The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 7 – 2
Every night, we close our eyes and cease to be. First we cease to see, then we cease to judge, then finally we cease to even be aware. Just as every person who has ever lived has done… both literally and metaphorically.
We live in a world full of sleepwalkers. People whose souls are unaware of their actions, who are carried along by their spirit with no awareness from their soul at all. They can’t choose not to sin, because they aren’t even aware they’re doing it. They’re just reacting to stimuli on instinct, moving by reflex, going through the motions.
They can’t see that there is no heaven when they read John 3:13; they can’t even see that there is no hell when they read their own favorite scripture, John 3:16 (“not perish” does not mean “not burn in hell”). Their eyes are so closed, they literally can’t see that. Sound familiar?
The world’s souls are imprisoned by sleep (Romans 11:8); but none of us were born that way. On the contrary, we have to learn to put our souls to sleep. We have to be taught to second-guess our choices, trained to worry about how others will react to doing what we know is right.
As a child, you were free of hypocrisy, thus were capable of seeing the hypocrisy in others; capable of seeing that a loving God couldn’t create hell, and that a promise is a promise is a promise. Because children, ironically enough, are ruled by their souls to a greater extent than their elders.
That’s why Jesus said “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein” (Mark 10:15). Because being soul-awake is the natural state of mankind!
That’s why you were curious, asked questions, believed your eyes, spoke the truth without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings, made choices without thinking of what other people would think of you.
That’s why children are boundlessly energetic. Think about it; they eat basically the same diet as their elders; where do they get their energy, if not from the fact they “have meat to eat” that their elders “know not of” (John 4:32)?
That is the food which has the power to make you never hunger or thirst or sleep again! (John 6:31-35, 49-51). So children aren’t awake because they’re energetic; they are energetic because their souls are still awake!
The soul is a piece of God Himself (Job 33:4). There is more power in that single breath God gave Adam, than in all the flesh it animated. Remember, the spirit is willing… it’s the flesh that is weak (Matthew 26:41).
And the spirit, anything made of spirit, including our own soul, has power (John 6:63). We are all born with that power; but as we age, society encourages our fractions to extinguish it. And our fractions love to have it so (Jeremiah 5:31).
FALLING ASLEEP
Remember when you were a child, and you hated taking naps or going to bed, and your parents said “sleep isn’t the same as dying”? We acted like it was, because as children we were wise enough to realize that sleep is a type of dying.
Every parent knows that the first step to sleep is to force a child to close its eyes, and/or turn out the lights. Likewise, the first step to soul sleep is for society to convince you that you aren’t seeing what you think you see; that it is better qualified than you to interpret what you see.
This is the cornerstone of all religion, of politics, of all the world’s systems: they know better than you what Truth is. And once you’ve obediently closed your eyes, the next step to get a child to sleep is to make a rhythmic sound that can occupy their mind; singing, a fan, a washing machine, and so on.
Likewise, society gets you to fall into patterns of sound, patterns of actions. Things your spirit can memorize that require no judgments. Regular worship services, following a regular pattern, with regular people; regular jobs at regular hours, regular meals, at regular times, and so on.
And since there is obviously nothing for your soul to do in such a life or such a religion, it gets bored, and naturally gets drowsy. And it’s only a matter of time until the body’s watchman falls asleep (Isaiah 57:9-12).
Note all of those things – alcohol, sleep, blind – that apply to souls, and which describe every professing Christian in the world today. Because when the watchman falls asleep… what’s to protect your fractions from being corrupted by lying spirits? Mark 3:27.
The world needs you to be lulled into boredom because no waking soul can say “yes, man was meant to work in a cubicle!”. No waking soul can say “I just have to get my degree”. And no waking soul can look at Christianity and say “yes! This is the religion of the Bible!”
At first, the souls of children resist these irrational routines; resist being put to sleep, as all children do in every sense of the word. Hence the rebels without causes, the hippies, the outsiders. But sooner or later society’s pervasive pressure forces most of them to play ball and “live in the real world”.
Because without the degree and the job and the church, it’s hard to function in society (Revelation 13:16-17). And the price society asks you to pay to be a part of it is invariably the death of your soul (John 15:18-19).
Not all at once; but the faster you accept the system and work with in, the more society rewards you… and the faster your soul nods off to dreamland. But notice Jesus’ use of the word “you”. Jesus was speaking to the soul of the disciples; their souls, alert and judging their fractions as He did, are what the world despises.
Not their bodies – the world cares deeply for them. Not their spirits – the world welcomes them with open arms. It’s the alert soul that terrifies them, threatens them, and makes them hate us. It’s the alert soul that, one way or another, they must put to sleep (John 15:10).
DOPING A SOUL
Children are by nature selfish, but they are not by nature liars; their parents must teach them not to say “why is that woman fat?” (Jeremiah 9:5). His soul saw an oddity, and wants to know why it happened. This embarrasses everyone involved… except him.
There is no shame, to him, in asking a perfectly legitimate question about moles on someone’s face. That’s why a child will not ignore his soul’s questions, nor will he allow you to do so (“but why? But why???”). Children have an endless capacity for nagging and insisting that their soul’s question be heard. You could learn a lot from that.
He will not easily let go of this habit; it takes a lot of work for society to teach children to ignore their soul (“why do we have to go to church?”, “why do I need to know fractions?”), and subjugate it to the spirit of the herd (“when you’re older you’ll understand”, “because I said so”).
We train them to ignore their soul, to listen to the spirit of the herd instead. We teach their soul to feel shame for doing its job. We train their spirit to lie for the benefit of a beast’s feelings. We train their hearts that they are special, that they are above the judgments of any soul (2 Peter 2:14).
And every time another such lesson is learned, their eyelids droop a little lower. Because with less and less that their soul is permitted to do… why should it stay awake? Proverbs 19:15. All of these things that we beat, shame, or bribe into children are like sleeping pills for their souls.
And it’s easy to choose that path when your fractions and the rest of the world hate your rule. That’s why all of us did, to one degree or another. But what does God say? Proverbs 20:13. Because first you close your eyes; then you stop judging; then one day, your soul is simply unaware… imprisoned in the sleep of death.
THE SLEEP OF DEATH
By the time we’re called, we’re already dead in our sins (Ephesians 2:1). Put differently, we are asleep in our sins. And because our soul is asleep today, we are destined to die in no more than a few decades; though in fact, that’s just another type of sleeping (Acts 7:60).
Ephesians 5:14 Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.
We close our eyes, fold our hands, cease judging, cease being aware, and gradually drift into nothingness. Whether that happens every 24 hours of life or after 1,000 years of life – types of days in the Bible – the pattern is the same (Proverbs 6:9-10). But is that how it’s supposed to be? 1 Thessalonians 5:4-8.
Now, if I were anyone else, I would go off at this point into how to live a sober Christian life. And sure, this has all kinds of implications into how you treat your neighbor, but if you haven’t figured that out by now, another lesson on keeping the law won’t help you.
No, my point here is we have the light of God! We shouldn’t be sleepy; any more than we should be drunken. Because we are not in darkness; and who can sleep when it’s light out? (John 11:9-10, 12:35-36).
So why can’t we stay awake? Sure, we’re supposed to eventually die/sleep, once per 1,000 year day, according to the statute God gave “in the day that you sin, you shall die” (to paraphrase Genesis 2:17). All have sinned, therefore all must die/fall asleep in less than one full day. That is to say, less than one millennium!
How many hours are there in a (thousand year) day? John 11:9. And one twelfth of 1,000 is 83 years old. Almost exactly the life expectancy at birth today in the developed world. So all of us live a mere hour compared to Methuselah’s day.
Practically everyone before the Flood lived for nearly 1,000 years – a mere “day” to God. At the end of which, as is normal at the end of any day, they grew drowsy and feel asleep. Yet today, we typically die of “old age” 900 years younger than we should.
That means our lives are the equivalent of waking up at 7am and going back to sleep at 8 am because we just can’t keep our eyes open! And even for that hour, we drag ourselves around as if in a dream, rarely if ever feeling truly awake.
So the question is… why?
WHY DO WE SLEEP?
In this world, there are those who are always tired; who can never sleep enough to be awake. Then there are those who are always alert, buzzed, wired, those who only need a few hours of sleep a night. Yet we know that anyone who is drowsy at 10am has something wrong with them.
Perhaps they had a late night, worked too hard yesterday, didn’t sleep well, are coming down with the flu, something. Because we know it’s not normal to be drowsy so early in the day. That’s not the way we’re supposed to feel!
So why to we so readily accept that it’s normal to fall asleep a single hour into the day of life God offered us? If someone has to take a nap before the thousand year day has even started, there’s something wrong with them.
Physical work makes you tired; but work doesn’t make you sleepy, exactly. On the contrary, exercise often wakes you up! Now excessive work can make you physically tired – but that doesn’t necessarily mean sleepy.
When you come home after a hard day, you watch TV or play games or something… you don’t usually go straight to bed. There again, if you do, people start to ask “are you feeling alright?” because they know that’s not normal! Because your day isn’t up yet!
Ironically, what makes us the most sleepy isn’t work at all; it’s the opposite of work: Proverbs 19:15. Inaction makes you just as sleepy, if not more so, than actual hard work. So if your life is a monotonous routine, of course you’re only going to stay awake for an hour before drifting off.
You know how hard it is to stay awake on guard duty, with nothing to do but watch? Imagine how much harder it is, when society is singing your soul lullabies as you try desperately to stay awake to guard something no one else even cares about.
So this is the sleep we are all called out of – not necessarily the sleep of exhaustion, but the sleep of soul-boredom. And yet that term might imply a peaceful sleep, yet it is anything but (Psalms 3:1-5). Our soul is forcibly bored; at first it rages and protests against its treatment by the spirit and heart, yet fails to overcome them.
In time, these struggles exhaust it; and this, and the fact that it isn’t allowed to do anything anyway, causes it to just go back to sleep.
WAKING UP
Waking up, for most of us, is not an instant affair. If it were, Garfield would have nothing to be allergic to, and there would be no market for “give me caffeine and no one gets hurt” mugs. And so waking up could be considered a process that takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
Likewise, none of us go instantly from asleep to awake when we are called by God to the Truth; we just begin the process of awakening. And sometimes God has to shake us pretty good to wake us up. And just like every morning, even then you’re still three-fourths asleep, and can easily fall asleep again if you let yourself.
I said above we were awake at birth; yet that, too, was an awakening process for the morning of our thousand year day. It was always going to take us 20 or so years (15 millennial minutes) to be fully alert.
Yet like so many of us do every day, we dozed back off after the alarm went off, before we ever reached fully awake status. So when Jesus found us asleep (Mark 14:37), He wakened us again by shining light in our eyes.
So we woke once, naturally; then were reawakened by Christ, and yet we still can’t watch “even 83 years (one hour)”! So now we’re asking a new question: having been awakened twice now, why can’t we stay awake at least until the day is over?
As I said above, there are two ways to become tired; work, or lack of work. Giving a soul nothing to do was the cause of our first soul-nap. And that can certainly happen again, after Jesus wakes you with the truth.
And yet if our soul awakens for a second time, we’ll find ourselves confronted with a plethora of grown-up problems our soul was not trained to handle. Our soul was asleep while our beast and spirit were getting into all sorts of trouble.
It’s rather like suddenly waking to find yourself driving a race car – there’s a lot of stuff coming at you very fast. But suddenly you have to make decisions – all sorts of decisions, and very quickly – which you were not prepared for.
Not surprisingly, if you managed to survive the race, bring the car to a stop, and step out onto solid ground, you’d find yourself completely exhausted from the stress of the situation. And that’s our answer.
WEARIED SOULS
If your body is tired, there can only be three reasons why. You’re either working too hard; you’re not working smart enough; or you’re working on things your soul has no business doing. These are also not mutually exclusive; all three are probably to blame.
The same is naturally true of your soul. If was ever truly awake, and then grew weary again before the day was over, it was either working too hard, not working smart enough, or doing things it had no business doing.
Because every choice it makes, every judgment it enforces, and every challenge it accepts, takes effort. If you’re too tired at the end of the day, you should look to one of these things – or all of them – and say “what am I doing wrong? I shouldn’t be this tired because life is not that hard”.
The first problem can be expressed as an equation; how much effort does it take, per decision, to solve a problem? The more wisdom your soul has, the easier the choices are to make (Proverbs 14:6). You might struggle for days with a decision I would make almost instantly.
Because skill at anything yields confidence, and confidence allows you to instantly make a judgment that a more timid soul might hesitate and vacillate over for days. In that case, the exact same decision requires much more effort for you – and thus exhausts you – far more than me.
So building wisdom requires exercise. Your soul must practice judgments just as a bodybuilder might do bicep curls (Hebrews 5:14). Because any bodybuilder will tell you, if you’re lifting the weights wrong, you’ll wear yourself out and still not be any stronger. You’ll only injure yourself.
The second problem is also an equation; how much work does it take to get your fractions to accept your judgment? Making the judgment is the easy part; if you then have to justify it to your spirit, and argue with your selfish heart, it takes a lot more effort, and wearies your soul more, than if they just said “yes, sir!”
Every judgment takes effort, and the less your fractions trust and obey you, the more quickly your soul gets tired. And that of course, is a function of how well your soul manages them – your consistency, your firmness, your fairness.
Regardless, the more resistance they give you, the more effort it takes to get through the day – and the sooner you feel the need to go back to sleep. The sooner you die, as seen from our limited perspective of things.
The third problem is the final equation that determines your soul’s strength, and it’s a simple one: more choices to make = more work to do. Because the third reason people are exhausted is because they are judging too much.
The purpose of the spirit is to be a yoke around the beast’s neck; a fence that keeps it out of trouble. So if you make a rule about, say, bedtime, you shouldn’t have to think about it every day. It’s a rule, it was made for a good reason, and unless something changes or there are extenuating circumstances, your soul has no reason to think about it again.
Once you make a good statute, you don’t need to defend it every time the beast wants to do something different; that’s the spirit’s job. You shouldn’t even hear the case unless there is new information; because hearing the case requires effort. And effort, very slowly, kills you.
So train your beast that rules are there for a reason; train your spirit not to bother you or worry about things you’ve already decided not to worry about. Ask yourself: “Why am I thinking about this? I decided this weeks ago”. Because once you do that, those things are not your problem.
MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS
A wise soul chooses its battles. And most things we pursue in this world don’t matter (Isaiah 55:2). We strive to fill our soul with the things the world tells us are good, but really, all we have to do is Matthew 6:33 to delight our soul with fatness.
It’s time your soul started deciding which things we need to do… and which things aren’t worth our time… or simply not our problem. For instance watching the news is more often than not what was warned against in Proverbs 26:17.
The things on the news are not your problem, nor do they have much effect on your lives (Job 5:19-27). So why get worked up over problems that don’t affect you, and which you can’t fix anyway? God has made us responsible for a very few things in this world – thankfully.
We are responsible to keep the law, internally and externally, positive and negative (Romans 13:8-10). And that is all we owe anyone. That is the baseline you always should return to, when you feel overwhelmed. You owe the world this, and nothing more.
You’re not responsible for feeding the hungry in Africa. You’re not responsible for bringing Jesus to the Chinese, or for that matter, to the Baptists. You’re not responsible for healing the sick, for mourning your nation’s sins, or for agitating against abortion. Some of these things are good to do, if you have time; but you’re not obligated to do any of them.
God makes the rain to fall on the just and on the unjust; not you. God feeds the ravens, not you. God adds those who need to learn the truth to the ekklesia, not you (Acts 2:47). You’re responsible for one thing only: to love one another, specifically, to keep the law towards them.
And if you could learn to do this, and nothing else, you would have as much stress as a flower waving in the wind. As much stress as a child has, come to think of it. Because remember: a child’s job is to obey his parents. Not to worry about where his next meal is coming from.
Not to worry about whether his brethren are fed, or making his parents be obedient to their parents. As long as he has obeyed their laws, statutes, and judgments, he is free of all other responsibilities. As long as his soul loves his brethren, as his father defined it to him, nothing else matters.
But the command to love one another uses agape. Which you’ll remember requires a soul to choose it. You cannot love one another if your soul is asleep; if it is not in control of your selves. So in order to even try to KEEP this command, you must selfishly prioritize the health of your own soul above all other things.
Your soul should be your only priority; because if it is, God won’t have to give you other priorities; your own healthy soul can be trusted to choose the right things to do all by itself. That is, after all, what we’re put here to learn!
If you did this, your friends and family might have less help now; but they would have better, wiser help when they really needed it later. They would have a friend whose soul was in control, and who might actually be able to really help them.
And your family would have a parent who could easily choose the right choice; that way, they wouldn’t have to try and follow you through the bushes in search of the trail you never should have lost sight of in the first place.
VOLUNTARY RESPONSIBLITIES
When you’re in the middle of the chaos that is life, it’s hard to imagine how life could possibly ever be simple. But it is, if you follow one principle: if you didn’t want so much, you wouldn’t have to work so hard.
Everything we do can be divided neatly in three categories; what you truly have to do, what you merely should do, and what you just want to do. It isn’t that life is confusing, it’s that these three categories are confused in your mind.
Once they’re sorted out, life becomes simple. Not always easy to make your fractions follow, but when the choice becomes clear the judgment becomes easy; and it’s the lack of a clear choice which most exhausts your soul.
So separate these categories clearly in your mind, then do all of the first, some of the second, and few if any of the third. Always keep the Sabbath, pay your taxes, feed your kids. Try to be there for friends and family when it doesn’t conflict with the first group of things. And if you have time left over, reward yourself with the luxuries.
Remember: you need water, food, shelter, and clothing, in that order. Most everything else in your life is a “want”, not a need. Do children really need band practice, ballet, soccer, and drama club? How many of those things will they actually use in 20 years? They might qualify as a “should”, but certainly not a “must”.
Do you really need all the toys and baubles you spend your money on? Are you truly going to be happy because you have this new gadget, or are you just getting it because everyone else has one, or because you want to show it off, or because it distracts you from being bored?
Do you really need to answer work emails at home? Do you really need a pet? Another baby? An unlimited cell phone plan? A car for each member of the house? (Ecclesiastes 4:4 – come to think of it, almost any verse in Ecclesiastes works).
Most everyone has far more fluff in their life than they need, and they’re constantly killing themselves working to add more trinkets they don’t need or even really want. So if you want your life to be easier, get rid of everything that makes it not easy.
I live most of my life out of a tiny backpack, with a few changes of clothes, a laptop, a cell phone, and not much else – about 15 pounds or so in total. Because I value the peace of simplicity more than I value houseplants and 4-wheelers (Ecclesiastes 4:6).
So when you choose your challenges, choose them well; and remember: your family needs a parent whose soul is awake, who judges righteously, and whom God loves and hears, far more than they need most of the things you work for.
DELEGATE
I want you to imagine something for a moment; let’s say you were hit by a bus tomorrow. Would the world stop turning? If you were incapacitated, who would be doing this thing you think you must do? We mislabel a great many things in our life as “must” when in reality, they’re barely a “should”.
So ask yourself: if these things wouldn’t be done if you dropped off the face of the Earth do they really need to be done while you’re here? Because however vital you think you are, life goes on, and you’re just… not that important.
Where is your time going? Why are you stressed? Ask yourself, who can do those things instead of you? Then go find that person, and get them to do it now. Because it wouldn’t be done if you were dead… and yet the world would keep spinning… so maybe it doesn’t need done at all.
I’m not trying to get you to shirk all your responsibilities; I’m trying to get you to focus on things that actually are your responsibility, and let go of everything you’re doing that isn’t your job. Remember: your first responsibility is to love one another; and as long as your soul is asleep or even drowsy, it is impossible to agape others!
These are the things that are wearying your soul, and you can’t do any of your responsibilities properly if you’re exhausted! Even if fractions are meekly and humbly obedient, and even if your soul has the wisdom of Moses, you can still be overworked (Exodus 18:13-22).
And any overworked soul is weak, and easily overcome – either by its own fractions, or by someone else’s. So let the captains of 50 or 1,000 solve this problem; that will leave you rested and ready to deal with the problems only you can solve. Stop worrying today about what can safely be done tomorrow (Matthew 6:34).
If you cease worrying about the things that aren’t your problem, and then separate the worries you have left into “must, should, and want”, you’ll find you have far less to do. And then you might not be so tired after a mere hour’s life.
JOYS OF CHILDHOOD
One of the joys of being a child is the near-absence of decision-making. Someone else makes every meaningful decision in your life; where to live, what to eat, what to do. This leaves little for his young soul to do – and leaves abundant energy left over to ask the questions his elders are too busy to wonder about.
Children chafe against these rules, it’s true; but mostly because the parents make decisions that, from the child’s perspective, don’t make sense. Often, the decisions don’t make sense because they’re simply wrong (“why are you getting a divorce?”, “why can’t we live on a farm?”).
The decisions that are correct, the parents rarely explain to his satisfaction – forcing him into a quandary. Either believe the soul that still says “this doesn’t add up, something is wrong”, or believe the herd which says “trust us, we know what’s best even if you can’t understand it”.
If he chooses to follow his soul, he will be at odds with everyone in his life, for the indefinite future (James 4:4, John 17:14). And it will probably train him to be stubborn, and arrogant – traits he may need for now, to survive, but which he will have to unlearn later in life if he’s to learn the truth.
But if he chooses to follow the world instead, his soul will die a little bit inside. Every time he ignores a valid question, every time he accepts “it just is” as an answer, it adds another link to his chains, another bar to his prison.
When you asked questions and you were told “because I said so”, your soul was pressured to make bad choices – or at least, to let your spirit make them for you (which is, itself, a bad choice). Every time you were persuaded to ignore your “better judgment”, it not only wearied your soul (Isaiah 47:13), but set it on a path that led to even more tiring choices tomorrow.
By the time you reached puberty, the irrational statutes of your parents, the demands of your friends, the pressure of school and then suddenly the biological imperatives of procreation were too much for your soul. You lost it. It just passed out, somewhere along there, because your soul was exhausted (Isaiah 57:10).
When you felt this happening, you should have said “wait a minute, this is the wrong path! Let’s retrace our steps until we find the path again!” That’s why the second half of that verse says they should have said “there is no hope” along this evil path (compare to Jeremiah 18:11-12).
You are fatigued because of the foolish length and unnecessary complexity of your life’s planned path (college, career, kids, being socially respectable, a friend of the community, a good Christian, etc.; compare to the very simple path in Luke 12:22-31).
Everyone in this world is exhausted because they’re walking a meandering route through jungle and desert instead of on the straight, albeit narrow, road God gave us to walk. Because if your soul is that tired, you’re doing something wrong!
As you learned in the last lesson, God’s way is easy (Proverbs 3:17-18). So if your path is rough, then either you’re not on the right road, or you’re not walking properly (Hebrews 12:12-13). It’s as simple as that. So are you lame… or blind? Asleep… or imprisoned? Or all of the above?
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
We fall asleep for two reasons; either our soul is overworked, or our soul is underworked. Which will put you to sleep faster: a hard day’s work, or a hard day’s sitting and waiting?
We rush to push our children into systems that put their souls to sleep as quickly as possible; Sunday school, regular school; college, jobs, church; all things designed to remove the burden of choice and lull the soul to sleep.
But when God awakens us, we swing to the opposite pendulum. Here is a newly awakened soul trying to juggle a thousand things, none of which it is prepared to handle. Trying desperately to find a needle-sized path in a veritable haystack of choices.
So it gets exhausted and is at just as great a risk of falling asleep again as it was before. It wasn’t so much a choice your soul made not to rule the heart and break the spirit. It was just worn out, it just needed a rest.
When you were a child, your soul was full of optimism and hope for your future. You believed you could solve the world’s problems. Like all journeys, it began with boundless energy and excitement, an alert soul ready for anything.
But as you actually began to walk that path, you encountered stumbling block after detour after mudslide, and your enthusiasm waned. Then life, far from being the adventure you envisioned as a child, became an exhausted slog, a desperate struggle just to stay alive.
And ironically, it is that very struggle to stay alive which is killing you (Luke 17:33). Because if you have to struggle… you’re doing it wrong. So the first step is to simplify your life, as drastically as necessary, until you can actually confront each decision, rather than be assaulted by a gang of them.
You need practice to get better at judgment, but like any kind of exercise, you need to rest between workouts – if you do any workout every day, you may injure the muscle, not improve it. So think about each one, and practice making better decisions. Making them faster will come in time.
One of the reasons for the distinction between the two people in Ecclesiastes 5:12 is simply that the laboring man has very few decisions to make; he goes to work, he works, he comes home. Life is simple.
The rich man, on the other hand, has to make decisions about employees, trades, projects he’s working on – and even if he makes every decision right, the sheer volume of choices he makes is exhausting. Mostly because he’s working for things he doesn’t even need (Luke 12:15, Proverbs 23:4-5). Just like most of us.
Like a laboring man, a child has few responsibilities; be home by dark, finish your peas, do your homework, don’t hit your sister. Fairly simple stuff that doesn’t require complicated judgments. So naturally, he has a lot of energy left over to bounce around, ask questions, explore and discover his world.
As a child of God, your life should be similarly simple, and your soul should be similarly inquisitive and open to new experiences. Not worn out and desperate for a nap. So your challenge is to find a way to make that happen.
No one can do it for you – the things I’ve said here are the slimmest guidelines of examples. You have to make it happen. And that’s the whole point, as always – your soul has to learn to make the choices of what to do, and more importantly what not to do, and then stand behind it.
Jesus had less trouble than we in making judgments because Jesus’ soul loved the Golden Rule more than He loved His heart or His spirit… and far more than He loved yours and mine. So the choice was always clear: “want” and “should” are a distant third and second after “must”.
When Jesus was overwhelmed by responsibilities and followers, He got rid of some of them (John 6:66). Or He disappeared for awhile (Matthew 14:23). Couldn’t He have stayed longer, tried harder, taught them something else, healed someone else? Of course… but those were shoulds, not musts.
So He scaled back His expectations, to keep His soul rested and healthy at all costs. When He felt overworked (Luke 10:2), He delegated work to people, even though He knew they were incompetent (Matthew 17:14-21), but who could do the job well enough – and learn from the process (Luke 10:1).
Because He knew that in order to agape all men, you must have a soul that is capable of making that choice; not a soul so overwhelmed that it can’t even see the choice.
Because what we owe to humanity above all else is ensuring that our soul is healthy.