Restoring Your Soul | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

Um, I heard a story recently about a missionary who was serving in a foreign country, and it was about a hundred years ago, so uh when you needed to transport something from point A to point B, it was a little different than it is today.

And so at the time he had to hire some people in the local village to be porters to help transport the missions ministry materials across country.

And so they set out on the journey, and the missionary was he had a sense of urgency.

He wanted to get there and he had a time, he wanted to get there in, and he felt like the porters were going kind of slow, you know, slower than what he wanted, and he kind of put up with it for a couple days, and then the third day he decided to dip into his leadership skills.

And he's like, you know, I'm gonna push these guys a little bit, push the pace.

And so he was able to do it on the third day.

He actually pushed them so much they they went twice as far on the third day than they had gone on the second day, and he's declaring victory.

He's thinking, I had a pretty good job, you know, and wakes up the fourth day, and uh they all were unwilling to budge.

They said, We're not going anywhere today.

And he was uh quite confused and tried to go back to his leadership vision casting talent, and he said, Come on, guys, you know, let's go.

We had a great day yesterday.

Let's run that back today, let's do it again today.

And they said, We're not going anywhere.

And so he goes to the spokesman and says, Everybody looks well.

Uh what's going on?

And he said, Well, we moved so quickly yesterday, today we're gonna stay right here and wait for our souls to catch up.

You know, the missionary uh showed up excited about what he was gonna teach, but it turns out that he had some things he needed to learn.

Have you ever been in a place where you feel like you're pushing so hard and you're going so fast that your soul is somewhere trying to catch up?

It might be just that's how you're wired.

Maybe you're one of those people, you've got a lot of vision, you got a lot of dreams, ideas, and maybe your attitude is such that you don't expect anybody to give you anything.

I'm not entitled to anything.

If it's gonna be, it's up to me.

I gotta make it happen.

And so you're a proactive, make it happen, get it done type of person.

Or maybe you're one of these people that say, you know, honestly, I'm not even pushing it that hard.

It's like life is pushing me.

So much is happening, things are changing, things are happening so fast.

And the bottom line is I find myself in a place and it feels some way like my soul might have been left somewhere back there.

I don't know when the man said our souls need time to catch up, if he was being literal or metaphoric.

I don't know if he literally thought the bodies and soul are so different than the souls back there, or if he just was giving a profound metaphor of what it's like to be pushing, pushing, productive, compulsive, and you're going and somewhere you lose yourself in the process.

So today I want to talk about how do we get our soul to catch up.

Um if you have your Bibles return to Genesis chapter 2, I kind of want to start with this idea.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

When I say the word soul, what comes to your mind?

Right?

What is what is your soul?

Right?

Some of you, when you think about your soul, you maybe think about a ghost or you think about an ethereal, disembodied being that is like you've got your body and then you've got your soul that's floating around here.

But what I want to do is I want to look at some scriptures in the Bible, particularly starting from the beginning, that helps us understand at least uh what the Bible is teaching as it relates to what is our soul.

So if you go to Genesis 2, okay, which is near the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis 2, we in Genesis 1 and 2, you have the creation account.

Right?

So in six days, God creates the world and separates uh things and puts them in their proper place.

And then in chapter 2, verse 7, it says, and God formed the man from the dust of the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and it says, and the man became a living soul.

Okay, so in the creation account, you have uh anthropomorphic language.

It's essentially giving human attributes to God, and it paints the picture, actually uses potter language.

So it presents God as being like a potter leaning over a pottery wheel, but it's it's God, Yahweh, leaning over the earth.

And he puts his hands in the dirt and the clay and he starts to form and he makes something tangible, but it doesn't become a person or a human or a soul until he breathes the breath of life into that soul.

And so now when he breathes the breath of life, now it's it's it's a person and it becomes a living soul.

Okay?

Now, the the uh concept of the soul or the word for soul is the word nephish.

Nefish.

And and the let me give you the definition for the word uh nephish today that we're gonna uh work off of is your whole living self.

Okay, your body, your breath, your thoughts, your emotions, your desires, your relationships, and your life before God.

Right?

Not like prior to God, but in front of God.

So when you have the breath of God entering into the dust of the earth, you have this collision and now connection between the divine breath and fragile humanity.

And wise people live with a constant awareness, a proper value for the breath of God that's in you, and a proper respect and wise thinking around the fragility of humanity.

I'm these two things going on.

I've got this body that is decaying, it's it's it's not gonna last forever, it's weak, it's it's temporal.

At the same time, I have the breath of God within me.

Now, if we go back to Genesis 2, and again, God creates everything, it gives the account in Genesis of God resting.

So it says in Genesis 2, 2, and 3, by the seventh day, God had finished the work he had been doing.

Okay, which, by the way, I could spend the whole rest of the time on this.

Think about this.

God finishes the work that he had been doing, he completed his creation, and he rests and stops.

But it's not that he didn't have more work to be done, right?

We're just in Genesis 2.

We have 66 books of the Bible of God doing work.

There's work, so to speak, that God's going to do.

But he understood that in the long journey of life where the work is never done, at some point you have to go, this is enough for now, and to be able to stop and rest.

And it uses the term that he rested from his work.

On the seventh day, he rested.

And again, there is the Hebrew word Shabbat, which is where we get the word Sabbath.

Okay?

So Sabbath, most of us we hear Sabbath, we think it means Sunday or something.

Sabbath doesn't mean Sunday, it means to stop or to cease.

So he stops his work, he rests.

And they said God blessed the seventh day and made it holy or set it apart because on it he rested from all of his work, he stopped from all the work that he had done in creation.

Okay?

So now let's think about this.

We know this theologically.

God is not, God doesn't get tired, he doesn't slumber or sleep, okay?

God, God doesn't become fatigued.

What God is doing here, and again, what Moses is delivering to us, is understanding that God is setting up a rhythm that we need.

How do we handle the divine breath that's in our lungs and at the same time have respect for the fragility of our humanity?

The fact that we are limited in our bodies.

What's interesting is the word nephish shows up over 700 times in the Old Testament.

So it's, in fact, if you think of the word shalom, which we've talked about, right, the range of meaning of shalom, that's about 250 times it's used.

Nefish is over 700 times.

Okay, that doesn't mean it's three times more important, so to speak, but it's just it's noteworthy.

It's important to understand that this concept is in the Bible quite a bit.

And the language that's used originates back from Genesis 2.

You remember we talked about the anatomy of anger and in the Hebrew mind how they were, remember we talked about anger.

Remember what part of the body that anger was in?

Anybody remember?

The nose, right?

So it says when God was angry, it said his nose got hot.

That God's it was hot of nose or uh red of face, and you know, it's like blood going to the nose and the heavy breathing.

So it's giving that visual imagery.

Okay, in the Hebrew anatomy, the soul is in the throat.

Because it's in the throat that I gain breath.

It's through the throat that I sustain myself with food.

It's through throat that I my throat that I consume water so and I don't dehydrate.

So my life happens through the throat.

If you want to end the life, you end it, you can end it right at the throat.

If you've ever been being choked and you couldn't give breath, you felt yourself leaving.

And when you got your breath, you start to breathe again, you felt life coming back.

If you ever run so hard, you're about to hyperventilate, okay?

Maybe some of you, panic attack, I can't get my breath.

And as your breathing slows down, you feel the life coming back to you.

And so the the imagery of the soul is in the throat and in the breath.

Now, if you take the Genesis account, okay, this is written by Moses, okay, it's historically traditionally attributed to Moses.

And if you follow the story, you know that in the Exodus story, God leads uh the children of Israel through the Red Sea.

They go into the wilderness, Mount Sinai, and he gives them law, right?

The law is delivered through Moses.

Now think about this.

What do we know about Moses?

Moses grew up in Pharaoh's home.

Moses grew up in the palace.

Moses understood empire really well.

He saw it from Pharaoh on down, and he understood that empires are driven by a compulsion for productivity.

Okay?

So he watched Pharaoh looking at the numbers every day.

Every day.

How are we doing?

How are we doing?

And then he's driving the people who are driving the people who are making the bricks and building the buildings and expanding and doing the work.

And if we stop, then we fell behind a day.

If you stop working and you start resting, you might be able to quantify what it will cost you to not work.

You might be able to figure up your hours that you didn't work and didn't get paid.

But you'll never be able to quantify what it will cost you if you don't rest.

If you don't stop.

And so Moses had a unique vantage point of an empire that's just driving, driving, driving.

And in the process, everybody lose their soul.

Everybody loses themselves from Pharaoh on down.

And so when he's delivering the law, he's giving a rejection of empire law.

He's giving them a way of living that is actually in communion, in connection.

It's honoring the way God's actually made us.

Yes, I have divine breath, so give proper honor and value to that.

But at the same time, you need to have respect for the fragility of your humanity.

And if you try to cheat that, if you deny that, if you break this law, there will be a consequence.

You're going to pay in one way or another, it will cost you.

And so when you remember now, he gives them the law, they break it immediately.

So this is the story.

Moses comes down, he's got the Ten Commandments, he shatters them because he's like, you broke God's covenant, and God in his mercy and his grace and his faithfulness, he gives the gives them the uh covenant a second time.

So now it's a new Ten Commandments.

So now the second time that it's being given, they go back to the origin story of God in creation.

And Exodus 31, 17.

It says it, but it adds a little something.

Look at this.

It says, in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and the seventh day he shabbatted, he stopped, he rested, he ceased, and then it says, and was refreshed.

It says, he was refreshed.

Now it's about to get good.

This is about to get interesting.

Because it doesn't say he was refreshed in Genesis 2, but it says it in Exodus 31, 17.

It says he was refreshed.

And if you look at the Hebrew word that we read in English as refreshed, it's the word nephish.

It's the word soul, but it's used as a verb instead of a noun.

Okay, so think of it like this: 700 times, over 700 times, nephish is used as soul noun.

So what is a noun?

A person, place, or thing.

So it's a thing.

Your soul is a person, you are, you know, you are a soul.

So it describes it as a noun.

Here is one of the only three times in the entire Old Testament that it's used as a verb.

So here's how we might do this.

You might say, hey man, recently, life has been lifing.

Okay?

What is that?

You're taking a noun and you're using it as a verb.

You're saying life, a thing, has been lifing an action.

Right?

So if you're like, man, listen, recently I've been adulting.

Okay?

Adulting.

What is adult?

Noun, but you're using it as a verb.

So when it says that God was refreshed on the Sabbath, it says that his soul was souling.

And based on our definition of Nephish, we know that the soul is the full self.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me.

So it was his full self.

So what it says of God is that his soul was souling, and his self was selfing, that he found himself.

The figurative language is that he caught his breath.

He got his breath back.

Now, let's not get weird theologically.

God didn't lose himself.

God is God, He's Yahweh, He's perfectly clear on who He is.

This isn't about what God needs, it's about what we need.

And so God is setting you and I up with a rhythm that properly values the divine breath that you've been given.

What an opportunity at the same time to have respect for the fragility of your humanity.

How do I do this?

Every so often here, every six days, you need to stop and find yourself.

The more life is lifing, the more your soul better be souling.

To find yourself, to reclaim yourself.

And we know this.

We've all been going so fast, we've all been pushing so hard.

We've all been in a place where you look up and you have lost yourself.

I talk to people all the time.

Oh, over the years, so many who have come to me in really low places talking about decisions they've made or places that they've gotten to.

And it usually, sometimes it takes this thing being a dumpster fire before there's a realization of like, oh my goodness.

It's like Tracy Patton said, the people don't tend to change until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.

So often it's this implosion, explosion, whatever.

Things are in disarray, and they finally start to figure, well, you know, step back and take it seriously.

And you you know how many times I've heard somebody go, that wasn't me.

That wasn't me.

And it wasn't them.

I mean, it was them, they did it, but that wasn't them.

That wasn't them, that wasn't their true self.

They lost themselves and the person that they had become in losing themselves.

They got out ahead of their soul.

And in losing themselves, then they made decisions that their self wouldn't have ever done.

And so we have this uh again, this becomes now a law that is not to be violated.

If you follow the story of the Bible, okay, they're given this law.

Of course, you know they eventually received the promised land, and then they lose the promised land.

So you have foreign empires that come in, take their land, displace them, and so uh when they come back eventually to Jerusalem, it's called the Second Temple Period.

All right, so if you're ever reading something about the Second Temple Period, this is simply the time in which the people of Israel came back after exile because their temple was destroyed by the empires, and so they went to rebuild the temple.

So the Second Temple period is really from the coming back to Jerusalem to the time of Jesus.

And in that period of time, what happened with the Sabbath or the resting, the Shabbat stopping, is it became this legalistic part of their culture.

It became a law that they started ratcheting up the consequences of violating.

But what happened slowly was that what was intended for reselfing, what was intended for your soul souling, started to turn into a legalistic burden.

So by the time Jesus shows up, uh you see that one of the biggest collisions that he has with the religious community is his behavior on the Sabbath.

Seven different times in the Gospels, Jesus heals or restores or delivers someone on the Sabbath, and the church people get mad about it.

Because they said, Why would you do that?

You couldn't, you worked on the Sabbath, and the law says, don't work on the Sabbath.

And so they were clinging legalistically to the letter of the law while losing the spirit of the law.

At one point, Jesus heals a man's withered hand.

Okay?

So this man has a withered hand, Jesus says, Hold it out.

He heals it on the Sabbath.

And they said, You shouldn't have done that because you worked on the Sabbath.

Now think about it.

What is the point of the Sabbath?

Is to re-self.

When something's off in your body, it affects your emotions every time.

When something's off in your body, it affects your spiritual life, your mental self.

Anybody that's ever suffered physically or something wasn't right, you had a surgery or you were fighting an illness or a disease, it messes with everything.

There's no part of your soul that's not touched because you're interconnected.

So when they just looked at it as a physical thing, Jesus saw a total restoration that needed to happen, and so Jesus is reselfing this guy.

It's the most Sabbath thing you could ever do.

But they had got so caught up in the legalistic side of it.

Um, he uh later, he's walking in uh Mark 2.

He's walking with his disciples, and they're hungry on the Sabbath.

You're not supposed to harvest on the Sabbath, you're supposed to put your work down for obvious reasons, and yet they were hungry, and so they they they lightweight harvest some grain.

They take it, they crush it down, they eat it, and they said, See, these guys are working on the Sabbath.

And Jesus says in uh Mark 2.27, he says, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

He's saying, let's go all the way back, man, to Exodus 31, when it says that God reselfed, that God's soul was souling, it was God trying to give us a gift that your soul needs to soul.

It wasn't that we would check every box perfectly and keep God off our back.

He's not doing it to give you another heavy weight to bear.

He's actually doing it to consistently reintroduce you to yourself so that the culture around you doesn't draw you into something, and one day you wake up and you don't even recognize yourself in the mirror.

So he says, the Sabbath, God's whole reason with doing this wasn't for him, it was for you.

It was for us, and these guys are hungry, so we're gonna go ahead and let them eat.

Okay?

So here's what I want to do.

I want to give you a moment.

I want to give you a little bit of help.

Five keys to restoring your soul.

Five keys to reconnecting with your soul.

The first one is this recognize when your soul isn't healthy.

In other words, recognize when your soul is divided.

Some of you, some of you in this room have a really hard time admitting that you're struggling.

Some people don't have a problem with that.

They're quite open about it.

And then there are others that maybe implicitly or explicitly you've been trained to push it down.

To maybe be in denial, to say it's not there, and to deny it.

Um, in Psalm 42, 1, it says, As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.

Uh this is the psalmist looking at a deer who's panting out of breath, is thirsty and tired.

So trying to get his wind so his throat, his soul is on.

On fire.

His soul's trying to get air, or her soul trying to get air and trying to get water because I feel dehydrated and I feel like I might hyperventilate.

And he's looking at this deer, going, I get, you know, drinking and panting.

And he goes, Man, that's what my soul feels like.

He admits it.

You know, I told you I started doing these uh in the summer, taking some extended time.

I've done this now for a few years.

The first year I did it, it was so different than I expected.

I thought, okay, I'm gonna take this time off.

It's gonna feel like such a relief.

I'm just gonna feel like I'm on vacation.

I'm just gonna feel like a dream.

And I, for the first week, was just totally anxious.

I felt this compulsion.

I was worried and stressed about what was happening here.

I felt a need to check in, and then I just felt this need to work.

And so my wife would tell you, for the first week, I was doing two-a-day workouts.

Like I was working out twice a day, and she's like, You good?

You know, and I'm like, Well, yeah, I think, you know, I don't know what's going on.

She's like, Okay, dude.

Like, this seems a little compulsive.

And I I I got to a place at the end of the first week, I was so not enjoying the rest, I almost went back to work.

I said, I don't know if I'm gonna do this.

I'm actually not sure.

And in my mind, this was the little uh self-deception that I offered myself was, hey, you know, these time off things, these are for other people who like to take breaks.

My work ethic is so incredible.

I'm such a dogged worker.

I mean, sorry, I have an S on my chest.

I can't, you know.

I mean, there are some guys that can probably sit and do nothing, but I'm just not one of those guys, dude.

I mean, I'm like, I'm a worker, dude.

I'm a hard worker, I'm a go-getter, so I'm just I'm not really cut out for these few weeks off.

That's just that's for weak people.

They must need that.

I don't need that, I need to get back to work.

The truth was that I had some internal turmoil that my busyness had allowed me to tune out because I had enough on my to-do list, enough on my goals, and enough on my calendar coming up that it kept me so busy I didn't even have to face it and think about it.

I had some issues of theology, I had some issues of psychology, I had some issues of emotion, I had some issues of relationship, I had some a lot of stuff going on, and because of that commotion internally, I had to decide am I going to admit that this internal turmoil is a divided soul, or am I just going to pat myself on my back for my work ethic and go distract myself with the work again?

So the whole thing, if you're gonna now, if you decide you just want to cope, okay, with all of this internal turmoil all your life and to turn it into some sort of productivity, God bless you, that's your option.

This is a free country, do whatever you want.

But if you want to come to a place where you allow your soul to be restored, you're gonna have to start by admitting, I kind of feel like that deer panting for the water.

I'm I'm exhausted and I'm thirsty and I'm dehydrated and I need God's help.

The second thing is this: you need to speak to your soul without shaming it.

Psalm 42, 5 and 6 says, Why, my soul, are you so downcast?

Okay?

He's talking to himself.

Some people have the tendency to try to silence their soul.

I my soul is trying to talk to me.

And and instead of telling it to shut up, start asking it questions.

He's interrogating his own soul.

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

My soul is downcast within me.

Therefore, I will remember you.

Listen, biblical self-talk is helpful.

And biblical self-talk includes curiosity.

Why am I feeling the way that I'm feeling?

It sometimes includes correction.

I have to correct a wrong attitude or belief.

And yet it maintains hope.

Put your hope in God.

So don't silence the soul within you.

Ask it questions.

Number three is remind your soul what it has forgotten.

Notice the last one said, My soul is downcast within me, therefore I will remember you.

Psalm 103, 1 and 2 says, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.

By the way, it's a great poem.

The way that it's set up is it says, Bless the Lord, statement, O my soul.

And then the second line is essentially defining the first line.

So, bless the Lord, O my soul, what's my soul?

All that is within me.

And then again says it, bless his holy name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.

Um, I want you to think about this.

The idea of remembering and reminding your soul of what it's forgotten, you think about how something small can obscure something much greater and bigger because it's right in front of you.

So I could block out the whole sun with my hand.

Just putting my hand right in front of my face, I can block out the whole sun.

Not because my hand is bigger than the sun, but because it's right in front of my face.

And so often our souls become so divided and disoriented because life is lifing.

And when life is lifing, sometimes it takes something that's much smaller, but puts it so much in your face that you can't see everything else.

And so part of resouling is to move that thing out of the way and to be able to get the whole picture and to remember.

You know, we took time this last uh few weeks, particularly my wife and I, and my daughter and I, to sit down and to tell each other stories and memories.

We talked about memories.

Hey, remember, and it was really cool to hear my daughter at 17 talk about things that happened when she was eight, when she was seven, and then to the journey.

And when you're doing that, not only you're not just entertaining yourself with stories, what you're doing is you're taking some of the stressful things that are right in front of you, some of the things that are creating frustration, the things that are creating anxiety, uncertainty, things that may be producing anger in front of you, and it's taking that from detaching you from your soul and it's moving it out of the way, and it's remembering and looking at all.

He says, He says, forget not his benefits.

Forget not his benefits.

So, what are the things that you need to go back and to remind your soul of what you've forgotten?

Number four is return your soul to the shepherd.

Psalm 23, 3 says, He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness.

Okay, the 23rd Psalm, the Lord is my shepherd.

He's gonna take care of me.

Shall I want for anything?

Makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside the still water, he restores my soul.

Eventually, he leads me on the right paths, okay, and I get on the right track, but not until he has restored my soul and replenished me, help my soul soul again.

And so Psalm 23 encourages us to come back to the shepherd.

I have a question.

Do you have a tendency when you're getting out ahead of yourself?

You're moving too fast, you find yourself either frustrated, fatigued, angry, confused, disoriented.

Do you find yourself in those moments going to the shepherd or away from the shepherd?

Do you find yourself isolating?

Moments of solitude are good, but solitude can turn into isolation.

So return to the shepherd.

Number five, last one is refuse the bargain that would cost you yourself.

Jesus says in Mark 8, 36, for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul or to forfeit himself?

What good is it to build your dream house and lose your family?

What good is it to land your dream job and lose track of who you really are?

What good is it to gain the respect of powerful people only to be completely unable to find peace when you're alone?

What good is it to multiply your net worth at the expense of a divided soul?

As Jesus asked, what is it, Prophet, if you accomplish all that stuff you're trying to accomplish?

And you push a little bit harder and you keep being sucked in and drawn in and seduced by a culture that's just compulsively productive and it defines you by your productivity.

You need to allow your soul to soul again.

When life is life, your soul needs to be souling, and wholeness will require you to say no to any game that demands disintegration.

I know for when it comes to soul condition and soul health, you almost wish you could hook it up to an EKG or run it through an MRI or get an X-ray.

It's one of the things when your body's hurting, at least if I can go get a blood test, or I can go get some sort of science back that tells me what's the problem, let's zero in on it, and here's how we get back.

When it comes to soul, when you've lost your soul, and I look out in the room, everybody looks well groomed, well fed, everybody looks good today.

I have no idea the brokenness I may be looking at.

I have no idea how depleted that you may be.

I have no idea how far ahead you are trying to wait for your soul to catch up.

But maybe today, even with the picture of the deer panting for the water, I feel like I'm dehydrated and I'm winded.

Maybe there's something in there that resonated for you today.

I want to take a moment to call you back to the shepherd.

Amen.

And as we take this next moment, uh, we're gonna sing a little bit.

But if this is you and you say, I'm I'm in that spot, I'm the deer panting for the water, my soul longs after you, as they begin to sing that, I want to invite you to stand on your feet and to take a moment to reconnect for God to set something in motion today of restoring your soul.