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BIBLE STUDY HANDOUT PART 2

BIBLE STUDY HANDOUT PART 2

• Emotionally Healthy Spirituality II

“Know Yourself That You May Know God”

Awareness of _____________________ and your ___________________ with God are intricately related.

Dividing our knowledge of God from our knowledge of ourselves can easily keep us at a _________________ level of spiritual/emotional development.

The majority of individuals go to their ______________ without knowing __________ they really are.

Most Christians don’t think that they have _____________________ to consider their feelings, to name them, or express them _________________.

When we ________________ our pain, losses, and feelings year after year, we become less and less _____________________.

The journey of genuine transformation to emotionally healthy spirituality begins with a commitment to allow yourself to ________________.

We are human beings made in God’s likeness and part of that likeness is to _______________.

We’re to ______________________ our feelings, reflect on our feelings, and _____________________ respond to our feelings under the lordship of Christ.

When we ___________________ our most intense emotions, we’re not being _____________ to ourselves and close off an open door through which to know God.

Allow yourself to experience the full weight of your feelings without ____________________ them, and then you can reflect and decide what to do with them and trust God to come to you through them.

God invites us to remove the ________________ layers we wear to reveal our authentic self. The issue is how to _________________ the false self and allow our true self in Christ to emerge.

THE TEMPTATIONS TOWARD A FALSE SELF

1. I am what I do: ________________________
2. I am what I have: ______________________
3. I am what others think: __________________________

DEVELOPING YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF

1. Pay attention to your interior in silence & solitude
   1. Silence and solitude are ____________________ to emotionally healthy spirituality.
   2. Learn to slow down the ________________ of your life.
   3. ______________________ will keep us from listening to our feelings, desires, dreams, likes, and dislikes.
2. Find trusted companions
   1. It can be very difficult to shed ___________________ of your false self in order for your true self to emerge unless you have trusted, __________________ companions to help along the way.
   2. There will be _________________ by others to keep us living lives that are not our own.
   3. Self-deception can easily cause us to fall into the trap of living in __________________ .
3. Move out of your comfort zone
   1. Are you living ____________________ to the life God has asked you to live?
   2. The ___________________ of living a life that’s not God’s for you can grow greater than the pain of _____________________ thereby causing you to shift out of your comfort zone.
4. Pray for courage
   1. When we shift into our true self in Christ, it’s always accompanied by a _______________________ from those close to us.

BIBLE STUDY HANDOUT

BIBLE STUDY HANDOUT

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

Ø Christian spirituality, without an integration of ______________ health, can be deadly to yourself, your relationship with ________________, and those around you.

Ø While individuals experience real and helpful spiritual ___________________ in certain areas of life, such as worship, prayer, Bible studies, and fellowship, they ________________________ believe that they are doing fine, even if their ________________________ life and interior world isn’t in order.

Ø This “progress” then provides a _____________________ reason for not doing the hard work of _____________________.

Ø Emotional health and spiritual maturity are ______________________. It’s not possible to be spiritually ____________________while remaining emotionally __________________.

Ø God made us as ___________________ people, in His image, inclusive of physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and social dimensions.

Ø _________________________ any aspect of who were are always results in destructive __________________________ in our relationship with God, others, and with ourselves.

Top 10 Symptoms Of Emotionally Unhealthy Spirituality

1. Using God to run from God
   1. We use Christian activities as an unconscious attempt to _________________ from pain.
   2. We create “God-activity” and ignore the ______________________ areas that God wants to change in our life.
2. Ignoring the emotions of anger, fear, and sadness
   1. We often _____________________ ourselves with false ___________________ to make these feelings go away.
   2. Our feelings are a ___________________ of what it means to be made in the image of God.
      1. To cut them out of our spirituality is to slice off a part of our humanity.
      2. It leads to a devaluing and _____________________ of the emotional aspect of our humanity, which is made in the image of God.
3. Dying to the wrong things
   1. We’re to die to the __________________ parts of who we are- defensiveness, arrogance, stubbornness, hypocrisy, judgmentalism, etc.
   2. We are not called by God to die to the “good” parts of who we are- _______________________, music, recreation, friendships, music, etc.
   3. We’re not to become _______________________ when we become Christians.
4. Denying the past’s impact on the present
   1. When we come to faith in Christ we’re born again, but this does not mean that what our past lives were won’t continue to ________________________us in different ways.
   2. The work of growing in Christ actually demands that we go ____________________in order to break free from unhealthy and destructive patterns that prevent us from _____________________ ourselves and others as God designed.
5. Compartmentalizing our lives into ________________ and ________________________
6. Doing for God instead of being with God
   1. Work for God that’s not ______________________ by a deep interior life with God will eventually be __________________________ by things such as ego, power, a need for approval of and from others, and a skewed sense of success.
   2. Our activity for God can only flow from a ______________ with God.
7. Spiritualizing away conflict
   1. Healthy Christians don’t ________________ conflict.
   2. To have _______________ peace you must disrupt the _____________ peace around you.
8. Covering over brokenness, weakness, and failure
   1. The pressure to present an _____________________ of ourselves as strong and spiritually together hovers over most of us.
   2. We are all deeply flawed and broken, regardless of our _________________ and ________________________, and are dependent on God and others.
9. Living without limits
   1. There are ___________________ that come with our ____________________; we can’t serve everyone in need.
10. Judging others spiritual journey
    1. If you’re ___________________________ with your own faults, you have no time to see those of your _________________________.
    2. Let others be themselves before God and move at their own ______________.

The pathway to unleashing the ______________________ power of Christ to heal our spiritual lives can be found in connecting our emotional health with _______________________ spirituality.