Emotional and Spiritual Maturity...They're Connected

I've been reading the book, The Emotionally Healthy Church by Peter Scazzero. It immediately drew me in because it was written by someone who shared my own long held belief that spiritual and emotional health are tightly linked.  In fact, one cannot mature without the other.  The fact that this author is also a pastor made it all the more interesting . 

In my own life, I can look back and see that some of the most rapid and profound spiritual growth periods occured  when I was in Christian counseling with an amazing woman who was gifted with the ability to teach the relationship between Scripture and emotional health.  She took me step by step through the healing process, never veering away from scriptural truths.  I began to know the Lord in a way I never had.  The bible truly is the best authority on psychology.  It's all in there.

Scazzero's book got me thinking again on how I could have maybe sped up the process of getting closer to the Lord in my own life.  He was telling his story from a pastor's point of view, relating how the Lord revealed to him his need to take a look at what was going on inside himself in order to be a healthier leader and teacher.  I think of myself on the receiving end of that.  Assuming that the teaching I have received over the years has been coming from emotionally and spiritually mature leaders,  how come it has taken so long for me to reach a deeper level of intimacy with the Lord?  I believe it is because I had reached a plateau emotionally.  Sermons and teachings that were meant to urge me on to newer levels of intimacy and maturity just were not sinking in.  In fact, I was feeling more and more distant and discouraged that I just could not ever achieve the the things that I should be doing. I felt like a disappointment.  There was something blocking me. I kept trying to get past that blockage by "performing" better. I thought that maybe if I got more involved in church activities, did longer devotions, was kinder to people,  served more, then perhaps I could counteract some of that disappointment.  I still felt that I wasn't knowing God better. I wanted to be close to Him but at the time, I didn't know how to get there. When we were singing in church the other day "more of you, Jesus, more of you..." I was thinking to myself, in years past did I really know what I was asking for in that song?  Did I know what that meant?  If I knew that knowing Him would mean first losing some things that I held dear, like my health, my career, my mobility, would I still be singing that song? Did I know that only by losing these things would the way be made clear to fall in love with Jesus?  I believe the answer is no.  I wasn't there yet. I wasn't fully aware of it, but what I really was thinking was that more of Jesus would be great if it meant feeling good, too.

So where does emotional health fit in to all of this?  It would take pages and pages to explain all that went on with my progression towards emotional maturity (and there still is a lifeime of learning yet to come).  So I will just keep it current.  In a nutshell, I was stuck.  Stuck on some issues from my past that resulted in some false beliefs about myself, such as "I'll never be good enough".  This caused me to interpret teachings from church, and even from Scripture itself as harshly critical at times. I kept on trying to "do better".  Finally, one Sunday morning, when I was feeling like a total failure because I was feeling too ill to go to church, I just reached a point of  despair and frustration. From the depths of my soul, I just cried to Jesus that all I wanted was Him.  I realized for the first time that He was my goal.  Just Him . From there, many emotional healings have occured for me. Scripture tell us that we will find the Lord when we seek him with all of our hearts.  If we come near to Him, He will come near to us.  I found that as long as my heart was tied up with freeing myself from emotional pain, it could not be free to seek all there is in a relationship with the Lord . I think we all do this to varying degrees, and we don't even know it.  I realized much of my daily life centered around things such as trying to please other people in order to feel good about myself.  In other cases I put up emotional barriers to protect myself from hurt.  There are many other ways that we keep our hearts too busy emotionally to include God.  For some it is to be achievement oriented.  The more we can accomplish in our career, church, etc., the better we feel emotionally.  Scazzero says, "To truly love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength requires that we know not only God but also our interior--the nature of our own heart, soul, and mind."

In my case,  a profound growth period began with my cry to have more of Jesus which came from deep within my heart.  It was genuine. I came near to Him in a new, more honest way, so He came near to me. I knew that in the past I greatly benefitted from learning from other people who were further down the road in their walks with the Lord. Some of these people are psychologists or counselors who wrote books. Some were just people who walked in faith and wrote.  So I began to read .  I chose to trust the Holy Spirit to be my Counselor, just like Scripture says He is.   He led me to some amazing authors, such as Leslie Vernick, Ruth Graham, Henry Cloud, John Townsend, John Eldredge, Larry Crabb, just to name a few.  They all apply Scriptural truth to their personal stories or teachings about emotional and spiritual maturity.  I learned from them.  An amazing thing happened.  I began to understand the Bible in a new way, seeing it with new eyes.  It seemed like the more emotional clutter that was removed from my heart, the more I understood and applied God's message to me in His Word.  I experienced many revelations of His character, and better understood His instruction.  I am so looking forward to watever else He has to teach me.