“Heart” refers to our inner self (emotion and mind), which I think should include our conscience, which we will lose if we cheat our conscience.
“Soul” refers to our entire person, which I think should include our identity.
I think that we lose an element of our heart and soul when our identity markers and our conscience are determined more by our ethnicity, denomination, tribal group, elitist tendencies, sectarian biases, propositional statements or core values, etc.
]]>I would expand your heart/mind/soul thinking to include two more pieces of the human existence: conscience and identity. Maybe “identity” is “self”.
I once became a “holy butcher”, chopping up my conscience and my identity, thinking this is included in “self denial” and “taking up your cross”. But I have since learned that God never intended human beings to be masochists. There is no glory in self-mutilation (either in a physical or spiritual or mental or financial sense).
I once thought God called us to live in the grotesqueness of the cross, creating pain and punishment in order to beat out our sins. In fact however, the gospel is entirely opposite. Christ’s sacrifice was “one and done”. Hebrews study is most helpful in this regard. There is one Priest who made one sacrifice. There is one Shepherd who oversees our souls.
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