Articles by Paul Scanlon

Soul Prosperity

‘Beloved I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in health just as your soul prospers.’ (3 John:2 NASB)

Here John makes a connection and identifies what, for many, is the missing link between external prosperity and internal prosperity. He makes clear that God wants us to prosper in life - but only as our soul prospers. All external prosperity must be rooted in a strong, healthy and prosperous soul. If not, the gap between what we have and who we are can become our downfall. The writer of Proverbs puts it this way: ‘An inheritance quickly gained at the beginning will not be blessed at the end.’1 Why? Because when sudden external prosperity meets inner soul poverty, the gap is very dangerous. Lottery winners have been recorded as saying that they wish they had never won for this very reason; they wanted the money but not the greater problems that sudden external wealth created for them internally, mentally, emotionally and even physically.

What is the soul?

The soul is made up of our mind, emotions and will; or how we think, how we feel and how we choose. The soul is the primary battleground of our lives; the battle for our mind, emotions and choices is unrelenting. Peter said: "Dear friends I urge you as aliens and strangers in the world to abstain from sinful desires which war against your soul."2
There is a war against our soul, and the millions of resultant casualties and fatalities within the church indicate that we are not winning that war. Multiplied millions of believers have been taken out of the race because when the war hit their soul, they lacked sufficient inner strength to survive. Many of those believers were the most charismatic, tongue-speaking and gifted individuals in the church. And we who saw them backslide were left shocked that such spiritual people could fall. The reality is however, that most of our problems, challenges and temptations are not actually spiritual, they are mental and emotional; issues of the soul.

We are spirit, soul and body

Human beings are made up of three parts: spirit, soul and body. Unless we understand how these three parts work together we will be forever vulnerable. ‘For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two edge sword, it penetrates even to the dividing of soul and spirit, joints and marrow it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.’3

Many of us grew up in churches where the Word of God was not wisely applied. We were not taught the difference between spirit, soul and body, nor how we could love and serve God with all of our spirit, soul and body. This produced an over emphasis on the spiritual and turned everything into a spiritual issue. So, when in difficulty, we automatically became more spiritually intense. If the problems persisted, we would look for divine intervention in the form of laying on of hands, deliverance, healing, prophecy, maybe a touch from God or an anointing - or all of the above! However, what nobody told us was that the problem probably wasn’t spiritual at all but soulish. We therefore didn’t need deliverance from a demon but deliverance from the wrong thinking and wrong feelings that were producing the poor choices our impoverished soul kept handing to us.

The devil understands very well how people are put together. That’s why his first approach to a human being was a direct assault on the soul. ‘Did God really say?’4 was an attempt to draw Eve into a mind game, which he knew would ultimately lead to her spiritual downfall. The devil does not approach our spirit direct. He knows that as believers, our spirit is off limits to him because it is born again of an incorruptible seed.5 He does not waste his time trying to corrupt what he knows cannot be corrupted. Your soul however is fair game, so he approaches it at will with all kinds of temptations, suggestions and options. He knows he cannot alter your heavenly destination, that’s too late, but he can sabotage your earthly destiny. He cannot separate you from Christ but he can separate you from serving Christ’s purpose in your generation. The battle for our lives is fought, won or lost in the arena of our soul; the arena of thoughts, affections and choices.

Soul-lag

Someone once said that the devil is not half as concerned about pushing you back as he is about containing you where you are. We don’t have to turn our back on God or leave the Church for the devil to defeat us, we just need to stop growing in our soul. Too many believers, who are in church every week and have good hearts, have simply stopped growing. If we fail to address people’s soul and make everything a spiritual issue, we will breed ‘super spiritual’ Christians with souls that lag so far behind their spirit, that there is never any follow through. We will continue to produce churches that from their spirit say ‘we are going to take the city’ but don’t have sufficient soul prosperity to take a simple correction in good attitude.

Some of you reading this have allowed your spirit to promise your Pastor or church leader something that your soul is not developed enough to see through. It’s not that you were insincere, it is just that your spirit wants to do lots of things that your soul isn’t ready for yet. Don’t let your spirit take you where your under developed soul can’t keep you. You can’t go anywhere in life or destiny unless all of you goes; spirit, soul and body.

Anything your spirit commits to can be cancelled out by your soul, because whatever your spirit orders your soul will have to pay for. If your spirit keeps ordering things that your soul can’t afford, you are heading for trouble. We must increase our soul prosperity to a place where it can afford to pay for whatever our spirit orders. The devil really doesn’t mind our churches majoring on spirit, because he knows that all completion depends upon the soul. Unreliability is the curse of church life; rather than soul-prospering it is soul-destroying for those on the receiving end of it. Why do unreliable people keep volunteering to serve then get an attitude when they are confronted about their flakiness? The constant cry of church leadership is ‘give me someone who is reliable, not deep, not gifted, spirit filled or even anointed, just reliable, just someone who will please show up!’

The Coffee Shop

In February 2003 we opened a ‘Starbucks style’ coffee shop in our church. It seats 300 people indoors and outdoors and offers a fully waitered service. It has added a whole new dimension
to the quality of both our, and more importantly our visitors, church experience. It is always packed and buzzing with life. It opens three times a week plus special events and conferences. It requires a staff of over sixty people. It’s a great thing to have, it is without doubt the biggest church coffee shop in the UK, but it has also taken many people’s soul to the limit of commitment, reliability and faithfulness. This is not a complaint; I could never criticise our church’s serving heart, they are brilliant. But this is not a heart issue it is a soul issue.

This initiative and others like it in the past few years have highlighted an important church growth principle to me: I cannot take our church anywhere in spirit that we cannot go in our soul. Whatever we envision from our spirit, we will have to resource with our soul. We will have to finance it, staff it, run it and sustain it, and all without a single goose-bump! Another particular problem with the coffee shop was that we staffed it almost entirely with our young people. I am a great believer in the promotion and empowerment of young people. However, young people have some notorious soul weaknesses like unreliability, poor self-discipline and lack of confidence. So it has been a great year of growing for our youth!

To become a great church we must develop a prosperous soul. The spirit is always willing, but the flesh is often too weak to translate that willingness into corresponding actions.6 If a coffee shop idea can defeat our soul then we will have to postpone the really big ideas until we grow a bigger corporate church soul. We will not get what we pray for, we will only get what we pray and work for. And we will not keep what we work for if we don’t become bigger than it. If we are not bigger than anything we run then it will run us. As a church we have decided that we will not live down to a weak soul, but we will live up to our spiritual destiny and all that this requires we become in our soul and body to achieve it.

Crossing Over

Back in 1997 our church began a journey that became known as our ‘Crossing Over’ period. It was like Joshua crossing over the Jordan to establish the new church we have now become. My book Crossing Over journals our experience of transitioning from a safe, comfortable, middle-class church to becoming a Centre of good works in the community, now reaching 10,000-20,000 unchurched people per month through a range of city-wide outreach initiatives.
Crossing over took our church to the limit of our soul capacity. We were stretched mentally, emotionally and physically without respite for almost two years. Some of our leaders went down with migraines, digestive problems, skin rashes, shingles and many other minor ailments. This was all a physical reaction to a soul pressure that was started by a spiritual decision to cross our church over. Talk is cheap but making that talk a reality is not cheap. Crossing over taught us more than at any other time in our church history that we are spirit, soul and body, and until all three parts of us can go, none of us can go. Many have asked us about crossing their churches over in recent years and our advice has been prepare yourself for the biggest mental, emotional and decisional battle of your life.

Soul Winning

‘He who wins souls is wise.’7 Once you understand what the soul is, this scripture, which has traditionally, though not biblically, been made to equate with getting people saved, takes on a whole new meaning. The proverb is not saying he who gets people saved is wise, it’s saying it takes wisdom to win people mentally, emotionally and decisionaly. I believe what the writer is saying is that by winning a person’s soul, we remove resistance to whatever it is we are winning them for. There are many people in business, politics and the media who are expert soul winners.

When we build churches that know how to connect with unchurched people mentally, move them emotionally and influence them decisionally, then we are building houses of wisdom. We will not need to rely on the Holy Spirit to zap people or wait for the big R (Revival) to come and save our cities, but we will have confidence in our church’s ability to win people, first to ourselves and then possibly to Jesus. There is no guarantee that people whose souls have been won will come to Christ, but it certainly removes a lot of obstacles to them doing so.

At the recent Graduation service of our Leadership Academy students, many of their unsaved friends and families came to church for the first time. Some students were a little nervous about what the reaction of their unsaved families to our kind of church would be. However, at the end of the service they were buzzing with enjoyment of the whole thing. Some of their families said things like, ‘we never knew church could be so much fun!’ Another, ‘we enjoyed every minute of it.’ Another, ‘we felt like crying; we want to come back.’ That’s what I call soul winning. Within one service and their first experience of church we connected with them mentally, moved them emotionally and favourably influenced their will towards us. I’m not aware that any of them got saved, but many of them now have far less resistance to getting saved. Our corporate soul won their soul.

The Shepherd of my Soul

‘The Lord is my shepherd I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul.’8 In this Psalm David reveals to us a discovery he made: God was not just the shepherd of his spirit but the shepherd and restorer of his soul. And God is not just the shepherd of your spirit, he is the shepherd of your soul too. God always approaches your soul through your spirit, whereas the devil always approaches your soul through your body and its five senses. It is therefore vital that we learn to live from our spirit and not our senses.
Living from your soul is like a lottery, because the soul is only as good as wherever it’s been feeding from - your spirit or your flesh. If your soul is feeding on trash instead of treasure, in a crisis it will hand you petrol instead of water. Your soul is downstream from your spirit, so don’t live off whatever manages to drift down into your mind, live from the source of your spirit and take control of whatever comes downstream.

The green pastures and the quiet waters from which our spirit feeds have a restorative effect on our soul. As David records further on in Psalm 23, a restored soul is one ‘without fear of evil’ and that absence of fear creates a new perspective on life which sees ‘tables’ of opportunity instead of enemies to be in fear of.9 This stability of soul brings it into alignment with our spirit and enables us to live in a realm of dominion; a life characterised by follow through and completion of all that we aspire to in our heart. The restoration of the soul closes the gap between what we see in our spirit and what we can actually achieve with the co-operation of our soul.

The more we understand about our make up, the better we become. Paul, when writing to the Thessalonian church expressed his desire to see them come to maturity as whole people in spirit, soul and body.10 He knew that without agreement between spirit, soul and body the outcome would be an ineffective and frustrated life. But with the inner agreement of a prosperous soul great things could be achieved.
Let’s commit to the process of flourishing in spirit, soul and body. Let’s learn to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Love God with all of you, not just a part of you. Love him with your mind, love him with your emotions, love him with your choices and love him with your body.

Two-thirds of you will Live Forever

Though we are made up of three parts, only two of them will live forever. So the sooner we begin to get it right the better. One day we will all receive a new body11 but we will never receive a new spirit or soul. You will always be you. So, if all we do is pay attention to the ‘you’ we see, our body, but neglect the two-thirds of ‘you’ we don’t see, the larger part that we ignore and underestimate will ultimately sink us like an iceberg.

Get to work on the eternal part of your being because contrary to popular myths, heaven will not turn you into a super saint. We will enter heaven the same person that we were upon leaving the earth and that person will have to give an account12 for the stewardship of this life and suffer consequences13 and loss for laziness of soul on earth. This is also clearly implied in the parables of the Kingdom,14 the parable of the talents,15 and the parable of watchfulness.16
So, let’s build lives and churches with prosperous souls. Let’s start spending more time on our inner man than our outer man for, ‘physical training is of some value but godliness has value for all things, for both the present life and life to come.’17

1 Proverbs 20:21
2 1 Peter 2:11
3 Hebrews 4:12
4 Genesis 3:1
5 1 Peter 1:23
6 Matthew 26:41
7 Proverbs 11:30
8 Psalm 23:1-3
9 Psalm 23:5
10 1 Thessalonians 5:23
11 1 Corinthians 15:42-49
12 2 Corinthians 5:10
13 1 Corinthians 3:11-15
14 Matthew 13
15 Matthew 25:14
16 Matthew 24:45
17 1 Timothy 4:8