Mar 13, 2025 5 min read what is the meaning of a soul

Take the Love Test

You do not have a soul. You are a soul, a uniquely loved human being. Who do you love most? How can you become the person you were created to be?

Love one another

Since Jesus commands "love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself," how are we to understand these as the components that make up our individuality? The way we understand the soul opens up our understanding of the nature of human life. The dominant sense from the Scripture is that the soul is equated with personhood.

Every person is a soul made up of three highly interactive, inseparable component parts: heart, mind, and body. As Dallas Willard says, the soul "correlates, integrates, and enlivens the various dimensions of the self."

What Scripture tells us

The Scripture tells us that all human beings are souls, and as soulful beings, each of us is being formed spiritually. The state of the soul, however, depends on whether we are in rebellion against God or have been penetrated by the life of God, whether we are moving away from God or toward God.

The natural soulful person — Natural soulful person

Paul gives us a picture of the natural person--someone who does not understand the things of God in I Corinthinas 2:14.

"The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit."

These people believe the gospel is foolishness, and their souls have settled for far less than the satisfaction that only the one true God offers; though God places eternity in our hearts, many live only for what time offers.

Idols made by humans have become the object of their devotion. The souls in rebellion against God are not on God's wavelength; they are tuned to a frequency that makes them deaf to God's invitation. The soul without God is dead to the things of God.

Some souls, however, have been imbued with the life of the Spirit.

The difference between the natural and the spiritual person is a life that comes from outside and penetrates the individual. Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born from above or born again.

Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again. - John 3:3

What he meant by this is that there is a life force which does not exist in the natural person.

Life force

The word used almost exclusively in the Gospels for this life force is zoe. This life force is what Jesus is talking about in John 10:10 where He says,

"I have come that they may have life [zoe], and have it to the full."

The most well-known verse in Scripture, John 3:16, also uses zoe:

"For God so lived the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life [zoe]."

Binary Reality:
There is just one of two trajectories
for us as soulful beings.

We are either a soulful (natural) person who is moving away from God or a soulful (spiritual) person who is moving toward God who has been penetrated by zoe.

Soulful beings

We are each a soulful being, made up of heart, mind, and body. Because we are soulful beings, each of us is being formed spiritually. Jesus says,

"Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself."

He is addressing that we have "caught the infection" of zoe. As C.S. Lewis notes, only if this "good infection" has penetrated our life can we be transformed into the person God intends us to be!

Surrender is the secret to being
an authentic disciple.

As soulful beings, the heart, mind, and body are each to be transformed intentionally and interactively so that we can love God and one another in an agape fashion. So, though we will look at each of the elements and attempt to get to their core so that they can be deployed fully in pursuit of our highest vocation, we need to keep in mind that they ultimately interface with each other inseparably in ways that we can never fully explain.

The heart, mind, and body comprise our life (soulfulness) as they blend together and influence each other. Souls last forever in an unchanged natural state, or they are transformed into eternal life-giving zoe by the Holy Spirit invading, abiding in the abode of the person who surrenders to God's plan of salvation--being saved from our natural selves.

Excerpt from The Essential Commandment by Greg Ogden