Welcome to the Prospering Soul Podcast. This limited series is all about how to take care of your soul and how to make sure you understand the ways to be healthy and balanced in life. In this series, John Meadert, lead pastor of Cross City Church, sits down to explain one of the most important secrets of his own spiritual growth and a detailed explanation of how people change. Welcome to the Prospering Soul Podcast. I'm John Meadert, pastor at Cross City Church.
I've been pastor for about 40 years altogether. I have, over the last 30 years or so, really studied carefully how people change. I've learned that really what happens inside a person's soul is what makes them successful in life with all the other things on the outside if the inside is healthy and strong. That's why I love to talk about soul care. I love to talk about the subject called the prospering soul.
I vividly remember visiting a couple a number of years ago in another city from where I am now. And this couple on the outside looked like they have everything together. It was a beautiful home. It was a bungalow style architecture type home that the husband had renovated completely. All the modern amenities inside, the windows, new doors, hardware, the whole bed, very classy. Two luxury vehicles sat in the driveway, the kind of cars anybody could be happy driving.
These folks were picture perfect. They had a lot of beauty. They had a lot of money. The husband was ruggedly handsome, tremendously successful. The kids had this mirror image look of these parents and had a reputation as the best little athletes in town. It all looked so good. But when I sat down to talk to them, I could see something in their eyes that said it all. This family was prosperous in every way outwardly. Their souls, however, their insides were not prospering.
And I had been called to come and discuss their marital problems with them. That didn't take me long to see that the problem was not necessarily their relationship, but the problem had to do with their lives, their hearts. Because their souls were not healthy, their relationship with each other was empty. And the only thing that was really shining about them was the outside of the life. So they were pretty polished on the outside, not so much on the inside.
And what was on the outside was no longer enough. They needed something different inside of their lives. Well, just using that family as an illustration, I would say to you that the above scenario was repeated a million times a day in our world. Outwardly things look great. We have that Instagram look often, but on the inside, our hearts do not look quite so well. And as I was studying about how people change, I realized that this couple needed what we all need. We need a prospering soul.
A few years ago, a friend recommended a book to me by a man named Peter Lord, and the title of the book was Soul Care. And I was intrigued by the title. I purchased the book back in about 1990 and began reading it. At the time I was traveling and I shared the gospel with someone that accepted Christ. I didn't have anything to give them to help them with their spiritual growth, so I gave them my copy of Soul Care.
And I never replaced it, but the idea has always been in my mind that taking care of our souls is an incredibly important thing. And so I just began to study the Bible myself. I began to yearn for God to show me a way that I as a pastor and a counselor could share truths from the scripture with people about why they have struggles in their personal lives. For example, how do I explain to someone why they cannot seem to get rid of habitual sin that's been ingrained in their lives for years?
How can I explain why they can't deal with certain fears and anxieties about different aspects of their life? Why can I not explain to them how they struggle in acts of obedience? And I actually pray, God, give me the ability to connect with people, to give them answers from your word, because I knew those answers were there. And what God revealed to me, I am sharing with you. In this series of talks, we're going to be dealing with subjects like, what am I?
I mean, how am I as a human being actually made up? We're going to talk about the divine process of obedience, how we actually learn to obey the Lord, how we learn to do the right thing. And some of us out there would just say, well, that's simple, you just do it. Well, it is simple in that you just do it, but what if you can't just do it? What goes wrong when you can't do what you know you want to do or should do? What about when you fail to do what you know is absolutely right?
What happens then? We need to come to grips with the clear answer to that question. In the process of this podcast, we'll be talking about enemies of the soul. I don't know if you know this, but you're in a war, literally, and you need to know how to win that war. We look at some weapons we use against the enemies of our soul. The Bible says we have everything in Christ Jesus pertaining to life and godliness. You'll remember some of the verses as I share these truths with you.
So we'll look at weapons we use. I'm going to teach you the three battlefields on which this war is waged, the battle of the mind and the will and emotions, which is what makes up your soul, by the way. We're going to talk about the price that you have to pay in order to have a prospering soul. It's very costly to live a life that's filled with prosperity inside, and yet it can take place and you can overcome the things that set you back.
One insightful writer that I read years ago made this statement. He wrote, the truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable. That podcast that we're talking about, the Prospering Soul podcast here, may well do that with you. It may make you miserable for just a little bit. But I want you to know there's a great end to this, a goal in mind.
And I want you to stay with me as I introduce this prospering soul idea and help you understand yourself according to the Bible and help you understand how to bring great change into your life and to prosper. There's a Bible verse in 3 John. It's in the first few verses of 3 John and it's a letter from John to Gaius. And let me just read these first few verses and pick up on the word prosperity in just a moment as I read it.
It says, the elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in the truth, beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health just as your soul prospers. I hope you caught that. He goes on and says, for I rejoice greatly when brethren came and testified of the truth that is in you just as you walk in the truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.
John, the apostle, is saying to this man, Gaius, he's saying, beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in good health just as your soul prosper. That word prosper means to make good progress. It means to grow. It doesn't really have anything to do with finances. It doesn't mean cars, money, and houses. It simply means good progress in your personal life.
Taken literally, this Bible verse says, I pray that you might make good progress in all things, that you might grow and continue to grow. When he was addressing people who had made a commitment to Jesus Christ. And here's the big deal here. He saw a connection between the soul making good progress and the rest of life making good progress. Again, I'll read that verse. I pray that you prosper and be in good health just as your soul prospers or progresses well.
So I'm going to come at this with the idea of if we can help your soul prosper, if we can make your soul progress well, then the rest of your life will do well in addition to that. What goes on on the inside definitely affects everything else. I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that when things are going bad spiritually, they seem to be going badly everywhere. In the book of Psalms, David spoke of a connection between sin and even the aching in his bones.
He says, my bones grown because of my sin. The same is true of Solomon in Proverbs chapter 17. He talks about the connection between soul and the rest of your life. So there's a direct link between the physical and the spiritual. We should come to a common agreement that if things are not going well spiritually, even though they may seem okay physically or financially, they're in fact not okay. And one day we'll wake up and find out just how bad it really is.
So there's a connection between how well you progress in your soul and how well you are in the rest of your life. And John says something else in verse three that I'll bring to your attention. He said, I rejoice greatly when brethren came and testified of the truth that is in you just as you walk in the truth. So this verse tells us that the truth that is in us directly influences the way we walk. Here's a principle. If you're writing something down, this is a great thing to write down.
What is in you influences what comes out of you. Have you ever stopped to wonder why did I say what I just said or why did I think what I just thought? Well, what is inside of you influences what comes out of you in the way of your thought life or what you say or your action. And what comes out of you is not just something that just happens. It's not just natural. It's really connected to what's on the inside of you. What comes out of your mouth or your thought life or your actions.
It's a direct connection to what truth is in you. You see, you do what you believe. You can't just throw what you believe out the window. Our actions and our behavior are directly linked to what we believe about God or about truth or about our relationship with God. And every other aspect of truth or doctrine is not something we can neglect or despise. So John's bringing that out for this individual he's writing to. I rejoice greatly when brethren came and testified of the truth that is in you.
Just as you walk in the truth, I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in the truth. So let me just tell you, if your soul is going to prosper, you're going to have to have an understanding of who you are. And my prayer is that we would learn to nurture and take care of our soul in the days ahead. Now we're going to begin in John, with the verses I've shared with you, but really there's a prior verse that God got my attention with in the book of Proverbs.
It says this, keep your heart with all diligence for out of it sprung the issues of life. That's chapter four, verse 26 of Proverbs. During the period of time which I had been studying this, I'd been bombarded by all kinds of literature concerning how to help people. Most of them took the approach of intermingling a little bit of psychology and psychotherapy with certain teachings of the Bible and applying them to people's lives.
And the insinuation was, yes, you need the Bible, but you also need psychology without which you will not be able to obtain victory. And as I read one of Jay Adams' books on biblical counseling, my questions were echoing inside as I read what he wrote. It says this in his book on biblical counseling. He said, was the Christian world really left in the dark for all these years until psychology came along? Were we really left alone? Were we really without the truth?
Did the church have nothing to say until the early 1900s when some of the psychology wise men and gurus began to come to the forefront? Did Charles Spurgeon, who was a great preacher, not have anything to say from the word of God that would change people's lives? Did John Cabin not have anything to say? How about the Wesley brothers? How about Peter and Paul and the apostles in the New Testament? They didn't seem to have a need for psychology and psychotherapy to help people.
And what about Jesus himself? Was not he equipped to deal with the same issues in people's lives that we deal with today? If all that is true and these men were equipped and had something to share that would change lives, then would we not find answers in the scriptures instead of in modern secular thought? Wouldn't we find answers in God's word? And that's my conviction that we have answers in God's word. It's not that modern thought can't help at all.
It's simply that it often deviates from the truth of God's word. I think there's an ancient secret that people are missing and that is that God has spoken about the problems we face in life. And I began to conclude years ago that there was no way to find an answer to human predicament apart from the scripture. And if I take every problem to the scripture, I'll find the answers I need.
We won't have all of our questions answered all the time, but we will find solutions to the problems that we face. And we'll find the kind of prosperity, that soul prosperity that God promises in scripture. So that's the journey we're on. And in order to do that, we need to think a little bit about who we are. How are we made up? And I'm going to begin that part of this talk by asking the question, are you spirit or are you soul? We know you have a body, but are you spirit or are you soul?
You know, if you do a word study on the word soul in the Bible, you may end up being confused, just like I was at first, in the Old Testament, you find soul defined synonymously with heart and spirit. But if you search the New Testament and notice the unfolding of scripture and how the word soul is used on a timeline or in chronological order, something happens to this word. It begins to morph. Its use begins to allow for a clearer and cleaner definition.
When Jesus spoke of the word soul, he used it in the same way we might use the word spirit. But after the resurrection and after the Holy Spirit was given to all believers, the word soul is used in an entirely different manner. From that point forward, the word soul is almost always distinguished from the word spirit and most often in the same verses. So I'm going to give you some examples of that. And first, that's the only one's five, verse 23.
Paul says, now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely and may your whole spirit, soul and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. So Paul prayed for them in a very specific way. He basically said, I pray that every aspect of your life will be preserved blameless until Jesus Christ comes back. But he uses under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit some key words that we need to know.
What the Holy Spirit reveals here is important that man's nature is trichotomic. Now I know that's kind of a philosophical word, but trichotomy means there's a threefold makeup of your being. Paul uses three words to describe the complete man, spirit, soul and body. And what we see here in that verse and also in Hebrews 412 is a clear distinction between the three different parts of our lives. And Paul prays that God would sanctify or grow or progress each area of our being.
So let's look more deeply at that. First off, let's examine and acknowledge the fact that each of us have a body. I mean, the truth is, it's hard to deny that. Some of you would like less body, some of you would like more, some of you would like a younger body, some older, but we all have a body. Everybody has a body. The word body there simply means a flesh and blood aspect of us. But the body does not make up what we are. It's just what we live in.
I've seen bodies that didn't have a spirit or soul in them. I've seen dead bodies. They didn't have any life in them because there's more to life than just the body. In fact, the most important aspect of life is not the body, but the soul and the spirit. And in these verses, we find Paul asking God to preserve your whole spirit, soul and body. So what's the soul and the spirit that Paul mentions? Well, the word soul in the Greek is the word suke.
It's where we get our English word psyche or psychology. And the word suke means mind, the will and the emotions. All of us as human beings have a body. And in that body dwells a soul which is made up of the mind, will and emotions. This is key to you understanding yourself. Now, in addition to that, the word spirit is the Greek numa. It literally means the breath of life. It's often used to describe the wind in its Greek form.
So the word spirit deals with the breath of life and each person, what gives life and what kind of life it gives. I'm aware there's a lot of notable scholarly writers who say that man is dichotomic. That he's twofold in his makeup and they reject the trichotomic understanding that I've just introduced you to and prefer to see just spirit and soul in some sort of union. Or they simply believe that these two were two words describing the same element. And I've read their arguments.
They've never been satisfied with their explanations of the two passages of scripture that make such a clear distinction here. And I note the separateness in this Bible between soul and spirit. And it seems Christians make the mistake of only looking at the aspect of spirit in their life. They don't understand how the spirit relates to the soul. But that's the focus of this study more than anything else.
When we understand that the soul is directly influenced by the spirit and understand how to let it be influenced by the spirit as it should be, we've begun to solve some real problems in our lives. Now the second thing to keep in mind is this one. The soul is directly influenced by the spirit. The soul is given life by the spirit, you might say. Remember the word spirit means the breath of life, the wind.
The spirit inside of you gives life to the soul, that is the mind, will and emotions and directly influences how you think and what you feel and what you want to do. In Hebrews 412, there's a great verse that talks about this. And it talks about it in relation to the word of God. Listen carefully. For the word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit. I hope you caught that.
Piercing to the division of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. So that passage distinguishes between the soul and the spirit. That's the second passage we looked at that does it. So I want you to see some analogies here that help you understand how the soul is influenced by the spirit. In this verse, there's a distinction between soul and spirit, joints and marrows and thoughts and intents.
Let me just take one example out of these. Hebrews 412 gives us this. It says, let's look at what gives life to what. And the middle example is in this verse that says the division of soul and spirit and secondly of joints and marrow. And we can understand that because we know something about the body. You know that the bone is the skeletal structure inside of your skin and under your muscles, they give support to your body. They keep you standing up.
You remove your bones and you simply slash to the floor. You have nothing to hold you up, but something inside those bones actually gives life to them and it's called marrow. Basically it flows on the inner part of that bone and literally gives life to the bones and joints. It allows your bones not to become brittle, so brittle that they just break and crumble. It fights diseases. All kinds of things take place within that marrow.
But the point is that the marrow gives life to the bones and the joints. Your bones and joints aren't much without that marrow. The last illustration of this verse is that the word of God is a discernment of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Your thoughts are not just random poppies, not just things that happen in and of themselves. They are directly influenced by the intents of your heart. So the intent of your heart gives life to your thoughts.
John MacArthur's commentary on Matthew says, the lust is what causes one to look. And I'm pointing out these analogies so that you can understand in the same way the marrow gives life to the bones, in the same way the intents of your heart gives life to your thoughts, the spirit gives life to the soul. I'll even go further and say this. The spirit determines the nature of the soul. The spirit you have in you determines the nature of your mind, your will and emotions.
And the key to you as a follower of Jesus, to changing what you think or what you want to do and how you feel when you do it, is to learn to get on the same wavelength as the spirit that lives inside of you. Your spirit, if you have the spirit of God, directly influences your soul. This is key to learning how to change. I want you to look with me at some biblical examples of how the nature of the spirit determines the action of the soul. And then we'll get more specific at how it relates to you.
In Mark 5 there's a story that the Bible has of a man called the Geresine Demoniac. And here's what the passage says. It says, They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gadarenes. And when he had come out of the boat, that would be Jesus, he immediately there met him out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit.
He had his dwelling among the tombs, and no one could bind him, not even with chains, because he had often been bound with shackles and chains, and the chains had been pulled apart by him, and the shackles broken in pieces. Neither could anyone tame him, and always night and day he was in the mountains and in the tombs crying out and cutting himself with stones. So this man's demon possessed. He didn't know Jesus Christ, even though the demons inside of him recognized Jesus as Jesus approached.
But this was a man full of the spirit of evil, an unclean spirit. It's also a stark picture of someone's soul, their mind, will, and emotion being directly influenced by that spirit that dwelled inside of him. That's a clear, vivid example that the spirit gives life to the mind, will, and emotions, and in this case even the body, he was able to rip those chains off of him.
Now there's another passage in Luke chapter 9 verse 51 that says this, it came to pass when the time came, had come for him to be received up, that he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem. This is Jesus on his way to the cross. He sent messengers before his face and as they went they entered a village of the Samaritans to prepare for him.
And when his disciples, James and John saw this, they said, Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them just as Elijah did? But he turned and rebuked them and said, You do not know what manner of spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives but to save them. And they went to another village. So Jesus used an unusual line here.
He said, You do not know what manner of spirit you are of, meaning that John and what John said did not come from the Holy Spirit. He said, Wait a minute, these guys were disciples, but these disciples had not yet been given the Holy Spirit. They were walking with Jesus and following him. They were starting to learn of his teaching, but they wanted to send fire down from heaven to burn up people. He would oppose Jesus at the time and Jesus said, You don't know what spirit you are of.
He says, Your spirit is influencing your mind, will and emotions and what you're saying is not according to my will or the will of my Holy Spirit. I don't want you to do that. But I can take this even further. You might have said to these guys, what are you saying? You need to quit talking like that. What's wrong with you? But Jesus went further and recognized the real problem and that was the spirit in them. Do you remember how John later responded to opposition in Acts 4?
After Pentecost, after he would receive the Holy Spirit. John and Peter responded to persecution by praying for more boldness and trusting God with the result. It's the same man, but something took place in his life. There was a change of spirit that changed John's life and get this key. The change of spirit changed his response to the circumstance. This is the point I'm going to make to you over and over again.
When you have a changed spirit, when the Holy Spirit lives inside of you, it will change how you respond to every circumstance in life. There is a direct link between spirit and soul. That's why we often know by looking at the fruit of a person's life, what spirit lives inside of them. That's why you and I, as born again believers, have every reason to expect good fruit to come out of our lives because of the spirit that dwells inside of us.
He's the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit should directly influence what we say and what our mind, will and emotions come up with. He influences the soul. As you process that over these last few moments, I want you to try to get that in mind. You're made up of three parts. You have a body, you have a spirit, and if you've been saved, born again, you've been given the spirit of God, and you have a soul, a mind, will and emotions.
It is the cultivating of the mind, will and emotions to be in tune with the spirit that God's made to dwell in you that brings incredible change to your life. It allows you to face circumstances in a good way instead of a bad way. It allows you to control anger or fear or panic. All those kinds of things can be brought under control by the power of the Holy Spirit that gives life to your mind, your will and emotions. In our next podcast, we're going to talk about what spirit influences you.
Just look at your life and see how you respond to things that are challenging, and ask yourself the question, what's giving life to my mind, to my will, to my emotions? What spirit influences me? Stay tuned with us on the Prospering Soul Podcast. Looking forward to seeing you connect again as we walk through the Prospering Soul truths. I pray it'll be fruitful for you, and it will change your life like it's changed mine. Thank you, and God bless.