Soulish Living and Suffering

William Landon writes some insightful words on suffering in his book The Spiritual You:

"We need to be honest about this aspect of living from the start. Not only is suffering not an indication of our failure or of our not really being saved but the opposite is true: 'In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering' (Hebrews 2:10) . . . We need to suffer, not to be saved or to stay saved but to be perfected in our salvation. This is how the Father drives us away from a soul-oriented living and into a spirit oriented living. To put it another way, this is part of the way the Father uses to show us the true nature of life in this world.

"Suffering, far from being an indication of our not being 'truly saved,' is an indication of the Father's working in us. I maintain that the person who does not have some trial in their life has a potentially serious problem. The absence of trial in our living can mean that we are not open to the Father's working in our life. If this is a result of our being so hardened to the Father's Lordship that we are closed to spiritual learning, then God may let us go our own way for some time. The Father will not ask us to bear more than we are able to endure. Our Father also will not subject us to needless suffering. In the same light, the Father will not leave us in our present, unfinished, condition.

"The point of the Father putting His life in us to be life for us is for resource, not for insulation. Our Father wants to raise us up to a place where we can go through our trials in reliance on His power: 'I can do everything through him who gives me strength' (Philippians 4:13). This is the perfecting of our salvation. This is a dynamic that can only be properly understood from a spiritual view of life. If we insist on dealing with and seeing things from the soul's perspective this will never make any sense to us. If we will submit to the spiritual view of these things we can begin to see the wonder of our Father's way. This wonder is how vastly superior the Father's way is to ours.

A Better Way of Living

"Living from the spirit is a strategy for success. Having our various individual situations and circumstances dealt with is symptomatic medicine. To only ask God to take care of today's crisis is very shortsighted and limited in its application and effect. While the Father is concerned about all that happens in our lives, this is not the 'big picture.' It is because the Father is interested in our entire life condition that He wants something much more pervasive for us.

"If I only have today's crisis dealt with I am really no better off. I have no new resolve with which to deal with life's situations and circumstances. I am no better equipped to deal with tomorrow's situations than I was today. What I need to come to see is that it is not my situation that needs to be changed; the change that is required is in me. If I can come away from the soul-oriented view of life I can let the Father show me this need. It is not that the Father is unconcerned with my specific situations and needs. It is rather that the Father is more interested in my being equipped for effective living in all situations than He is in simply fixing individual problems.

"Dealing with individual situations is a soul oriented and grounded way of living. The desire to use our relationship with the Father to this end is based on a false understanding. This false understanding is that we are capable from our own resources, to deal with most of the things in our lives. If this were truly the case, we would only need the Father to deal with the really tough issues. It is difficult and humbling to have God show us that we are equipped to deal with exactly nothing on our own: 'I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing' (John 15:5). Nonetheless, this is the reality of our living.

Proper Self

"There is a certain truth in the idea that we are to have a collaborative living with the Father. However, the soul understanding doesn't quite get the concept of this relationship right. It is not a question of us doing most of the stuff in our lives and calling God in like some kind of cosmic consultant to handle the 'really tough cases.' The proper collaboration between the Father and us for living is this: God does the living and we let Him.

"It has never been , as some fear, a question of our individuality being swallowed up by the Father. The question before each of us is not if we are to be an individual self but an issue of being a proper self. In other words, how do we come to the place of being the person (self) that God created us to be? As I have spoken about throughout this writing, it is only in our coming to dwell in our proper self that we can ever hope to find peace and rest. It is only by submitting to being the people the Father made us to be that we can be spiritually healthy.

"The place of proper self is not a question of any particular outward appearance. The proper self is an invisible commodity and is ultimately an issue between the Father and each individual child in His family. While this proper self results in manifestations that may appear in the physical world, this is not the primary nature of our life with God. This proper life is spiritually oriented and requires the spiritual view to be rightly understood: 'So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal' (2 Corinthians 4:18). It is for this reason that we fail when we become fixated on the visible aspects of our lives. This is why soul oriented living falls short. While the soul itself is eternal, if we are trying to live by the resources of our soul we are really living by the direction of the flesh. Always keep in mind that the flesh is temporary.

"If we are to have any chance of experiencing the peace and rest that is the Father's desire for us, we must be eternally oriented. The only eternal orientation that is possible for us is through the spirit oriented self (soul)."