Rachel Starr Thomson

What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

That may be history’s most haunting question. It cuts to the heart of my life and yours: what good does all our work, all our effort, all our love, all our passion, all our mistakes, all our successes—what good does any of it do if in the end we lose our own souls, if we lose our identities, all that makes us human?

The question was asked about 2000 years ago by Jesus of Nazareth. It’s as poignant today as it was then. Everywhere you look, people are fighting to hang on to their own souls. Their self-respect. Their identities. Jesus’ question echoes in every mid-life crisis, every idealization of childhood, every psychologist’s office, every divorce, every career change. It’s there in our work and in our play, in the choices we make about style or fashion or pastimes. We’re all fighting to define ourselves and hang onto ourselves because we know that something is threatening to undo who we are.

We’re losing ourselves, and we’re not sure how to stop it.

The Threatening Force

It’s ironic that most people’s efforts to hang onto their own souls backfire on them.

You’ve seen it: the kid who rebels against his parents because he doesn’t like the box they’ve fitted for him. He chooses friends they don’t like. In his quest to find himself he starts losing himself—to peer pressure, to drugs maybe, to alcohol. Twenty years later that kid’s sitting on a street corner, an alcoholic with nothing left and no real idea of who he is except a slave to the bottle.

A woman divorces her husband in her desire to rediscover herself, but she ends up so eaten by bitterness that her whole life becomes about him and what he did to her anyway. The exec defines himself by material things and paychecks, so he sacrifices some of who he is to chase them, and before you know it, it’s hard to find the man under the possessions. He’s gained the world, but he’s losing his soul.

Or maybe he’s lost it already.

So often, when we go to find ourselves, temptations arise that will end up destroying us if we take them. But we do take them.

In those instances, Jesus would have used the word “sin” for what we’re doing. It’s an old-fashioned word not really understood or liked in our culture, but it’s also the best word for what’s going on here.

Sin is doing what we know (or are pretty sure) we should not do. Sin is a voice inside that offers us the world if we’ll listen, but doesn’t deliver anything  but more problems. Problems that can’t be shoved aside. Problems that take root deep inside us.

Problems like anger or rebellion or alcoholism or bitterness or materialism or serial divorce.

Paul was one of the earliest Christian teachers. He described sin as slavery: “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?” (Romans 6:16). So did Jesus: “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34).

Paul also described vividly the way sin traps and frustrates us, even when we want to do better:

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing . . . So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:18–24)

A Very Old Problem

Sin is a very old problem. That’s why I want to use the word “sin” instead of coming up with something more politically correct. Whatever you call it, it’s been threatening the human soul for as long as we’ve been around. Every story in history can testify to that. Everywhere you turn, you can see this battle. People enslaved by their desires. People doing things they don’t really want to do that cause destruction for themselves and others. People eaten up by guilt. People with a thousand Achilles’ heels.

History doesn’t exactly show us a panorama of healthy souls, of people reaching all their potential as beautiful, creative, healing, loving, successful creatures.

The Bible talks a lot about this problem of sin and how people dealt with it in ancient cultures.

Genesis (which means “Beginnings”) is the first book of the Bible. It tells the story of sin this way: the first human beings were in close relationship with God. Genesis says they “walked together.” But eventually, man rebelled against God. Their rebellion was sin, and it made them susceptible to more sin—to trying to do things without God in ways that would eventually cause them to self-destruct. The Bible records the first murder shortly after this entrance of sin in the world, and various kinds of family division and strife and violence and sexual exploitation.

It didn’t take men long to learn how to lose their souls, apparently.

What wasn’t so easy was getting them back. Pretty early on in the accounts of the Bible, we see people killing and burning animals as a sacrifice for God. In Exodus, the Bible’s second book, such sacrifices are defined and explained. They weren’t about feeding God or trying to bribe Him. They were about symbolically dealing with a real problem. They were an admission that sin was serious, that it was destroying those who did it, and that the guilt they felt was real.

Killing an animal you owned (at cost to yourself, as you were probably a sort of rancher whose herds were your livelihood) and putting its blood on the altar was a way to symbolically “atone.” That is, you were saying, “God, see how seriously I take my sin. Accept the blood of this innocent creature in the place of mine, because what I’ve done will destroy me otherwise.” And symbolically, God did accept the sacrifices.

Keep in mind that these weren’t like the sacrifices of other nations around them. They weren’t about making God happy or bribing him. They were about admitting and paying for sin.

I know, that’s very foreign (and maybe repulsive) to us. But it’s a pretty powerful picture when you think about it. And it tells you that these people, thousands of years ago, were just as desperate as we are to get rid of this monkey on our backs—this tendency to self-destruct and lose our own souls even as we try to keep them.

That’s something else Jesus said: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:49).

Out of Symbol, Into Reality

Now, I’m not suggesting you go out and find a sheep and kill it to try to kick sin. It won’t work. It didn’t really work for the ancient Hebrews, either. Remember, it was a symbol. But it was a symbol that pointed ahead to something.

In the Bible’s “letter to the Hebrews,” written during the rule of the Roman Empire centuries after the accounts of Genesis and Exodus, the writer (who might have been Paul, but didn’t sign his name) described the problem with the old sacrifices this way:

For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near . . . For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. (Hebrews 10:1,3)

But Hebrews also brings the symbol into reality:

When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God . . . For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. (Hebrews 10:12–14).

The same Jesus whose question I find so haunting did something incredibly radical: He offered Himself as a sacrifice to atone for our screw-ups, our self-destruction, our hurting of others—our sin.

That would be radical enough if he had been human. But according to the Bible, He wasn’t. That is, he was—but he wasn’t only human. He was also God. And He didn’t give in to sin like we do. Not ever. Not once.

That made His blood, in God’s sight, able to atone for sinners like you and me. Like Hebrews says, His offering of Himself “perfects forever those who are being sanctified” (“sanctified” just means “set apart”—we’re set apart by believing and trusting in Jesus).

That’s the message of the Christian faith. It’s not that we need to do good things so God will accept us (we won’t be good enough). It’s not that we need to find a way, through keeping rules and prayer and charity and being nice, to kick our tendency to self-destruct. It won’t work. God knows that.

The message of the Christian faith is that God admitted what we have such a hard time admitting—that we’re hopeless and helpless on our own. But He loves us, so He took on human form and stepped in to make an atonement that actually works.

An atonement that lets us back into good relationship with God. And an atonement that will give us power over sin so we can finally stop self-destructing, stop losing ourselves, and find our souls.

It’s about making us who we were always meant to be.

Oh yeah, and John 3:16 also tells us that through Jesus’ death and resurrection on our behalf, God will give us eternal life:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16–17)

I grew up in a Christian home. I am a classic “good girl.” I have high standards, no addictions, no deep dark secrets from the past. But I know all about sin, because it’s the monkey on my back too. Left on my own, I self-destruct, no matter how much I don’t want to. I can’t live the way I want to—not without God’s help. But because of this message, I’m getting my soul back. I live in a relationship with God. I’m trusting the atonement of Jesus to pay for me and give me power to become what I was meant to be in the first place.

You can read more in the Bible: www.biblegateway.com. (Check out John and Romans first—I recommend the English Standard Version.) Or e-mail me at thomson.rachel@gmail.com. Even better? Check out a local, Bible-believing church or talk to a Christian you know about this message.