by John Ortberg
There is greater congruence between what I think, feel, choose, and do. I experience, at least for a few moments, what it is to be unconflicted, whole.
My soul gets healed.
Of course, my soul was not made to stand in front of the ocean forever. But I can bring some of that wholeness with me into my divided world. The psalmist says our job is not to heal our souls, but to make space for them so that healing can come. “He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters. He refreshes my soul.”
Where are your green pastures? Where are your still waters? I am not an expert on sheep, but I have a friend who raises them. He says that sheep basically do nothing. They eat . . . they lie down . . . they sleep. They are totally dependent on their shepherd. They do not plan their next meal. They do not make a list of what they have to do tomorrow. Eat. Lie down. Sleep.
Of course, none of us can actually spend all our lives doing nothing. But I think the psalmist uses the metaphor of sheep to make a point. How good are you at doing nothing? How long can you sit in a chair in your backyard and do nothing? Not water the lawn. Not mentally plan the next day. Not worry about your taxes. Just sit and do nothing. By painting this picture of a lamb enjoying whatever his master puts in front of him, we are shown what we need to “refresh our souls.” We’re generally quite good at doing something, but we’re really bad at doing nothing.
The space where we find rest and healing for our souls is solitude.
The world, culture, society — all of this — exerts a relentless, ceaseless, lethal pressure on your soul, and without relief from all of this chaotic interference, the soul dies. J.B. Phillips translates the familiar words of Romans 12:2 to say: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould.” The world imposes hurry on our souls like a child squeezes a handful of Play-Doh. In solitude we withdraw not so much from creation, but from the pressure of the world. We withdraw so our souls can rest in God. In solitude we remember we are not what anybody thinks of us — we are sheep tended to by the Shepherd.
Solitude provides a shelter from noise and distraction, and that can be scary. We have become almost addicted to both. Have you ever headed out for a nice walk or run an errand and discovered that you left your cell phone behind? If you’re like me, you either dashed back to retrieve it or worried the whole time that you were missing an important call.
Your soul needs rest.
Or you get home early and the house is empty, and you realize you’ve got about an hour of solitude that your soul desperately needs, so you lie down on the couch and turn on your flat screen to catch the last innings of a baseball game.
Your soul needs rest.
It is not always the “world” that squeezes us into its mold. We all too often distract ourselves. Being completely alone with nothing but our thoughts can be frightening, so we will use anything to distract us from experiencing the soul-healing that comes in solitude. We fear doing nothing because it would mean facing up to the inner realities that distress our souls: fear, anger, loneliness, failure. Perhaps that’s why, in the familiar psalm quoted earlier, “He makes me lie down.” He doesn’t invite us to lie down. He doesn’t plead with us to lie down. He makes us. When it comes to the rest we need to restore our souls, we’re like our own little children at bedtime. Kids just don’t want to go to bed, no matter how tired they are. So at some point as good parents, we pick them up, carry them into their bedrooms, and make them go to bed.
Is it bedtime for your soul?
DOING NOTHING IS DOING A LOT
The capacity to do nothing is actually evidence of a lot of spiritual growth. The French writer Blaise Pascal wrote centuries ago: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they are unable to stay quietly in their own room.” In solitude we liberate ourselves from the pressure of the world. You don’t do that by going into solitude with a list of things you want to work on. You don’t even approach solitude with the expectation that you will come away with some deep spiritual insight. It’s not about what you’re going to do; it’s about what you’re not going to do. In solitude you rest.
Back in the garden, the perfect home for the soul, God modeled for us the need for rest: “God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” Later in his journey with mankind, he made rest one of the ten uncompromising directives for how we should live: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. . . . On it you shall not do any work.” Spend one day a week, one seventh of your time, doing nothing. I love how the late evangelist Vance Havner wrote about the soul’s need for rest: “If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart in a while.”
Abraham Heschel wrote: “Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self. . . .”
Christians of my generation, and especially those preceding mine, recall Sundays (the Sabbath to most Protestants) as being pretty boring. About all that was allowed was going to church, reading the Bible, and taking naps. No playing sports on Sunday. No TV on Sunday. No commerce on Sunday — if you ran out of gas on the way to church or needed to buy a gallon of milk, tough luck. I am grateful that in our wisdom we have abandoned such legalism, but the notion of rest was — and still is — God’s idea.
RESTING IN ACHIEVEMENT
The final phase of the Cycle of Grace is Achievement. Jesus achieved a great deal. He taught, healed, befriended, recruited, trained, traveled, confronted, defied, and launched the greatest movement in human history. To achieve — to bear fruit — is crucial to the soul. But fruitfulness is just as much a matter of grace as acceptance is. The fruitful soul is also a Sabbath-soul.
There is another way of looking at the Sabbath that may seem to contradict what I just wrote, but it bears examining. I have always wondered, if God is omnipotent, why would he need to rest? The most common answer I’ve heard is the one I just outlined: that he did it as an example for people to follow. But there are many commands he gives to the human race that he doesn’t follow — starting with the first one about being fruitful and multiplying.
There is another answer that also has something to say about soul rest. Old Testament scholar John Walton notes that the entire creation story in Genesis is set against the backdrop of sacred space. Just as a seven-day framework is set up in Genesis, royal temples or sacred palaces were inaugurated during seven-day festivals. In Eden, God himself created a garden. Kings often had gardens outside their residences. God uses the same kind of language that kings used in their kingdoms. A king says, “Let there be taxes,” and there are taxes.
When a temple or a palace was inaugurated, it symbolized the victory of the king. When his enemies were subdued, he could leave the battle, enter the temple, and rest on his throne.
A throne is where a king rested.
It didn’t mean he was taking the day off. It meant that there was no crisis or battle in his kingdom, that he would be able to rule with wisdom and justice and delight. Everyone wanted the king to be able to rest on his throne.
That’s why God rested. It didn’t mean he took the day off. Everything was the way he intended it to be in his sacred space — what we know as the universe. He could reign with ease and delight.
FREEDOM FROM THE CYCLE OF WORKS
The opposite of the Cycle of Grace is what might be called the Cycle of Works. In this, I simply go backward against the tide of grace. I begin by trying to achieve impressive accomplishments through my own strength for my own ego. I hope that by doing this I might feel significant.
I hope that this sense of significance will sustain me through all the difficulties and stresses of life. And ultimately I hope that the end result will be a life that is somehow acceptable to somebody.
> The Cycle of Works will destroy my soul. It is the hard yoke. It is the heavy burden.
But when your soul is at rest, it occupies the throne of your life. Your will is undivided and obeys God with joy. Your mind has thoughts of truth and beauty. You desire what is wholesome and good. Your body is filled with appetites that serve the good and with habits that lead you into excellent living.
Your soul is at rest.
Whether with an entire day, or periods of time set aside every day, your soul needs rest. Not a change of scenery or a spiritual retreat — those are fine and may contribute to rest. But to remain healthy, our souls need solitude with no agenda, no distractions, no noise. If someone asks you what you did in your “time apart,” the correct response should be, “Nothing.”
Doing nothing does wonders for the soul.
CHAPTER 12
THE SOUL NEEDS FREEDOM
The law of the LORD is perfect, refreshing the soul.
PSALM 19:7
Really?
“They delight in doing everything God wants them to, and day and night are always meditating on his laws and thinking about ways to follow him more closely.”
Don’t they have anything else to do?
The old masters of the life of the soul used to warn about the dangers of dis-ordered attachment. Desire is good, but when you want something too much, it threatens to take God’s place in your life. It will lead you to make bad decisions. It will put you on an emotional roller coaster. The ability to have anything you want actually can cost you your freedom.
Samson had an unquenchable desire for Delilah; the rich young ruler was consumed by his desire for money; Saul coveted the power that came with his throne; Cain gave in to his desire for revenge. How did that work for them?
In the movie A Christmas Story, one of the kids is given a double-dog dare to touch his tongue to a frozen flagpole on a December morning. Instantly, his tongue is frozen fast to the icy metal, and from that moment he isn’t going anywhere. He is stuck. A slave to his tongue. Freedom will come, if it comes at all, only with enormous pain.
We get double-dog dared all the time. Make it about sex. Make it about money. Make it about security. That tender object stuck frozen to the flagpole is your soul. It craves to be free, but we’re not sure what that means.
CONFLICTED ABOUT FREEDOM
Imagine you were driving, and a squad car pulled you over for going too fast, and you explained to the officer, “I just don’t feel authentic going only sixty-five miles an hour. When I drive, I try to be guided by my deep inner voice, and my deep inner voice was telling me today, ‘You can go ninety. You should go ninety.’ So, officer, don’t try to impose your rules on me. When I’m driving, I have to be free!” We have a word to describe these people: speeders. Or crazy.
Imagine an IRS agent knocks on your door. He says, “The government has noticed you haven’t paid any taxes for the last ten years.” Indignant, you respond, “I understand that paying taxes may work for other people, but not for me. It would feel kind of hypocritical. If I were going to give some of my money to the government, it would not reflect my deepest passions and values. So don’t impose your rules on my money. I have to be free!” We have two words to describe these people: tax evaders.
Finally, imagine a man dating a woman, and as they enjoy a nice romantic meal, he leans closer and says, “Being faithful to just one woman would be too confining. I have grown to be in touch with my core inner self, and when my core inner self sees a woman around who’s really, really attractive, it wants to stare and chase and see if it can get her to respond.” We have a name for these people. We call them . . . I’m not even going to go there. You can vote on this one yourself.
The soul cries out to be free, but the common perception is that Christianity stands in the way of freedom. It’s all about obeying someone or something that tries to tell you how to live your life. As a Christian, according to this perception, you’re not free at all, but submissive, dependent, and enslaved by your religion. So people wonder — does God infringe on your soul’s need for freedom? Does becoming a Christian mean somebody dictates what you do, what you think, how you live? Even Christians sometimes adopt this view. They may affirm their belief in Jesus as the Son of God and accept his gift of salvation, but retain their “freedom” to decide for themselves how they should live.
The soul needs freedom, but what exactly does that mean? That I can do whatever I want?
People believe Christianity is too restrictive, because too often, that’s the way Christians have lived. We do not delight in the law of the Lord; we delight in keeping it better than other people, or using it to prop up our sense of being “set apart,” more pure than the rest of the world. Part of what inspired Philip Yancey’s wonderful book What’s So Amazing about Grace? is the pain he experienced over his church’s legalism: “I came out of a Southern fundamentalist culture that frowned on co-ed swimming, wearing shorts, jewelry or makeup, dancing, bowling, and reading the Sunday newspaper. Alcohol was a sin of a different order, with the sulfurous stench of hellfire about it. . . . No short skirts for women, no longer hair for men, no polka dots on dresses for women because they might draw attention to suggestive body parts, no kissing, no holding hands, no rock music, no facial hair . . . it all calls to mind the dog who thought his name was ‘No’ because that’s the only word he ever heard from his master.”
Sometimes the church has tried to inflict its rules on broader society. Historian William Manchester records some of the “no’s” of John Calvin’s Geneva: no “feasting, dancing, singing, pictures, statues, relics, church bells, organs, altar candles, ‘indecent or irreligious songs,’ staging or attending theatrical plays, wearing rouge, jewelry, lace or ‘immodest’ dress . . . naming children after anyone but figures in the Old Testament.”
The law revives the soul? Seems more like the law oppresses the soul. True, rules may be required for a society to survive, although we generally want them to be the minimum required to protect innocent people from harm. Why would anybody think a soul might delight in them? Could it be there is a connection between the law and the soul that is not apparent to us?
The soul craves to be free, but soul-freedom turns out to be a little more complicated than we think.
OBEDIENCE PRODUCES FREEDOM
Israel has always revered the giving of the law in a way that is hard for most of the rest of us — even Christians — to understand. Before giving Moses the Ten Commandments to deliver to Israel, God offered this significant reminder: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” He could have said, “Here is a list of rules and you better obey them or else.” Or he could have said, “I am the Lord your God and I expect you to do exactly what I tell you to do.” Instead, he introduced “the Law” by reminding them: “I am your liberator.”
The Ten Commandments were never designed to be a stand-alone list of rules. They come within a relational context. They describe what living up to a certain value and a certain identity and a certain destiny looks like. In fact, in Judaism, they are not called the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew term is aseret hadevarim, which literally means “ten utterances” or “ten statements” because they were rooted in things that are meant to be in God’s kingdom. They flow out of how we were designed, who we were meant to be. We read them as “this is what you have to do,” but God was saying, “this is who you are.” That’s why we don’t so much break the Ten Commandments as we break ourselves when we violate them.
Revelation elsewhere in the Bible comes to individuals. God comes to Noah. God comes to Abraham. These ten statements are the only place in all recorded history where he comes to an entire people. This became so formative to Israel that in later centuries, Jewish people would trace their ancestry back to their ancestors at Sinai, the way that people in America trace their roots to the Mayflower.
As Moses met with God on Mount Sinai, we are told, the people of Israel “stood at the foot
of the mountain.” To this day in Judaism, people will stand for the reading of the Ten Commandments. There’s a wonderful saying in the Talmud: “Every Jewish soul was present at Sinai.”
When these words — these commandments — were given to Israel, had they just traded in one form of slavery for another? They used to be bound to Pharaoh; now they’re bound to Yahweh. Were they still not free? When we bind ourselves to God, to a code of morality that transcends our own particular opinions, do we lose freedom, or do we gain freedom? If my soul needs freedom, what does the law have to do with it? I believe the soul is actually revived by law.
OBEDIENCE TO GOD INCREASES FREEDOM
Think of freedom coming in two flavors, two kinds of freedom. There is freedom from external constraints, somebody telling me what to do. This is freedom from. But there is another kind of freedom that might be called freedom for. There’s the freedom for living the kind of life I was made to live, freedom for becoming that man I most want to be — freedom for.
You do not have to be an expert to recognize that the kind of freedom our culture craves is freedom from external restraints. Tell someone he can’t do something, and he’ll probably find a way to do it. Sometimes just for the fun of it, if Nancy and I are in bed and about to go to sleep and she reaches to turn out the lamp, I’ll say to her, “I command you to turn off that light. You must obey me.” Sometimes she’ll leave that light on all night long just to make the point that I’m not her boss.
You’re not the boss of me! Freedom from external restraints appeals to all of us, but I do not believe that it’s the freedom the soul needs. For example, you generally can drink as much alcohol as you want, restricted only by laws prohibiting drinking and driving and public drunkenness. But if you want to get loaded every night in the privacy of your home, you’re free to have at it. Eventually, however, your drinking will begin to cause problems for you. It damages your health. It embarrasses your kids. It hurts your marriage. It threatens your job. You get to a point where you want to quit but you can’t. You discover that you are not free to enjoy sobriety. You’re free to drink as much as you want, but you’re not free to not drink.
