The Parable of the Souls

Welcome to an audio teaching from Winter Park Baptist Church in Auckland, New Zealand.

If you would like to look at the message notes or see some questions for reflection that take the lead from today's teaching, head to our website winterpark.org.nz and head to the online tab where you'll see services and series, and you can download different resources from there.

Thanks for joining us, and we hope you're encouraged by today's teaching.

In 1907, Dr.

Duncan McDougall recruited six subjects for a weight loss study with a difference.

This was not about keto, paleo, or intermittent fasting.

The goal was to measure weight loss at the moment of death to estimate the weight of the soul.

So six near-death patients were recruited and their beds were placed on a set of scales, and they were weighed before and after death.

And the results led the experiment to conclude that the human soul weighed approximately 21 grams.

The experiment has been ridiculed in the scientific community for its methodology and its conclusions, but it hasn't stopped this idea being used in popular culture.

In 2003, there was a movie named 21 grams based exactly on this concept that the human soul weighed 21 grams.

But before we can ask how much the soul weighs, we need to ask what is a soul?

Soul is one of the most used but least understood words.

We talk about soul food, soul music, soul mates, and it means something, but we can't necessarily describe it.

We say that the eyes are the window to the soul.

But what do we see inside?

In church we talk about saving lost souls.

Do we just save the 21 grams that escapes at death?

Or something more?

What is the soul?

When worship songs, we we sing about our souls, and sometimes we even sing to our souls.

Praise the Lord, oh my soul.

And I don't know about you, but those lyrics do something to me, to my soul even.

But still, if you asked me to describe that, I'd find it really difficult.

In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word nepesh can be translated as soul.

And then in the New Testament, the Greek word that is translated soul is psyche.

So you have these two words, Old and New Testament, that could be translated soul.

But interestingly, Bible translators in more modern versions have been less and less inclined to translate these words into the English word soul.

Just have a look at these numbers here.

In the King James Version, there's 573 uses of the word soul.

In the English Standard Version, 273.

The NIV, 126.

And the NLT, 76.

But even so, the soul won't go away.

We may not understand it.

We may not be able to weigh it.

We may not be able to draw it, but we feel it.

And we sense that it's significant, perhaps even key to us living flourishing lives following after Jesus.

I have a mentor.

If you were here or joining with us for Father's Day last month, you would have met him, Christoph.

Occasionally when I'd catch up with Christoph over a cup of Wellington's finest coffee, he'd ask me, Bro, how's your soul?

I never quite knew how to respond to that question.

And now as a young adults pastor, I sometimes try this question with young adults.

And when I ask them, they pull the same confused face that I would pull with Christoph.

So how about you?

How's your soul?

Speaking of mentors, you may have heard of the dynamic between two Christian writers, Dallas Willard and John Ortberg.

Dallas uh mentored John Autberg.

And if those names don't ring any bells, you may have heard of a fellow called John Mark Comer.

Yeah, that guy who wrote the book about Hurry.

Uh, Dallas Willard told John Ortberg to ruthlessly eliminate hurry from his life.

And then John Mark Comer turned that into a best seller.

Anyway, John Ortberg was mentored by Dallas Willard.

And John would often go to Dallas for advice.

Around the time that Dallas told him to ruthlessly eliminate Hurry, he was asking him questions about how to have a thriving inner world, even when things were not thriving in his outer world.

He was facing the pressures of a large church and a growing ministry and how to have this kind of thriving inner life even when the church was not thriving.

To have that conversation, Dallas replied, we're going to have to talk about the care of souls.

This wisdom has been condensed into Ortberg's book, Soul Keeping, which I read recently and provides the inspiration and structure for today's sermon.

It's a brilliant book, and I highly recommend reading it.

In it, Willard says that the soul is the capacity to integrate all our parts into a single whole life.

The parts that he is speaking of are our wills, our minds, and our bodies.

He represents this with three concentric circles.

The first circle is the will.

The will is our capacity to say yes or no.

We could call this our agency.

The next circle is the mind.

And in this framework, our mind relates to both our feelings and our thoughts.

And then the circle outside that is the body, our physicality.

Willard said that our body is our little kingdom.

It's the place in the whole world where you get to exercise your will.

And the body also we can control it, but it can control us.

The body has desires and appetites that can control us.

Surrounding all of that is a final circle, the soul.

It is the soul that integrates will, mind, and body.

The soul is you in the most complete sense of who you are.

The soul is all of you.

That's why we sing lyrics like Bless the Lord, all my soul, and all that is within me.

And now we've defined soul.

Let's turn to our passage for today.

This is the first parable that Jesus tells in Mark's Gospel.

It's often known as the parable of the soils, but today we're going to consider it as the parable of the souls.

We're going to read from Mark chapter 4 from verse 1.

Mark 4 · chapter mention

Again Jesus began to teach by the lake.

The crowd that had gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat on it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water's edge.

He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said, Listen, a farmer went out to sow his seed.

As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up.

Some fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil.

It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow, but when the sun came up the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.

Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain.

Still other seed fell on good soil.

It came up, grew, and produced the crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.

Then Jesus said, Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

Once in my former career as a sports scientist, I was working with a football team on tour in Myanmar.

The team was at training doing some finishing practice, so lots of staff were playing ball boys.

Our job was just to get the balls back to the start of the drill as fast as we could.

And at trainings, there was always this sense of urgency, not just for players, but for staff to facilitate the training.

So we're rushing around doing that.

The stadium we were in was one of those with an athletics track around the outside of the football pitch.

And as I kicked one ball back, my standing foot fully slipped.

Both my feet and my body went up like a high jumper, except there was no crash map.

I landed on the track and bounced like a basketball.

One of the coaches after the training managed to find the video recording from the session, zoom in behind the goal and get a clip of my spectacular bale, which gave everyone a good laugh.

For some of us, our souls have become hardened like that athletics track.

The word of God bounces off like seeds on the path, and it becomes bird food.

Jesus explains the meaning of it like this.

Some people are like seed along the path where the word is sown.

As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.

The soul has become hardened.

And the hardening of the soul often happens for very human reasons.

There are understandable reasons for this.

Many of us have experienced hurts, betrayals, and disappointments from which we have developed a protective shell around ourselves.

Underneath this hard outer shell is ultimately fear.

Fear I'll get hurt again.

Fear that I'll look foolish, fear of rejection, fear of failure.

The invitation for the hardened soul is to vulnerability, to opening up just a little bit of softness to God.

That the seed, God's word to us, might land on a pocket of good soil and not bounce off a hardened soul.

This could look like this opening up could look like asking for prayer.

This could look like forgiving someone who has hurt you.

It could look like taking a risk to trust somebody again with what's going on inside for you.

It could simply look like opening up your hands in prayer as a physical display of an inner opening before we move on to the next soul condition.

I have a short prayer for our hardened souls.

Let's pray.

God, where our souls have become hardened to you and to others.

Would you cultivate again soft and receptive soil?

Amen.

Are you ready for another epic fail story?

When we were young, my sister and I would often holiday with our family in Hastings on the south coast of England.

It's a classic British coastal town complete with a pier, arcades, mini golf, historic castles, and stone beaches.

And I have two strong memories of those stone beaches, and both of them involve blood.

One when a stray stone thrown by a kid hit my sister in the head, and we needed to go to AE.

To this day, I still get really uptight whenever I see anyone throwing stones at the beach.

But that is not the story that we're going to focus on.

The other story was when I ran to dive into the sea, not quite calculating the angles, and went face first into the stones about a foot below the surface.

I emerged out of the waves with blood pouring from both of my nostrils and spent the rest of the beach day trying to stop the nosebleed.

And I learned in that process that you can't dive into the shallows.

If the condition of the first soul was hardness, the second soul condition is shallowness.

This is how Jesus talks about the rocky soil.

We often think about the rocks, but in fact, Jesus is talking about shallow soil.

He says some fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil.

It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow.

But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched and they withered because they had no root.

For some of us, our souls are like this soil.

The opposite of a deep soul is one of superficiality, a superficial soul.

In his modern classic book, The Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster opens chapter one, a key part of the book.

He opens like this.

Superficiality is the curse of our age.

The doctrine of instant gratification is a primary spiritual problem.

Their desperate need today is not for greater, for a greater number of intelligent people or gifted people, but for deep people.

How do we develop a deep inner life with Jesus?

Now, honestly, that is not something that can be squeezed into the second point of a three-point sermon.

It is the work of a lifetime.

But I want to share one thought which comes from our passage about depth.

That when Jesus explains the parable to his disciples, he connects the shallow soil to those who fall away in times of trial.

This is from verse 16.

It says, Others like the seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy.

But since they have no root, they last only a short time.

When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.

You see, trials can play two roles when it comes to the depth of our souls.

Trials reveal the depth of our faith, of our souls, and trials further deepen us if we allow them to.

Stand firm and stay the course.

You will emerge a deeper soul with a deeper faith and a deeper relationship with Jesus.

And isn't this just the case for relationship?

Our deepest relationships are the ones where we've walked through challenges and difficulties together.

So keep walking with Jesus.

For some of us, perhaps the question is what if you have not yet faced the greatest challenge to your faith?

When that challenge does come, what will it reveal?

A shallow faith that is scorched by the heat, or someone with deep roots in Christ who can make it through.

Let's again have a short prayer.

God, where our souls have stayed shallow, would you expand us, growing down our roots deeper still into you?

Amen.

Next weekend is going to be a first for our little family.

We're hiring our first storage container.

In between moving houses, we we need to keep all of our stuff somewhere.

And thankfully, there are no lack of companies who are ready to make money from storing our stuff.

Turns out lots of people do this.

So you'll see them all around Auckland.

In 2023, uh actually there were over 51,000 self-storage facilities in the USA.

51,000.

That's more than Starbucks, McDonald's, and subway locations combined.

And we're talking about the US.

That's crazy.

As you find every time that you go to Move House, you have more clutter than you think.

The third type of soul condition is the cluttered soul.

This is the one soil that Jesus explains perhaps most clearly to his disciples.

Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word, but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.

The first seeds fell on the hard path and nothing grows there.

The second seeds fell on shallow soil and nothing last thing grows there.

The third seed, though, falls on fertile soil.

Growth is not only possible, it's happening.

But there's so much growing that competition becomes the problem.

This is the cluttered soul, the overcommitted soul.

And this might be where many of us see ourselves.

We might not want to think of ourselves as hardened to God, although we might be.

We might not want to think of ourselves as shallow souls, although, again, we might be.

But to think of ourselves as a bit cluttered, it's almost a given, right?

In our life.

It's a socially acceptable soul condition.

And yet Jesus uses his most violent image here.

Choking.

It's a violent, aggressive word.

The thorns choke the plants so that it produces no fruit.

Worries, distractions, and desires strangle the word of God in our lives.

So if we think, okay, oh, I'm just a little bit cluttered, Jesus might be saying, that is choking the effectiveness of my life in you.

So I ask you, what is cluttering your soul?

The worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, distracting desires.

Jesus says that these things choke the fruit that God wants to produce through you.

The invitation to the cluttered soul is towards simplicity.

Imagine your life as a smartphone.

I have an Apple phone, and sometimes I forget how many apps are running in the background.

And you do that thing where you swipe it up, and then you can see all the apps, and you go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and you swipe them all up.

It's really satisfying.

Perhaps some of us in our lives we need to have a clear-out like that.

Well before iPhones, Paul said it like this.

Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and fix our eyes on Jesus.

That's Hebrews 12, verse 1.

Hebrews 12:1

So let us say a prayer for the cluttered souls.

God, where our souls have become cluttered, clear us out that we might be simplified around you.

Amen.

Your soul is the deepest part of you.

It's the part that integrates all that makes you you.

At the start of the sermon, I asked you, how is your soul?

We've talked about the hardened soul, the shallow soul, and and the cluttered soul.

I wonder which you most relate to.

The invitation of this parable is for all of us to move towards being receptive souls.

Receptive souls welcome the word of God immediately, deeply, and exclusively.

The invitation for the hardened soul is to softening, appropriately laying down our armor and opening ourselves to God and to others.

The invitation for the shallow soul is to depth, to allowing the word of God to get below the surface of our lives.

The invitation for the cluttered soul is towards simplicity, stripping out of what Jesus has not called us to, that we may excel in what he has called us to.

As we close, we're going to sing perhaps the most famous song written about souls.

It was written by Horatio Spafford after a period of unfathomable loss.

In 1870, his only son died of scarlet fever.

In 1871, the Great Chicago fire destroyed his home and property investments and all of his wealth.

Then in 1873, he sent his wife and four daughters ahead of him to England and received a couple of days later a nightmare telegraph from his wife.

It just said, Saved alone, what shall I do?

The shipwreck had resulted in the loss of all four of his.

Daughters' life.

As Horatio boarded a ship to be with his wife in England, and as the ship went past the place where his daughters had drowned, he penned uh those famous words, It is well with my soul.

What enables someone in going through that to say that it is well with their soul?

To write some of the most profound lyrics that we ever sing in the midst of just a tragedy that's like the book of Job, literally.

What allows someone to say, It is well with my soul?

My prayer is that we would all be able to say with increasing confidence, not in ourselves but in God, that it is well with my soul.

Not just because I get to go to heaven when I die, and that is important, of course, but I would my prayer is that also in this life, we would be able to say it is well with my soul because my soul is centered around its maker.

My will, my mind, and my body are not divided against each other but in alignment.

I have an integrated soul living in the same direction, following after Jesus with all of who we are, receptive to his word and will in our lives.

Let's pray.

Would you today bring softness again?

Give us the courage to open up even just a little bit to what you might have for us.

Lord, where we have been content to remain in the shallows, would you draw us deeper into you?

Even if we are facing trials, Lord, would you would you through those trials show yourself faithful to us, and may we we pray, Lord, for for those who are experiencing that right now, that they would know your presence with them and that they would emerge on the far side of those trials with a deeper faith, a deeper soul, a faith that has been tested but has been proven of great worth, and that they could increasingly say with confidence, it is well with my soul.

And Lord, where we have become cluttered, Lord, would you clear out our souls?

Help us to be great discerners of what you're calling us to and what's distracting us from your call on our lives.

Help us to simplify our lives around you at the center.

And I pray, Lord, for everybody watching this that they would have a sense that they have a soul, that they've been intricately made by you, that they are loved by you, designed by you, and that all of their parts have been created by you just as you want them.

That they are a soul that is eternal, Lord, that has an eternal destination and that really matters.

That in the words of the Christmasing hymn, the soul would feel its worth.

And in doing that, may we become closely connected to you, uh, at peace with you, whatever our circumstances.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

The version of It Is Well that you're about to hear is performed by a gospel singer called Wintley Phipps.

I I listened to this version a number of times over the last sort of decade or so, and it always moves me.

He he has an incredible voice, uh, a a sort of wonderful smile and resonance.

And the video starts with a short intro and encouragement from the singer.

I hope that you enjoyed this version and and we'll be leaving you with this video today.

So thank you so much for joining us.

May this closing song Bless Your Soul in Christ Jesus.

And uh I saw this flight attendant, and she looked uh a little discouraged.

So uh I went and I got a cassette of my first recording and I handed it to her and I said, You know, I just feel impressed to share this with you.

She said, Thank you so much.

I've been having a really rough time.

Well, three weeks later, she was uh working another flight and saw Cliff Barrows.

And she said, Mr.

Barrows, it's such a pleasure to have you on my flight.

She said, Can I ask you something?

Have you ever heard of a young man by the name of Wentley Phipps?

And he said, No, I've never heard of him.

She said, Hold on a minute.

And she went back to her purse and got a cassette, the same cassette I gave her, and gave it to Cliff Barrows.

Three weeks later, I get a call from Cliff Barrows.

We want you to be one of the soloists with the Billy Graham Crusades.

Hook up from heaven, I call it.

And God told me to share this with you.

It is in the quiet crucible of your personal private sufferings that your noblest dreams are born, and God's greatest gifts are given in compensation for what you've been through.

It is well when peace like death my way when so it is, it is a very important thing.org.nz and you'll find various ways to contact us.

God bless.