EHS 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.