Menlo Park Presbyterian Church 950 Santa Cruz Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025 650-323-8600 Series: /soul-o-lo-gy/ June 17, 2012 3 John Satisfaction John Ortberg We're in this series called /soul-o-lo-gy/. We're studying the soul. Now what happens in a moment at like that is something touches the soul for a lot of us. The soul is real, and it's the most important thing about you. There are a lot of questions coming up about the soul, and I want to encourage you if you have a question, send it to the church. If you write to communications@mppc.org, we'll try to get to as many questions as we can in this series. There's a tiny little New Testament book called 3 John, and it starts with an intriguing little prayer. He writes, "To my dear friend Gaius, whom I love in the truth. Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well." I wondered when I read that, What does that mean for a soul to get along well? So let's try this. Everybody on this side of the room ask somebody next to you, "How is your health?" John writes about that. Just ask, "How is your health?" Talk about your bodies. Over here, ask, "How is your soul?" Okay? Talk about your soul. So just for a moment if you would do that. Turn to somebody around you. This side, ask, "How is your health?" This side, ask, "How is your soul?" Now it's been kind of an interesting thing. All weekend, the conversations flow more easily and longer on the body side. We find it easier to talk about our bodies. It's often kind of hard to talk about our souls. Eugene Peterson, the guy who did The Message Bible, wrote, "I had a pastor when I was a teenager, an adolescent, who always greeted me with, 'How are things with your soul today, Eugene?' The question left me stuttering and tongue-tied. I hardly knew I had a soul. Mostly I had hormones." He came to dread that question because it just involved a series of clichés. Some people think it means, "How are your devotional life and your quiet time?" In Jesus' day, a lot of Pharisees had real regular devotional lives, but their souls were a mess. Eugene said in his church, it kind of meant, Am I all fired up with intense emotions? A lot of times churches can manipulate people's emotions. Then people go out and lead really sinful lives. Most people in our world never ask the question at all. People ask you, "How are you feeling?" But if somebody asks you about your soul, it may be hard to answer. I may not even know. There actually is a reason for this. We're looking through the nature of the soul. These are the parts of the core of you: your will This is your ability to choose, sometimes referred to as the spirit or the heart. You can say yes or no. Then the next dimension is your mind. Those are our thoughts and our feelings. Then the next dimension is your body with all of its habits and all of its appetites. Then comes the soul. The soul is that which integrates all of these different functions, your ability to choose, your thoughts and your feelings, and your body into you, into one integrated being. - 1 -
So the soul is the deepest part of you. It is so deep that there are parts to my soul I cannot seem to understand and I cannot seem to control. This is why writers in the ancient world, not just in the Bible but there too, would often address the soul in the third person, in a way they would never do with the will or the mind or the body. They'll say things like, "Bless the Lord, O my soul." Or in Psalms 42, "Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?" There is a depth to your soul that is beyond words. Nancy and I got married in California. Nancy was a California girl, but I wanted to bring joy to her soul. So for a surprise, I took her to Wisconsin for our honeymoon. It did not bring joy to her soul, so I saved up for 20 years, and for our anniversary, we went to Australia. We went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. It's amazing. If you've ever done that, one moment you're snorkeling in a few feet of water. You see the reef. Then when you go over the edge, it's like going over a cliff. Literally you're looking down at, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds, thousands of feet into a bottomless abyss. Nancy is normally a very adventuresome person, but going off over the edge and staring down at the abyss actually scared her. She wanted to get back into the boat. I said to her, "I've been saving up for 20 years for this trip. You will not get into the boat. You will swim over the abyss." She did not swim over the abyss. She got back into the boat. So for our thirtieth anniversary, we're going back to Wisconsin. The soul is that way. Often we live such shallow lives. Then something happens, a crisis, a birth, a death, and we get this glimpse of this tremendous depth. In fact, one word in the Bible to describe an eternity without God is called in the Greek abussos. We get our word abyss from that. The soul without God for eternity, the abyss. The soul can do God. The soul can do not God. The soul cannot do shallow. There is a depth to you words cannot describe. In chapter 7, verse 11, in the book of Job, the great book of suffering, Job says, "I will speak out of the bitterness of my soul." He is speaking from the depth of his being. Now by the way, as we think about soul, this notion of depth is part of why the Bible speaks of the soul of God. Many people don't know this. There are over 20 passages in the Bible that talk about not human souls but God's soul. God says to his people, "I will put my dwelling place among you, and my soul will not reject you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people." Everything God is stands behind this promise. "My soul will not reject you." When Jesus was baptized, we're told, "A voice from heaven said, 'This is my Son, whom I love; with him, my soul is well pleased.'" The idea here is God is speaking from the deepest place of his being. The soul has a depth the word self does not convey. So how is it going with your soul? How is your soul doing? Now the biblical writers talk about this a lot. They consistently found when they asked themselves, How is my soul doing, kind of a chronic pattern that their souls were like never satisfied. They were constantly yearning after something. The Hebrew word for soul, nephesh, is used 755 times in the Old Testament. Over and over, it's described as longing or wanting or desiring or striving. That's why actually that word nephesh is often in your Bible translated as mouth or stomach or throat. The Hebrew way of conveying human experience is very concrete, and the Bible talks about the soul being hungry or thirsty or hollow or empty, not satisfied. You find these statements like, "It's better to be satisfied with what the eye sees than to live with a craving nephesh, a craving soul, which we all have. Genesis tells a horribly violent story of a man named Shechem who violated a woman named Dinah. It says, "His nephesh, his soul, craved Dinah." His soul is not doing overly well. - 2 -
You know, in our day, we would talk about obsession because we tend to use therapeutic language, but it's a condition where the will has become enslaved, and the mind has become enslaved by desire. When that happens, the soul gets disordered because all of these are out of whack. The ultimate reality behind human dissatisfaction is sinful souls that have been cut off from the God we were made to rest in. That's why we're dissatisfied. Now getting whatever I want will seem like it will gratify myself, but it will destroy my soul if I'm all about just getting what I want because I want to please myself, but my soul was made for God. So I want to spend the rest of this message looking at How do I pursue a satisfied soul? How do you and I pursue soul satisfaction? There are a series of observations. 1. I must acknowledge and confess (I start here) my/our chronic dissatisfaction. Our souls are always craving, never satisfied. The prophet Habakkuk wrote about sinful man. "See, he is puffed up; his desires are not upright Indeed, wine betrays him he is never at rest." This is life in our world, never at rest. He opens his soul up as wide as the grave " and like death is never satisfied." Now I know that sounds a little extreme, so I want to just make this very concrete for a few moments. We're going to do a mass confession of dissatisfaction. Confession is good for the soul. If you are ever dissatisfied, whiney, cranky, I'm going to ask you to actually raise your hand just as a way of confession. Hang on for a second. Let me run through the categories first so you know what you're getting into like if you're ever dissatisfied with your work. A "theologian" named Drew Carey said, "You hate your job? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody. They meet at the bar." There is actually a national organization for research at the University of Chicago. They just listed the 10 most hated jobs in the world and the 10 happiest jobs in the world. Turn to the person next to you really fast. See if you can guess what was found by the University Chicago to be the number one happiest job in the world? What job produces the happiest people? Turn to the person next to you. Take a guess. See if you can come up with it. I'm not making this up. I'm going to write (this is from the University of Chicago) what was found to be the number one happiest job in the world. That's it right there. Very interesting stuff. What they found was the 10 least happy jobs actually were more financially lucrative and higher status than the 10 happiest jobs. So what's the difference? Well, they found people in the happiest jobs had a higher sense of meaning. Less money, less status, but a higher sense of meaning. The main thing you bring home from your work is not a paycheck. The main thing you bring home from work is the soul. Work is a soul function. We're made to create value. The writer of Ecclesiastes says, "There is nothing better for a person than that he should make his soul enjoy good in his work." "This too, I see, is from the hand of God " Because of sin, now we're all dissatisfied. Again, these are the categories: with your work, if you've ever been dissatisfied because you're not married, if you've ever been dissatisfied because you are married, if you've ever been dissatisfied with your money, your body, your boss, your hairline, your waistline, your bottom line, your neighbors, your dog, your car, your relatives. If you've ever been dissatisfied with any aspect of your life or the life of the person sitting next to you, would you raise your hands really high right now and just look around the room at what a cranky, whiney church we have in this place where we have more resources to pursue satisfaction than ever before in the history of the world. - 3 -
See, a paradox of the soul is the soul is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God. The soul craves to be secure. The soul craves to be loved. The soul craves to be significant, and we find these only in God in the form that can satisfy us. That's why the psalmist says to God, "Because your love " Think about these words. "Because your love is better than life my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods." You find this theme, satisfaction, appetite, all over the Bible. The soul craves because it's meant for God. So the psalmist says, "O my soul, find rest in God." A practical word about soul-care here because we want to learn how to care for our souls. In our day, we talk a lot about self-talk. Books get written about the importance of self-talk. We all talk to ourselves. That's a really important part of the human condition. Everybody here talks to themselves. In the Bible, people talk to their souls. The difference is the soul exists in the presence of God. So you'll see in the Psalms and elsewhere people speaking to their souls because when you speak to the soul, it naturally turns to prayer because I'm aware God is always present. So this week, when you blow something, when you're frightened, when you're dissatisfied, instead of mindless self-talk, speak to your soul. Why are you afraid, O my soul? At one point this last week, I got really angry at somebody. Finally I literally stopped because I was just like immersed in anger for a chunk of time. Then I just stopped and said, Why are you angry, O my soul? It was very interesting. I found that I just began to pray, and it was like God saying to me, "John, you are not your anger." It's like my soul had a place to stand with God, and we could talk about, Okay, now how will we deal with this anger? See, that's the soul resting in God, but it begins when I just acknowledge the truth my soul is hungry and needy and craves all the time. The next observation flows out of the first one. I can do this this week, and you can too. 2. Practice surrendering my need to always get what I think I want. Jesus says, again part of the paradox of the soul, if I aim at a life of pleasing myself, I will actually destroy my soul, whereas if I place honoring God above pleasing myself, then my soul can find true satisfaction. He says these things the human race has not been able to forget for 2,000 years: "For whoever wants to save their soul will lose it, but whoever loses their soul for me and the gospel will save it." In other words, the soul desires a life that is about more than this satisfaction of desire. In other words, I will never achieve satisfaction if I make the goal of my life achieving satisfaction. There's another wonderful psalm with a great picture of this, Psalms 131. The psalmist says, "My heart is not proud, O Lord. My eyes are not haughty I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me." Such a striking picture. How do you wean a child? Well, you do it by strategic disappointment. You deliberately withhold from the child what it wants so the child learns it can be master and not slave of its appetites. The psalmist says, "My soul is becoming like that. It's not constantly troubling me with unsatisfied desires all the time. I am learning that my soul can satisfied with God, even if all the appetites of my body or the desires floating around in my mind are not being gratified every moment because, in fact, gratification of mind and body will actually dismantle the soul." So again, this is something we can all practice this week. Whenever you're disappointed this week, whenever you don't get your way, take that disappointment as a chance to practice soul satisfaction in God. A friend of Nancy and me was telling us this week he had talked with somebody who worked with - 4 -
both Nancy and me in our former church in Chicago. That person had good things to say about both of us. I was kind of eager to hear, What are the good things this person had to say about us, particularly about me? My friend started with Nancy. He said, "Nancy, this guy back in Chicago said about you, 'She lights up a room.'" She does. If you know her, you know this. She brings so much energy. She makes everybody else just kind of come alive. She plays hard, and she laughs hard, and she goes deep, and she works hard. She says hard things nobody else in the room has the guts to say. She makes everybody else around her just want to be a better human being. Then he turned to me and said, "John, he said about you he admired how you work within your limitations." I thought, I don't want that. That's not what I want him to say about me. I want what she is having. That's what I want! Then there is a chance to say, Now does it all have to be about me, or could I rejoice in what gets said about somebody else? Could my soul be satisfied in being loved by God? Can my soul be still like a weaned child? Then in that moment, my will can actually say, Yes, God. I want that. God, would you help me with that? This same week, two friends of mine, both deeply involved in the same vocational field, one got a big promotion, and the other one didn't. The one who didn't just had a huge, sincere party to celebrate the good news for the one who did. I thought, That's so cool. Now, see that's a soul that's resting in God rather than depending on applause and achievement. Here's some soul homework. This is by way of Dallas Willard. "If you want to really experience the flow of love as never before, the next time you are in a competitive situation [around work or relationship or whose kids are the highest achieving or looks or whatever], pray that the others around you will be more outstanding, more praised, and more used of God than yourself. Really pull for them and rejoice in their success. If Christians were universally to do this for each other, the earth would soon be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God." 3. The soul is more satisfied when it is less self-preoccupied. I die to myself. My soul comes alive. One of the great soul passages in the Bible from the prophet Isaiah: "Come, all you who are thirsty " That's the human race. Thirsty souls, come to the waters. " and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost." This is grace. "Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?" That's just our world. "Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live." Now to be thirsty is to be driven by unsatisfied desires. God says the wrong approach to soul thirst is through human achievement and acquisition and looks, and so soul satisfaction is not about me acquiring the right things; it's about me acquiring the right soul. That soul will not be obsessed with myself. There's a really interesting phrase that's used a couple of times in the Psalms. Psalms 22, the psalmist says, "Deliver my precious soul from the power of the dogs." A little later, "Rescue me from my enemies, my precious soul from these lions." Does the phrase "my precious" ring any bells with anybody? Remember Lord of the Rings. You may know a character named Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. The word Gollum actually comes from a Hebrew word that's used in the Bible. It's used one time in Psalms 139 for an unformed body. That little word golem in Hebrew actually became in the Middle Ages a kind of character for a figure in Jewish - 5 -
folklore that would be a kind of soul-less slave that would serve its master sometimes with great resentment. That's part of why Tolkien chose that name. Gollum, for many, many centuries in the story, had what he wanted, the ring, his precious, but it did not satisfy him. All that it did was torture his mind and then his will about what if he lost it. Gollum is a picture of a lost soul incapable of love. God wants people to remember every encounter they have with another human being is an encounter between two souls. Everybody you see. In my selfishness, I forget this. These are amazing words. These are from the book of Exodus. God says to his people, "You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the soul of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Now in the ancient world, that idea, "You shall embrace the other, the stranger, because you know their soul," those are amazing words. Everybody you see has a soul. People in your family have a soul. People you love have a soul. People who irritate you have a soul. Amen? Democrats and Republicans have a soul. Amen? Amen? White people and black people have a soul. One of the most influential books in the twentieth century written about 100 years ago by W. E. B. Du Bois was called The Souls of Black Folks, maybe the most profound writing on racism and humanity in the twentieth century. He did not call it The Selves of Black Folks. See, we demean people when we forget they have the depth and dignity of a soul. Everybody does. A soul is a person existing through eternity before God. Everybody has a soul. Rick Langeloh is from Southern California. He is down there right now. He reminded me this week that even Los Angeles Dodgers have souls (tiny, cramped, ugly, little souls). The soul cries out for connection. To love someone with your soul means your will, your choices, and your mind, your thoughts and your feelings, and your body, your behaviors and your habits are aligned for the good of their entire being before God. That's soul love. We see amazing words in the Bible. We're told the soul of Jonathan (that's his whole being) became attached to the soul of David. Jonathan loved David as he loved his own soul. Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as his own soul. Now there is depth to relationship there that is a million miles away from our world. Another practical note. Do you have anybody you love like that? Do you have a soul friend? If you don't, a place to begin is just to pray, "God, would you give me a soul friend I can love like Jonathan loved David? I'd like that, God. Would you teach me this week? Help me practice to see the souls, not just the bodies, of the people who are all around me and to pray for them and to will for their good before you." Last observation, and this one is really, really important when it comes to satisfaction because we're all on this quest to be satisfied. 4. The ultimate issue in the universe is not my satisfaction; it's God's satisfaction. This is quite sobering. One of Jesus' stories was about a man who believed he had found this secret to satisfaction. He acquired a lot of stuff. He had a windfall. He said to his soul, "'You have stored up many things for yourself. Take life easy; Eat, drink, and be merry.' But God said to him, 'You fool! This night your soul shall be required of you.'" - 6 -
There's a lot of stuff going on in that story. Part of it is when Jesus says, " shall be required of you," he is usually actually technical language from the financial arena. That was a word they would use when a loan came due. It's required. Jesus is saying, "Your soul is not your soul; it is God's soul. It has been given to you on loan. When you die, it will come due." Our souls belong to God. They were made for God. That's why we're so thirsty. Sin makes us thirsty, but we can't solve that thirst. "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?" One day we found out at a place called the cross through a man named Jesus. That's very interesting. What happened to Jesus at the cross is sometimes talked about under what's called the doctrine of satisfaction. Satisfaction. The idea is our sinful souls cannot satisfy God's demand for holiness and justice. They just can't. So God sent his Son. We're told about him, "After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities." After the suffering of his soul. At Gethsemane, Jesus actually says this. This is in the gospel of Mark. It's also in Matthew. Jesus says, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." On the cross, Jesus, who is God with us, suffered not just in his body but in his soul to the depths of his being. Jesus was satisfying the demands of justice and holiness and righteousness, dying the death we all should have died, paying the debt we could never pay. One day, Jesus will come back. There's a line I love from an old hymn (some of you might know it) "This is My Father's World." There's a line in that says, "Jesus who died shall be satisfied, and heaven and earth will be one." One day Jesus is coming, and when he comes, he will set everything right. This is the good news part of the sermon. When Jesus comes, he is going to set everything right. We have that to look forward to. One day, God will look back on his creation and be satisfied. You know, when God first made everything, he looked at everything he made. He looked at the sun and the moon. He looked at the dry land and the seas. He said, "It's good. It's good!" He is satisfied. Then sin comes and junks it all up. One day God will be satisfied again. The question is On that day, will you have entrusted God with your soul? This is Father's Day, and I was remembering this week a time a long time ago. I was on a missions trip to Ethiopia. I was gone for about two weeks. It was just before our middle child was about to turn 1 year old. At that age, two weeks is like forever. I was kind of thinking by the time I got back and I had been gone two weeks, She may not recognize me at first. I would talk about that with Nancy. Nancy would say, "Don't worry about it. Probably she won't, but don't worry about it." I couldn't stop thinking about it. I got off the plane and started walking down that ramp. Do you know how at the gate back in the old days everybody could just come and visit you at the gate? They didn't have to go through security, and they could bring BB guns or whatever it is they wanted to bring right up to the gate. I'll never forget this. I came walking off that gate, and Nancy was there and Laura who was almost 3 then and Mallory who was just about to turn 1. She looked up at me, and her eyes lit up. There was this big smile. She threw her tiny little hands up over her head and just toddled up that ramp to me. That has been 25 years ago, and I can remember it like it was yesterday. I threw my arms around her. All I could think of was, She knows me. She knows me. She knows me. One day your soul will come due. One day the Father will return. Every child who has entrusted their soul to Jesus will know him, and he will know them and throw his arms around you and say, "My child, my - 7 -
child, my child." In his satisfaction, we will be satisfied. Are you ready for that day? Would you bow your head and close your eyes for a moment? Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you that you made us and that you made our souls. You know the truth about them. We don't even understand why we want. We just know every day there is so much, and it gets uncovered in the oddest moments. Right now in the quietness of this moment, we place our souls before you. We offer to you our wills, our minds, our bodies. We ask you would forgive all of our sin, what we say and what we do. We acknowledge we haven't done anything to deserve it, but through Jesus, through what he did on that cross, we come before you right now as your children. God, may our souls right now find rest in you. - 8 -