What is the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?

1st in the series:

Putting the Pieces Together: a Journey toward mature discipleship*

In 1950, Bob Pierce founded what has become World Vision, the world’s largest Christian relief and development agency. Today that organization serves more than fifty million people a year in 103 countries. Bob Pierce was passionate for Jesus and for stamping out hunger and disease. His friends said, "He is restless to win souls." "I have never met a person with greater compassion." "He is a true Christian Samaritan who literally laid down his life for the needy ‘little’ people of the world." Bob’s passion led him around the world, marked by his desire to meet spiritual and physical needs wherever he saw them.

Bob was a picture of mature Christianity, but the tragic reality is that his work was done at the expense of his family. A family friend said of Bob’s wife, "she knew a deprivation of a different kind than those to whom her husband was ministering." Bob Pierce’s marriage was so strained and unhealthy, that at one point, years passed when they didn’t even speak. Bob’s children were disillusioned with God and the abandonment by their dad. Although God gave the family one night of reconciliation before Bob’s death, he spent most of the last years of us his life alienated from his entire family.

How can it be that someone so faithful in serving God and admired by so many for his deep spiritual maturity could be missing out on the joy of healthy, loving relationships with those closest to him? To bring the question closer to home, how can so many passionate followers of Jesus have broken, unhealthy, failed relationships with friends and family? Why is the divorce rate among born again Christians is equal to (or as one research group suggests) higher than those who aren’t Christians? Why do 7 of 10 of lay leaders in the American Church admitted to visiting adult Web sites at least once a week? Why do so many followers of Jesus have a hard time saying "NO"? Why don’t Christians deal with conflict any better than our non-Christian co-workers?

Pastor Peter Scazerro answers these questions in his book, The Emotionally Healthy Church. The heart of the problem is that many Christians have separated the issues of emotional health and spiritual maturity. This book shows that the two cannot be separated. Family problems like Bob Pierce and our high divorce rate stem from a faulty model of Christian discipleship.

He writes, "It is not possible for a Christian to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature." Emotional Health is the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to Christian discipleship. Many of us pray, read the Bible, teach classes, participate in a cell group, serve those in need, and much more, but are not fully mature in Christ because they have never dealt with the issue of becoming emotionally healthy. How can someone be:

• Dynamic speaker: unloving parent/spouse;
• Board member: unteachable, insecure, defensive;
• Memorize entire books of the Bible: unaware of depression & anger;
• Pray and fast: still critical of others, justifying it as discernment;
• Lead 100s: driven by a need to compensate for nagging sense of failure;
• Pray for deliverance: from demonic realm, really just avoiding conflict.
• Outwardly cooperative @ church: unconsciously undercutting supervisor (passive-aggressive)

A healthy discipleship model must include emotional growth as well as spiritual growth. This book on emotional health is providing the roadmap for our next 6 weeks of exploring what it means to put all the pieces together as followers of Jesus Christ. We’ll dig into God’s Word and invite the Holy Spirit to transform us from the inside out.

Why would we dedicate 7 weeks to a study of emotional health? First of all, because we are more than simple spiritual beings. We are also physical, social, intellectual, and emotional beings. One thing that affirms our humanity is our ability to feel emotions. Perhaps the songs we sang this morning even evoked an emotional response in you, and that’s not unintentional. We recognize that worship music ministers not only to us spiritually, but also emotionally. God created us to be emotional beings. We can try to suppress our emotions, but that ends disastrously; the sooner we accept that we are emotional beings, the better off we’ll be.

Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality; listening to our
emotions ushers us into reality. And reality is where we meet God. Emotions are
the language of the soul. They are the cry that gives the heart a voice.
However, we often turn a deaf ear through emotional denial, distortion, or
disengagement. We strain out anything disturbing in order to gain tenuous
control of our inner world. We are frightened and ashamed of what leaks into our
consciousness. In neglecting our intense emotions, we are false to ourselves and
lose a wonderful opportunity to know God. (The Cry of the Soul, Dan B. Allender
and Tremper Longman)

I have talked a lot about discipleship and transformation, about growing more and more like Jesus. It can be easy to spiritualize Jesus, to think of him as aloof, not feeling the deep emotions that we feel. Last week Chad really brought home the truth: that Jesus was fully human. And being fully human, Jesus felt emotions, too!

• Jesus shed tears (Luke 19:41; John 11:35)
• Jesus was filled with joy (Luke 10:21)
• Jesus was grieved (Luke 14:34)
• Jesus was angry (Mark 3:5)
• Jesus was overcome by sadness (Matthew 26:37)
• Jesus felt sorrow (Luke 7:13)
• Jesus showed astonishment and wonder (Mark 6:6; Luke 7:9)
• Jesus felt distress (Mark 3:5; Luke 12:50)

If we are created in the image of God, and God in the flesh experienced all of these emotions, then it must be okay for us to be emotional beings as well!

Furthermore, our emotions are the language of our souls. They can "explain" how we’re really feeling and what’s really happening to us and within us. Quite frankly, we have often allowed our external behavior to remain unconnected to our inner worlds. Though most of us would never act out on what’s going on inside (never road rage or shake a baby), often there’s a disconnect between the two, and it takes a lot of work not to act out on what’s inside. Friends, when we put on a good face and simply behave ourselves when there’s something else going on inside, we’re playacting. The word the Bible uses for this kind of playacting is "hypocrite." I’m not suggesting that we begin acting out on every sinful desire that’s in our hearts; I am suggesting that we need some emotional healing if we want true wholeness. In Luke 8, Jesus encounters a suffering woman; for twelve years she has been bleeding. Believing that Jesus had power to heal her, she touched his robe and was immediately healed. Jesus confronted her, and she told him why she had done that. When she told him, he responded this way: Daughter, you took a risk trusting me, and now you’re healed and whole. Live well, live blessed!

Notice that there were two separate healings: she was immediately healed of her bleeding just by touching Jesus. But she wasn’t fully whole yet. Why not? She had suffered through twelve years of being ostracized. Every day for 12 years she was reminded that she wasn’t part of society. When Jesus pronounced that blessing upon her, he was doing more than just physically healing her; scripture says she had already been healed before he blessed her. But now she is whole. I believe that our emotional health is part of this wholeness that Jesus wants for us.

The second reason we’re looking at emotional health is because loving well requires emotional health. When Jesus was asked what was the most important commandment, he responded in Matthew 22:37-40 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. If I’ve got lots of emotional baggage, it’s hard (or impossible) to love God, myself, and others.

It can be hard to love yourself; I know this full well. I tend toward being a perfectionist, always aware of how short I’ve fallen. Some of us hear Jesus’ words of self-denial and sacrificial love and have a hard time loving ourselves without feeling guilty. It can be easy to feel guilty about saying "no" when someone asks you to do something. I wonder if our lack of boundaries or self-care is linked to our inability to love ourselves. I’m not talking about being narcissistic or self-centered, but we can’t love our neighbor if we don’t love ourselves. And God made us in His image, so we are worthy of love.

For some, our greatest challenge is to love others. We’ve been betrayed, abandoned, neglected, or wounded in so many ways that loving others seems too risky. So, we don’t let other people get to know us too closely, or we put up walls when someone offers constructive criticism, or we find ourselves criticizing when we really want to encourage, but we don’t understand why.

So often when people talk about relational problems or complex emotions, our "Christian" response is something like, "Let’s pray about it." And then we wait for God to wave a magic wand. The reality is that many of us should be in counseling of some kind to unearth the deeper emotional issues that are sabotaging our efforts to love God, ourselves, and others. If we want to follow Jesus, we have to lead a life of love. And if we want to love well, we need to become healthier emotionally.

Why don’t more Christians pursue greater emotional health? Quite honestly, we’re afraid to. Afraid of what we might discover about ourselves. Afraid of the pain. Afraid of being rejected by God or others if they knew the real me. Afraid God can’t or won’t really help us. Afraid that others will think we are unspiritual. Afraid that we will get depressed. Afraid of feeling powerless or vulnerable. But the truth is this: Fear cannot control Jesus’ Followers.

God’s position on allowing fear to control our lives is pretty straight-forward. He’s against it; it’s all about the power of His love. 1 John 4:18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. Because of God’s love, we can courageously face the darkest parts of ourselves and be transformed from the inside out. Next week, we are going to pick up this theme again and talk about how God’s grace allows us to search deep within without any fear.

The final reason we’re talking about emotional health is that emotionally healthy people make better salt and light. It seems like there’s a serious shortage of emotionally healthy people in our world today. Most of us don’t have to look any farther than the mirror, but we can see it in others, too. When we meet an emotionally healthy person, we take notice. We don’t often find a supervisor or coworker willing to admit mistakes and humbly seek help from others. It’s unusual to see someone with an addictive personality who understands the roots of their behavior. We’re immediately intrigued by the married couple who seems to display deep love, respect, and intimacy in their relationship. We are surprised when we meet someone who lost a loved one to cancer and isn’t bitter or depressed. These are the kind of qualities we see in emotionally healthy people.

As we become more emotionally healthy, our influence as salt and light flows naturally from us. There’s no greater evangelism method than the power of a changed life. Maybe you’ve been praying for your spouse or grown child to be saved for years, but to no avail. I wonder what kind of impact it would have on them if they saw full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, the Fruit of the Spirit. How would they react if they saw you get control of your temper, tame your tongue, or say "no" to activities because you discovered the gift of limits? Transformation of our emotional health has a huge impact because the changes sink deep into who we are.

If we want to go to the next level as a church, we will have to each go to the next level in our emotional health. Who wants to go to the next level in our relationship with God? In your marriage? Your career? Your influence in others’ lives? Your ability to excel in school or sports? In the weeks ahead, we will explore the connections between emotional and spiritual health in six key areas that will help us all go to the next level in many areas of our lives.

1. Looking beneath the surface
2. Breaking the power of the past
3. Living in brokenness and vulnerability
4. Receiving the gift of limits
5. Embracing grief and loss
6. Following Jesus’ example of loving well

There is a list of resources in your bulletin this morning; please make use of this list to help you. There isn’t any reason why we should remain emotionally unhealthy when we have the resources to grow. My prayer for the weeks ahead is that we will open ourselves up to loving, healing, transforming power of God’s Spirit in our lives, and that we will never be the same.

NOTES:

1. This message series is being done in conjunction with Rev. Ryan Bash, Rev. Blaine Keene, Rev. Becky Piatt, and Rev. Rob Turner

2. Quotes are from "The Emotionally Healthy Church: A Strategy for Discipleship that Actually Changes Lives" by Peter L. Scazzero, Grand Rapids, MI. Zondervan, 2003.

*this message, along with others in this series, has been adapted from Peter Scazzero's book The Emotionally Healthy Church.