This week on Things Unseen we've been thinking about what we've called soul shapes or more

accurately soul mishapes. We were created to be the image and likeness of God, but that

image has been distorted and the likeness profoundly marred. Our souls, who we are essentially

as human beings, well they've been bent out of shape. And although the root of the distortion

is the same in all of us, it manifests itself in different ways from one person to another.

I remember as a youngster being helped by a comment written in the personal diary of Robert

Manning McShayne, a young Scottish minister in the first half of the 19th century. He wrote to

this effect, I have discovered that in me lie the seeds of every known sin. And we mustn't forget

that, but it's also true that each of us can be fertile soil for particular sins. Our souls can

be bent out of shape in very individual and personal ways. I suspect that maybe the reason that

some of the letters in the New Testament have fairly lengthy lists of the sins of the flesh,

or as we might say distortions of our soul shape. Think of one of these lists, the one that Paul

gives in Galatians 5 verses 19 to 21, about the works of the flesh. They're evident, he says,

sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy,

fits of a hunger rivalries, descensions, divisions envy, drunkenness orges, and things like these.

One thing we're surely bound to notice about these ugly soul shapes is that some of them are more

subtle than others. They include not only the obvious sins of the flesh like sexual immorality,

but also what our late friend Jerry Bridges used to call respectable sins,

like strife and enmity and jealousy. And the other New Testament lists are rather similar.

Isn't it interesting, for example, that we sometimes still speak about a person being eaten

up with jealousy? What a picture that is of a soul shape. A person who sees something that

someone else has that they want, and they begin to eat themselves away.

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