I'm with you up until scarred souls - what is that?
Even after salvation, we still have a natural man with whom to contend in our thinking, decision making and behavior.
Our thinking processes reside with our soul as discerned from our body or spirit.
Both believers and unbelievers have souls. The term 'Soul Man', although might be intended as a worldly complement is actually a criticism of the believer. We may advance soulish thinking, decisions and behavior or we may remain in faith and through Him advance in our thinking, decisions and behavior as the new man in Christ. The old man was dichotomous with body and soul, dead in the spirit. The new man is alive in the regenerated spirit, with body and soul.
As believers, until the ressurrection, we still have a corrupt body, and our thinking is still scarred from past thinking habits when we were dead to Him in the spirit. Some of those scarred soulish thoughts were generated by genetics. Some were scarred in our souls by wrong thinking. Whenever we step out of fellowship with Him today, after salvation, until we return to Him (repentence) and confess our known and unknown sins to Him (confession), we continue to operate independent of His Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and return to scarring our thinking processes.
This is why some Christians degenerate into either lasciviousness or in asceticism. Some may fall into legalism, following their thinking that so long as they open a textbook and quote its grammar, they are advancing with God. But unless the believer returns to Him on His grounds via 1st John 1:9, continuing involvement in religious things will tend to remove the believer from growth in the believer's spirit, and worse, tend to scar his thinking so that when he perceives sin, rather than returning to God, he returns to a counterfeit system of thinking still separate from the Holy Spirit.
We all have scarred souls. Until we suffer the first death, while we return to Him and remain in fellowship with Him, He is free to advance us in sanctification, further faith, doctine, belief, in our spirit, through our souls, through faith in Him.
An analogy might be made in playing basketball. If we step out of bounds as when we sin, if we step back in the game on our own volition, independent of righteous authority and judgment, none of our advancement is counted for anything righteously good. We might continue down court and score many a basket, but the referree will never allow those actions to be credited as scors worthy of reward. Likewise, when we sin, we step out of God's bounds or plan for our activity in His plan. Until we turn back to Him, hand the ball back to Him, for Him to grant us forgiveness and allows us to rebound into proper recognized behavior.
All our behavior begins with thinking. Subliminal or active decision making is still influenced by our thinking. Where we have sinned in the past, we may develop habits not only in our flesh, our body, and our actions, but also in our thinking and decision making processes.
By having faith in Christ, He is free to indwell us, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit providing a temple for Him within us. That begins in our soul, our thinking, where He is free to regenerate our spirit and continue His sanctification of us.
The scarred soul is a major impediment to our advancement in what might be called an epistemilogical rehabilitation, because where we interrupt His work in us with our independent thinking, our scarred soul is likely to be numb in perception of our rejection of Him. This is why faith is pre-eminent to feeling or emotion in our relationship with God. Faith allows Him to do the work and doesn't provide any obstacles to His sanctification processes, whereas feeling and emotions maybe frought with scarred erroneous thinking, decisions, and perceptions idle for deception.