What the Soul Does

Welcome to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life. 1 Corinthians chapter 2. 1 Corinthians chapter 2, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians chapter 2. If you're using your Pew Bibles, the New King James Pew Bibles provided for you, you'll find that on page 1013. Brothers and sisters, hear now God's perfect word.

And I, brethren, came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom, declaring to you the testimony of God, for I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling.

And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor the rulers of this age who are coming to nothing, but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery. the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages of our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew. For had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, I have not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love him. But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit.

For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the spirit of God, For they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him?

Prayer for Illumination

But we have the mind of Christ. Thus ends this portion of the reading of God's word. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. Let's pray. God, we need your spirit now. Father, we have read your word. We have heard it in our ears. Now, Father, as we come to the preaching of it, we plead with you that you would please help us We need you to enliven our dull minds, to soften our hard hearts. Lord, we pray that you would please help us to have discernment, to look at these things and go through the scriptures and find out if they really are so. Lord, we pray that you would keep, Lord, keep distraction and temptation at bay. that where our minds would want to wander and where our adversary would want to take us to think upon other things, Lord, we pray that you would arrest our minds and our hearts this morning. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Sermon

There are countless self-help books There are countless podcasts. There's an amazing array of different modalities of psychology. There are all sorts of people and institutions and media empires that are building up and have been built up to try to tell you who you are in your inner person. The whole field of this in philosophy and theology is called anthropology. Who we are as humans, and that's what we've been working through over the last few weeks, and we've talked before about who we are generally and the different philosophies that have been trying to influence us and teach us. Who we are as a body and soul united.

Why does our body matter? And last week we entered into multiple parts here, so what is our soul? And last week we looked at the substance of it, but we didn't really talk about what does your soul do? And so this morning I'd like for us to explore this idea of the faculties of the soul. What does your soul actually do? What's it pull off? Because our soul isn't a doormat. Your soul thinks. Your soul chooses. Your soul desires.

And so unlike normal expository sermon where I'm going straight through 1 Corinthians 2, I have listed a ton of different Bible verses on your outlines. I am not going to have time to hit every single one of those verses, but I hope that you will go and be good Bereans and find out for yourself, are these things so? But I'll try to pick up on the highlights. Theologians all the way back from Augustine in the 400s, zooming forward all the way to the 1700s with Francis Turretin.

And in the Reformed tradition, the idea of the soul and the faculties of the soul have generally been three different things that your soul has or does, faculties that it possesses. The intellect, the will, and the affections. This is what the soul does whether it was in the Garden of Eden or now. And we'll get to what happened after the Garden of Eden next week, but this week I want to talk about specifically the soul as God created it. See, in Ecclesiastes 7, verse 29, God said, God made man upright. The soul was created in God's image, not only in substance, but also in its functions.

And the first faculty of the soul is that we think. We have an intellect. Thinking and understanding reside in the inner man. Thinking happens in your soul. You might think that sounds a little bit odd. Because we're not used to thinking of our brains. But notice how the scriptures speak about thinking.

Deuteronomy 8, verse 5, you should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you. Or Proverbs 23, verse 7, for as he thinks in his heart, so he is. Eat and drink, he says to you, but his heart is not with you. Do you see, think in your heart, think in your heart.

When Mary thought about all the things that the angel had told her, where did she meditate on these things? She pondered these things, keeping them in her heart. So the heart is the seat of intellect. We think with our souls. In scripture, the heart is not just a seat of emotion, it's a seat of thought, memory, and judgment.

We talked about this last week, there's a whole pleniple of words that the scripture uses for your inner person, whether it's your heart, and we normally think of heart with like emotions and affections, things like that, but it's also tied to your spirit, your soul, and we talked about those aren't two distinct things, but they're overlapping terms, and they're all these terms that God gives us for our inner person.

Because see, your soul reflects, it feels, it reasons, Psalm 13 verse two says, how long shall I take counsel in my soul? Having sorrow in my heart daily, how long will my enemy be exalted over me? Do you see what he said there? How long shall I take counsel in my soul?

He's reasoning, he's talking to himself, he's thinking to himself in his soul. In Psalm 77 verse 6, I call to remembrance my song in the night, I meditate within my heart, and my spirit makes diligent search. These things are happening in his soul, he's meditating in his heart, in his inner being, that's where he's thinking, that's where he's meditating. The soul has knowledge, it counsels itself, it reflects upon itself. Even in difficult times, oh my soul, why are you so cast down within me? Your soul reflects.

The spirit of a person is a seat of his thought and intent. If we go to Proverbs 20, verse 27, the spirit of a man is a lamp of the Lord, searching all the inner depths of his heart. And even 1 Corinthians, what we read this morning, 1 Corinthians 2 verse 11, For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God except the spirit of God, the spirit of our immaterial life. is a place of knowledge and self-awareness. It's because God has made you animated. He's breathed into you the breath of life that you are able to think.

Because see, thinking, especially the reasoning and the moral judgments which we make, are part of being made in the image of God. This is weird for us as Westerners, right? Because the mind is often identified with the inner man, right? We think of thinking and we think of our brains. We don't often think of our souls or our hearts, our spirit, but notice how Paul speaks of it in Romans 7.

For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members." There's very much that's in his mind. He's thinking and he's got a law in his mind and yet he's got these fleshly desires and he sees this war in between him. but it's not just his mind because his soul is engaged in this battle and in this fight. Paul distinguishes between the outer man, the body, and the inner man, the soul or spirit.

So what role does your brain play then in your thinking? If your soul does the reasoning, if your soul does the thinking, why'd God give you a mushy bunch of gray matter up in your skull? Because it's an instrument. Scripture does not deny the instrumentality of our body. Our brains are a part of our body. And your soul uses the different organs of your body. This is why we talked about the psychosomatic union. You are a body and soul in one person. And so you cannot think without a brain typically. The soul uses the brain. This illustration is going to break down eventually, but as I was trying to wrestle through this and how do your soul and your brain work symbiotically.

Have you ever met a farmer before? Farming is like in their blood. It doesn't matter if you take them away from the field. If they're a farmer, they're a farmer. But have you ever met a farmer without a tractor? I mean, I met farmers in India who didn't have tractors. But they're very much farmers. But yet, if you take away a farmer's tractor, especially here in the US, are they going to be able to farm as effectively? No. Does it make them any less of a farmer? No. It may be hindered, it may slow them down.

It's the same way with when you have somebody who gets brain damage. They're still very much a thinking individual. I remember working at a care facility, and there were guys that I cared for. There were three specific guys in this hallway that were under my charge, and as I was caring for these three different guys, all of them were so mentally handicapped that, I mean, it was, you fed them, you changed them, you showered them, you cared for them, but not a single one of them could make a word out of their mouth. Each one of them had brain damage at some point in their life. and every single one of them was made in the image of God and I could tell things were going on in their brain even though they couldn't express it out of their mouths. Were they any less human, any less made in the image of God because their brains had been damaged? No, I have all assurances someday I'll have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and answer if I treated them with dignity and respect, spoke to them as human beings who could think in their souls.

Your soul uses your body, including your brain. And I don't want you to think that these are like totally two separate different things, because your soul and your body are united. But I want to ask you, as we think about our soul as the seat of our intellect, does God care about what you think about? Does God care about what you think about?

What is the meditation of your heart? What is it when you're zoning off, when you're driving down the road, or you're working in the garden, or you're mowing the lawn, what is it that your heart meditates upon? What's going in your mind? What are you thinking about? What do you delight in in your mind?

This is why Jesus, I think, very clearly, when they asked him, what is the greatest commandment? You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and he says something a little bit different than Deuteronomy chapter six. And with all your mind. Because your mind, your heart, and your soul, this is the inner portion of your being, and Jesus cares very deeply about your thought life because your thought life is part of your soul.

So what are you meditating on? What are you taking in? As a world is always trying to spoon feed you its own philosophy, its own theology, its own message about who you are, where you'll find good, where you'll find pleasure and glory, what are you feeding your mind? What are you feeding your soul as you think?

Your mind is part one of the faculties of your soul. The other faculty of your soul, the second is your will. Your will, your volition. Again, this is classic. This isn't even like reformed theology. What I'm giving you guys is very broad Christian theology. We can look at Augustine, or we can look at the medieval theologian, Aquinas.

We can look at Calvin, or we can look at Turretin, and as they define the will, I define it this way. The will is the rational appetite of the soul, the faculty by which the mind, informed by understanding, chooses or rejects. So the rational appetite of the soul, the faculty by which the mind, informed by understanding, chooses or rejects. Your will is not synonymous with your desire or with instinct. There are things that happen in your parasympathetic nervous system that you don't even think about, right?

I love watching these little videos that come up on Facebook or YouTube, right? It's like amazing dad moments, 21 amazing dad moments, right? It's like the kid's walking behind him and he doesn't see him and the kid falls and like out of nowhere, right, God's built his nervous system with such a way that it's able to just... Snatch him up from the alligator as he's fallen down into the pit, right? And it's just like, how did he even do that?

God's given us these innate senses sometimes, or sometimes almost like spidey senses, right? Where you're able to, there are things that we do we don't even think about. How often do you think about beating your heart? You don't have to, right? That's part of how God's wired your body. There's all sorts of things in your body you don't have to think about, but you just do.

That's not what we're talking about when we're talking about the will. When we're talking about the will, we're talking about the faculty of deliberate volition. Choosing because of something. And that choosing, that act of deliberately choosing something is an act of the soul. It's a function of the soul. The soul wills and the soul determines.

Job chapter 7 verse 15. So that my soul chooses strangling and death rather than my body. Job is in the pits of depression. He's expressing how he's feeling. He says, my soul chooses. Not just that his soul feels this way, but his soul chooses. Now he has to speak to his soul also and say, no, you're not going to do that.

Rejoice in the Lord instead. But we can go to Psalm 27, verse four. One thing I have desired of the Lord, that which I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. And he desires something, he desires the Lord. He desires to go to God's temple.

Why did you come to church this morning? Some of you kids, you're like, well, because mom woke me up out of bed and dad threw me in the shower and I had to come, I had no choice. But for those of you who chose to come, why did you choose to come here? There's far more entertaining churches. There's way better TV shows. I mean, let's face it, the number of people who come to church in America diminishes more and more and more as people love their entertainment and their golf and their brunches.

So why did you choose to come here? Because for some reason in your mind either you thought about something or you desired something and you chose to be here. Your soul intended to be here. The heart is where resolve is made. And your soul is where you decide who you will be and what you will do.

This is what Daniel did in Daniel 1, verse 8. But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not desire himself with a portion of the king's delicacies, nor with the wine which he drank. Therefore he requested the chief of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself. Daniel chose, purposed, willed in his heart that he would not defile himself.

It had to be from his inner man. I remember when my pastor was going through these texts in the book of Daniel when we lived outside of Chicago. And I thought, that's who I want my son to be. Somebody who would purpose in his heart. That's why we named our son Daniel. I don't know if he's going to become that person, we pray for it.

But who are you purposing in your heart that you will be? But here's the hard thing. Your spirit can be willing, but if we're honest, we know our spirit can also be stubborn. Your spirit can be willing and it can be stubborn. Jesus knew this, that's why he told the disciples in Matthew chapter 26, 41, watch and pray lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. Jesus makes a ready distinction between willing spirit and fleshly weakness.

You may resolve in your heart that what you want to do, I do not think that John and Peter, when they were there, and Jesus had told them time and again, guys, keep watch, stay awake and pray for the hour is coming, it's about to be here. Boys, stay awake and pray.

And he came back to them and their eyes were heavy. I don't think in their hearts they thought, you know what, I don't really want to listen to Jesus. Instead, I'm going to sleep. But at some point, they did overcome to their physical desires, didn't they? Could they have chosen differently? Could they have decided to stand up and do jumping jacks or pushups to stay awake and keep praying? Yeah, sure, they could have.

But there's a struggle in our soul, isn't there? As we deal with bodily weaknesses. And even spirits that aren't so willing to follow after the Lord. In Deuteronomy chapter two, verse 30, it says this, but King Sihon of Heshbon would not let us pass through.

For the Lord your God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate that he would deliver him into your hands as it is this day. Did you notice that? God hardened King Sihon, King of Heshbon's heart. What did he do? He hardened his resolve. It's not that God hardened his heart against all things of the Lord. That's not what it's saying. It's saying he hardened his resolve. He already chose in his heart, I hate the Israelites and they're not coming into my land. And so what did the Lord do? He said, okay. Okay, Sihon, that's what you want to do? Go ahead and be that way.

In his heart. was hardened, his spirit, that seat of his volition became unwilling to let God's people through. And again, the New Testament speaks all the time about the will being in the inner man. We already talked about Romans chapter seven, verses 15 and following, where Paul is struggling with this law of his mind and his inner being, right? He knows that there are things in his mind, and yet he's struggling in his mind to resolve to do the things he would want to do. But then in Romans chapter nine, he continues on and says, so then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.

Human will is real. Please, hear me out here. Because there are people who will say of Calvinists, of Reformed folks like us, because we have a high view of God's sovereignty, that you don't have a will at all. They'll say, well, according to Calvinist theology, God is just this puppet master up in heaven, playing strings, and you're nothing but marionette dolls. And we say, The Westminster Confession of Faith has an entire chapter on the will of man. You do have a will. You truly do choose. As we'll get to next week, the problem is we truly do choose to sin. Our hearts are bent towards that. But you do have a will.

Don't let anybody try to say you don't have a will. One of the cruelest things that anyone can do to another human being is to say, you don't have any choice. You don't have any will whatsoever. No, you always have a choice. You always have a will. Now, what you choose may have repercussions. This is one of the reasons why I'm not a huge fan of slapping different labels on people. and then giving it to them as an excuse, as if they have no choice and they must go along with whatever deficiency or disorder they have. No, you still have a choice who you're going to be. You have a will. God's given it to you. It's part of being made in his image. The question is, will you will for his glory or for your own pleasures?

Scripture says all over the place, that we choose, we refuse, we resolve, we seek, we desire, we delight, we submit, or we resist. And just like we talked about before, we often think about our will, and sometimes that interacts with our soul, but it's often our minds, right? It's like this brain battle, right? Brain versus being, and who's going to win out. Again, your soul uses your brain to will. You think through things, sometimes maybe it's not so well, I know that's for me, but then you choose.

Because your soul is exercising the faculty of the will to choose. A paralyzed person may not be able to move their arms and legs, but they can still choose. They can still will. There are all sorts of things that we will that aren't seen. You can decide in your heart. You can will in your heart.

I no longer like that television show. Kids do this all the time, don't they? It's one of the things that amazes me about toddlers. All of a sudden, it's like a light, a switch can just go off and all of a sudden they can decide, I don't like that food anymore. Who's influenced them? What's happened? I don't know, but something happens in their little depraved souls that all of a sudden they decide, I'm not eating that. The will exists.

So I need to ask you, what are you choosing most often? What are you choosing in your heart? What are you choosing in your life? Every day you are filled with a pleniply of different options. What are you choosing? I don't know. I beg you, don't let it just be pushed off to the side that, well, it doesn't really matter what I choose. No, whether you eat or you drink or whatever you do, do it unto the glory of God. Choose for his glory.

Lastly, there's also affections. The third faculty of the soul is affections.

The scripture presents affections, things like your desires, your loves, your fears, your joys, your griefs, your hopes, as integral operations of your soul. Affections are neither mere bodily instincts nor random emotions. affections are spiritual, moral movements of your inner person. In biblical understanding of a man or of a person, the affections flow from your heart, from your soul, from your spirit. And your affections are governed by the will and by your understanding. And your affections are either ordered or disordered depending on the moral condition of your soul. What you desire is directly tied to, your affections are directly tied to the moral state of your soul, the condition of your soul.

So what are the affections? Jonathan Edwards wrote an entire treatise on this. called religious affections, and he defined them as the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul. Affections aren't just emotions, nor are they just animal impulses like mere instincts, but your affections are morally charged desires and responses. Your affections are morally charged desires and responses. Your love, your joy, your hatred, your fear, your grief, your zeal. These are affections of the soul, and they are what will primarily dictate and motivate you in your life, and they come from your soul.

You may think that, well, I overeat because I have these instincts, and I just need to eat, and I can't help my instincts. No, you can control. I can control. Every time I put a donut in my mouth, it's because I love the sugar more than I love the pimples and the weight. And it's my choice. And I'm choosing that I want to set my love there.

This is the thing you face every day in your life as you struggle with priorities, as you struggle with the different issues in your life, and you react with passionate affections one way or another, and then out of those affections, you choose things.

You consider them in your mind, in your heart, and then you set your plans in action, and you do them. There's plenty of biblical evidence for the affections of our souls. Your soul rejoices, grieves, and longs, and is troubled. Psalm 42 verses 1 through 5. I'm just going to quote part of that. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God.

The soul can experience grief, longing, and despair. This is why when you come to a funeral of a loved one and you weep and you wail, but there's something in you that when you go home, you're just exhausted. And you know it's not just because physical. You didn't just run a marathon, but you feel like you just ran 100 miles because your soul is exhausted from grief and sorrow.

Psalm 84 verse 2 speaks of the affections of the soul. My soul longs, yes, even faints for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. This is the affections of the psalmist crying out, yearning, yearning for God, yearning for God's people, yearning for something bigger and better than the fears and the failures of this life. He knows that even the birds have their nests there and can find rest, and he just wants rest for his soul. Make no doubt about it, Jesus had affections in his soul as well. He spoke of it that way. John chapter 12, verse 27.

My soul is troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. Before this purpose, I came to this hour. Jesus sees his affections as not just things that are outside of him, Or somehow his sorrow isn't just because he's thinking that, oh, the cross is coming, but it's in his soul that Jesus knows that the time and the hour is at hand.

And you can see him here wrestling with his soul. My soul is troubled. And you see his mind wrestling in his soul as he says, Father, save me from this hour, but for this purpose I came to this hour. Jesus is speaking within his own soul, finding resolve, finding the will to go to the cross because he loved his father and he loved you. Do you see Jesus loves you with his body and with his soul? The cross was no accident, but the true man, Jesus Christ, thought in his mind, knew the price that was going to come at redemption, and wrestled with his soul with the pain of drinking down the cup of his father's wrath, and yet resolved to bring his father and heaven glory because he loved you. Jesus had a soul filled with affections, zeal for his Father's will. The soul loves, it hates, it desires, and it rejoices.

Proverbs 4.23 says, keep your heart with all diligence, for out it springs the issues of life. The heart is the source of your affections. You just go all over the Psalms with this, Psalm 119, 20. My soul breaks with longing for your judgments at all times. Your affections flow from your soul.

I don't wanna beat a dead horse here. We're gonna skip number three about the soul being spirit and grieved. But I do wanna point out the distinction from your bodily emotions. Scripture does not deny that your emotions involve the body. trembling, weeping, but the source and the meaning of those experiences is in your soul. Trembling, weeping, flushing, sweating, other physiological responses, things that happen to your body can and do often go along with emotional experiences. But the scriptures consistently teach us that the soul and moral significance of these experiences don't lie in your body. but in your soul. Again, Edwards emphasized this when he said, it is not the body, but the mind only that is the proper seat of the affections. Psalm 73 verse 21, thus my heart was grieved and I was vexed in my mind. Bitterness is located in the soul, not just in your hormones or your nerves.

Now sometimes your body can be off. You may have neurodevelopmental issues in your brain. You may have chemical imbalances, and your body does affect. You may have hormonal balances. There are ladies who go through menopause, and later in life, they have a hard time wrestling with their emotions. Postpartum ladies really struggle with this, right? It's because your body does produce these different hormones, and it does affect the state of your emotions and your affections.

The question is, do you reign over your mortal bodies, or do you just go with it? your bodies. Guys, this happens too. Midlife crises, bipolar disorder, there's all sorts of stuff. We know that we have a psychosomatic union, our body and soul are interlocked together.

Paul, when he's writing to the Philippians, he says, For God is my witness how greatly I long for you with all the affection of Jesus Christ. You know where this is going, my favorite Greek word, splogna. He longs for them with all of his bowels, all of his guts. When he thinks about them, when Paul was thinking about the Philippians and he was remembering them and the hardships they were facing and he remembered their faith and their love for Christ Jesus, he loved them from deep down in his kidneys.

Because you know this, your affections, your emotions often, people will get all blushing. You'll feel your heart seem to feel warm when you love someone. There are physical manifestations of deep feelings, but those deep feelings reside in the inner person.

Make no doubt about it, your feelings aren't neutral. One of the things that we had to talk with our kids about early and often, and we still do regularly, is your emotions don't control you. You must control your emotions. We live in a culture, in a therapeutic age, where your emotions are neutral. Your emotions are good. You need to feel those emotions. You need to just enjoy those emotions. Sometimes you need to latch your identity to those emotions.

Brothers and sisters, that's a scary place. That is a scary, scary thing. It rips apart families. It creates tyrants of little kids. It causes havoc in the workplace. It rips apart marriages. I beg you, do not let your emotions define you. Your emotions are evaluative.

They're directional. They either point towards flowing to God or to ourselves. We should seek to have rightly ordered affections. Psalm 119, 97. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. And even Jesus, as we just spoke about earlier, Matthew chapter 22, verse 27, Jesus said to them, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Psalm 37, delight yourself also in the Lord, and he shall give you the desires of your heart. Are your desires pointing towards God's glory, towards loving others, or do your desires point towards sin, the world, yourself, and your idols?

I'm not going to spend much time on this part, but that's going to be next week, but we have often disordered affections. Jeremiah chapter 17, verse 9, the heart is deceitfully wicked above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Ephesians chapter 2, verse 3. Speaking of us before we came to Christ, among whom also we once all conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. Your affections, brothers and sisters, reside in and flow out of your soul, so what do you love? What are you zealous for? What do you get angry at? What do you sorrow over?

These are not value neutral questions. but they show us what we're treasuring, what's most important in our inner being. That's why Jesus said, it's not what goes into a man that defiles him, but it's what comes out of him. Because out of the heart, the mouth speaks, or out of your inner person. Man, just thinking last night and this morning as Olivia and I were talking, I was not, I was a pretty grumpy guy last night. and overwhelmed this morning, it became very clear as I was trying to think about this sermon, just how sinful my own affections can be, that I wanted ease, I wanted quiet, I wanted Brian's way, and not to love and serve my own family. Our affections need to be discipled. Our thoughts need to be changed, not just our actions. What brings you joy? What do you love? What are you searching and seeking after?

You were made to think God's thoughts. You were made to desire God's desires. And you were made to will what God wills. That's part of what it means to be made in the image of God. In holiness and righteousness. You were created to think God's thoughts, desire his ways, choose his will. God gave you the faculties of your souls as a gift. You have been entrusted with your soul.

And this is why someday you must also give account for your soul. It was meant to reflect God's image in your mind, in your will, and in your affections. So I end with this appeal. I beg you, please do not neglect your soul. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet loses his own soul?

What are you loving? What are you treasuring and pondering in your heart? What are you meditating upon? What wakes you up in the morning And what gives you peace at night? What comforts your grieving soul when death weighs heavy upon it? Are your affections set upon Christ? Do you meditate upon God's law? Do you delight in his word day and night? Do you tell your soul, I know what you naturally want, but we're going to will what our Father in heaven wants. Will you be like Christ? because he's poured out his spirit in your heart that you can actually do it. What are you doing with your soul? Do you value what God has entrusted to you?

Closing Prayer

Let's pray. God, we pray that you would please help us. Lord, you know that we don't, we don't fully understand a whole bunch of these things. There's a whole lot of technical language in this sermon, a lot more red than normal. God, we pray that you would please somehow use your word, that it would not return void, that you might illuminate the minds of our hearts God, we need your spirit. Lord, we need you to help us think correctly, to help us to choose for your glory and give us affections that are from heaven and not from our fleshly desires.

God, I feel weak. Only your spirit can actually do anything with this sermon to build up your people. And so God, care for your sheep. Where there were wrong things, let them blow away like chaff in the wind. And where there's truth, Lord, let us walk in it. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.