Self-improvement is no more God’s plan than self-salvation. God’s plan is not just for us to be saved by grace – it is for us to live by grace.
To follow Jesus means learning to arrange my life around those practices that will enable me to stay connected to him and live more and more like him. In short, this is just another way of defining a spiritual discipline. A spiritual discipline is any activity that can help me gain power to live life as Jesus taught and modeled it.
Self is a stand-alone, do-it-yourself unit, while the soul reminds us we were not made for ourselves. The soul always exists before God. So soul is needed for deep art, poetry, and music.
I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one,” writes Douglas Coupland. “I know because it hurts.
The truth is, the soul’s infinite capacity to desire is the mirror image of God’s infinite capacity to give.
A soul can be saved. But it will take softness and depth and space. The world won’t help much.
Once you’re a little bit to the side, God can come to the center.
Brother Lawrence called this “practicing the presence” of God, and the most important part of that practice lay in “renouncing, once and for all, whatever does not lead to God.
A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction.
No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and no faith is as solid as a wounded faith.” Elie Wiesel.
People would rather debate doctrine or beliefs or tradition or interpretation than actually do what Jesus said. It’s not rocket science. Just go do it. Practice loving a difficult person or try forgiving someone. Give away some money. Tell someone thank you. Encourage a friend. Bless an enemy. Say, “I’m sorry.” Worship God. You already know more than you need to know.
I was practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.
Our soul’s problem, however, is not its neediness; it’s our fallenness. Our need was meant to point us to God. Instead, we fasten our minds and bodies and wills on other sources of ultimate devotion, which the Bible calls idolatry.
Francis Fenelon reminds us, “God is merciful, showing us our true hideousness only in proportion to the courage he gives us to bear the sight.
Underneath the surface of the skeptic is fear – fear of being disappointed.
God designed us so that our choices, our thoughts and desires, and our behavior would be in perfect harmony with each other and would be powered by an unbroken connection with God, in perfect harmony with him and with all of his creation. That is a well-ordered soul.
If you have a positive attitude, you are likely to live a decade longer than people with a negative attitude.
Our world has replaced the word soul with the word self, and they are not the same thing. The more we focus on our selves, the more we neglect our souls.
Work is a form of love. We cannot be fully human without creating value.
The child in Bethlehem would grow up to be a friend of sinners, not a friend of Rome. He would spend his life with the ordinary and the unimpressive. He would pay deep attention to lepers and cripples, to the blind and the beggar, to prostitutes and fishermen, to women and children. He would announce the availability of a kingdom different from Herod’s, a kingdom where blessing – of full value and worth with God – was now conferred on the poor in spirit and the meek and the persecuted.
We are not the passive victim of others’ opinions. Their opinions are powerless until we validate them.