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"I looked on my right hand, and behold, that there was no man that would know me; refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul; I cried unto thee, O Lord, I said, Thou art my refuge, and my portion in the land of the living." (Psalm 142:4-5)
I'd like us to think particularly about that striking phrase, "No man cared for my soul," and our title is very simply: Who Cares About Your Soul?
This is a psalm of David, and the heading says it is a prayer when he was in the cave, the cave of Adullam. He was about 32 to 34 years of age. David was an extraordinary and brilliant man, and a brilliant king also — the second king of Israel.
Going back into the 11th century B.C., there is Saul, the first king of Israel; and then, as you come into the 10th century, it is David. But the handover to David was prolonged, and David suffered for six to eight years being pursued by Saul.
He was about 13 or 14 when he was anointed to be king by the prophet Samuel, and Saul was condemned of God. Saul, filled with jealousy and insecurity, went to great lengths to exterminate David. David was brought into the royal household as a kind of therapist-musician to console Saul and stabilise his moods.
Then came the great event everyone knows — the Philistines' champion, Goliath of Gath. David, a youth of about 17 or 18, became the one to challenge him. The felling of Goliath catapulted David — brilliant in his own right — into becoming the personality of the day, the ultimate celebrity, and eventually a great military leader who led victory after victory.
But now he's 28 to 30, banished from court, on the run. He has been pursued into the Judean deserts, into the huge cave of Adullam, where his headquarters was. He had people around him who came to him for protection, and his father's household — and there was Saul with 3,000 crack troops. Finally David is utterly worn down and in great peril, and this psalm comes.
"When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then thou knewest my path."
He said, "I looked on my right hand, and beheld," where you would normally look for an advocate, "but there was no man that would know me." Though many people were for him, nobody would dare put in a word for him. They would lose their heads at Saul's court.
"Refuge failed me" — there was nowhere he could take his little band for safety. "No man cared for my soul." He was utterly alone in the corridors of power.
Those are intensely interesting words. "No man cared" comes from the Hebrew verb "to walk." It actually means something like: nobody was following my interests. Our King James translators rendered it "cared for," which is brilliant. No man stood for him.
Some translations render the word "soul" here as "life." The Hebrew word nefesh can be translated life — but it's a special word. It means your whole life, your entire being, your cause, your purpose for existence. David was anointed king; his purpose was to rule. That was the significance of his life. No man cared for his soul — the total me. Often the word "heart" is used in this all-embracing sense in the Bible.
It's amazing today how little attention is given to the soul. It wasn't always like that. When I was a youngster, everybody paused at the word "soul" — even people who weren't churchgoers. They believed there was more to a human being than flesh and blood. But now it's been brainwashed out of society by rationalism and materialism.
So what is the soul? Biblically, it is the immaterial part of you. You couldn't find it if you dissected a corpse. It's resident in the body and makes use of the body, rather as an instrumentalist plays an instrument. The soul plays the body.
The soul is generally described as having five parts:
You pray with your spirit. You understand spiritual things with your spirit. So the question is: Is your soul functioning? Or is that part of your soul dormant, almost like being dead?
If your soul is asleep, your spiritual faculties don't work. You've got no spiritual eyes. You open a Bible and it's just dry and meaningless — this astonishing revelation from God, consistent from cover to cover, telling us about God, ourselves, our fallen state, and what God has done to reconcile us — yet it's meaningless to you because there are no spiritual eyes.
The old illustration is that a person whose soul is inactive is like a goldfish in a bowl. The goldfish has no way of understanding the world outside the tank. It's totally satisfied with what's in the bowl — it's all it knows.
Before we're converted to God, we know nothing about the real purpose of life, about eternity, about what it is to walk with him. We can be very proud of ourselves, we can despise the Christian faith, because we don't see it. We're shut into a material world — satisfied with its trinkets, things we can touch and smell and possess. You're a prisoner within that limited world.
This is parallel to our experience. Who cares that you've got an inactive soul?
No man cares about your soul, or has the power to bring it to life. Only God can help you. Only Christ can help you.
Here is an enormous problem: God is holy, and we are rebels against him, lost in our sin. And the biggest tragedy of all is that probably you don't care yourself about your soul.
Some people don't care because they are so lightweight and trivial. They trip along through life, wholly satisfied with the latest fashions and celebrities. They may hold PhDs, and yet in their personality they are very shallow, and have never given a thought to the soul.
Dear friends, if you think you may just be a thoughtless, heedless, lightweight person, pray to God to help you. In that condition you'll go to hell — a rebel to the end of your life, spurning God, no worship, no love, no interest in your Creator. Don't let it happen to you.
Some people, because they're so ignorant in spiritual matters, simply have never grasped that Christ came into the world. The eternal second person of the Godhead came to be a Saviour to needy, fallen, sinful human beings. God in his great love has so cared for souls that Christ came into the world incarnate, to go to Calvary's cross, so that God the Father could pour out upon him the eternal punishment due to all who would trust in him, that they could be forgiven.
From our point of view, it's as if God has a problem. He is holy; we are sinful. He cannot accommodate sin. He cannot let sin off. It is God's holy, perfect, pure character to be infinitely indignant against sin — this is called his wrath, the indignation of God against human pride, greed, deceit, and covetousness.
How can God forgive when it is his holy nature to punish and destroy sin? He wouldn't be God if this were not true. That's the problem of God: how can he show his loving kindness and forgive us?
There is only one way. God must come himself and become incarnate — the perfect man, the Lord Jesus Christ, who was God and man. He became a man so that he could suffer our death, be our representative, take our place, and feel what we should have felt by way of punishment for our sin. This is the atoning, substitutionary death of Christ for sinners. And he did that for all who turn to him.
He therefore has the power to forgive and bring the soul to life so that you can pray and you can understand.
If you don't mind my going into a little ancient history: when I first came to this church, in 1970, I was just 31, and it was my second pastorate. There were very few of us — a few pews — because after the war and a lot of bombing around here, things had run down. Most of those who occupied the pews were in their 80s.
After I'd been preaching here just a few weeks — and this is nothing to my credit; I'm only a messenger — a lady in her mid-80s came to see me. She had been a member of the church for decades. Her Christian name was Florence. She said:
"Pastor, I have found the Lord. My soul has been brought to life. I've been a worshiper, not realising I didn't walk with God, for more years than I could dare tell you. But I've repented of my sin, and I asked him to forgive me. And everything is different. I feel sure I have received life. I have at last been born again."
Down the years — old people, young people — I have heard this so many times: "I believe I have found the Lord." And it has worked in their lives.
One of the earliest young people who professed Christ when I first came became a hospital doctor. He had been an atheist, and the Lord gave him light and understanding. He repented of his sin, trusted in Christ, and was dramatically changed. Not so many years ago, another older man who'd been attending — but to whom nothing meant anything — was 72 when he said, all smiles, "I have found the Lord." He has never been the same since.
If you listen to the message of the gospel and realise the seriousness of your position — my soul is dead, I'm a lost person — then ask yourself: why aren't you interested in your own soul? Is it because you've already been captured by certain sins and lusts that are too important to you, and you're trapped?
But God cares for the soul. Christ cares, and feels, and follows your interests so closely that he came into the world and suffered and died on Calvary to be a Redeemer for us. You need to come to him. You need to repent of your sin, hand over your life to him, and trust him and him alone.
You may say, "I've got some good points." No, you haven't, friends — not really. Of course you're capable of kindness, generosity, some good things. But when you consider what we are by nature, it's totally outweighed by our sin.
It's not simply that we do sinful things. We do sinful things because we have sinful hearts. I perform selfish acts because I have a selfish heart, and I carry it about all the time. There isn't just a "sin clock" that clicks round a notch each time you sin — it's running all the time. We say boastful, proud things because we have a proud heart. That's our settled condition. How much we need the forgiveness and cleansing of God.
We need to repent, to yield our lives, and to trust in Christ and him alone. Then comes the moment — if we're sincere — when we know he's worked within, re-crafting and remaking us. Our conscience comes to life, we love the Lord, we pray to him, he hears and answers from on high, and we understand his word. It becomes to us a source of direction, comfort, and information — and there's nothing like it.
Whereas once we had no interest, now we say: this is amazing, what I have found, and where the Lord has brought me, and what he's done for me. That's what we must do, friends — turn to him.
Let's pray together.
O God, our gracious Heavenly Father, look upon us. Show us things perhaps we never grasped and never saw before. Write in our hearts the great urgency of our situation to seek and find thee. O Lord, come and deal graciously and tenderly with us. Thou alone dost care for the soul; bring us to life, draw us to thyself, and bless us from this day forward, so that one day we shall enter into everlasting glory. O Lord, look upon us and help us now. We ask these things in the name of our Saviour, for his sake. Amen.
