A Living Soul

“I can see what I’m supposed to be. I just can’t get there.”

A woman who had been a Christian for fifteen years said those words. She served at her church, gave generously, and read her Bible every morning before the rest of the house woke up. From the outside, her faith looked unshakable.

“I feel like I’m standing in front of a window I can see through but can’t open,” she said. “I know all the right things. I just can’t seem to live them.”

Maybe you know that window.

You believe the right things. You pray. You read the Word. You serve. And yet there’s a gap between the life you know is yours in Christ and the life you actually live on an ordinary Tuesday. Peace comes and goes like weather. The same old patterns keep coming back, no matter how hard you try.

You haven’t lost your faith. You may not even feel far from God. But you know, deep down, that there’s a fullness you haven’t entered yet.

Nothing is wrong with you. You’ve simply never been introduced to one of the most important parts of you: your own soul.

The answer, stated plainly

When you were born again, your spirit was made alive in an instant. You passed from death to life (John 5:24). That part is finished, sealed, and can’t be undone.

But your soul, which is your mind, your will, your emotions, and your desires, is on a journey. And that journey has a pathway, a blueprint, and a destination.

This is why so many sincere believers struggle for years with so little progress. They’re working on their behavior when the real work needs to happen in the soul, the hidden place where identity, desire, and will actually live.

As Lloyd puts it in the book: you cannot fix a source problem with a willpower solution.

The book rests on two simple things:

“You mean it’s already in me?”

For many years, Lloyd has taught men and women at the Coachella Valley Rescue Mission, people who had lost everything to addiction and to choices that looked like freedom and turned into chains.

One man, whom the book calls Marcus, arrived with hollow eyes and trembling hands, carrying twenty years of choices he couldn’t undo. He had made promises at church altars and broken them before the week was out. He knew the truth. He just couldn’t live in it.

One afternoon, sitting on a bench outside the chapel, he said quietly, “No matter how hard I try, I keep returning to the same old habits.”

Lloyd opened his Bible to John 7:38: “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”

“You’ve been trying to build a fire,” he told him, “when there’s a river of living water running right beneath your feet. You don’t need to build the river. You need to stop damming it up.”

Marcus looked at his scarred hands and said, “You mean it’s already in me?”

“Since the day you believed.”

He didn’t change overnight. But from that afternoon on, he changed. Lloyd watched a broken man become a whole one. Not a perfect one. A whole one. And the difference between those two words is the heart of this book.

This book is for you if…

• You love God, but feel saved and stuck at the same time
• You’ve tried harder, prayed more, and read more, and the same patterns keep coming back
• Your peace comes and goes, and you don’t know why
• You teach, lead, or counsel others and want words for what you’ve seen them struggle with
• You’re coming out of addiction or a hard season and are tired of starting over
• You sense there’s more to the gospel than you’ve been shown

A word from a pastor