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My Soul
By John Gavazzoni
Very shortly after finishing my previous article, "Losing YOUR Soul," I realized it was important to address how the soul might properly be called, "my soul," without the factor of self-ownership, self-sovereignty, and self-determination being the soul's orientation. So this following short addendum: The virgin Mary, upon receiving the implanted Word, that she was to receive an impregnation from God by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, resulting in the earthly birth of the Savior of the world, she extolled, "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior." Ahh; here we find the soul in its proper place, the place of recognizing, and thus magnifying the Lord as its Savior. I hope the reader understands that God always saves as Lord. The notion that one can receive Jesus as Savior, but only later receive Him as Lord, is very misleading. He saves us AS our Lord. He saves us by the exercise of His Lordship.
This is where Mary is coming from. The Word of the Lord has united her spirit with His Spirit, informing her soul that its only proper activity is within that union. We must understand that such magnifying of the Lord by our souls only occurs as God magnifies Himself in and through us. I remember when I was pastoring years ago, and there was all kind of exhortation about needing to glorify the Lord, that I heard the Spirit say quite emphatically, "Only God can glorify God." Much of what we think of as bringing glory to God is nothing more than wood, hay, and stubble stuff. We can speak of my soul as given by God. As such, we can say with Mary, "My soul doth magnify the Lord..." Our soul, as a gift from God, does become our soul. When God gives a gift, He gives it, and it becomes ours - BUT only in union with Him, for upon giving any gift, the gift continues active in us as God maintains it and sustains it in communion with us. We have nothing that we were not given by God, and we retain nothing that is not sustained by Him. This applies to our very selves. Any continuation of being is within the Being of God.
What a huge difference there can be between how one person speaks of "my soul," and how another does. When there occurs a disconnect between the reality of our being's source, and how we conceive of our being, the soul takes on a kind of life of its own, cannibalizing itself in order to sustain its anti-existence. Give it up. Let it go. Don't cling to yourself. In the sense of the soul as independent and autonomous, it's good riddance. Oh, how burdensome the self-oriented soul becomes. A miserable burden. So Jesus' gracious words, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto YOUR SOULS, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" [emphasis mine]. Why, Oh why, do we labor so to defend our soul's right to belong to itself, and with that, its insistence upon its own rights!
When the soul releases its hold on itself, a beautiful thing happens - and no one has better described it than Stuart Hamblen in the lyrics to his song, "Until Then:" "...the soul of man is like a waiting eagle; when it's released, it's destined for the skies. But until then, my heart will go on singing; until then, with joy I'll carry on. Until the day, my eyes behold that City, until the day God calls me home." The soul's home is that place of belonging to Another: to Him whose soul descend into Hades for our sakes. He was not left there. Neither will we be. We will be delivered from self-ownership.
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