Category: Soul training

ways of training our souls

Difficulty to opportunity

Offended Soul

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“A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.”

Prov. 19:11

I had an interesting moment when I happened to come across a friend’s note to me where she said.

“…resting in God, you will be able to get hurt and still care more about the other person than your own untitledpain.”  I read that while fuming about an offense I was holding onto. It took me right back to one of the messages of Moses and turned my heart. 

 

From Moses’ life we learn that

 

  • after failure in trying to help others on his own
  • after running for his life
  • after surrendering to God when he felt entirely inadequate for what God was asking
  • after leaving his comfortable, peaceful life on the side of the mountain

 

Moses was accused, offended, fed up, wounded by God’s people and felt his stinging weakness.

That’s when God brought others around him and Moses persevered in the dry, barren wilderness where all depended on God. (Numbers 11) But not without some soul searching.

 

I found an offense lingering in my soul taking up space, keeping me from rest and freedom to relate with joy and care toward others. I don’t want to live like that! I remembered (as Michael Hyatt says):

 

Offenses are inevitable, often unintentional, they can be good for us (to look at ourselves) and holding onto them is a choice.

 

I chose, after some wrestling, to let it go into God’s hands and see what I can learn from it. I’m already seeing how self-focused the reaction was and feeling the freedom of a whole new perspective. Will you stop long enough to consider:

 

Is there anything lingering in your soul taking up space?

Some questions to help with that: What am I anxious about?  What makes me feel discontent?  What could be some reasons for lack of joy and freedom in me?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Soul training

Soul Delight

 

 

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“If your word had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.” Ps. 119:92

“They are not just idle words for you, they are your life…” Deut. 32:47

“The word – living and active” in us… Heb. 4:12

I’ve started a list of descriptions in Scriptures of what a mature believer looks like. I was intrigued with the end of Hebrews 5 about being “skilled in the Word of righteousness and trained in the powers of discernment.” Then I read a good friend’s words:

Guest post; thanks to Timmy Hanauer, landscape designer, integrated farming consultant, fisherman, theologian, and best man in our wedding. : )

Hebrews 5 :11-14 “…you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles…of God, and you need milk and not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”

He notes:

“To soak in the analogy for a moment – infants, because their digestive tract is still developing, require specific food that breaks down easily and does not need to be chewed.  Also because they lack of handling skills, they require someone to deliver that food, making them dependent. The analogy finds traction at several points.  Immature believers are still learning how to absorb, understand, and integrate the Scriptures into their lives.  Their inability to chew – to study, memorize, and meditate on the Word of God in such a way as to be self-directed by God, as opposed to dependent on other people as teachers, speaks to their spiritual “toothlessness”.   The immature believer typically gets his spiritual input from hearing the Word of God taught or preached (pre-digested food, i.e. MILK).  Studying or rightly handling the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15) is an essential skill acquired by the maturing believer.  It involves considering the context of a passage of scripture, not reading into a passage meanings that aren’t there, taking into account the interplay of culture, history, etc.

All of this is part of our romancing the Lord with our minds and hearts – pursuing the food that fuels our pursuit of Him and His kingdom.  Cherishing the Word, meditation and hunger for it, flow from this type of study. As God is revealed in the Word through daily chewing and absorption, our attitudes and outward actions change.  When this is happening primarily apart from just “hearing” the Word of God taught and preached, then one has graduated from “milk” to “meat.”  At this point, someone is also ready to teach or parent those still dependent on milk.”

Interesting analogy! What do you do to chew on the Word?

Here’s to our maturing spiritual digestive systems!  🙂

Soul Help, Soul training

Soul Warrior

I’m resonating with this post, so wanted to share.wowarrior

Beth Moore on spiritual warfare:

“The enemy comes for you. Of course, some of you aren’t calling it spiritual warfare yet because that’s what the older generation called it and you want to be cooler than that. [:)] You had sort-of become convinced that the devil was not that real. Not that specific. Not that personal. Not that aware. And surely God would not allow him to mess with your kids.

And it’s not just the enemy. Your own vulnerabilities erupt into liabilities. Life’s taking a crowbar to every crack in your armor. You are tempted to things you swore you’d never do. That you judged _____________ for doing. Your past comes calling. If you’re married, your marriage, which you’d boasted about publicly, looks like it could go humiliatingly belly-up. Your kids are going nuts. Or maybe it’s you losing your mind. Half the time, you think you are going crazy. You’re getting criticized. You’re getting a lot of opposition. You daydream sometimes that you quit and moved to a remote island with your family, wore loin cloths and drank milk out of coconuts and swam with dolphins. You night-dream that you hung in there in your calling and it slaughtered you.

You have come of age.

What you’re going through is how it goes. I don’t know why on earth we older ones are not telling you more often and with more volume. Maybe it’s because we don’t want to discourage you but it’s so ridiculous because you’re already discouraged. Or maybe it’s that you won’t listen to us anyway. [I don’t agree with her here; I have found open ears among this group.]

But this is my shot at it today. You have come of age. You have come of notice to the devil. At the same time, your very faithful God who loves you has made a covenant through the cross of Christ not only to save you but to conform you to the image of His Son. His obligation out of His wonderful grace is to grow you up. And there is suffering in growing up. Among other things, you are forced to face the deceiver and pretender in your mirror.

I’m here to say to you today that it will not always be this hellacious. Oh, trust me. It will ALWAYS be hard. It will at times be horrific. But this season of eyeball-bulging nobody-ever-said-it would-be-like-this coming of age will not last forever. Mine lasted about seven years. Yours could last one. Or ten. That’s all up to God. Well, and you. Your cooperation is required.

It’s all about whether or not you’ll quit. Or whether or not you’ll get sloppy. Whether or not you’ll hang onto the first things that so drove you in the beginning. Jesus. The Scriptures. Holy passion. Holiness. And not just hang onto them but press further and further and further into them. Or will you slip into the black hole of busy-ness and business, of name-making, marketing, position, notoriety, self-importance, celebrity and Instacrap? Now that you are no longer naïve, what will you do with all of this? Will you fight for a pure heart that the world and your own flesh have so polluted that you think you no longer have what it takes or will you just go with it and figure this is how it happens?

And, in the words of Galatians 3:3, what you’d begun in the Spirit, you’ll just do from now on mostly in the flesh. You’ll  get prayer warriors to pray for you instead of also scrapping it out yourself on the floor, fighting with everything you’ve got in the heavenlies, hacking it through, bloody and bruised, defending the ground God entrusted to you.

You’re at the most critical place in your calling. The place of slaughter. The place where either the devil’s going to all but kill you, your flesh is going to destroy you or God is going to crucify with Christ that ego and fear and, truth-told, laziness and raise you MIGHTY.

Fight it out. Do not quit. If you’ve gotten sloppy, stop it. If you’re messing around in sin, repent. Go back to your face. Get that Bible open and plant your nose in it. Memorize Scripture. Learn how to fast and pray. Quit talking about Jesus more than you actually talk to Him. Quit letting your mouth overshoot your character. Become that person you’ve made fun of for taking it too seriously and being so dramatic about it.

You have what it takes. Do it. And I’m going to tell you something. What it will get you is Jesus. JESUS HIMSELF. Pre-eminent in all things. He is the joy. He is the prize in the fight. He is what makes getting hit by the debris in the hurricane worth it. Jesus Himself. He is everything.

I’m writing you today because I’m so proud of you. You’re out there doing the thing. And I don’t want you to quit. Pay the price.”

What is your next step in training your soul to be a warrior?

 

Soul training

Overtaken Soul

ManPushingRock

In moments when my sin wants to get the upper hand, to assign to me deserved condemnation, I have an Advocate, a Way out of that; something much more powerful than even my sin!

The fact that I am guilty is clear. The greater fact that upon confession I am free from that guilt takes faith in the reality of what Jesus did. I can live under the shadow of guilt or take the gift of forgiveness that leads to freedom and change. Sometimes I can stare at forgiveness or freedom like a beautiful, expensive gift, unopened and unappreciated.

Psalm 40 has intrigued me.  After a verse like

Ps 40:5 – “You have multiplied, O Lord my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you.”

and

Ps. 40:11- “O Lord you will not restrain your mercy from me; your steadfast love and faithfulness will ever preserve me.”   

Then he says,

Ps. 40:12 – “For evils have encompassed me beyond number; my iniquities have overtaken me…my heart fails me.”  40:13 – “Be pleased to deliver me…”  

This shows quite a contrast, from high praise to near despair, crying to him for help.  So we’re in good company when we feel amazed at God as we look back on his goodness, but then get overwhelmed as we see our shortfalls and the obstacles before us as we look forward.

When things in our lives want to overtake us, there are ways out.  “No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man…”  1 Cor 10:13

Here are some valuable words on dealing with sufferings of life when you feel overtaken from Michael Hyatt’s podcast by Michelle Cushatt 11-2015:

Lessons from suffering:

  1. The unexpected is unavoidable. It’s just unavoidable. That sounds like bad news, but when we incorporate that into our daily lives, into our stories, we realize it’s totally unavoidable, so we shouldn’t be surprised by it. Don’t let yourself be completely derailed by the phone call you didn’t expect, the promotion that didn’t work out, the child who’s struggling, or whatever it may be. The unexpected is unavoidable for all of us. We’re in good company.
  2. The second lesson is that the suffering is invaluable. I tell people, that’s not a good party conversation. Nobody wants to talk about suffering, but it is invaluable. In the midst of suffering, you can be mad at it, you can be angry at it, but if there is a way to lean into it, the rewards on the other side are just incredible. So somehow we have to figure out how to not resent it and resist it. It’s going to come. We can’t do a lot about it, so if we can somehow not resent it or resist it and instead lean into it, the suffering becomes a great teacher.
  3. The third takeaway would be that the reward is incomparable. We know we run those 26.2 miles of the marathon because of how it feels when it’s done, to know we accomplished it, and that’s just a race. Imagine how much more rewarding this life is when we choose to run it well to the very end. So the unexpected is unavoidable and the suffering is invaluable, but the reward is incomparable.

“. . . often God leads us through the land we most want to avoid in order to produce the fruit we most desperately desire.” The Land Between: Finding God in Difficult Transitions by Jeff Manion p. 191

What unopened gifts are you staring at?