“Your Most Important Possession”
Edited transcript of a lesson given by Chad Sychtysz on April 28, 2006.
Transcript by Michael Franklin; editing by Chad Sychtysz.
Thank you so much, all of you, for coming tonight. I know there are members from this group here, of course, and those from other groups, and those from no groups at all. I am appreciative of you being here tonight and for taking time out of your week to talk about some spiritual things that I hope you will find to be very beneficial to you.
Our intention in this series, not just tonight but throughout this weekend, is to both educate and inspire you with an appeal to your intellect. In other words, you are an intelligent person: God has given you that intelligence to use with regard to your spiritual needs. Then He has provided you with information that we can cite and use towards your spiritual needs. That’s really what we are going to be talking about this whole weekend. I hope you understand that.
We’re going to start our series by talking about probably one of the most intriguing aspects of human life—something that no living person has ever seen, no film has ever recorded, no earthly container has ever held. It is part of every person, yet you will never find it in an anatomy and physiology textbook anywhere because you can’t define it with words and pictures and you can’t describe it with science. I’m talking, of course, about the human soul.
This is a subject made even more intriguing by the very fact that every one of us has a soul. When I say that you “have one,” I’m not talking about that in the passive sense, like you have one and someday you’ll use it, or that you might access it now and then. You’re using it right now. By the very fact that you’re conscious and that you understand what I am saying, and that you are also interpreting what I am saying through your mind, you are using the soul God has given you. So it’s fully engaged right now. You’re listening, you’re thinking, you’re making decisions, you’re animating your body, or at least giving your attention. Think about your soul in that regard: it is an ever-active, always-engaged part of you.
Now I want you to think about all the possessions that you own: your house, your car, your furniture, your valuables. Maybe you’ve got a boat or an RV, maybe you’ve got some property, hopefully you have some savings, and so on. Which one of those is the most valuable to you? This is a question that we must ask ourselves. Which of our possessions is most valuable? If you had to choose one over all the others, which one would you keep?—you might look at it that way. Or you might look at it in another way, with regard to duration: how long do you plan on keeping whatever it is that you choose?
You know, when we ascribe value or worth to something, that thing only has meaning in the context where it is recognized. I’ll give you an illustration. Suppose you go out into the Australian outback and you find there a tribe of Aborigines who have never had any contact with outsiders before. You come up to them and hand them a wad of American currency, and you say, “This is going to make you filthy rich!” And they look at you but have no idea what you’re talking about. The money means nothing to them. They’ve nowhere to spend it. They’ve no idea how to use it. It is absolutely worthless to them. The reason is because it is completely unrecognized by them and they do not have a context in which to use it.
So it is with all your earthly possessions. You’re going to a place where all your earthly possessions are unrecognized. They do not mean anything. They have no worth. There is no significance attached to them. Furthermore, you’re not taking any of these things with you. When you die you will be in a world—in a context—where these things that you and I now enjoy in the physical sense are not going to be. We’re just not going to have them and we’re not going to be able to use them any longer.
Now when I say, “You are going to enter into this world,” which part of “you” do you think I am talking about? Is it the physical part of you? No, it’s not that. Is it the physical things that you own? No it’s not those, either. It is your spiritual soul. Nothing of this physical world enters into the realm of the afterlife but the human soul. Your soul transcends or goes beyond the earthly context. So when we talk about the soul, we are talking about your most important and valuable possession, because it outlives and outlasts everything else that you have—even the accumulation of everything else that you have.
So we would do well to focus our attention on this most important subject. Someday we will appreciate all the more why that is. What you do with your soul may not have been a priority to you up until now, but it must be a priority for you before you stand before the living God. And when I say, “It must be,” I mean that in the sense that it is imperative that you make that a priority because your soul is valuable to God. God treasures your soul far above any other physical thing that you have in this world.
The Invisible Part of You
Well, a good question to start with on this subject is, “What is the soul?” I have never seen a soul, have you? But if you could see one, what would it look like? How can you be sure it exists if you can’t see it? What would it weigh? What color would it be? Is it opaque? Is it translucent? Does it look like a ghost—you know, like you see in the cartoons? Is it white and shadowy—that sort of thing? Immediately we realize that we are trying to describe or measure or quantify something with earthly terms that really is a spiritual entity. We are trying to take something spiritual and measure it by physical terms or physical capacities. That doesn’t work and you know that.
Every person is made up of two parts. There is the seen part and there is the unseen; there is the visible part and there is the invisible part; there is the bodily part and there is the spiritual part. The physical body exists in a three dimensional physical world; your spiritual body does not. Your spiritual body exists in a realm that you cannot see or even comprehend and neither can I. These facts make the discussion about the soul not just intriguing but also difficult, as you will see.
In the Bible and elsewhere in other kinds of literature that talk about soul, you’ll find “soul” is sometime synonymous with life. In Psalms 30:3, for example, the psalmist says, “O, Lord you have brought me up my soul from Sheol”—the Hebrew word for grave—“You have kept me alive that I would not go down to the pit.” This is a figurative expression of the soul that is really referring to a person’s life. In other words, the psalmist is saying, “You saved my life,” in a very poetic way. Likewise, Proverbs 25:25 says, “Like cold water to a weary soul, so is good news from a distant land.” Well obviously the soul in that context doesn’t mean something invisible or spiritual, but really is referring to one’s life. So the word “soul” can have a figurative meaning, depending on the context.
But the Bible also speaks of the soul as the spiritual counterpart to the human body. It is a person’s life but it’s much than just being alive. It refers to more than just a mere existence, much more than a mere earthly consciousness. There is a real and definite existence beyond this life—whatever we call this life. There’s more to it than that: stuff you can’t see; things you can’t see; entities and beings you cannot see.
In Matthew 11:29, Jesus said, “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” He’s not talking about rest for your life here, but He’s talking about rest for something beyond what you see here. In Matthew 10:28, Jesus also said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul. Rather, fear Him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.” That implies an existence that goes beyond the here and now. Here, people can kill the body but that’s all they can do. Once the body is dead, there is nothing else that they can do to you. But the implication is that you are still alive, or at least you still have existence, even though the body is dead. That’s really what Jesus is implying. But there is a God who is able to destroy not only the body, but also the soul. He is the God to whom we should pay attention.
Implications of the Soul’s Existence
Even though the soul is invisible—to us, anyway—we can know that it exists for several reasons. I’m not going to elaborate on this discussion. If someone really wants to get into much more detailed discussions, I’m sure we can do that on a private level. But I think that we pretty much are going to be in agreement over these things.
First of all, the Bible affirms over and over, both directly and indirectly, the reality of the human soul. And this is significant because the Bible is the only source of written information which does not originate with man himself. Think about that idea: the Bible is the only written information we have that did not come from men. I know men sat down and wrote the words [of the Bible], but that information did not come from men [cf. Galatians 1:11-12]. And so we have divine authority concerning that which man cannot see but which is absolutely real nonetheless. That is very important for us to understand.
Man’s life does not consist merely of what he sees, but also what is unseen. I’d like us to turn to 2 Corinthians 4:16, where it reads,
Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory, far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
Your body is not eternal. This building is not eternal. This lectern and all the physical things you see around us are not eternal. Eternal things are more important than these; these will disappear, but invisible things last forever. All the things that are seen are all going to disappear. You’re going to disappear—that is, your body will disappear.
Your soul, however, is eternal. Even though the soul may not be saved—and we will discuss more what that means later on—it will not be annihilated. We have nowhere in Scripture that speaks of the annihilation of the soul. Yet the Bible speaks in numerous occasions of the ultimate destiny of men’s souls, and we have much more to say on that in upcoming lessons this weekend.
We could also appeal to the fact of your consciousness to prove the soul’s existence. Consciousness refers to the awareness of your existence or of existences, if you will, apart from what your physical senses perceive, that is, your sight, your hearing, your taste, your smell, your touch. Beyond these five senses, you understand that things exist not perceived by those senses. Something spiritual or invisible about you is picking up on these things and you understand that. You have a perception of yourself and this world that really cannot be defined by mere physical senses.
[The Theory of] Evolution claims that we all came from space dust and pond scum. At best—the best that that theory can offer—it describes how physical things came into being. I’m not saying that it even succeeds at that, I’m just saying that that’s the best that it can do as a theory. But it cannot even begin to describe why we think, why we feel, why we love, why we hate, why we have emotions at all, why we have this perception of things that cannot be seen, why we even think about things that cannot be seen. It cannot even begin to touch those things. It cannot even begin to explain anything non-physical, even though non-physical things are all around us.
We could offer a third proof. We’ll call this “moral intuition,” for lack of better words. We sense “right” and “wrong” that are not based entirely upon physical culture or our environment or our learning. In other words, you know intuitively what is right and what is wrong, at least to some degree. You may not know this exactly all the time but you have an idea when you’re doing something wrong even if no one told you. You have this perception of right and wrong that is not influenced by or is not necessarily sourced from the physical world. You can believe a lie, of course; therefore, you can suppress moral intuition. You can suppress the fact that you’re doing something wrong: you know it’s wrong but you tell yourself that it’s okay. You can convince yourself to believe a lie, but you cannot deny the existence of moral truth.
As a fourth proof: even though we cannot measure or touch or capture what leaves the body upon death, we are certain that something does leave the body at that time. That’s why we bury dead bodies. They are no longer people to us, but they’re rather just bodies that something which is no longer there used to inhabit. And that’s why we call them dead people or “dead bodies,” right? They’re not persons, they no longer have an identity, they no longer have a relationship with us, because whatever it was that animated that body is now gone. That’s why we put them in the ground.
Death is then the separation of the human soul from the human body. But the sensation of life is so strong we know intuitively that it continues on even after the body is dead, even after that separation. In Ecclesiastes 3:11, it says, “God has set eternity in man’s heart,” even though man cannot grasp eternity. And I think that is a parallel principle to the soul. You and I cannot grasp the soul entirely, yet God allows us to understand at least enough to know that it exists and to know that we have to do something about it—that we have to be caretakers of that soul. We will talk much more about that, of course.
Attributes of the Soul
In further describing the soul, there are four basic characteristics which intertwine with the others, each one affecting and influencing the others. The first attribute we will look at is that of intellect: one’s thoughts, one’s logic, one’s reason. You’re using intellect right now—at least I hope you are. I’m going to defer to you that you are using intellect! You’re able to identify things, process information, discern, weigh things out, and remember facts and details. That’s all part of what your soul is doing, or we might say that that is what is called your “mind.” Your mind is a part of your soul. Your mind is something non-physical, cannot be measured, something that is non-tangible, and is non-earthly. It cannot be seen and yet it does exist and it’s part of you.
Then we have emotions: passion, anger, joy, sorrow, happiness, feelings, our sensitivities, moods—whatever you want to call these. We all have a vast array of emotions and these are all part of our soul as well. In other words you can’t look at a physical body by itself and attribute any emotional aspect. Your body is a physiological construction of bone and muscle and organs and blood and so on, but it’s not going to have a single emotion without a soul. The emotions are a part of the soul of a person.
The other thing we should consider is that of will. When talking about will, we’re really talking about the power or energy to choose evil or good, to choose right or wrong. We’re talking about that moral freedom or discernment to make such decisions in the first place. In general, we are talking about the power or energy to pursue or ignore desires, which I’ll talk about in a minute. Think about what Jesus said for example in Matthew 26:39, while in the garden [of Gethsemane] right before His death, when He prayed to God, “Not My will, but Your will, Father…” In other words, “Father, not what My soul wants (so to speak), but I want what Your soul wants. Not My human desire, or My human pursuance of My desires, but rather I want Your divine desire to be met.”
And of course that leads us to talking about desires, which is another part of the soul. Our sensual lusts, our wants, our ambitions, our urges, cravings, hungers, appetites, our motives—these are all part of our desires which are all part of our soul. Now, have you recognized that you have all these things? It is your soul we are talking about. When we speak of these aspects of the human person, it’s not just the physical body we’re talking about—we’ve gone well beyond that. We’re talking about something that cannot be defined or described entirely by physical or earthly things.
Someone says, “Well, what about attitude?” We’re getting there. The disposition of the soul is considered one’s attitude. It’s not really one’s mood, so to speak, but it’s a frame of mind. Mood has to do with emotional disposition and so on, how you’re affected by external or environmental influences. But attitude is your frame of mind, or, someone might say, it’s your focus of energy. When we ask, “What is your attitude about this or that?” we mean, “What is the focus of your energy about this thing or that thing?” We talk a lot about attitude in the church and in religion. Attitude involves all of the four aspects that we talked about —intellect, emotions, will and desire—and yet it is defined separately from all of these as well.
I’ll give you something just to think about: in a sense, attitude indicates the soul’s distance from God—not literally, of course, but figuratively-speaking. I want you to think about that idea: attitude indicates a soul’s distance from God. Consider a passage like James 4:8, where James says, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” What is James really getting at? What is he really saying? He is saying, in essence, “Change your attitude. Change your distance to God, so to speak.” Of course, your distance from God will change as your attitude changes. Or you might say that it is your “drawing near” which changes your attitude. However you want to look at that, it comes up the same thing. Incline your soul toward God. Seek after Him. Pursue Him. Let us have that attitude that Paul talks about in Philippians. In 3:15 he says, “And if in anything you have a different attitude, God will reveal that to you also.” The word “attitude” there can be translated “mind” as well, but it fits in the same idea. In other words, if you are far from God, God will reveal how far away you are and will draw you to Him. Change your attitude. Change how you look at things, change your frame of mind, change the focus of your energy. We’re talking about attitude when we talk about those things.
Your Soul Comes From God
Now, so far we’ve only talked about definitions and concepts. Now we’re going to get down to practical applications. In Ezekiel 18:4, God said, “Behold, all souls are Mine.” I think that God means “souls” in both senses: one’s physical life and also one’s spiritual counterpart to his human body, his invisible soul. Both of these things are given by God, but your spiritual soul will return to God. Ecclesiastes 12:7 talks about how the body goes back to the dust from whence it came and the spirit goes back to God from whence it came. In Hebrews 12:9, God is referred to as the “Father of spirits,” and of course He’s the Father of your spirit. He is the Father of all living spirits, because the life of man—both of earth and of eternity; the life that is on this earth, and the life that lasts forever in eternity—is given to man by God.
You see, human beings can reproduce through means that we did not create or develop, but only with respect to the physical body. In other words, our mothers and fathers did not give us a soul, and you who are mothers and fathers did not give souls to your children. You gave your children a body, but that’s all that you gave them. And you had little to do with that, except for your physical part in the reproductive process. Obviously, there are aspects of human life that are far beyond yours or my capability to understand. How do you put together a human body? Well, that’s hard enough, right? How do you put together a soul with the human body? That’s something that’s beyond us altogether. Thus, at best, we are able to participate in reproduction, but bringing into existence what we call “human life” is really something that only God can do and only God does since He gives to the human body something that nothing and no one else is capable of giving. When a child is born, for example, it’s not the doctors who inject a soul into that child when it comes out of the mother. It’s not the mother herself or the father himself who has given that child a soul. That child is born with a soul—we know that because he has all the attributes (ultimately) that we’ve talked about in this lesson. Upon maturity, we see these things. Where did the soul come from? Is it merely a biological process? Is it merely a physiological process? No, but you see, it goes well beyond that.
The point of bringing all this up is to recognize that your soul is something that is given to you by Someone greater than you. It didn’t just appear. It’s not just something that passively came with you like gift wrap or something like that. Your soul is something that is specifically given to you by God to be your possession during your stay upon earth. God has entrusted your soul to you, to be taken care of by you. Thus, your soul is not to be taken for granted, it is not to be neglected, it is not to be abused, it is not to be forsaken, it is not to be polluted.
Someone says, “Well, why not?” Because God has given you your soul, your most important possession, and there is nothing that you can do by yourself to reverse the harm done to the soul. Once you corrupt the soul, the soul is corrupted. Once you pollute the soul, the soul is polluted. Once you neglect the soul, the soul is neglected. There’s nothing that you can do by yourself to fix that.
Your soul also is uniquely yours. You do not share it with anyone else, and no one shares their soul with you. Your soul cannot be killed by other people, as we mentioned earlier in Matthew 10:28. The body can be killed by men, but only God can destroy the soul. Now what’s interesting is that you can allow other people to enslave your soul, but only with your consent. I know a lot of people might argue with that by saying something like, “Well, I’m enslaved by some other person and it wasn’t my doing whatsoever.” I’m not talking about your body here; I’m talking about your soul. You can allow your soul to be enslaved by some other entity or some other force or some other person’s will. This is because when we deal with the soul, we’re also dealing with the negative aspects of the soul—carnal appetites, vices, addictions, lusts. These are the things that can be taken advantage of by other forces. And we will talk more about this, especially in the next lesson.
But such enslavement is a personal choice. This is not imposed upon you. In fact, in 1 Corinthians 10:13, Paul actually talks about the “way of escape” that is given to every man to avoid such enslavement. You do not have to be overtaken by sin. You may choose to be overtaken, but there is a “way of escape” with regard to temptation that exists for every person. Now, the fact is that we have not all taken that escape. We have all succumbed to temptation, in one way or another. But the fact also remains: there has always been a “way of escape.”
Your Soul Is Your Responsibility
Once again, in Ezekiel 18:4, God says, “The soul who sins will die.” In other words, sin is an incredibly dangerous and lethal affliction of the soul. Sin doesn’t kill the soul by itself, but the soul dies that is corrupted by sin, and God destroys the soul that is corrupted by sin. That person who refuses to address his sinful situation is going to be destroyed.
In 1 Timothy 2:4, however, it says that “God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” In other words, God desires every person to come to His salvation and His truth. So if someone says, “Well what does God want of me, exactly?” Well, I would go to 1 Timothy 2:4 and say at least this: God wants you to be saved by coming to the knowledge of His truth. He wants your salvation and He provides for this salvation through the truth that He offers you.
So we use expressions like “the salvation of the soul” or “saving the soul” and what we mean by these is the entrusting of your soul to the One that is both able and willing to save it. He is not one or the other, but both: He is capable and willing. He desires to take care of your soul that you and I have allowed someone else to enslave. And I want you to think about what God offers in the most positive way. It implies both rescuing your soul and preserving your soul. In 2 Timothy chapter 1:12—we have a song which is based upon this passage—Paul says, “I’m not ashamed” (to suffer for the cause of Christ, that is) “for I know whom I have believed and am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day.” So what Paul is saying to Timothy here is, “I believe that God is capable of rescuing my soul and also preserving my soul. I entrust my soul to Him.”
This is a paradox. When we talk about paradox, we’re talking about things that don’t seem real or do not seem right in our earthly context, but they make perfect sense in God’s spiritual context or according to the divine power of God. God entrusts your soul to you, just as He’s entrusted my soul to me. But the best possible way for me to manage my soul is to entrust my soul to God. It was not my decision for God to give me a soul. That was God’s decision. But it is entirely my decision to entrust my soul to God so that He can save it. This is where “free moral agency,” or the free will of man, comes into play. God gave you a soul—that wasn’t your choice, that wasn’t your decision, that’s something He does for you, that’s what life is—but now the question is, what are you going to do with that soul? That’s your decision for your soul; that’s my decision for mine.
The best thing that we can do is to entrust our soul to the only One powerful enough to save it. Christ is the only One capable of providing the means by which the human soul is saved.
Over in Acts 4:12, the apostle Peter said, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven which has been given among men by which we must be saved.” Think about this idea. Here is something I have been thinking about a lot lately: as powerful as God the Father is, He is unable to save your soul apart from God the Son. Even God the Father cannot save the soul apart from what God the Son has done. Of course, we’re talking about Jesus Christ as God the Son. So we see that God the Son, God the Father and God the Holy Spirit—all three of Whom we know to be “God”—work together for the salvation of your soul, if indeed you consent to that salvation.
Choosing Salvation—While There Is Still Time
Well, we have only one soul and we have only one opportunity to save it. We should then make decisions toward the salvation of that soul since “opportunity” is limited to this life. Once this life is over, all decisions made here are final and irrevocable. Several times, I’ve encountered people who envision that, in some way or another, they are going to be able to somehow throw themselves at the mercy of God in the afterlife or to make an argument with God. They imply that they will be able to bring their record books, so to speak, and thump them down and make a case to God and say, “This is what I think should happen!” or “I don’t think you have any right to do this or that!”
It’s not going to be that way! We have no indication whatsoever that we’re going to be able to do any such things. Instead what we learn from the Bible is that you have an opportunity right now to make your decisions. And whatever decisions that you and I make in this life, we are going to have to settle with the consequences of those decisions as God settles them once and for all in the life to come. That’s why it’s sometimes called the “Day of Reckoning,” because God is going to reckon to you a future based upon whatever decisions you made here in this life.
God expects each and every person to take care of the needs of his or her soul right now while there is time, because you are going to a place where there is no opportunity for such decisions to be made. You are going to a place where there is no time for repentance. You are going to a place where there is no time or opportunity for appeals for mercy. You are going to a place where there is no time. That’s where your soul is going: to a realm—for better or worse, depending on what you choose—where there is no more time.
But we don’t have to fear. We don’t have to worry. God is faithful, the scriptures say; He will never abandon one who is truly seeking after Him [Hebrews 11:6, 13:5-6]. But sin is not something your or I can take care of on our own. I hope that we’ve made that clear and we’ll certainly make that clearer as we continue in this series. Therefore, we have to listen to the solution that God provides and respond rightly to that. We have to listen and we have to respond. Jesus says [Matthew 7:24-27] that the “wise man” is the one who hears His words and then acts upon them. It’s not enough to hear the words of Christ; you have to act upon those words.
Once again, the purpose of this series is to identify the problem with the soul and to also discover God’s solution for that problem. And in that solution there are two parts: there is God’s part (what God does) and there is your part (there’s something that you do). These two parts are not equal in scope or power, but they are both extremely important. In fact, your soul cannot be saved unless both parts are satisfied. We’ll talk more about that concept in future lessons. But I encourage you to participate in the rest of our lessons as we will talk more about these ideas.
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