250803 Soul Keeping (2 of 5)

Defining the Soul and Its Deepest Needs The great songs that we've sung this morning reminding us of why we're here and what calls to our hearts. And we're going to continue this morning speaking about such things as we continue our series on soul keeping. Let me just pray for us, Father. We are sad in these moments that you would settle our hearts, that we would have a sense of being separated from all the things around us and listening for your voice alone. Lord, we pray that this morning you might revive our souls, that we might get a sense of being enlivened again, of knowing that we've been in your presence and that the Almighty God of heaven has met with us and spoken to us. So we ask in these three moments, Lord, grab our attention, help us to think of things of You and to listen for your voice. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen. Well, this series is designed to cause you to stop and think a little, to think about what it is to have a soul. And of course, for some of you, you're now doing this in small groups as well. And I genuinely hope your small groups aren't just a comprehension test of filling the the book and tick the box sort of thing, but but rather it's an opportunity for you to slow down and to talk about how your soul is doing and listen carefully to how other people's souls are travelling as well. If you read in the book and listening to the sermons, I pray that'll be your experience as you do that as well and you think about what God might be saying to you about your soul. Well, last week we talked about what a soul is, and we noted that from early on in the Bible, it talks about seeking God with all of our heart and soul. And often in the Old Testament, especially in the early part, it puts those two words together, heart and soul. And it's like God is saying to his people, I want all that you are. I want you to respond to me with everything that you have. We spend a lot of time trying to pull all that apart, but the gist of it is straightforward and simple and very clear that God is calling to us. You remember last week we talked about the fact that as Altberg describes in his book, he quotes Dallas Willard. And Dallas is his famous saying you are a soul made by God, made for God, and made to need God. Hence you were not made to be self-sufficient. And we thought a little last week about the fact that self-sufficiency is the thing that eats your soul. It erodes the sense of who you are and what you do. It starts to pull apart how you were actually designed and created to be. And yet everything around us, everything you hear, everything you learn in all the conversations you have in this world, they will tell you that you need more. You know, we talked about the fact that our souls were made hungry, hungry for God, and we spent so much time filling that space with a whole bunch of other stuff, and it doesn't satisfy. It's like eating too much McDonald's. After a while, you just crave something with a bit more substance, real food, something that's going to nourish you. And so the call in as we think about our soul and as we talk about what that is and how that works, the call is for us to slow down enough to give some attention to how our soul is travelling. Willard and then opered both to find it at, you know, there's lots of words in the Bible and there's lots of parts that it talks about head and mind and heart and soul. It uses all these words and it gets really confusing. And what we we talked about last week is the fact that it doesn't matter what terms we use. The way that these guys have coined the term soul is to say there's a part of us that keeps us together and helps us to relate to God. I know during the week, as some of you have started reading and talking in groups, there's been a few questions back to me. Yeah, but how does that fit with spirit? And how does that fit with. I get that, But just think of it in this term. God made you as one integrated person, but there is a part of you that holds you together that calls to God and God calls to. That's the part we talked about. You can use whatever words work for you. It doesn't matter. We're using the word soul, and I think it's deeply biblical to do that. But this part of us that says I need something more, I'm hungry, I need to find some level of satisfaction, some level of contentment. This is the part of the Bible talks about as being the soul, the bit that holds us all together and helps us to be an integrated person. Understanding Receptivity to God's Kingdom Message When Oldberg is talking about this, he points towards a very famous parable and saying says this is actually a parable of the soul. And of course we know it as the parable of the soils or the parable of the seed or the parable of the sower. If I was to do a quick survey, I can almost guarantee that most of you would say the parable of the sower is about evangelism, about, you know, God throwing out seed. And sometimes it takes root in it. Sometimes it doesn't challenge for you. Go home and reread it again. You find it in Matthew, Luke, and Mark, early in Mark, later in Matthew and Luke. But look it up and find the story and read it for yourself because here's the thing, as I've done that that dawns on me. He doesn't actually say this is about people finding faith for the first time. He's actually talking about this difference in soil. It's really a parable of soils, not a parable of seed or or the sower because the sower and the seed are consistent in every version that he gives in the different soils that it lands on. The difference is in the actual soil. And when you read this and Jesus explains this to the parables, you'll see it there that he, he talks about that this is about hearts that are receptive to the message of the Kingdom. That's how Jesus describes this parable. There is no question that for most people, especially people sitting here, there's been a time when that happened for a first time, when you actually heard the good news about God and that you responded for the first time. But isn't that true of us all the time? That we may have started as good soil where the seed took root and started to flourish, but then life comes along and knocks out about and it's no longer true. You see, this is a parable about how we receive the message of the Kingdom is what Jesus says here he doesn't use his normal When you read this, the the guys who wrote the synoptic gospels generally say the good news is the message. But here the Greek actually uses the word logos for message. And logos does mean message like the content of the message. Of course you know the word logos because you find it in John chapter one that Jesus was the logos. He was the word of God. And so here when Jesus says I'm the sower and I'm throwing out this news of the, the, the Kingdom, this message of the Kingdom, he's saying there is a message that comes from me that calls something from you. The job for us is to slow down enough and to say, how's my soul doing now? I can guarantee for most of you there was a time when your soil was full of good soil. It was a healthy place where the message of the Kingdom came and it took root and it grew and it flourished and it was something beautiful. But the question for us as we sit here this morning, for some it might be a first time thing, but for many of us, we're sitting there saying, how's my soul now? Does my soul hear the message of the Kingdom, Doesn't hear the things that God would whisper to me in the dark of night? Does my soul respond to things that my Creator would want to say to me? Now, one of the things I've discovered as you get older is that it's easier to get distracted. We get into rhythms, You know, we're doing business. The way we go about things. We have patterns. Most of our life is set into patterns that cause us not to have to think too deeply about things. You've noticed this, and I've said it before, but you've noticed you can get to work in the morning and you can't remember anything of the trip on the way in. Why? Because we've got part of our brain that just does that. It sets a pattern and it just does it. You don't need to tell it to do it all. The problem is that as we do that, as we get into rhythms and patterns, we can start to diverge a little from being a healthy soul. We can start to have that eroded a little bit because this thing's sneaking in from every other angle. That's starting to undo the goodness of the soil, the place where the plant needs to grow, the message needs to take root. Can I encourage you even as you sit and listen today, just to do a little bit of a self inventory and to ask yourself, how is my soul doing? Is my soul a receptive place? Is it a place that when I get criticism from my spouse or my family or from my friends or from someone at work, that feels secure and safe to listen and to change? Is my soul a a healthy and vibrant place that on a regular basis here's the things that my Creator says to me as he conforms me into the image of God's own son Jesus, the scripture talks about? Or am I just running on regular routine and toughening myself up and not listening for the voice of God? Jesus tells this parable. You read it for yourself, But he says he who has ears, let him hear. And he says to his disciples, this message will come to many people and we'll simply bounce off them and they won't listen at all. They won't get it. They won't understand is his word. And his call to them is be healthy soil. Have the kind of soul that's soft and receptive so that you can hear the things that God is saying to you and you can grow to be the person God created you to be. That you can start to leave behind some of those tough and bumpy and awkward bits and become more and more like what Jesus modeled to us. How Pain Can Harden Your Soul and Heart As Jesus tells this parable, you know the story well, but he says he's the first kind of soul. And this is the hardened path in the Middle East where it doesn't rain much. It's pretty dry. But there are paths and the paths of the places that people tread. That's the shepherds and the travelers and the animals. You know what this looks like if you've been even in a dense Bush sort of circumstance, you find game trails, those places that animals have worn into a trail and that the dirt gets hard as a result of all the traffic. Here's something that I discovered on the farm which I did not know. Did you know ants make trails? And I'm not talking little trails. They make massive, big trails. It's like a superhighway for ants. And you go, how can something so small and so light make such a strong trail? And as everything started turning green with all the rain we've had, you can look out on the field and you can see the trails that the ants have made. The sheep contribute to some of them as well. But I've noticed that the sheep don't like the Ant trails, so they have their own trails. But you can look and you can say, here's where the dirt has become hard and nothing is growing. And yet it's something that's so light can even do that to the soil. Isn't that amazing? Something's so light, but by the millions repetitively they have trampled down the soil. Jesus says that some souls are like the path. They're so hard beaten, they're so trodden down that nothing can grow there. You know what does that for us? Pain. Pain causes us to form hard trails as we experience pain. We are naturally, as humans, pain avoidant. We do everything in our power to avoid it if we can. And when we suffer pain, it creates hard trails for us. And they're places where things won't grow. They're places that have been so trampled by what others have done, sometimes by what we've done, sometimes just by the circumstances, that things have trouble growing there. You know what it's like to suffer pain. You can't be human and not be affected by this. We live in a broken world amongst broken people, and bad things happen. We don't have our lives as we plan them. They really turn out as we expected. We have all the grief that goes with that and that pain can cause us to harden our hearts to have souls that are are non receptive. You know, when Kyle and I first started ministry about a million and two years ago, it feels like that someday we had a lot of role models who were people had been pastors in the ministry for a long time. Kylie went to a a gathering of of pastor spouses. In those days. It was a single gender sort of thing. And so all the women would get together and talk about how their husbands have been hard done by and the things that had happened and how church people weren't really that very nice. And, you know, Carly came back from one of those meetings and she said to me, Steve, their hearts are just so hard. I get that. I get why, because when treat people treat us badly, when we're not well looked after by others, when everyone wants to take a poke at you, it's easy to become a heart. Kyle and I talked about it and it was a conversation that went over over months. And you know, we made a resolution as 20 somethings that we would always cry that when we saw something that broke our heart, we'd cry. When we saw things that weren't right, we'd cry. When God wept, we'd cry. See, Because it's so easy, isn't it? And even as I'm talking, some of you assessing for yourself, you know what you've done with pain, and pain has made you tougher. And look, I get it. We live in a world where pain is overwhelming. We now have media that streams in from every corner of the globe. And if we allow ourselves, we could be swamped with all the pain out there. I'm not talking about glorifying pain. I'm not talking about going and seeking pain. I'm talking about as we see things and as we notice things, that our hearts would be soft, our souls would be receptive. That we wouldn't harden ourselves and just become tough people who can handle anything, but that we allow it to break our hearts. You know, I mentioned last week the picture of the little boy in Gaza who's dying of hunger as his mother holds him. There's something about that that should always touch our hearts. We don't go seeking those kind of pictures. We don't. But when we come across things that are are true tragedy where humans are treating humans badly or or circumstances have ganged up and made a terrible tragedy of the circumstance, our heart will be moved. When we walk through the streets and we see people who aren't as well off us as us, we don't harden ourselves and say that's just their problem. They made bad choices. There's something in our heart that cries a little bright. We are cool to have souls that are soft and healthy. And I know even as I speak to a group like this, that some of you have seen raw evil and some of you have seen tragedy that beyond words to describe. Some of you have experienced pain that goes all the way to your very soul. God alone can redeem this stuff. Hardening up doesn't get us there. And Jesus says that sometimes when the message of God's Kingdom comes and is cast out, it bounces off you because you've hardened your heart. And pain will do that. Why Living on the Surface Erodes Your Soul's Depth The second kind of soil that he talks about is the rocky soil. And this corresponds to a shallow soil. This is where some sand is formed in the rocks where where it has blown over and and just put a thin layer. And that the message of the Kingdom comes and it starts to take root, but it can't go down because the soil is too shallow. For some of you, in response to life, for all of us, this is a temptation We want to end for the we want to head for the shallow end of the pool. We want to get into shallow places where life can't affect us that way. We want to live on the surface of life and just skim along and bounce with all of that and we don't go anywhere deep with it. You know, when the psalmist talks about this, he, he uses the phrase talking of God that deep calls to deep. Do you know what that's saying? That the depth of God wants to interact with the depth of your soul. When we live shallow lives, when we have shallow souls, there's no room for anything to grow and to flourish. It needs depth. It needs to go somewhere. I reckon a good illustration of this is what I call the tourist soul. You know what we do when we go as a tourist to places? We go to some of the most disadvantaged and poor places in the world where there's tragedy happening around every corner. And we go and we admire the beauty and sit in a nice hotel. And there's this, this layer between US and the rest of the world, this layer which is a hotel room wall where where we, we actually just enjoy the shallowness of the moment. If I was to ask you to go and live in those places every thinking you would coil up. Because you go, I prefer a far shallower sense of that. You know, this is this is going when I took a group of folk from my last church to the mission field. And you go and you, you see the, the deprivation, you see the lack of food, you see the lack of technology that they have. And the church group that I was with would constantly say, you know, what they need to do is and you know, something like what they need to do is buy a tractor. That would be so much more efficient. They could have crops. They could rather than all this tilling by hand. They, they and the missionary who was taking us around would say to us, you don't yet understand what it is to live here. And then I should spend a little bit more time there. You see that the the way that they can't petrol around is in two litre milk containers. That's the only, only thing they have. Can you imagine how many 22 litre milk containers it takes to fill up a tractor? And he says, what would happen if the tractor got a flat tire? How how would they replace that? What would happen if the tractor breaks down? Who will service that? You see, when we live in a shallow world, when we make our shell, our souls shallow, there's this sense in which you say, well, all that needs to be done is that's my experience of church with many people. They come to me and they say, well, what we need to do is, and God calls us to something more. He says, come to the deep end of the pool. Come to the place where you're out of your depth, where the world is messy, where there's pain all around you and things aren't going right. Start to feel the sense that you can't sustain yourself and let me hold you. That's the call for a deep soul. We've just sound the words help my help me to go to deep places that my feet won't naturally wander. We've just some of the notions so that my faith might become stronger. You know, all birds written another book called If you want to walk on water, you got to get out of the boat. And his contention is this. And he's right, isn't he, that we live shallow lives that stay in the shallow end of the pool and we don't do the deep stuff. We don't feel the pain of everyone else around us and we don't respond because we're scared. We're scared that we're going to be out of our depth and not be able to cope. Now, I get self-care and I'm not saying you should be overwhelmed by this world and everything in it, but guys, take a risk. Discover what it is for deep to call to deep. Discover what it is to be held in the hands of the living God, to know that as you're sinking that Jesus can pull you out of the water and help you to walk with him. On the surface. You see, there's a level of soul development that calls something from us that rather than make our our world safe and shallow, that we might know what it is to have some depth to us. Freeing Your Soul from Clutter and Fear And the third top, which is probably the most common for us, is what he calls the cluttered soul, the one in which the sea comes down and finds a bit of dirt, but it gets strangled by all those things around it. We talked about this last week. I call this soul sickness. You know those places where where you feel hungry and you want stuff and so you feel your life with stuff around you. And the message of the Kingdom of God can't take root because you've cluttered it. You've crowded it with everything else Jesus talks a lot about. This is the story of him and the the rich young ruler. What must I do to have eternal life? Oh, it's simple. Yeah, yeah. Why don't you just sell everything and come and follow me? And the rich young ruler couldn't do it. And he walks away. Why? Plotted soul. There's a story of a farmer who's doing really well for himself, and he's got more than he needs. And he says, oh, I'm going to sit back and put my feet up and life's going to be good. Eat, drink, be merry. It's all good. And God says when Jesus tells a story, God's voice is, you foolish man, you've invested in all this other stuff and you haven't attended to a deep relationship with me. You know, there's a call in our lives, folks, not to clutter our souls, whether that's with activity or whether that's with stuff, it doesn't really matter, does it? But to avoid the pain and to, to stay away from all those things, we go, how do I make myself feel good? How do I gratify myself? And we put that in the place of God. And Jesus says it causes an unhealthy soul where the message of the Kingdom cannot take root. He gives the 4th type. And of course, I think he gives this as hope. He says you were created to have a soil soul that is healthy and good, and that where the message comes and it lands, it would take control and it would grow and it'd be something beautiful. Many of you have experienced that. And I wonder as you sit here today, whether or not that's still your experience or whether you found that over time that as life has worn you down, your soul has become harder from pain or shallower from fear or more cluttered from self gratification. The call back to you here is to free your soul. Let it be what it was created to be, a place that's less worried about everything else going on around it and says I simply listen for the message of God's Kingdom. I don't have to compete with everyone else to have stuff. I don't have to be scared and fearful. You know, one of the things that breaks my heart most is that churches have made God a fear fearing God, God to be feared. And yet the very opposite is true. When you read scripture that this is a God who says, know that I am awesome, know that I am big, know that I am great and know that I am for you. And he calls us to find freedom from fear. Some of us have just simply become cluttered. As we sit here this morning, today, at this very point, you get to make some decisions because this is not once done, always done equation. This is an everyday equation. And today's a good day to stop and to say how healthy is my soul? How well am I doing with this? Have I cluttered it? Have I hardened it? Have I shallowed it out to nothing? Three Ways to Nourish and Anchor Your Soul So what do you do to keep your soul healthy? Three things and I'm done. Here's the first thought. Your soul is a sponge. It soaks up the things around you. And you know the thing about sponges is that when you squeeze them, whatever it's soaked up is what comes out, eh? When we get home and our spouse or our family say something to us to try and redirect us and all that stuff comes out, you know the little kid inside you is stamping his feet going, I'm not going to do that. You can't be the boss of me. Whatever you suck up around you will come out. So here are the three things to think about to focus on what is good. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. Whatever you've learned or received or heard from me or seen in me, put it into practice and the God of peace will be with you. This is a book he writes a letter he writes to the Philippian church, and there's a book all about joy and how you can have joy and how you can experience life with joy. And he says here, The thing is, be a sponge and suck the right stuff up. If we base our relationships on what we see on TV, on the romance novels we watch, or maybe even worse, the porn that we look at. If we start to form foundations and suck the wrong messages in, there is no chance that our marriage won't actually suffer as a result of it. You know, when it comes to family and friends, again, if we look to the wrong influences, and I often think, you know, one of my kids favorite series was Friends on TV. You know, this unrealistic group of friends that work things out and live in an unrealistic apartment and do unrealistic things and you go, wow, if that's what we form our idea of what relationships look like, we're going to come up short. Paul says to him, There's going to be a lot of people around you who are going to tell you things about how this works, but rather simply focus on things that are true, things that are noble, things that are right and pure, whatever is lovely, things we've admirable. Can you feel your soul actually reviving? As I leave, read the list. When we fill ourselves up with those things of God, those things that are right and good, he starts to restore our soul in Galatians when he writes to them, he says this. So don't, don't let, don't get tired of doing what is good at the right time. We will reap a Harvard of blessing if we don't give up. The call is that good work helps us to know what is good work. Not to spend our lives just earning money, not to just keep ourselves busy. But rather than do things that are good, that make a difference, there's something in it that calls to us and causes us to actually look to God and to think about how big he is and how good he is. And last this, as we go into communion, we take hold of the hopes that before us. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul and secure. Our soul doesn't need a center. It needs something to hold on to. It needs something that won't move. And you know, folks, when we celebrate communion together, that's at the very heart of what this is all about. When we take this bread and we drink a little cup of juice, it reminds us of what Jesus has done to us. And here when the writer to the Hebrew writes, he says, know this, that if you make this a center, it will be like an anchor to you. It will give you hope. For many of us, we're buffeted by life. We've been knocked around a lot. And what this says is you're being held. You're being held by the eternal God, your loving Father, and you're safe. You're safe to let go of all those things the world wood forest feed you, and safe just to hold on to the hands that hold you. Know that it's enough for some of you, even right in this moment. There's things going on in your life that are difficult. Know that you're held as we take communion together. Thank God that you're held into the future, that He will hold you and everything. We'll be OK. I'm going to pray and then we're going to share communion and then we're done. Father, this morning as we think about our souls and think about how you created us, our prayer this morning is that you might speak to us, that we might hear the words of a loving heavenly Father. Lord, remind us that what Jesus has done for us has made it possible for us to be held by you. Lord, for some of us this morning, there's things we need to let go of, There's things we need to make choice about. There's things we might need to do differently. Father, give us the courage. Help us as we take this communion, to recommit ourselves to You and to remind ourselves that you are the one who holds our past, who holds our present, who holds our future. Lord, we ask you to do this as we remember You. Please we are speak to us. We pray this in the name of Jesus, Amen.