Feeding Your Soul

When your soul is in turmoil, it’s hard to see clearly. Fear, anger, sorrow, and despair can distort your perception of reality. It’s hard to keep things in perspective. They can actually magnify your troubles.

Often, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, what you need is somebody to take you by the shoulders, look you square in the eye, and speak some sense to you. Sometimes that somebody is you.

I get this from the Bible. Listen to the psalmist talk to himself: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Ps. 43:5).

This was a man in trouble. He felt threatened and overwhelmed. And in the first part of the psalm, he was doing exactly the right thing by pouring out his soul in prayer to God. But then he stopped praying and spoke directly to his soul.

God is very intentional about what He includes in the Bible. So, when God includes this kind of soultalk in the inspired hymnal for the ages, we’re supposed to notice. God clearly intends us to speak to our souls. So, we need to understand why this is important.

When the psalmists talk to themselves, what are they doing? In every instance, whether in desperation or celebration, they are reminding themselves that their hope is in God. Why? Because in a world of tribulation (John 16:33), hope drains away, and they know how crucial it is to feed one’s soul.

Hope is to our soul what energy is to our bodies. Hope is the spiritual energy generated in the soul when we believe that our future is good, even if our present is bad. Our souls must have hope to keep going, just as our bodies must have energy to keep going.   Continue at Jon Bloom

Psychiatric Medication and the Image of God

Watch any daytime talk show with an expert medical guest or flip through Time magazine's colorful diagrams, and you'll see that the latest emphasis in neurology, the brain's causal influence on human behavior, has leaked down to the popular level. Many of these experts consider the human being primarily as a physical creature whose actions, feelings, and thoughts for the most part simply manifest neurological activity. Undesirable feelings or behavior, then, should be addressed by ever-more-precise medical methods.

Many Christians have correctly seen the incredible danger such an understanding poses to a biblical worldview, which involves realities beyond what can be seen, touched, or medicated. In other words, we know that a human being involves more than the body. But we also know that the body is a vital aspect of our being as designed by God. So we begin to answer this question---How should Christians think about psychiatric medication?---by considering at least two aspects of what it means for people to be made as the image of God.

1. The Image of God as Union Between Soul and Body

 

The immaterial soul does not function independently of the material body. The soul is not a "ghost in the machine" whose function is autonomous of corporeal mechanisms. God intentionally designed humankind to represent himself in the physical world---a psychosomatic unity comprising both a soul that reflects the immaterial God and also a body that grounds him in material creation.

The keystone passage introducing the image of God is Genesis 1:26: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'." Biblical scholar D. J. A. Clines has pointed out that this phrase is better translated, "Let us make man as our image" for grammatical reasons as well as for historical-contextual reasons. Man, as the image of God, is the physical representation of God's presence in creation.   Continue at Jeremy Pierre

An Appointment You Will Keep!

Dear Reader,

You and I may not know each other; possibly we shall never see one another. Yet, I desire to write a personal letter to you.

I write to you because you and I have more in common than you may realize. Though we may never meet each other in this world, we shall one day be in each other’s presence because we both possess a never-dying soul. With this soul both of us must appear before God, your and my Creator, in the great judgment day. “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27).

You may do all in your power to put the thought of death away from you. Yet you cannot escape the fact that you must die. You know that you must die and face God. Perhaps you are reluctant to think about death because you also know judgment follows death as surely as night follows day. In all seriousness, therefore, could I possibly press upon you a more significant question than this: What is going to happen to you when you die?

The Bible, conscience, and common sense, all declare to you that there is an eternity you must face. Therefore, don’t avoid this question for your own sake: Am I prepared to die and face God as Judge?

I am sorry to have to tell you that millions today think they are prepared to meet God who shall end in hell following the great day of judgment. This is what God tells us in His Holy Word: “Many will say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy Name? and in Thy Name have cast out devils? and in Thy Name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from Me, ye that work iniquity” (Matt. 7:22-23).  Keep Reading>>>

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Satan the Proud and Powerful (Part 2)

In our day there has been a renewal of interest in the work of Satan. Hollywood has given us The Exorcist and The Omen and a host of other films to whet our appetite for the occult. Within Christian circles there has arisen a new concern for ministries of deliverance. Some of these deliverance ministries have developed a bizarre and radically unbiblical view of demon possession and deliverance.

For example, we hear that we can recognize the departure of a demon from a human soul by a manifest sign that is linked to the particular point of bondage. We have people saying that particular demons cause particular sins. There is, they say, a demon of alcohol, a demon of depression, a demon of tobacco, and so on. I have listened to tapes from well-known deliverance ministers (whose names I will not mention, to protect the guilty) in which they teach the signs of departure of the demon. A sigh, for example, indicates the departure of the demon of tobacco. Since the tobacco demon enters with the inhaling of smoke, he leaves us with an audible exhale. Likewise vomiting may be the sign of the departure of the demon of alcohol. There are demons for every conceivable sin. Not only must each one of these demons he exorcized, but there are necessary procedures to keep them from returning on a daily basis.    Keep Reading...

J.C. Ryle on a Sinner’s Prayer

One of my favorite devotional authors is J.C. Ryle, and I have often gone to his trilogy of books, namely Practical Religion, Old Paths, and The Upper Room for personal encouragement and rebuke.  In his chapter on prayer, Ryle addresses a sinner who has yet to come to Christ in repentance and faith. Consider his counsel:

When does the building of the Spirit really begin to appear in a man’s heart? It begins, so far as we can judge, when he first pours out his heart to God in prayer.

If you desire salvation, and want to know what to do, I advise you to go this very day to the Lord Jesus Christ, in the first private place you can find, and earnestly and heartily entreat him in prayer to save your soul.   Keep Reading...

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The Soul's Thirst

Every soul thirsts. This thirst may not be obvious in every moment, but at some point and to some degree every soul thirsts after something, something it does not have. We are rarely content in our current condition, rarely content just the way we are. But while we all thirst, we do not all thirst in the same way. Donald Whitney’s book Ten Questions To Diagnose Your Spiritual Health has much to say about this. Whitney identifies 3 ways in which our souls thirst.

The Thirst of the Empty Soul

The soul of the unbeliever is empty toward the things of God. Until the Spirit fills the soul with his presence, it is devoid of any love for God. Without God, the unbeliever is constantly looking for something, anything. But he is unable to fill the emptiness. This is something many people do not understand, but something the Bible teaches clearly: While the believer’s soul is empty because he does not know God, he does not and cannot seek to fill it with God. Many people believe that unbelievers are truly seeking after God but unable to find him. The Bible tells us, though, that the empty soul is unable to understand or satisfy this thirst. Not only that, but the empty soul does not want to understand this thirst, and would not, even if it were possible. The empty soul is completely and fully opposed to God; it is deceitful and desperately wicked. As Paul writes in Romans 3:11, quoting David, “no one understands; no one seeks for God” (Psalm 14:2). Keep Reading...

Body and Soul (and Spirit?)

The Dark Night of the Soul

Soul Idolatry Excludes Men out of Heaven