Holistic Christian Living
Spiritual leaders should help
all Christians live balanced
and integrated lives that please God.
Here's Gene:
Earlier the apostle Paul prayed
for the Thessalonians.
And it's a beautiful prayer.
And now he's going to pray again.
But let's look at what he prayed
previously in chapter 3, verses 12 to 13--
I call it faithful intercession:
And may the Lord cause you to increase
and overflow with love for one another
and for everyone, just as we do for you.
May he make your hearts blameless
in holiness before our God and Father
at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ
with all his saints. Amen.
But that wasn't the conclusion of his prayer.
Because he picks it up again
as he's concluding this letter.
And it has to do with their
spirit, soul, and body.
He uses these three words.
Another beautiful prayer. It reads:
Now may the God of peace himself
sanctify you completely.
And may your whole spirit, soul,
and body be kept sound and blameless
at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul uses three words here:
spirit, soul, and body.
But notice he also uses the word sanctify.
And when he uses the word sanctify,
it really means holiness.
That word is really related to holiness.
And we see this very clearly stated
throughout Scripture that there are
really three facets of sanctification.
There is positional holiness.
In other words, when we come to Jesus Christ,
when we put our faith in Jesus Christ,
God sees us perfectly holy.
And if he didn't, we could not really
relate to him.
That's why he sent Jesus Christ.
That we call positional holiness.
And then secondly, there is what we call
theologically progressive holiness
or progressive sanctification.
And that is, once we become a believer,
we are to become more and more
like Jesus Christ until he comes again.
Until, and when he comes again,
then we will be ultimately sanctified
or ultimately holy--ultimate holiness.
Three phases: positional holiness,
progressive holiness, ultimate holiness.
And ultimate holiness really relates to
the fact that we are with Christ.
We've been transformed into
his image completely.
We're a part of the bride of Christ,
that's so beautifully described
in the book of Revelation.
When we are presented,
as it were, with white robes to Christ.
We are the bride and he is the groom.
Perfect holiness.
Now here, when Paul uses the word sanctified,
when he writes to the Thessalonians,
he's dealing with progressive holiness.
What he is saying to these believers,
what he's praying for these believers
is that they will become more and more
like Jesus Christ.
And he uses these three words
to describe this progressive experience
of becoming more and more like Jesus Christ:
spirit, soul, and body.
Now this raises a very interesting question.
Because when we look at these three words,
there are some who conclude that this, in essence,
describes who we are as human beings.
If you want to describe a human being,
this is the construct that describes us.
We are spirit. That is the spiritual.
We are soul. That is the psychological.
We are body. We are physical.
The only problem is that when you study
the word soul and spirit carefully, the authors
of Scriptures uses it interchangeably
to mean basically the same thing.
And that's why some call themselves
dichotomous rather than trichotomous.
A dichotomous view is that basically
when we look at Scripture
and we attempt to define a human being,
that we think in terms of the material.
That is the body.
And we think in terms of the immaterial,
that is the spiritual, soul, immaterial part.
We are body and we are then immaterial, as it were,
made in the image of God.
The problem is that when you study Scripture,
you find even more than soul and spirit
used to describe who we are in the immaterial part
of our image--the image of God.
For example, you have spirit.
You have soul.
You also have the word mind.
Well how does the word "mind" relate
to soul and to spirit?
We also have the word heart.
Our heart.
How does that relate to spirit and soul and mind?
Or we simply have a reference to our inner being,
within this body in which we live.
And so there are some conclude that this
inner being involves these different facets:
spirit, soul, mind, and heart.
One of my good friends, who's now with Jesus,
used to say: I'm not a trichotomous.
I'm not a dichotomous.
I'm a multi-chotomous.
In the sense of describing who we are--
our real inner being.
The Bible uses spirit, soul, mind, and heart
to describe that.
And it's very difficult for us
to understand the differentiations.
But there's still a mystery here.
Because when you go to a passage
like Hebrews chapter 4, verse 12.
Notice how the author uses these words:
For the word of God is living and effective
and sharper than any double-edged sword...
And by the way, let me simply say:
That's quite a metaphor--a double-edged sword
describing the Word of God.
And this double-edged sword, the Word of God,
is penetrating or will penetrate:
...penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit,
joints and marrow.
It is able to judge...
And then he uses a word:
...the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
And there you have soul and spirit
and thoughts and heart.
And yet you have an emphasis on
the Word of God dividing soul and spirit.
So it leaves us with a mystery
in terms of our inner being.
How do you describe that?
But the fact of the matter is, we can
understand sufficiently that if we're going
to grow spiritually as we should,
we certainly should grow spiritually
in our soul, in our spirit.
But with other words: in our minds, in our hearts.
Becoming more and more like Jesus Christ
as we reflect who we are in Christ
through this body in which we live.
Until God takes us home
to be with Jesus. And gives us then,
ultimately as believers, a brand new body.
So it's a great mystery.
And some day it will be very interesting to--
[talk about this with] the Lord Jesus.
We probably won't even need to talk about it
because we'll probably understand it.
But here's the point that I think we have
to be very careful of.
And that is that we don't take these three words--
body, soul, and spirit--and develop
a theological construct and say:
This explains who we are.
There's more to that concept when we look at
the totality of Scripture.
The important thing is that we be balanced
in our approach.
And that's why we go back to the fact that
Paul prayed that their whole body,
that their whole spirit,
their soul will be preserved blameless
until the day of Jesus Christ.
And that's balance, I think in terms of our
spiritual growth in Christ.
But I raise this question for application:
In what specific ways can we help all Christians
to become integrated and not compartmentalized
in their lives?
And what happens when Christians fail to maintain
the balance for which Paul prayed?
That balance really he prayed for:
body, soul, and spirit.
Well that's not an easy question to answer.
Except to say that there are several ways
in which this sort of trilogy
is used to explain who we are
and how we live.
For example, we can talk about the head.
We can talk about the heart--our inner being.
We can talk about our hands to illustrate action.
When we talk about the head,
certainly we can talk about cognition.
What we know--knowledge.
We can talk about the mind.
And when we see the word "mind,"
it's really more than brain.
We certainly can decipher that.
But again, we don't understand it totally.
We talk about knowledge.
We can understand that.
But the point is that if we're not careful,
we can focus on knowledge
or the head or the cognitive.
And because we know certain things,
we believe that we're spiritual.
Or this is the basis of spirituality.
And that can lead to an extreme.
The other aspect of that is the heart,
which relates to emotion.
It relates to feelings.
It relates to the mind.
And if we focus on the heart or on feelings,
and then that can lead to emotionalism.
It can lead to basing faith on feelings
rather than on fact.
And it creates confusion for us.
It creates, as it were, spiritual ups and downs
because we're relying on emotion,
rather than on the facts.
And that's the reason why it's
so important for us to maintain balance
in our Christian lives.
And I believe this is the very important principle
that Paul is emphasizing here
as he closes out this letter.
And so let me just read
that Principle once again.
I've called it Holistic Christian Living:
Spiritual leaders should help
all Christians live balanced
and integrated lives that please God.