Caring for Your Own Soul

In this post, we’re going to briefly look at four ingredients for caring for our souls. As a counselor, I would even view these as the components of doing good self-counsel. Full disclosure: I often read a book, hear a podcast, or get asked a question that involves counseling (or at least is counseling-adjacent), and it sparks more thoughts…which often take shape in writing. This post is no exception. I’m riffing off a podcast I recently heard that was about an old book called Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. A Puritan named Thomas Brooks wrote it in the 1600s. So I have not yet read the book, but I was intrigued by what I heard the book is about, in particular something that Brooks brings up in the introduction. Brooks states that four things need to be studied and known in soul care. And these things are just as necessary today as they were in his day. I think they make a helpful framework for helping ourselves and others.

Number One: Study Christ

If we are going to know what to think, believe, and feel about, well, anything, then we must know the heart of Jesus. What did he do during his life on earth? How did he speak? How did he act? What were the affections, rhythms, and patterns that shaped his life? What enabled him to trust his Father so completely? How did he respond to people who were hard-hearted, whose own sin endangered their souls? How did he respond to people who were crushed, whose lives were filled with sorrow? The unified person and character of Jesus led him to respond in perfectly appropriate and proportionate ways to an incredible variety of situations, all while never once giving in to sin.

If we are going to care for our souls well, we must know the heart of Jesus. We must know that he is worthy of our full devotion. We must know that he is divine, that he makes God known and accessible to us. We must know that all his commands are only ever for our ultimate good. We must know that our sin is a betrayal of him. But if we are Christians, we must also know that he is united with us against our sin, not opposed to us because of our sin. We must know that he loves us so much that he will not tolerate ongoing, willful, or high-handed disobedience. We must know that he willingly, happily, ably, and completely has wiped away our sins. When we are grieved, emotionally tired, and in pain, we must know that he is our High Priest who understands our experience (Hebrews 2:17, 4:15) and is able to comfort the weary (Isaiah 50:4, Matt. 11:28). When we read the four gospel accounts (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), we must feel not only his divinity, but his humanity. We must look for the incredible balance of his tough words and his tender words. We must hear his comforting, “Don’t be afraid, little flock” when we are terrified (Luke 12:32). We must marvel at his depiction of a father whose response to shame after confessed sin is to accept a son back into his home (Luke 15:20-24). We must insert ourselves into the story of his tender singling out of a woman who was ostracized and a reproach to society due to physical suffering that was no fault of her own (Luke 8:43-48).

If we are going to nurture our souls, we must know Jesus intimately. If we are going to be a help to others when they need spiritual nourishment, we must know Jesus intimately. And knowing him intimately is not a test of mere theological knowledge. Knowing Jesus is an apprenticeship and a friendship.

Number Two: Study the Scriptures

If we are going to have a gradually growing ability to counsel ourselves and steward the experiences God gives us, we need to cultivate our knowledge and love of the whole counsel of God in the Bible. This point and the prior point are connected. All of Scripture ultimately points to Jesus. As Sally Lloyd-Jones says in her excellent The Jesus Storybook Bible, “Every story whispers his name.” And conversely, Jesus fed on Scripture.

Speaking of which, have you ever wondered how it is that, in his last moments before dying on the cross, Jesus could quote from the Psalms? This wasn’t a mechanical thing. You and I will likely not die the gruesome kind of death that Jesus did. But to much smaller degrees, we still know what it’s like to be pushed or squeezed to what feels like a breaking point. At these times, what is it that most naturally comes out of us? It’s a culmination of what we care about and love the most. In those moments, we’re not going into rehearsal mode and pulling out a script of what we are supposed to say. Among other things, from the cross Jesus said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1) and “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46; Psalm 31:5). Jesus said these things because he had feasted on Scripture. It oozed out of him. When his life was literally on the line, this is what came out of him most naturally. He knew and loved his Father’s companionship, his heart, and his good commands.

We, too, need a desperate hunger to know the whole counsel of God. We need the whole storyline of Scripture (i.e., creation, fall, redemption, restoration). But we also need to know and appreciate the unique help offered by various portions of Scripture (e.g., the law, the historical books, the prophets, the wisdom literature, the gospels, the New Testament epistles, etc.). If you read any great fictional series, such as The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia, you know that to leave one of the books out means that you not only fail to grasp the entirety of the storyline, but you also miss out on knowing particular characters, subplots, and events that in turn give shape to the overall story. If, for example, you are struggling to believe that God has forgiven you for your sins (or a particular sin), it is wonderful to read “If we confess our sins to [God], he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.” (1 John 1:9) But it is even more wonderful to complement that objective truth with the true story of David’s dealings with Mephibosheth, a crippled man who politically was his enemy. David tells him, “I will give you all the property that once belonged to your grandfather Saul, and you will eat here with me at the king’s table!” (2 Sam. 9:7). This passage puts into narrative form what God has objectively done for us and brings it home to our hearts. Studying all of Scripture yields these treasures to us.

Number Three: Study Your Own Heart

If we are going to counsel our own souls, we have got to know ourselves. I’m not referring to our height, weight, blood type, personality type, or whether we prefer the mountains or the beach. I mean we’ve got to know our hearts. By heart, the Bible refers to who we truly are—our wills, desires, minds, affections, etc. We need to know what makes us tick. What do we care about? What do we want? What are our motivations? What are our expectations? What are the things that threaten to rob us of sleep at night? What are the things we so strongly feel we need when we are stressed that we will sin in order to get it? Why is it that I feel the need to outshout or outwit my spouse? We all have reasons for why we do what we do, but we often don’t pause to consider what these driving factors are.

Jesus himself said, “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say [or do] flows from what is in your heart” (Luke 6:45). David says, “Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts” (Psalm 139:23). David isn’t even referring strictly to sinful things. He is simply inviting God to reveal who he truly is and to bring things to light that he can’t see. A study of our hearts will sometimes reveal sin. This should not be surprising to us. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Other times, a study of our hearts will reveal weakness that can either look to God in faith or respond with self-reliance. “When I am afraid, I will trust in you” (Psalm 56:3).

How do we study our hearts? More could be said on this, but at a bare minimum, it requires honesty and a willingness to slow down at times to ask ourselves these questions. Psalm 42 is one of the most helpful examples that I know. The psalmist admits to feeling internally distant from God and to facing extremely difficult external circumstances. He asks himself multiple times, “Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad?” (vv. 5 and 11). In asking these questions, he is given helpful remedies, such as remembering God’s faithfulness in the past, worshipping with other believers, singing, and praying.

Number Four: Satan’s Devices

While we do not want to look for a “demon under every rock,” the reality is that we are likely far too often unaware or forgetful of the fact that Satan is at work, opposing God by opposing God’s people. He can do this in many ways. Many times it’s by taking obviously sinful distortions and making them look enticing to us. James says that “Temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away” (1:14). Do you hear the predatory wording? It’s important to remember that Satan works in concert with our own flesh. (When the Bible speaks of our flesh in this way, it’s not referring to our physical bodies, but to our naturally sinful and rebellious nature.) Satan dangles the bait while hiding the hook. We think we’re ingesting something sweet, only to have it transformed into gravel in our mouths (Prov. 20:17).

Many other times Satan will take even good things and use them to gradually draw us away from our first and primary love for God. The apostle Paul stated, "Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible for me, but I will not be mastered by anything” (1 Cor. 6:12). This is the essence of idolatry: giving a good thing God-like status. Our loves become disordered. In his fictional The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis imaginatively depicts how a senior demon talks to his junior nephew demon about successfully sabotaging a new convert’s faith. The senior demon, Screwtape, says, “Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the Enemy [God] or near to us….[Something like politics, money, marriage, health, etc.] is not, in itself, necessarily favorable either to us or to the other side. It is simply an occasion which we and the Enemy [God] are both trying to exploit. Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material.” Satan can attack in obvious ways, but more often, he will attack in subtle, insidious ways. He’ll use anything—the “raw material”—at his disposal.

Conclusion

By talking about the ingredients of self-counsel, we don’t mean the absence of the necessity of other believers. Every Christian needs Christian community. Indeed, one of the four ingredients described above (all of Scripture) explicitly speaks to this reality (e.g., Hebrews 10:25). However, every follower of Jesus is responsible for appropriating biblical instruction and biblically-inspired impulses in their own lives. While the four ingredients above are not necessarily exhaustive, they cannot be neglected. Study of Christ, study of the Scriptures holistically, study of our own hearts, and study of Satan’s tactics can collectively be used by God to keep us tender to his Spirit and aware of the workings of our own souls.