O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water. Psalms63:1
This is Selwyn Hughes' Seventh Law and like Stephen Covey's Seventh Habit ("Sharpen the Saw") this one takes us inward again. An analogy that works for me is that the first six laws are like ripples in a pond spreading outward and the seventh law throws a stone back into the middle so that the ripples can start again!
Henry Drummond described the soul as the "chamber with elastic and contractile walls, which can be expanded with God as its guest, illimitably but which without God shrinks and shrivels until every vestige of the Divine is gone and God's image is left without God's Spirit."
Many of us started a journey with God, but because we have not learned the art of Soul-Care, the hurly-burly of life has squeezed God's influence out of our souls and we have been overcome with the noise and chaos of life...
Soulcare is about making space and time where we can open our souls to God again so that He may whisper into our spirits, strengthen our character, galvanise our convictions, nourish our self-images, love our inner-child and heal our brokenness.
His tools are Truth (His Word), surrender (Prayer and Confession), Stillness (Time out) and the "still small voice" of His Spirit.
Selwyn Hughes says this: "The soul is renewed in daily contact with God. Neglect this and the result will be emptiness of the soul. The soul needs time with God it if is to develop and grow. Those Christians who say they are too busy to spend time with God in prayer and meditation will find that this neglect of the soul will have serious repercussions in their lives...
For years now, a conviction has been growing in my heart that the Christian life rises and falls at the point of the devotional."
(More to come in the next few days...)
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
