Healing for the Soul & Spirit, Part 1

 

September 6, 2019

 

This is a topic I have mostly avoided for the past 20-plus years, ever since I first heard it discussed.  I’ve heard about “soul fragments” for years, but never really considered the Scriptural foundations for this area of teaching – and in fact thought folks who ministered in this area had really gone overboard, stretching the Word into an area that didn’t really exist.

This is an area of understanding where I have had some blinders on – and thankfully the Holy Spirit has opened my eyes.

When Jesus first began His ministry, He opened up to the Isaiah Scroll and read the following:

Isaiah 61:1-3:  ¹The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek (åéðˆòÈ -€aònaòyv:depressed in mind and circumstances, humble, lowly, poor); he hath sent me to bind up (Lá—ç˜ - chaòbash:to wrap fully, to heal, to gather back together)  the brokenhearted (øá—LÜ - shaòbar:crushed, broken in pieces, torn apart -- + -- áìÅ - leòb:[the heart, metaphorically] feelings, the emotions, the will or intellect), to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; ²To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our  God; to comfort (íç—ðˆ - naòcham:to breathe strongly upon, to ease) all that mourn; ³To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.

The way this is expressed in the Hebrew text has always amazed me because it literally describes those whose mind, whose thoughts, feelings and emotions have been shattered and ripped apart into pieces.  In other words, they’ve been fragmented.

Now, consider how God commands Ezekiel to prophesy against the false prophets:

Ezekiel 13:18-20 (NASB):  ¹⁷Now you, son of man, set your face against the daughters of your people who are prophesying from their own inspiration. Prophesy against them ¹⁸and say, Thus says the Lord GOD, “Woe to the women who sew magic bands on all wrists and make veils for the heads of persons of every stature to hunt down souls!  Will you hunt down the souls of My people, but preserve the lives of others for yourselves?  ¹⁹For handfuls of barley and fragments of bread, you have profaned Me to My people to put to death some who should not die and to keep others alive who should not live, by your lying to My people who listen to lies.

²⁰Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am against your magic bands by which you hunt souls there as birds and I will tear them from your arms; and I will let them go, even those lives whom you hunt as birds. ²¹“I will also tear off your veils and deliver My people from your hands, and they will no longer be in your hands to be hunted; and you will know that I am the LORD.”

By this word, we can easily see that those who are in the realm of the occult – those who practice witchcraft, divination, sorcery, use Ouija boards, promote transcendental meditation, etc., become the tools of Satan themselves to rip apart the minds, the souls, the feelings and the emotions of those who fall prey to them.

Then we have the picture of “soul restoration” – putting it back together so that it is intact and whole – in the 23^rd Psalm.

Psalm 23:2-3:  ²He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. ³He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

The Hebrew word translated “restoreth” in this passage is the word: áeL - shuòb.

   This is an important word and concept in the Hebrew language.  It means: to bind back together, to restore to the starting point, to pull in again, to bring back home.

Everything that the Enemy does to God’s people is designed to break apart, to divide, to destroy and to conquer.

By the same token, everything that Jesus made available to us by his suffering, death on the Cross, and His Resurrection is wholeness, completeness, soundness – in other words, restoration back to the original state in which God created Adam.

So long as we have parts of ourselves that are not intact, we’ve not been restored.  In a non-restored state, we are still vulnerable to the Enemy.  We are specifically vulnerable to deception, and we provide open inroads for demonic torment and activity in our lives.

There is an area of activity that is prominent in society today, and that is fornication.  Writing to the Ekklesia in Corinth, Paul describes what happens when fornication takes place:

I Corinthians 6:13-20:  ^13bNow the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.  ¹⁴And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power. ¹⁵Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ?  Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid. ¹⁶What?  Know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? For two, saith he, shall be one flesh.  ¹⁷But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.  ¹⁸Flee fornication.  Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.  ¹⁹What?  Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?  ²⁰For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.

The Greek word that defines “body” in this text is the word, soma.  It is a word which defines one, whole complete being, the body as a sound whole.

When two people engage in sexual intercourse, they become one body.  At the same time, there is a sharing of their soul (hence the world’s concept of “soul-mate”), their thoughts, their minds, their wills, and their emotions.

They literally give a part of their soul, their thought-processes, their minds and thinking and their emotions one to another.  Each party to the intercourse takes away from the sexual exchange a part of the other person.

That’s not strange or unusual.  It happens to be the way God designed things.  But sexual intercourse was specifically designed for the marriage relationship.  Consider what happened when God first took Eve out of Adam.

Genesis 2:21-25:  ²¹And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; ²²And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. ²³And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. ²⁴Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. ²⁵And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

You see the process taking place, don’t you?

What’s the first thing God did to Adam?  He put him into a deep sleep so that his mind  -- his soul -- would not get in the way of what was about to take place.

God then takes a part of Adam out of him and forms Eve.  From this point forward, neither Adam nor Eve are complete without each other.  Eve shares a portion of Adam’s soul and body, and Adam has a part of himself in her.

Thus, the Law of Marriage came into being.  Marriage takes a man and a woman and joins them together so that they become one new being – a whole being.

Their lives together from this point forward become a sharing of each other.  The woman takes on many of the characteristics and likenesses – a part of the very character and makeup – of her husband.  He, in turn, by virtue of joining with her shares her mind, her thoughts, her soul, her very being.

Over the course of time, they become so much a part of each other (that’s to say, in a God-ordered and blessed relationship) that people associate the one with the other.

The deviant and aberrant form of this relationship comes in fornication and adultery.

The man or the woman who engages in a sexual relationship with a partner not their spouse shares a part of themselves with the other person.  There is a transfer that takes place which renders each person – from that point forward – incomplete.

Their minds, their souls and their emotions have been “rended” – torn apart and shredded, even if it is only a little.  The point is that from this moment each person is incomplete.

Worse, when the relationship between two people is adulterous, and it continues over a period of time, the other “injured” spouse in the marriage is damaged because of the continuing relationship between the adulterous spouse and the wife or husband; and soul fragmentation and transfers increase.

The more that kind of exchange takes place, the more splintered and shredded each person becomes; and when a man or woman has multiple sex partners – particularly in the case of both male and female prostitutes – the worse the situation becomes.

I dealt with and ministered to a woman one time who had lost track of the number of sex partners she had been with.  Nearing 30 years of age, she’d never been married.  Literally, this woman was the epitome of the word, “scatter-brained.”  Her mind, her soul and her emotions had been scattered amongst many men to the point where she could not stay focused for any period of time on any task.

Once she received deliverance and began to renounce and repent of each relationship restoration of her mind and her being took place.  At the time, I did not know to lead her through the “defragmentation” of her mind, but the Holy Spirit took care of it.

Within less than two years she grew and recovered and matured spiritually to the place that the Lord brought to her His counterpart for her and we got to see her married and settled.  The Lord had restored her soul.

There is another kind of sexual intercourse that is even more devastating to the soul, the mind and the emotions than simple (if there is such a thing!) fornication or adultery.  That is incest.

When a father takes his daughter and uses her as a sex partner in the place of his wife, because it is so much a violation of the way God ordered relationships between man and woman, it has unimaginable destructive power.

The same is true of a mother and son or a brother and sister.  (This is a side-note to this discussion, but you can now appreciate the gravity of Ham’s sin against his father, Noah, and why such a curse was pronounced on Canaan.)

The shattering of the mind and emotions – unless restoration takes place by the Spirit of the Lord – causes a lifetime of damage and torment to both people who are involved – both the perpetrator of the incest and the victim.

Consider then the spiritual consequences when spiritual adultery takes place.  Paul makes the statement that “He that is joined unto the Lord is one Spirit.”

Because we are first and foremost spirit-beings, the impact of spiritual adultery or fornication (and that’s a subject we’ll deal with in a different study) is even more far-reaching.

We can use as a quick example (for the sake of this study) involvement in religions – even those that call themselves “Christian.”

Consider Mormonism, the J.W.’s, Scientology or Science of Mind for instance.  Then there’s Buddhism, Confucianism, Hindu and Islam as extreme, and overtly demonic.

Now, let’s take a look at something David wrote.

Psalm 7:1-5:  ¹O LORD my God, in thee do I put my trust: save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me: ²Lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending it in pieces, while there is none to deliver.  ³O LORD my God, if I have done this; if there be iniquity in my hands;  ⁴If I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me; (yea, I have delivered him that without cause is mine enemy:)  ⁵Let the enemy persecute my soul, and take it; yea, let him tread down my life upon the earth, and lay mine honour in the dust.

 

You see what David is driving at here.  He describes persecution as a cause of “rending” one’s soul.

The word “tear” in this instance is the Hebrew word óø‡è - tÖaòraph; and it means: to pluck off, to pull to pieces, to rip with doubt.

What is clear in David’s prayer is that the Enemy has a legal right to inflict doubt – and in the process, pull to pieces the soul of the persecutor.  Thus, both the persecutor and the persecuted become victims of soul fragmentation; and doubt is one of the results.

Two quick scriptures come to mind where doubt is concerned.

I Kings 18:21:  ²¹And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions?  If the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.

Then there’s James’ epistle.

James 1:5-8:  ⁵If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. ⁶But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. ⁷For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. ⁸A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

We’ll wrap up this part of this study with a look at something Peter wrote in which he describes a condition that prevails in the unregenerate, unrepentant individual.

II Peter 2:10-15:  ¹⁰But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities. ¹¹Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation against them before the Lord. ¹²But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption; ¹³And shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day time. Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you; ¹⁴Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children: ¹⁵Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness;

Peter makes clear that those whose lives are filled with uncleanness, who walk after the carnal thinking of the flesh, see their minds, their thoughts, their emotions and their understanding so ripped apart that (1) they despise governing power and authority of any kind, (2) they think nothing of speaking evil against leaders and accusing them falsely – including speaking evil of God and angelic beings, (3) they show their utter ignorance when they open their mouths to speak, (4) their eyes are full of adultery and fornication, (5) they’ve been so taken over by sin that they can’t stop sinning even if they so desire, (6) they are full of covetousness, greed, and suffer with a poverty mentality, and (7) their children are cursed with the need to bribe and be bribed in order to attain their own selfish goals.

This is perhaps an extreme picture, but it is a clear example of a mind so shredded and splintered that normal thoughts and normal behavior are completely absent.

Is there hope for someone like this?  Is there redemption and healing for those so taken into captivity by the Enemy?

Stay tuned.

In case you are missing out on real fellowship in an environment of Ekklesia, our Sunday worship gatherings are available by conference call – usually at about 10:30AM Pacific.  That conference number is (712) 770-4160, and the access code is 308640#.  We are now making these gatherings available on video using ZOOM.  If you wish to participate by video on ZOOM, our login ID is 835-926-513.  If you miss the live voice-only call, you can dial (712) 770-4169, enter the same access code and listen in later.  The video call, of course, is not recorded – not yet, anyway.

Blessings on you!

 

           

Regner A. Capener
CAPENER MINISTRIES

RIVER WORSHIP CENTER
Temple, Texas 76504

Email Contact: CapenerMinistries@protonmail.com

 

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