Solutions for Distorted Souls

Sin can leave our souls misshapen in subtle ways. Yet the Great Physician offers treatment to reveal and straighten what has gone awry. Today, Sinclair Ferguson conveys the means of being reshaped into the likeness of Christ.

This week on Things Unseen, we’ve been thinking about what we’ve called “soul shapes,” or more accurately, soul misshapes. We were created to be the image and likeness of God, but that image has been distorted and the likeness profoundly marred. Our souls—who we are essentially as human beings—well, they’ve been bent out of shape, and although the root of the distortion is the same in all of us, it manifests itself in different ways from one person to another.

I remember as a youngster being helped by a comment written in the personal diary of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, a young Scottish minister in the first half of the nineteenth century. He wrote to this effect: “I have discovered that in me lie the seeds of every known sin.” And we mustn’t forget that, but it’s also true that each of us can be fertile soil for particular sins. Our souls can be bent out of shape in very individual and personal ways. I suspect that may be the reason that some of the letters in the New Testament have fairly lengthy lists of the sins of the flesh, or as we might say, distortions of our soul shape.

Think of one of these lists, the one that Paul gives in Galatians 5:19–21, about the works of the flesh. “They’re evident,” he says, “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.” One thing we’re surely bound to notice about these ugly soul shapes is that some of them are more subtle than others. They include not only the obvious sins of the flesh like sexual immorality, but also what our late friend, Jerry Bridges, used to call “respectable” sins, like strife and enmity and jealousy. And the other New Testament lists are rather similar.

Isn’t it interesting, for example, that we sometimes still speak about a person being eaten up with jealousy? What a picture that is of a soul shape: a person who sees something that someone else has that they want, and they begin to eat themselves away. Can you imagine? I suppose our technology could give us a good picture of that on a computer screen. A person who’s jealous of someone else, and every moment of that jealousy, they are eating themselves away in a process of self-destruction.

I wonder if you’ve ever met a Christian who gets irritated and angry and says to you, “Now, I don’t suffer fools gladly.” It sounds as though they regard that as a virtue, but they don’t realize it’s destroying them. They’re suffering from a clogging up of their spiritual arteries so that the love and patience of the Lord Jesus isn’t able to pulsate through them, to enable them to pity sinners and to love them. After all, Jesus was willing to suffer fools in order to save them and transform them. Jesus was full of compassion for foolish wandering sheep, but this person thinks such people deserve everything that he metes out to them in the way he dismisses them. He breaks bruised reads, extinguishes dimly burning wicks. He doesn’t realize how un-Jesus-like his soul is shaped.

And the list of misshapen, distorted, disintegrating soul shapes could go on and on, don’t you think? And here’s the challenging thing: we often don’t notice it in ourselves, and that’s a real problem, but it is one for which the Lord provides courses of treatment that will help us. Let me just mention two of these quickly.

The first is friendships—Christian friends who care about us and know us, and we can trust them, and they love us enough to wound us if it’s necessary. I know it’s a terrible thing to be wounded in the house of your friends, but remember there’s another Scripture that says, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Prov. 27:6). Incidentally, that’s one thing the gift of marriage is for, isn’t it, to help us know ourselves better and to be encouraged to grow in grace.

And here’s another element of the treatment that goes along with the first, and it’s a remedy provided for us even if we’re not married and even if we don’t have really close friends, because every Christian has a friend who sticks closer than a brother. And how does He help us? He helps us through the regular preaching of His Word. I hope you’ve often discovered that under the faithful preaching of the Word—discovered the Lord Jesus speaking to you in a way no one else could, speaking about things in your life that, as far as you know, no one else could possibly know about. He’s like a physician who has a very special diagnostic gift, and as His Word is preached in the grace of the Spirit, we sense that the Lord Jesus is speaking to us personally. It’s almost as though we hear God’s voice saying the same words He said to the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration: “This is my Son, listen to Him.”

I think this may be why Paul told Timothy to preach the Word in a way that was consistent with its purpose: to teach, to reprove, and then, notice, to correct. That’s a word that was used in the first century in the context of the practice of medicine. It’s used of healing something that’s been broken or distorted. Yes, there’s a reshaping of our souls that takes place through the ministry of the Word. I hope you have such a ministry. I hope you pray for it. And if you have it, please don’t neglect it, because it will reshape your soul into the image of our Lord Jesus Christ.