Daily Devotional By Desiringgod Ministry – John Piper Ministry 27 August 2024 | Topic: To Gain the World and Lose Your Soul
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To Gain the World and Lose Your Soul
One great feature of modernity, from Satan’s standpoint, is the sheer rejection of the soul. We live in a world stupefied by the material. Ask ten people on the street about their souls — if they don’t wonder aloud, “What does this babbler wish to say?” (Acts 17:18), they will tell you that if they do have a soul, they have not thought much about it. Even ancient pagan philosophers wrote dense treatises on the soul, but the mass of men today live as though they are soulless. And yet these same people investigate the silliest things under the sun. If anything is worth thought, is it not your soul? “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22).
Yet perhaps this treacherous thoughtlessness is not so novel. John Bunyan (1628–1688) could plaster this over our age as well as his:
[The soul] is neglected to amazement, and that by the most of men; yea, who is there of the many thousands that sit daily under the sound of the gospel that are concerned, heartily concerned, about the salvation of their souls? — that is, concerned, I say, as the nature of the thing requireth. If ever a lamentation was fit to be taken up in this age about, for, or concerning anything, it is about, for, and concerning the horrid neglect that everywhere puts forth itself with reference to salvation. (The Greatness of the Soul, 105)
Hell is being filled not so much with a shaking fist as with a shrug. How little thought, how little attention, how little time or effort is paid to eternity. Many a sinner today thinks thoughts of his everlasting soul as deep as his belly button. His neglect offends both God and his own well-being — he suicides the immortal part of him by his thoughtlessness. If Jesus’s question was needed then, it is needed all the more now. Dip it in fire, carve it in granite, engrave it upon the conscience: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?” (Mark 8:36–37).
Three Lessons on the Soul
Do not pass on from his question. Answer it. What does it profit you to amass all this world has to offer you — if the genie emerged to grant your deepest wishes — if in the receiving you let slip your soul? Too many live for the world and whisper, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But God will say to him on that dark day of judgment, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you” (Luke 12:19–20). If your soul be lost, all is lost, for you are lost.
Adrift in a naturalistic and atheistic West, you may need help considering the immaterial and immortal self. Satan the destroyer blinds man to the glory of Christ, but also to the glory of souls. Many do not know Jesus and do not want to know Jesus because they do not know what a soul is and what it means for it to be lost. Dear reader, do you know what it is to possess a soul? Do you know what it is to lose it? Consider then your own soul’s importance through three comparisons.
1. Your soul is greater than safety.
We need to study this before we are tested on it: your soul is worth any suffering to keep. Jesus introduces his question about soul-losing in the context of cross-bearing. He refuses to hide the cost of discipleship. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). Look ahead of you; there it is, a horrid sight to the flesh: a cross. But not just any cross, an empty cross. You get closer; what sick joke is this? Your name is etched upon it.
“Hell is being filled not so much with a shaking fist as with a shrug.”
You, die that death? Impossible. By no means. Absolutely not. And yet this is the instrument Christ puts before his disciples. Nails. Nakedness. Shame. Torture. All chosen — daily (Luke 9:23). What argument can even a divine mind produce to prod trembling sheep to such a slaughter? One word: life. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).
Jesus’s question — What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? — assassinates all alternatives. What does it gain us to refuse our cross, refuse his way, sidestep his suffering, to keep our brief life in this world and lose our life with him in the next? If you live for anything, live for that which will bless your soul; if you die for anything, die pursuing the good of your soul and the souls of others.
2. Your soul is greater than your body.
Local gyms, hospitals, makeup departments, medicines, and fashion all prove man cares about his physical self. A man cannot suffer a hangnail without it becoming a preoccupation. How much money must he spend to make the illness go away? How much to drink from the fountain of youth? We’ll pay it. How anxious he is to swell that bicep but a few centimeters or trim that midsection a few inches — how many hours, how much pain, what inconvenience he will endure for the body.
In all of this, we spend our focus on the wrapping paper of God’s far greater gift. The mass of humanity cares more for healthy and beautiful bodies than they do for healthy and beautiful souls. The one they can see in the mirror; the other is immaterial and, thus, to them unreal. What a tragedy. Not only is your soul that which can commune with God and that which will live forever, but it is that which will determine your resurrected body’s fate. A soul in heaven shall not have a body in hell, and the soul in hell will not have a body in heaven. The two will join: where the soul is, there the body will be also.
3. Your soul is greater than all the world.
Oh, how man excavates the ground for gold. How he crosses oceans, sails from shore to shore, sifts dirt for diamonds — in these he thinks he finds treasure. In these he thinks he finds what matters.
How differently does Jesus teach man to compute. Find the buried treasure, capture the pot of gold, unearth Atlantis, fill your barns, attain that celebrity, wealth, and status, and you will gain nothing worth considering, nothing even worth comparing to what you lose if you lose your soul. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? It profits him nothing. If the whole world could fit in your right pocket, but your soul should slip through a hole in your left, you’ve lost everything worth keeping.
In other words, you will never obtain anything in this world more valuable than what you lose by forfeiting your soul. Yet, like a madman who has escaped from the asylum, we scour the middle of the freeway looking for lost pennies. What are these compared with our very lives? What are a few gold coins compared to our souls? The world and all its desires are dust, rotten trash, a loathsome disease compared to riches you already possess by virtue of being a creature with a soul.
Lose Not Your Soul
Consider, really consider, Jesus’s second warning shot: What can a man give in return for his soul? “Return for his soul” — does Jesus not speak from the vantage point of hell? The man has lost his soul and wishes to buy it back. What can he give for its return? What would he not give for its return? Yet he does not have the funds. He sold himself cheaply and cannot buy himself back. He has hated himself. The bowl of red stew is empty; only tears remain; how foolishly does Esau barter his birthright!
What can a man give in return for his soul? Let a lost soul answer. What coin or feast or pleasure would that rich man in the torment spare to ferry his soul over that uncrossable chasm to where Lazarus sat? How vain the world now appears to him — less than a single drop of water upon his tongue to reduce his anguish. What can a man give in return for his soul? “Nothing now!” he groans through sobs.
Reader, you can lose your soul — most do. To lose your soul by thoughtlessness is an easy road and natural. To keep one’s soul in following Jesus to our crosses and beyond — this is supernatural. Do not lose your soul!
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