Do you remember the first crush you had as a little kid? My four year old grandson has a crush on a little girl in his preschool class. It is a time in our lives when we are captivated by beauty. For a boy of four, it is something that stirs this little guys heart that causes him to want to please the one of his affection. Granted, this first love experience may not happen at four, but we are wired for love, after all. Are we not made in the image of God? We still retain certain aspects of the nature God which he designed Adam with. We are made just like Him having the aspects of the nature of “Love” like Himself, though marred.

A recent survey by American Psychiatry says that nearly half of American households have had someone seek mental health treatment this year! This is just one such survey revealing the struggle and confusion of the human soul. Believing in God but not trusting Him practically is like the above picture.

Another study done in 2007 found that 3 out of 100 people struggle with depression. The same study showed that people being treated for depression tripled in the early 1990s. Overall about 8.7 million people were treated for depression in 2007 compared to 6.5 million in 1997. Today it is estimated that 11% of people world-wide suffer from some form of depression and among adolescents under 18 years of age its closer to 70%. Is it any wonder the suicide rate is up so high with teenagers?

Life has a way of feeling like a “Tug-Of-War” and, so often, we never seem to reconcile why. Without getting too complicated, let’s unravel the elements that make up the individual and why we tend to be pulled in more than one direction. Put your seatbelt on and hang in there with me and be prepared to have your brain stretched just a little bit…it will be worthwhile in the end!

I have desired to investigate the concept of the “Soul” and how the health or sickness of the soul affects our everyday life, so in this article I wanted to address the seeming tug-of-war between our soul and spirit. From my studies over the years, the soul and spirit are inseparably linked, although one may be the proximate leader.

As we have discussed previously, our spirit is given to us by God when we come into existence and our soul is a combination of our mind, will and emotions. To make matters more complicated, we have a personality that is part of our soul, which is also given at birth, that is both a composition of what God gives us and what our genetic heritage gives us. Still with me?

Ever wonder why your Christian walk seems to be erratic? Why you just can’t seem to have a stable Christian walk with God and people?

This is a complex question, but one worth investigating. Just because the question is hard doesn’t mean we should avoid it. The soul itself is often a mysterious topic, and most writers in the last 50-75 years don’t refer to the soul much at all if ever. If you go back 100 years or more there was a lot of discussion about the soul and it’s importance. Writers in the past spent their whole life trying to understand the soul and it’s function.

Today, if a writer or commentary refers to the soul they say it’s not important, only a person spirit is what’s important because they say our soul will be lost when we die and only our spirit survives. First, this is totally false as the soul and the spirit are often the same word in Hebrew as well as greek being “breath” or air. Now I am no scholar, but there is a enough passages of scripture to see that the soul and the spirit often are inseparably link to each person. Secondly, they assume the soul fades when a person dies. King David wrote about the soul a lot.

Reading this morning, I am challenged to reflect on the thought, “Am I Laying The Ground Work For The Future”?

There is a story of the prophet Elisha being ministered to by a woman through her acts of kindness.

While reading the scripture this morning, a passage stood out, and I’m wondering how many of us often pass over such verses to quickly because we think it’s just a bridge between ideas. Maybe the Lord has something to say to us this morning that we just might miss as just being filler, when it’s far more than we realize. Here is the verse that caught my attention:

John 16:12
“Oh, there is so much more I want to tell you, but you can’t bear it now.”

The information we are exposed to shapes our thinking and action, whether we like it or not. Our minds are created to process huge amounts of information and develop the ethics we end up with. But what if the information we acquire is either distorted or presented with a bias that we can’t detect on the surface? You know the answer…a distorted view or reality.

If the foundation of our thinking was corrupt or bias at an early stage of our development, we incorporated those distortions into our perception of reality, all the while believing our way of thinking was how life is. I’m still trying to correct those imbedded distortions in my life at the age of 65. Some things are hard to get out of our lives even when we know they’re false.

Sitting this morning at the Charlotte airport, I’m reading and considering the study of the “soul” and how it operates in man. I’ve been investigating this subject now for a number of years, ever since reading and meditating on King David’s words in the Psalms.

More recently, I have been stirred by John Ortberg’s book “Soul Nurture”, and Larry Crabb’s book, “Soul Talk”. Both these books reveal how much the average Christian has neglected the subject, and the church has failed by in large to adequately explain.