Take Hold of Your Soul

Emotions. Ever-present, always needed, often hard to deal with. They are given to us by a loving God to experience and reflect him in an amazing way. They are given to allow us to have relationships. In some sense they mean we are alive. What is a human being without feelings, emotions, affections, desires? What is a romance without hearts that understand love and derive joy from it? Emotions are essential to who we are as human beings. But, sadly, we are sinful beings that think and feel in a corrupted way. This is why selfless love is COMPLETELY unnatural to each and everyone of us. We get upset because someone doesn't treat us like we think we "deserve" to be treated. We get sad because someone doesn't approve of us or think highly of us.

Our thoughts and emotions speak to us all the time preaching to us a gospel of self love. As Christians emotions play a crucial role. God doesn't command that we do a big list of commandments from mindless obedience. He commands that we obey him joyfully. He makes a demand on our emotions, often a demand we feel incapable to perform. I often find no reason to worship God in my soul. Looking for an intuition or good feeling about him it seems there is none present. Despite our sense of inability to obey God joyfully, the scriptures say that God has given us "everything we need for life and godliness." So what about our obstinate souls that stand with their arms folded in defiance of the living God? What can we do about our emotions when they are resistant to the reading of scripture, to the singing of songs, and to fellowship with believers?

An obvious answer is prayer. Cry out to God. Repent of any sin that is weighing down your conscience and making your soul cloudy.

In addition to this we must learn to apprehend our souls. We must speak to ourselves. This is not the same as the self-talk that I learned about in educational psychology classes. We do not say to ourselves, "okay, I can do this, I just need to slow down and think this through step by step". Instead of telling myself "I can" I speak the gospel to myself. God can, Jesus can, the Spirit can! I must do as 2 Corinthians 10 says and wage war on any rebel thought that seeks to rise above the dominion of Jesus.Abraham, the father of the faith, circumsized himself. Jesus has circumsized our hearts if we have the Spirit of God in us. But like Abraham we must grow to the place that we can cut on ourselves in a spiritual sense. Instead of listening to our thoughts and emotions and letting them run rampant in us, we should confront them with the truth of the scripture that is "sharper than any two edged sword" and that "divides soul and spirit" and discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart (Hebrews 4:12).

Instead of letting our soul endlessly speak to us, we must grab hold of our souls and speak to them. We must rebuke and correct ourselves, violently refusing to allow self-addicted emotions and thoughts to run our lives.

We must say with the Psalmist....
Psalm 43:5
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God.

This is a daily process. Its preaching the gospel to yourself. We need to do it everyday so that we can grow in grace and effectively serve others. If we are constantly beat up by our thoughts and emotions because we fail to speak to them and fail to force our souls to dwell on Jesus we will not be in a position to help our brothers and sisters because we will be ever-dwelling on our own calamity. There is great joy to be had in Gods salvation, but we have obstinate souls, and as a result, joyful obedience to our God is a violent struggle. Therefore, dont let your soul preach to you everyday. You preach to it. You grow in self-control. You take authority over rebel thoughts that raise themselves up against Christ.