Emotionally Healthy Relationships
“Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is not possible for a Christian to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.” -Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality
Emotionally Healthy Relationships | Apr 16, 2023
This week, Pastor Dale began our new series on Emotionally Healthy Relationships. When followers of Jesus are not discipled emotionally, we may come to one of two conclusions:
Emotions are bad and can’t be trusted because they will change or are a sign of weakness, lack of faith, or doubt.
Emotions are everything. How you feel is the truth. If something feels difficult, it must not be the right thing for you.
We even have an emotion about other people’s emotions. Our emotions affect our relationships, not only with others, but also with God. What Jesus taught and modeled was that our love for God was measured by the degree to which we love others. In fact, He was so clear about it, it would be unthinkable for His followers to think otherwise. And yet, they did – and so do we. (Matthew 5:44,46; Matthew 7:1; Matthew 5:23-24)
Emotional Healthy Spirituality, as we will continue to unpack as we go through this series…
…is not about you feeling good, more relaxed, more at peace, or finding your inner self.
…is never about feelings over the truth of scripture - it’s actually taking scripture at its fullest truth, and embracing Jesus’ command.
…is about your ability to love well.
The marker of loving God well is loving others well. This can’t be done if we don’t mature emotionally and spiritually. Over the next many weeks, we are going to look at some things to help us be open, honest, and fully mature with our Father. For those feeling a pull to go deeper, you can find a link to Peter Scazzero's book here. There's also a community group that begins April 26th to discuss and learn together more about this important topic.
Emotionally Healthy Relationships | Apr 23, 2023
This week, Pastor Dale continued our new series on Emotionally Healthy Relationships. This morning's teaching provided powerful insight into a natural behavior that often leads to conflict in our lives. Our natural tendency is to tell ourselves stories about another person's behavior. It may be a text exchange, an expression on someone's face, a gesture, a behavior. We tell ourselves a story of what it meant. When we do this, when we interpret, tell stories, make assumptions, and don’t check for the truth, we do things that are destructive. We jump to conclusions about people and assume things based on our expectations and assumptions. When we do this, we are believing a lie and telling a lie about this person. Even if it's just in our minds, we could quite possibly be condemning an innocent person.
“Every time I make an assumption about someone without confirming it, I am at risk for believing a lie about this person. My assumption is just a breath away from misrepresenting reality. Because I have not checked out my assumption with the other person, it is very possible I am believing something untrue and effectively bearing false witness against my neighbor. I am especially prone to this temptation when the other person has hurt or disappointed me. That also makes it more likely I will pass on my false assumption to others. When we exchange reality for a mental creation (a hidden assumption) we enter a counterfeit world. At that point we exclude God from our lives because God does not exist outside of reality and truth. We also wreck relationships by creating needless confusion and conflict.”
― Peter Scazzero & Gerri Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Relationships
Pastor Dale provided two things we can do to improve this unhealthy behavior:
Stop Mind Reading
Clarify Expectations
If you missed the teaching, we invite you to take time and watch it today as Pastor Dale provided very helpful context around the expectations we have, how they can be problematic, and most importantly, how we can clarify expectations with others going forward. When we do this, we become healthy people, a healthy church, and a healthy community.
Emotionally Healthy Relationships | Apr 30, 2023
This morning, Pastor Dale helped us look at the importance of looking back in order to go forward. We're often told to forget the past, that God has made us new. And yet, both the blessings and sins of our families going back two, three, even four generations can profoundly impact who we are today. Discipleship requires putting off the sinful patterns of our family of origin and relearning how to do life God’s way in God’s family.
Your family and extended family are the most powerful influence/relationships into who you are as a human. The things learned, modeled, and normalized is in your bones. Each generation’s failures make the next generation’s environment in which they grow up even more difficult to be faithful to God and because of that, it’s like a compounding interest of sin and destructive family habits that continue to accumulate over generations.
“Unfortunately, it is not possible to erase the negative effects of our history. This family history lives inside all of us, especially in those who attempt to bury it. The price we pay for this flight is high. Only the truth sets us free.” ― Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality
Even as followers of Jesus we often bring all of the patterns, thoughts, and influences to how we read the Bible, how we see God, and how we relate to each other. The great news, the gospel is transforming, life-giving, and renewing.
Pastor Dale mentioned additional resources to help you understand your family of origin. You can find them here:
Emotionally Healthy Relationships | May 7, 2023
This morning we looked at the importance of what lies beneath the surface. Like an iceberg, a significant amount of what we carry emotionally is below the surface of our lives, unseen by others. Most of our time is spent keeping it down in an effort to protect the surface life, rather than confronting the reality of what lies beneath. Unfortunately, this can result in an untransformed life where we continue the patterns of the past no matter how damaging they are.
Our Father cares deeply about what’s beneath the surface and desires for us to let Him in to rearrange our inner lives. This isn’t to simply take the pain away, but to navigate our pain with Him. When we open the deeper places of our lives to Him, God meets us in that place and transforms us. You may be asking what you can do to begin this process of inviting God in and allowing Him to transform your inner life. Pastor Dale highlighted one way that’s become incredibly helpful in his life: becoming aware and paying attention to what’s under the surface within a relationship and/or in a community of relationships. One of the ways we can become aware is by answering these four assessment questions:
What am I angry about (from the past or the present)?
What am I sad about (small or big loss, disappointment, or choice)?
What am I anxious about (money, future, family, health, job)?
What am I glad about (a relationship, an opportunity, your church)?
The goal is to identify what’s going on below the surface so we know what we need to present to God. Once we’ve identified what’s beneath the surface, we have the opportunity to take that through the lens of what we’ve Pastor Dale has taught us earlier in this series:
Is this an untrue story I’m telling myself? Who do I need to clarify with?
How can I grieve this?
Is this something that’s been passed on to me?
Pastor Dale’s strong encouragement to us is to practice the above with someone you love and trust this week. Then, take it to God. Talk to Him about it and ask Him what He wants you to know and what He’s asking you to do. It may be to forgive someone, to surrender it to Him, to continue talking to Him about it. He wants to transform your inner life and is awaiting the invitation to be brought in.
Emotionally Healthy Relationships | May 14, 2023
This morning Pastor Dale talked with us about the importance of listening - why we should listen and how to listen.
“Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.” - David Augsburger
Listening well to others doesn't mean we have to agree with what they are saying. We can love others well by listening to them and being present with them. Ways we can be successful in listening to others is to:
Clarify expectations. “I want to talk to you about something, is this a good time to be heard?”
Set aside time for communication, maybe a weekly listen.
Clarify how you feel heard.
Listening well also requires listening incarnationally. Listening incarnationally is to listen at a heart level with empathy, listening to the words and emotions of the other person. Ways we can help do this include:
Speak using "I" statements
Keep your statements brief
Stop to let the listener paraphrase
Include your feelings and properly connect them to something
Be honest, clear, and respectful
While the above is helpful, often it's the HOW to practically do this that's missing. Pastor Dale provided specific steps from the Emotionally Healthy Relationships Workbook. The seven steps he outlined are below.
Give the person your full attention.
As you listen, begin to step into the speaker’s world. Try to feel what they are feeling. Listen to their words and their emotions.
Avoid judging, interpreting, and fixing.
Reflect back to the person what you understood them to say while acknowledging their emotions.
Confirm what they said, how they felt, and if you interpreted it correctly.
Ask, "is there more?" or "tell me more about that."
Repeat the process until the person feels heard and you understand where they are coming from.
Emotionally Healthy Relationships | May 21, 2023
This week, Pastor Dale continued our series on emotionally healthy relationships and talked with us about integrity and the integration of it in our lives. Living your God-given life with integrity involves remaining faithful to your true self. This requires something that is incredibly difficult - distinguishing your true self from the demands and voices around you while living out the calling and mission God has given you.
In order to do this, we must know who we are in Christ, that the truest thing about us, if we've accepted Jesus into our lives, is our union with Him. This is the most irreducible reality about us. If we peel everything else away from our lives, the solid, immovable truth is that "The Truest” thing about us is our union with the Resurrected Christ. God's mission for us is to integrate that truth with integrity into all the spaces of our lives.
Emotionally Healthy Relationships | May 28, 2023
Today Pastor Dale concluded our series on Emotionally Healthy Relationships, talking with us about how to fight like peacemakers. We've all been mentored in some way around conflict. It comes from places like our family of origin and others who've had an influence on our lives. For many of us, we've learned to manage conflict in the following ways.
• Keep silent about it and within it
• Feel ashamed that things bother you
• Shame others that they don’t measure up
In most situations, we use these things to attempt to “Keep the Peace” instead of truly “Making Peace.” We bring these experiences into our personal, community, work, and church relationships. Peacemaking often causes waves, which can feel like a storm, but the end result is calm waters not just on the surface, but down into the depths as well.
Pastor Dale shared practical steps to “fight with the purpose of making peace.”
Ask for permission then start with “I notice…"
State why it is important to you. “I value…”
Fill in the following sentence. “When you do this I feel…”
State your request clearly, respectfully, and specifically. “I would like you to…"
Listener: Consider the request. In a few sentences, share your feelings and perspective. Speaker: Agree to the request or offer an alternative. Listener responds.
If needed, write your agreement and set a date to address it again in a few weeks.
The above may seem like a lot of work. The truth is, it is. The end result is worth the effort as we learn to not only make peace but in doing so, love one another well. The measure of spiritual maturity is the level at which we love one another. How we go through conflict with others reveals all of our emotional health and spiritual maturity.
