Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 193
TRANSCRIPT
I wonder how many of us have been taught the importance of self-care. I know that I have been taught often that we are to be selfless, but I am not sure that I have applied being selfless in the right way. I don’t believe it means to ignore taking care of yourself. In this Podcast, we are going to talk more about taking care of ourselves so that we can be selfless and give unto others.
I’m Lee Whitman with Restoring the Foundations and I welcome you into this Hope Healing and Freedom podcast. I want to begin this week’s podcast by giving a shout out to my friend Jason. Last week I mentioned that I could not find verse in the bible to back up my love of riding my motorcycle with Jesus. He pointed out 2 Corinthians 2:14 that says,
“But thanks be to God, who always leads us (on His) triumph in Christ.”
Thank you, Jason!
This week I want to continue looking at the importance of taking care of your spirit, soul, and body. Many in the body of Christ are either struggling in their walk with Jesus or are completely falling away from their faith in Christ because they are not doing what Cindi and I call self-care. Self-care is not being selfish, but rather it is keeping yourself healthy in spirit, soul, and body. Once again, I played a lot of sports as a younger man. If a player is injured, they are not able to help the team succeed until they recover from their injury. They have to sit out of the games and take care of themselves as they recover in order to be able to get back in the game and help their team. It is much the same way with people in the body of Christ. We are a body that needs all of the parts to work effectively. Several years ago, I sprained my big toe. The big toe is not a huge part of the body, right? Yet that sprained big toe kept me from living a normal life for several months. Many Christians have been injured, so to speak, by things that have happened to them, and they need to take care of themselves so they can return to being a productive part of the body of Christ.
Our verse for today is 1 Thessalonians 5:23. It says,
“May your spirit, soul, and body be kept complete.”
In last week’s podcast, we talked about the necessity of feeding your spirit, because your spirit is the essence of who you are. It is the core of your identity as a child of God. We are spirit beings who have a soul and live in a body.
In this week’s podcast, I want to talk about the soul and body and the need to take care of each of these vital parts of us. The bible talks a lot about the soul. There are somewhere around 95 verses in the bible about the soul. Some of the most famous are verses like in Psalms 23 where it says,
“He restores my soul.”
The place to begin this discussion about the soul is in the beginning. Genesis 2:7 says,
“Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
In the original language of the bible, the word soul is a multi-dimensional word. The Hebrew language does not just have one meaning for a word like most of our English words. Rather, the words paint a picture. The word used for soul is one that paints a multi-dimensional picture to explain what it means. In English translation of this word means soul, self, life, creature, person, appetite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion. Let me read those again. It means soul, self, life, creature, person, appetite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion. All of those words are part of the picture the bible is trying to use to describe the word soul.
For our purposes in this podcast, I want to simplify the definition of the soul. The soul is the essence of your personality. It is your desires, your emotions, your thoughts, your appetites, your passions, and what we often refer to as your self-life. The soul is made up of the mind, the will, and the emotions. The mind is obviously the housing of our thoughts and intellect. It is the places where we have the ability to reason and think. The mind is the information processing system, much like software in a computer. It includes all of our cognitive or thinking abilities like perception, memory, and imagination. It is where we gather and process new information as well as compare that new information to information already obtained. It is an amazing gift given us by our Father God. The bible talks about the mind over 600 times, that is how important our minds are in our relationship with God. The mind is also one of the major places of struggle for believers. Romans 12:2 says,
“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Why do our minds need to be transformed? Because, according to this verse, our minds have been conformed to the world we have been born into.
The second part of the soul is the will. The will gives us the ability to choose. It gives us the power to override our impulses or even the external circumstances. It enables people to make conscious choices rather than simply responding to external stimuli. The will is ultimately what gives us the ability to do the things we need to do and not do the things we do not want to do. When we choose with our will to do something, we can do it no matter what we think or how we feel. It is what allows us to set human behavior apart from instinct driven behaviors. I believe when someone says I can’t do something; it is because they have not chosen to make the choice. It is not that they can’t do certain things, it is more that their will is weak and they can’t make themselves do it. How is it that people can perform heroic acts like running into a burning building, or face a person with a gun head-on? It is because they have trained their will to act in those manners. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot by a would-be assassin. During that attack, the assassin shot President Reagan once and pointed his gun at President Reagan to shoot him a second time. The Secret Service agent standing next to President Reagan turned his body point-blank to the assassin’s gun and took the second shot intended for the president. That is not a normal instinct for someone to do. Our human instinct is for self-preservation, but this man had trained his will so that instead of running from danger, he turned and put himself into harm’s way saving the presidents life. I have seen the video of that day several times, and I am constantly amazed at the strength of will of that Secret Service agent.
The third part of the soul is our emotions. Emotions are a wonderful gift from God. Without them, life would be like watching a movie in black and white. Emotions are what bring color to our world. They were given to enhance our lives. The problem with emotions is sometimes we allow emotions to run our lives. Emotions provide color but they also don’t always tell us the truth. It is very common to get our emotions damaged. That happens when something or someone does something hurtful to us. That wound remains in our emotions. When I was in elementary school, I was horrible at spelling. In fact, I am still not very good at spelling. I am thankful that they have spell check on my computer to help me. We would often have spelling bees in which everyone would stand up, and the teacher would go around the class and have them spell the words for that week. I would almost always be one of the first to misspell a word and would have to sit down. I felt stupid because I did not spell well. That feeling caused me to think less of myself because I felt stupid. I knew on a cognitive level that I was not stupid because I did OK in school, but the feeling remained. During an RTF healing session, Jesus took me back to one time in when I was in third grade, and I misspelled a word, and the teacher made some derogatory comment. My emotions were wounded in that memory, so Jesus had to take me back to that memory to heal that wound. It is amazing what a difference Jesus can make by healing a memory.
RTF is a wonderful gift for getting our souls healed. RTF can bring healing to your soul in several ways. The first way is by breaking lies that you believe. In last week’s podcast, I talked about Gary who was a gifted evangelist and pastor who grew a college bible study into a thriving church. Gary, however, did not understand about self-care. When the thriving ministry crept in on his marriage by taking time away from his wife and children, the enemy planted a lie in Gary’s mind that his wife didn’t love and respect him as much as another woman in his ministry. As that lie gained more and more control of Gary, it influenced his will, and Gary gave into the temptation to have an affair, an affair that ruined his marriage and his ministry. If Gary had dealt with that lie when it was still only a temptation, I believe the affair never would have happened. Pastors often are the worst at doing self-care. They get so busy taking care of other people in their church that they neglect themselves. Temptations are not the problem. It is quite normal to have temptations come into our lives. The problem is when we don’t take those temptations and deal with them. I believe if Gary had gotten RTF ministry and addressed the lie that another woman would be better for him than his wife, he would still be in ministry today.
Another way RTF ministry can help the soul is by bringing healing to wounded emotions like I described above. Emotions are very real, but they don’t always tell you the truth. If we choose by our will to live out of those wounded emotions, we are going to make bad decisions. When we are able to get our hearts healed using RTF ministry, then we can make much better decisions. Many years ago, I “felt” like God was disappointed in me. I think the reason I felt that God was disappointed in me is because I was disappointed in me. I had been fighting an addiction to pornography for many years. At this time in my life, I was not acting out on that addiction, but the struggle and temptation were ever-present. I was disappointed in myself that I was still having these temptations. Another minister friend of mine walked me into that place of disappointment and asked me to invite Jesus into that memory. It was amazing. Father God came into that memory riding up to me in a golf cart. I know, a golf cart is not in the bible, or is it Jason? Anyways, God coming to me in a golf cart brought so much acceptance I have never been the same since then.
The purpose of this podcast is to point out the need to take care of your spirit, soul, and body. If we neglect any one of the three parts of man, we are potentially opening the door for the enemy to take advantage of us.
PRAYER
Holy Spirit, would You show us any ways we are not taking care of our spirit, soul, or body?
Thank you for joining us on this Hope, Healing, and Freedom podcast. I was at a celebration for a friend of ours and two people came up to me to tell me how much these podcasts are an encouragement to them. If you enjoy these podcasts, would you recommend them to your friends? You might even put them on your personal Facebook page for your friends to listen to.
