3 Common Ways We Tend the Needs of Our Soul || Why Proactively Caring for Your Soul is Important

Have you ever desired to live a spirit-led life? Maybe even with great intention, you ditched the needs of your heart and soul in order for your spirit to grow. I know many Believers who have spent their whole lives working to “not live by the flesh”. We have become excellent at the outward appearance of spirituality, but our souls and body have been neglected. A product in response is a Church dressed in a play pretend costume, perfecting its ability to neglect a vital piece of its tridimensional being. 

In the Church at large, we take care of our spirits, and some may even take good care of their bodies, but our souls are often the most neglected parts of our beings. Our souls are where our metaphorical hearts live. I am fully convinced that our hearts (souls) know things that our bodies and spirits are completely unaware of. The heart feels its way through life and is sensitive to emotions. It is the home where things like love, passion, and mercy live.

I’d propose the neglect of our souls is rooted in a distorted perception of our flesh, but the piece we’re missing is that when we were saved we became new creations. You are a new creation! That means that all of you became new when you received salvation. Not just your spirit, but your soul included. 

So, it is time to adjust our thinking — we need to be whole on the inside, so we can be real on the outside. No more pretenders. No more Captain America wannabes. No more stage actors! We need our souls to thrive in order to live in the fullness of what Christ paid for. 

You might be sitting there wondering where to begin. How do you approach the needs of your soul when you have been disconnected from them for so long? I first want to address three main ways we tend to approach meeting the needs of our souls: inactively, reactively, or proactively. 

Inactive: You are inactive when you remain ignorant of the condition of your soul. In the inactive mindset, you embrace your desperate need as an unwanted yet necessary part of life’s process. Then you work hard to convince yourself that love, acceptance, attention, approval, and significance are not necessities but choices that can be opted out of. Maybe you don’t try to meet the needs of your soul because you want to be spiritual, so you wear your dysfunction as a badge of honor. Or worse yet, you bury your needs so deep that you can’t consciously remember where you even put them. Life just happens to you when you live inactively. Eventually, you find your soul existing in brokenness, emptiness, and loneliness.

Reactive: You are reactive when you acknowledge your soul’s needs but then fulfill the needs in dysfunctional ways. This is the proverbial “looking for love in all the wrong places” scenario. Living reactively often leads to all kinds of extremely dysfunctional devices that never fulfill your need to be known deeply or your desire to be loved for who you are. The fruit of this reactive lifestyle may be sexual promiscuity, pornography, fantasy, selfish ambition, and so on . . . anything that gives you the sense of being known, feeling powerful, and feeling loved. Yet instant gratification has horrible side effects! Typically people who live this way for any length of time have a trail full of broken relationships that follow them.

Proactive: You are proactive when you wisely assess the needs of your soul and then devise a healthy strategy to meet your needs. Metaphorically speaking, you stop eating out of dumpsters, and you start planning your meals.

A great place to start when desiring to get in touch with the needs of your soul so that you can live proactively is to understand the power of love. You need a deep understanding and acceptance of love to seep so powerfully into your soul that it overflows out of you and into the hearts of others. Let’s first take a look at David’s relationship with his soul. 

David, the man after God’s own heart, was extraordinarily in touch with the needs of his soul, and consequently, his soul loved God. Look at the way David talked to his soul: 

Why are you in despair, O my soul?

And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him

For the help of His presence.

(Psalm 42:5)

After a time of deep distress, David’s soul was bragging about the Lord! Even when he is wandering in a literal desert, David has soul-ish ways: 

O God, You are my God; I shall seek You earnestly; My soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. (Psalm 63:1)

Did you catch that? David’s soul hungered for God, and the guy wasn’t even born again! There are hundreds of references to the soul of David loving on God. I am convinced that your heart can take you places your head can never go! The teacher in Proverbs put it like this: Trust in the Lord with all your heart And do not lean on your own understanding. (Proverbs 3:5)

Did you notice the wisest man in the world clearly said that we must trust God with our hearts, not our heads? In fact, he went on to say that we shouldn’t put a lot of weight on what we understand. So is love always a feeling we can logically comprehend or is it sometimes something only our soul experiences?

Ephesians 3:16–19 says, “[the Father] would grant you . . . to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God”.

First of all, we are supposed to be rooted and grounded in love. In other words, the core foundation of everything we believe, do, say, live, and experience must flow from love, be motivated by love, and be grounded in love. And we are not to be rooted and grounded in just any love, but in the agape love of God, that must be experienced to be comprehended (agape is the Greek word for God’s love).

You are also invited to comprehend the love of God that’s beyond comprehension. Check it out one more time: “to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.” This is the place where the infinite transcends the finite, the supernatural infuses the biological, and the heart is enlightened to the secret dimensions of His passion for you! You heard me right; He is wild about you! He didn’t just die for you; He lives for you. In fact, He lives in you, around you, and through you.

Has your soul been living inactively, reactively, or proactively? Have there been areas of your life where you need to ditch the need to understand and embrace the love of God that surpasses knowledge? I want to challenge you today to assess how you have been living and invite the Lord into your journey of breakthrough!