The Workshop

God made us with a body, spirit and soul - three distinct parts of one person. Among other ways, this is how we are made in God’s image who is three distinct Persons of one God. Our body, spirit and soul work together to form our life.

Your soul is the workshop of your life. 

Our bodies and our spirits bring the raw materials into our souls, and then our souls produce a cohesive life that corresponds to our experiences. Our souls are where we sort out all the physical, emotional and spiritual experiences we have as we form our lives. Everything we see, and experience, mills about deep within us until it comes out in the way we live. Our body and spirit are both the lines of input from the world into our soul and the means of expression from our lives back to the world. We can control the output of our workshop by bringing in the right materials. By bringing in good resources, we can increase the chances of producing a good output. We also can surrender control of our workshop to God so that our workshop and life become God’s primary domain.

Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life…. Ponder the path of your feet, and let all your ways be established. Do not turn to the right or the left; remove your foot from evil.

Proverbs 4:23-27

What you put in is what you get out.

The way we keep our heart and guard the workshop of our life is by controlling the roadways of entry to our workshop. The path of our feet, the light of our eye, and the canal of our ears are all things we control that affect what goes into our workshop. Monitoring the stuff going into our workshop is an important first step, but if our workshop is broken, the output of our life will be lacking. To produce a good life, we have to let God run the workshop of our lives. Our ongoing growth depends upon our focus, whether we focus superficially on our behaviors or focus inwardly upon our soul. We can try to become a good person by changing our reactions, but such changes rarely last, and if they do, they become the god we worship. When we seek to become a clear reflection of God from within our soul and allow that to change our behaviors, we become the people God wants us to be and wind up doing the things He wants us to do as a result rather than a cause.

Your soul is not a vacuum. Something will fill it.

The loading space in our workshop will always have material in it. Many things in the world want to fill our loading space, and unless we intentionally fill the vacant space with something, the world will fill it for us. It is not enough for us to clear out the loading space for our soul, we have to fill it with good material. (See Matthew 12:43-45). 

We can surrender control of the workshop of our lives to God, and we can bring Him the right materials to produce a life that honors Him.