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

or more accurately, soul, myths shapes.

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, while 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

Murray McShane, 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 may be 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 anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy,

drunkenness, orgies, 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.

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