedom for your soul.
The alcoholic admits she lacks the willpower to quit drinking. She surrenders her will — her freedom — to a higher power, and through that act of surrender receives power to be free not to drink. It is a model that has healed millions of people through Alcoholics Anonymous, and it is not limited to the abuse of alcohol. If you want to free your soul, you acknowledge that there is a spiritual order that God has designed for you. 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. True freedom comes when you embrace God’s overall design for the world and your place in it. This is why in the Bible you see this strong connection between God’s law and soul-freedom.
The psalmist writes, “I will always obey your law, for ever and ever.” Then the very next verse says, “I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts.” Or, in the book of James we find that “whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it — not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it — they will be blessed in what they do.” God’s law was given to us not to force us to obey a list of rules, but to free our souls to live full and blessed.
The enslaved soul is sick and needs reviving. In the early centuries of the church, people began to speak of the “cure of the soul.” One of the early church fathers wrote, “For the cure [sometimes translated as “care”] of the soul, the most variable and manifold of creatures, seems to me in very deed to be the art of arts and science of sciences.” He goes on to say that the cure of souls is harder work, more important than healing bodies. Sometimes when we use a therapeutic word like healing, it can sound as if we’re only talking about the wounds and the scars and the hurts we carry around. We do all have those. It’s good to be open about them, but at the core, the disease that really threatens our soul is sin. I am complicit in the sickness of my soul in a different way than in diseases that attack my body. I say yes to greed and lust in a way I don’t say yes to colds and strep throat.
The sickness that denies the soul its freedom responds poorly to conventional treatment. The late American sociologist Philip Rieff suggests that we have adopted a secularized, therapeutic framework for viewing life that ignores the needs of the soul. “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”
SIN, FREEDOM, AND THE SOUL
To understand how the soul becomes enslaved and where freedom truly lies, we need to consider three different levels where the soul gets trapped. One way to think of this is to imagine a target with three concentric circles moving from the outer edge to the bull’s eye.
Sinful acts. These are particular behaviors: We lie. We cheat on a test. We gossip about somebody. We yell at somebody when “it’s not fair.” We are able to commit these sins every day without remorse, thanks to a tool without which we could not survive given the reality of our souls: denial. A friend of mine commissioned the Barna research group to do a national survey on the top temptations people say they face when it comes to sin. This was done anonymously online, so respondents didn’t have to worry about anyone discovering their deep, dark sins. Hatred, abuse, racism, breakdown of families, rampant greed, dishonesty, violence. According to their honest answers, what do you think are the most destructive temptations facing the human soul today? Lust? Greed? Hatred? Jealousy? Dishonesty? Pornography?
Here’s what we say they are:
Number one: worry. “I’m tempted to worry too much. I guess I’ll have to confess I just don’t trust God as courageously as I should.” Number two: procrastination. “Sometimes I put things off.” Number three: overeating. “Sometimes I eat too much.” Number four: Facebook and Twitter. “I guess I’d have to confess sometimes I use social media too much if I want to be really brutally honest about myself.” Number five: laziness. “I can waste a lot of time doing nothing.”
Even with a guarantee of never being found out, we can’t bear to tell the truth about our sins. Sadly, the soul enslaved by sinful acts cannot be healed if we deny that those acts are really our responsibility.
The King James translation of James 1:21 doesn’t mince words: “Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness.” We don’t recognize ourselves in those words. Filthiness? What’s that? Naughtiness, related to that old word naught, means we have amounted to nothing? Those are sinful acts, but if we don’t recognize them in ourselves they will continue to enslave our souls.
Sinfulness. The next ring on our target goes deeper and has to do with our orientation. The Bible will in some places address sins, but in other places will address sin. Sin is a deeply entrenched pattern way below the surface, insidious — like a disease that just leaks out of us without any effort. My sinful acts are premeditated; my sinfulness is more like a habit I can’t control. Self-serving words that just come out of my mouth, even when I’m not trying to promote myself. The way I’ll cater to somebody because I think they’re important or attractive or wealthy when I don’t even like that quality in me. I don’t know how to turn it off. I don’t know how to shut it down. It’s in my body. Jealous attitudes. Chronic ingratitude that just crops up. These thoughts that come into my mind.
Paul says, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. . . . For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing.” Now these are incredibly important words, especially “this I keep on doing.” Sinfulness is the habit of sinning.
A habit is a relatively permanent pattern of behavior that allows you to navigate the world. The capacity for habitual behavior is indispensable for human life. When you learn how to type or tie a shoe or play the piano or drive a car, it’s hard work. You have to concentrate on it. After you learn, it becomes habitual. It’s in your body. Good habits are enormously freeing — we accomplish good things almost on autopilot. One study from Duke University found that more than 40 percent of the actions people take every day aren’t decisions, but habits.
Good habits f
ree us, but when sin becomes a habit, our souls lose their freedom.
When Paul says there is nothing good in your sinful nature, he is not talking about a ghost inside you someplace that’s fighting it out with another ghost somewhere. He’s a brilliant student of human life who knows that sin, evil, wickedness, deception, pride, greed, racism, anger, and ingratitude have become second nature to us all.
You can override a habit by willpower for a moment or two. You go to church. Read the Bible. Worship. Sing. Pray. You feel at peace with God for a moment, and then your sin habit returns. Habits eat willpower for breakfast.
Our only hope is not for more willpower; it is for a new set of habits. Richard Foster told me once that the theologian Thomas Aquinas devoted over seventy pages of his writings to the cultivation of holy habits. Also, the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Steps are all about acquiring new habits through which we have access to God’s power to do what willpower can never do.
This is what the cure of souls looked like for Jesus’ followers. They confessed their sins to each other, prayed, and studied the Scriptures together. They replaced sinful habits with new habits — Jesus habits. They met and broke bread together, not as an obligation, but for survival. Soul survival.
Original sin. This is the bull’s eye — the explanation for why we sin in the first place. We can’t help ourselves. The phrase “original sin” is not actually in the Bible, but the story of humanity’s fall from God’s grace in the garden describes our condition. Something is broken or wrong with our very nature. There is a leaning toward sin in human beings that’s just there.
Mere human efforts (education, environment, therapy) cannot cure the sin problem. My brokenness, like yours, is very complex. Parts of it have to do with my wounds and my scars and my disappointments, but at the core is my natural inclination toward sin. It is deeply embedded in our souls, and it is literally killing us. We cannot change this condition, but we can free our souls from its power over us by recognizing that it is there, daily seeking God’s forgiveness and strength, and living the way he designed us.
It is only when we surrender to God and his ways that our souls experience freedom. We may stumble along the way, for no one is perfect. But we serve a perfect Savior who is patient and always ready to forgive us when we fail.
When evangelist Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth, died in 2007, she chose to have engraved on her gravestone words that had nothing to do with her remarkable achievements. It had to do with the fact that as long as we are alive, God will be working on us, and then we will be free. She had been driving one day along a highway through a construction site, and there were miles of detours and cautionary signs and machinery and equipment. She finally came to the last one, and this final sign read, “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” That’s what is written over Ruth Graham’s grave: “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.”
Construction today. Freedom tomorrow.
CHAPTER 13
THE SOUL NEEDS BLESSING
A great surgeon named Richard Selzer had to cut into the face of a lovely young woman to remove a large tumor. He did the best he could, but in the course of the surgery, he severed a tiny twig of a facial nerve that controlled one of the muscles of her mouth. Her once lovely face would remain grotesquely twisted in disfigurement for the rest of her life. Before the surgery, she had that kind of face that would sometimes cause people to just stop and look at it because it was so lovely. No one would ever do that again. If they stopped to look at her face from that day on, it would be for another reason.
Her young husband was beside her hospital bed when she asked for a mirror. As she looked into it, she asked Selzer, “Will my face always look like this?” “Yes,” he replied. “It will, because the nerve was cut.”
She was silent, but her husband smiled. “I like it,” he said. “It is kind of cute.” And then, to add an exclamation point, he bent down to kiss her crooked mouth. Selzer wrote, “I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers to show her their kiss still works.”
To show her their kiss still works.
Selzer concluded, “I know it is the marred and the scarred and the faulty that are subject to grace. I would seek the soul. . . . Yes, it is the exact location of the soul I am after. I have caught glimpses of it. . . .”
The soul is seen when it reaches out in love. The Bible’s word for this is blessing.
My friend Dallas used to tell me, “Churches should do seminars on how to bless and not curse others.” I thought that was simply a cute saying. I should have known better, but for me, blessing had become an irremediably trite church cliché. Somebody sneezes and someone else will thoughtlessly say, “God bless you,” although we’d be surprised if God actually did. Or it becomes a way to dress gossip up in Sunday clothes: “She can’t take care of her own children, God bless her.” It’s a phrase pastors used at the door on Sunday after the service when they felt they should say something spiritual but they didn’t know what else to say. Or it’s a safe hospital prayer: If I pray “God heal this cancer,” my reputation is on the line, but if I pray for blessing, it’s hard for anyone to prove I’m a prayer-failure.
Then one day I got a seminar from Dallas on how to bless. I was with my wife and daughter. There were other people in the room, but this was really for us. There are two great words in the Bible, Dallas said, that describe the posture of our souls toward other people. One is to bless. The other is to curse. 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.
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. We communicate it with our bodies. Blessing is kind of like an ancient dance of the Hokey-Pokey; before you finish you have to “put your whole self in.”
Blessing is done by the soul.
In Genesis, Isaac was about to give his blessing to his son. He asked his son to prepare him a meal first and give it to him to eat, “that my soul may bless you before I die.” The idea that the blessing comes from the soul is repeated again later in the story when Jacob sneaks in to appropriate the blessing that would have gone to his brother Esau. “I will eat of my son’s venison that my soul may bless you.”
It’s instructive that Isaac wants food so that he can bless — will the good. Psychologist Roy Baumeister — the preeminent researcher on willpower in our day — notes that the single greatest predictor of whether judges will “bless” convicts with parole is how recently they (the judges) have eaten. The word soul returns when Esau found out what had happened, and asked that his father’s soul may bless him. This sequence of eating/soul-blessing is repeated three times (Gen. 27:19, 25, 31). By eating, Isaac “increases” his soul. In the blessing the soul “forcefully expresses itself to empower the soul of the other.”
In each case, it is not simply Isaac who blesses. The blessing comes from Isaac’s soul. It is so deep and real that once it has been given, it cannot be revoked. It is so deeply desired that Esau is panic-stricken at the prospect of losing it: “Bless me, even me also, O my father.”
LEARNING TO BLESS
So we sat together, my wife and my oldest daughter, Laura, and I, as Dallas taught us how to bless. He began by quoting the world’s oldest blessing, which God gave to Aaron to bless the people of Israel. “You can change the wording if you want,” Dallas said, “but it’s hard to improve on God.”
The LORD bless you and keep you;
The LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
Blessing and cursing are not compartmentalized Bible words at all. They are simply the two ways we treat people. They are as inescapable as breathing out and breathing in.
We are acutely sensitive in our souls to being blessed or being cursed. I was driving in downtown Me
nlo Park, coming out of a meeting where we were making ministry plans to help people learn the love of God. I was getting ready to make a left-hand turn. A driver coming from my right didn’t have her turn signal on, so I thought she would go past. I began to inch forward to make my turn. It turns out she did turn left, but because I had inched forward she had to adjust her turn. She just glared at me with that expression that says, “Don’t you know how to drive?”
I found myself getting angry immediately. She was condemning me, and the human heart hates to be condemned. I wanted to jump out of my car, force her to stop, and scream: “It wasn’t my fault; it was your fault — you didn’t use your turn signal; but now you’re blaming me! How dare you?” I even wanted to add, “Your heart is wicked and deceitful above all things!”
I didn’t say anything because it just wasn’t practical to do that on the street, and because I recognized her — she goes to my church. So I just gave her the blessing sign.
I used to think cursing someone meant swearing at them, or putting a hex on them, so it was pretty easy to avoid because I do not swear much or do hexes. But as I listened to Dallas, I realized how wrong I had been. You can curse someone with an eyebrow. You can curse someone with a shrugged shoulder. I have seen a husband curse a wife by leaving just the tiniest delay before saying, “Of course I love you.” The better you know someone, the more subtly and cruelly you can curse them.