Our souls are our vineyards

"Our souls are our fields and vineyards, which we are every one of us to take care of, to dress, and to keep. They are capable of being improved with good husbandry; that may be got out of them which will be fruit abounding to our account. We are charged with them, to occupy them till our Lord come; and a great deal of care and pains it is requisite that we should take about them. These fields and vineyards are often in a very bad state, not only no fruit brought forth, but all overgrown with thorns and nettles..." - Matthew Henry, from his commentary on Proverbs 24:30-34

Many seminary educated Christians are taught that we are to do nothing to improve ourselves. That such efforts are needless works that accomplish nothing towards salvation. This is the eternal nursery, no-effort doctrine of establishment Christianity.

They are taught, and they only think in terms of the pre-regeneration state of fallen man.

Once regenerated, though, by the word and the Spirit we are *able* to make efforts. It's part of our progressive sanctification. In that Puritan quote above you see it.

Efforts don't apply to our justification or our definitive sanctification, those two things God accomplishes 100%; yet progressive sanctification is a project involving both the individual Christian and our Triune God.

God-reliant effort, as J. I. Packer put it in his Concise Theology.

This is where I talk about the language of the Work found for the most part in the book Fourth Way by Ouspensky. It's ancient knowledge and practice. Ancient psychology, if you will. New Testament psychology, if you will. Though with nothing of the idiocy of what passes for psychology in this era called the modern world. Psychology is not even a word that captures all of it. Progressive sanctification might suffice (if leftists hadn't hijacked the word progressive).

To cultivate our souls as vineyards we need language to be able to see what we're doing and have to do. We need language to see things we can't currently see within us and without us in the world around us. Things remain an invisible enemy that control us until we are able to shine light on them and get control of them or eliminate them. New language is needed to shine that light.

Fourth Way, or Work, teaching is called esoteric Christianity, but that just means practical level Christianity. It's not for everybody, but it's available to anybody. Establishment Christianity is astonishingly shallow and polices its environments by calling anything outside its circle of comfort or above its level of understanding "gnostic." Gnostic for them being a word with a very wide and ill-defined pejoritive meaning. Cathars were the Puritans of their day (cathari is Greek for pure, or the pure ones, the same pejorative the Reformation era Puritans received from the establishment Christianity of their day). The people who exterminated the Cathars wrote histories about them saying they were gnostics, justifying their genocide. This has fooled, perhaps willfully fooled, church historians and establishment Christianity to this day. It didn't fool Calvinists like John Owen, though, interestingly.

So you need the foundation of regeneration by the word and the Spirit. You need discernment of the Holy Spirit. There is wheat and chaff in everything. Only the Bible is pure wheat. You also need the foundation of sound doctrine. The Bible and sound doctrine. Reformed Theology, five solas, doctrines of grace, classical Covenant - Federal - Theology. Maybe some worldview analysis to see how New Age teaching goes against truth as found in the word of God so that you can discern and distinguish between Gnostic/New Age teachings, Fourth Way teachings, and biblical teaching.

In any event, find what you need to cultivate the vineyard of your soul.