Spirit, Soul, and the Part He Left Out

Midnight, the bag half unpacked on the floor, one lamp on, and Nathan sitting on the edge of the bed with his shoes off and his socks still on, which is a particular stage of tiredness that everybody recognizes.

He has been away three days at something and it was good. Genuinely good. Not a mountaintop, he does not really do mountaintops, but three days of the kind of teaching that reorganizes a shelf in you, and two conversations he will still be thinking about at Easter.

And so he is doing the thing he always does when he comes back from something, which he has never named and would be slightly embarrassed to have described out loud. He calls it, in his head, checking. Everybody else would call it an inventory.

How is my spirit. That is the first one, and he has a whole vocabulary for it, twenty years of it, words like dry and open and settled and thin, and he can locate himself on that scale in about four seconds.

How is my thinking. That is the second one, and it is just as developed. What am I carrying. What have I been going round on. What did that conversation on Thursday actually disturb.

He is good at this. He has been doing it since he was thirty-one. It is not morbid and it is not vanity; it is a man who takes his own inner life seriously and has done the work.

And tonight, at midnight, on the edge of a bed, with his elbows on his knees, something goes slightly sideways, and it is this: he cannot remember the last time either of those two questions was about his body.

There is no third question. There never has been.

His body appears in his thinking about himself only as a set of complaints, and only when it is loud enough to interrupt: the knee, the sleep, the thing his doctor said in March that he has not done anything about. It has a file, and the file is called problems, and there is no other file.

Twenty years of a serious, honest, well developed interior life, in which one third of him has never once been on the list.

The book he was reading on the train is beside him on the bed, open at the end of a letter, and he picks it up because it is there, and he reads the benediction he has heard a hundred times, and he counts the nouns.

You have that inventory. Yours might be shorter or messier. But you know which parts of yourself you check on, and you know which part only ever comes up as a complaint.

Three nouns, and the third one is the body

This is how Paul finishes his first letter to the Thessalonians, and it is a blessing rather than an argument, which is why it goes past most of us without stopping.

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.1 Thessalonians 5:23

Sanctify you wholly. That is our word with an adverb on it, and the adverb means completely, entirely, through and through, with nothing left over.

And then Paul unfolds what wholly means, because he does not leave it as a vague warm word. Your whole spirit and soul and body.

Three nouns. And the third one is body.

You have a body, and Scripture puts it in the same sentence and under the same verb as your spirit. That is the written word and not my read of your midnight, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the last blessing of a very early letter and lays it on the edge of a bed with one lamp on.

Nobody has to teach you to bring your spirit to God. You have twenty years of vocabulary for that. Nobody has to teach you to bring your thinking. That file is thick.

Paul, closing a letter, blessing a church he was worried about, names all three and puts the sanctifying over the lot of them, and the one you have never brought is sitting there in the list in plain sight where it has been the whole time.

Preserved is His verb, not yours

Now look at what he asks for, because the verb changes the whole relationship.

Be preserved. That is passive. Somebody else does it. Paul does not pray that they would maintain themselves, manage themselves, keep themselves in order. He prays that they would be preserved, and the one doing the preserving is named at the front of the sentence: the very God of peace.

And then the next verse, which is the one that takes the weight off completely.

Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.

Who also will do it. Paul finishes the blessing by saying the doing is God's. Not aspirationally. Flatly, as a fact about God's character: He is faithful, He called you, and He is the one who will carry this out.

You are under a preserving that is His work, spirit and soul and body, and it is already His to do. First Thessalonians 5 puts the verb in the passive and then names who is faithful, and the same Spirit who was at work in that young church is the one making it a present fact in a man with his shoes off at midnight.

So the file marked problems has a category error in it. You have been holding your body in the management department while the letter has it in the preserving department, and those two departments have completely different staff.

Let me guard this, because a man like you can turn any paragraph into a project by breakfast.

I am not asking you to add a third inventory. If tomorrow morning you build a body audit with the same rigour as the other two and run it every Monday, you will have understood nothing and you will be tireder by August. That is not what is being handed to you.

And I am not telling you to ignore what the doctor said in March. Take that seriously. It is the ordinary wisdom any friend would give you and there is nothing unspiritual in it.

What I am telling you is that one third of you has been outside the sentence you have been praying for twenty years, and it was never outside Paul's.