Power-feeding Your Soul

25 Aug Power-feeding Your Soul

EVERY MOMENT OF EVERY DAY, SOMETHING IN YOUR SOUL IS BEING FED AND SOMETHING IS BEING STARVED.

Because we live in a fallen world, the natural course of events will feed the world’s values into your soul and starve the Spirit’s values. It is unavoidable. Drive down the street and see seductive images on billboards selling everything from diamond rings to mufflers. Open a news article by a respected news source and read four-letter words that you only heard in back-room conversations in times past. Visit a Christian website and be greeted by advertisements over which the website may not have full control, promoting violent, demonic-themed movies.

Then there is the power of conformity. Subtle but powerful values wash over us constantly in conversations with coworkers, exchanges with retail personnel, interviews with politicians, and down-time with friends. As culture forms values of right and wrong, funny and not funny, important and unimportant, those values soak into our souls like coffee into tooth enamel, gradually dulling our sensitivity to higher things.

Unless you move to Montana and go off the grid, your soul is daily fed with powerful messages that dull spiritual perception, divert spiritual focus, and dissipate spiritual strength.

The result is a weakening of Christian character, and a precipitous descent of Christian attitudes, values and behavior that mirrors that of the world. Perhaps with a few years’ lag-time in some cases. In other cases, it is essentially simultaneous.

If you are serious about discipleship, you have to ask yourself the question, “What do we do about it?”

The answer is complex and multi-layered. But we begin with taking care of self. Our first step is to be sure that we are not falling prey to the danger. Our first step is taking care that we have an answer, that we have something to share with others that will help, that if they watch us (and they will), they will be able to imitate the answer lived out in our lives.

To start, we must offset the power of culture by power-feeding our soul, each day, large doses of things of the Spirit.

Perhaps the key Scripture passage that speaks to this is Romans 12:2:

“…do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

This tells us that if we want to be living demonstrations of the fact that God’s will is good and acceptable and perfect, we must be transformed… and if we are to be transformed, we must have our minds renewed.

So, while there is much more that we could do, we begin by daily power-feeding our souls Scripture in doses sufficient to offset the influence of culture. We do this by memorizing key Scriptures so well that we do not have to struggle to recall them. We memorize them so well that someone could shake us awake at 3 o’clock in the morning and say, “Quick, what is Romans 12:2?” and we could rattle it off without hesitating.

Then, we mentally rehearse, recite and ponder our verses over and over again each day. Deuteronomy 6:6-8 suggests that we let the verses go over in our minds at least these four times of the day:

• When we sit in our house (meal times, other times of conversation)
• Walk by the way (driving in the car, shaving, waiting in lines)
• When we lie down (when we go to bed and are going to sleep)
• When we rise up (when we get up in the morning and begin our day)

The key in memorizing and meditating on Scripture is not to go a mile wide and an inch deep, but to go an inch wide and a mile deep.

In the process of choosing which Scripture verse to use to power-feed our souls, it is helpful to observe that there are three levels of Scripture to be mastered:

• Bible verses
• SuperVerses
• MegaVerses

MegaVerses and SuperVerses can be used with precision and power to offset the influence of culture on our spiritual lives. We’ll talk next week about the differences and how to use each, and look at formulating a game plan for power-feeding your soul.

I’ve created a 15 minute video with some tips on not merely knowing verses from the Bible, but on repeating them until they change you. You can still get that video for free here: Master the Bible So Well That the Bible Masters You.

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