“He Restores My Soul”
“As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.” Psalm 42:1 NIV
This past week, I really felt the Lord pressing on what it means to be healthy in my “soul.” God made us to be body, soul, and spirit – and He cares about all three parts that He made.
I am wired to be really sensitive to things of the spirit. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s part of the way God made me to be a gift to the body of Christ. But if I’m not careful, I can get out of balance and forget to equally take care of my soul and body.
Last week, a good friend of mine confronted this out-of-balance perspective in me (the way good friends do). She showed me that this idea I had that our spirit is primary and our souls and bodies are secondary or less important actually came out of Greek philosophy[1] and was opposed to the Hebrew understanding of humanity that provided the context in which the Bible was written.
When God created the world, He declared it to be “very good” (Gen. 1:1-30). If God didn’t value the physical world, He wouldn’t have made one. He would have just created us to be bodiless spiritual beings like angels. But God liked the idea of a physical world and physical bodies. In fact, God so valued the physical world that He sent His Son, Jesus, to take on human flesh (1 Tim. 3:16, 1 John 4:2) and enter the physical world to redeem it from the devil. Jesus physically died and resurrected for our salvation, and He spent a good portion of His ministry healing the sick to demonstrate the Gospel of the Kingdom in which Jesus destroys the works of the devil including the impact on physical bodies (Matt. 4:23). God values our bodies so much that even to this day, Jesus still has a glorious, resurrected body, and we as believers are promised a resurrected, glorious body like the one Jesus has (Phil 3:21).
The Psalmist-King David writes, “O God, you are my God; I earnestly search for you. My soul thirsts for you; my whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water” (Ps. 63:1 NLT). It is not just our spirit that longs for God, but our souls and bodies long for Him too. And He longs for those parts of us in return. These parts of us are no less important to God than our spirits are. Dr. Randy Clark writes that we are redeemed, body, soul, and spirit, at the moment of salvation, but while our spirits get reclaimed right away, we have to reclaim our souls and bodies in a not-so-immediate process called sanctification.[2]
John writes, “Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers” (3 John 1:2 NASB). Being healthy as a whole human means being healthy in body, soul, and spirit. And we prosper as our soul prospers. Wow! No wonder our Good Shepherd makes us “lie down in green pastures” and “leads [us] beside quiet waters” to “restore [our] soul” (Ps. 23:2-3a NASB). Our souls are important! The healthiness of our souls matters to God and it should matter to us too.
In the pursuit of “soul” health, I went on a walk this week and was surprised to come across a deer walking along the water, but also not too far from the walking trail. It reminded me of the line from the Psalm, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God” (Ps. 42:1). As I walked along, I had a long overdue heart-to-heart with the Lord about the healthiness of my soul. “Okay Lord, on a scale of 1 to 10, how healthy are my emotions right now?” I then asked Him to score my mental health and my spiritual health. (I didn’t ask for a number for physical health, because I was pretty sure I could self-assess a 0 out of 10 at that moment in my life!). The conversation then moved to the kinds of things He had in mind for ways I could improve my emotional and physical health. Since that conversation, I’ve been cooking more, spending more time outside, and renewing my mind with the truth that God cares about my emotional health and my physical health just as much as He cares about my spiritual health. Jesus died to redeem all three parts of me: body, soul, and spirit – and I don’t want to sell Jesus short of anything He died to redeem.
My prayer for us today is that we keep pressing into the deep kind of healing that Jesus purchased for us – body, soul, and spirit – as we come fully alive with the abundant life of Jesus.
“Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He who calls you and He also will do it.” 1 Thess. 5:23-24 NASB
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[1] Randy Clark, Empowered: A School of Healing and Impartation Workbook, 6th ed., (Mechanicsburg, PA: Apostolic Network of Global Awakening, 2022), 53.
[2] Randy Clark, The Biblical Guidebook to Deliverance, (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2015), 26.