You Won't Grow Spiritually Unless You Grow Emotionally - Ep 127

Emotional maturity is key to your spiritual growth. That’s why I start with the heart and the skills for emotional maturity when pursuing spiritual growth. It takes emotional maturity to carry out the spiritual instruction in the Bible.

For example, when you read a passage like James 1:19, 20 about being slow to anger you might think or have been told that you need to be more spiritual to do that. You don’t need to be more spiritual you need to be emotionally mature.

Understand this, my beloved brothers and sisters. Let everyone be quick to hear [be a careful, thoughtful listener], slow to speak [a speaker of carefully chosen words and], slow to anger [patient, reflective, forgiving]; for the [resentful, deep-seated] anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God [that standard of behavior which He requires from us]. James 1:19,20 Amplified Bible

Being a careful listener when someone is confronting you or questioning a decision takes emotional maturity to listen without taking anything personally or without defending yourself. You need emotional maturity to listen and form a response rather than reacting to what is said.

It also takes emotional maturity to see when you feel like reacting so you can bring that place in you that wants to react to the Lord for healing or correction.

Seeing something from someone else’s point of view requires emotional maturity.
"Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:15)

"Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32).

It requires emotional maturity to not need people to understand you or to not need people to be like you, to be able to love them. To not take it personally if they don't understand what you're saying. To be able to be curious and be able to stay in conversations until there can be understanding of why they think the way they do, to see whether that's because they haven't been in the kingdom very long or because they've been taught wrong or life experiences or whatever it is.

Being able to have those conversations and sit with disagreements and differences requires emotional maturity as well as spiritual maturity.

It also takes emotional maturity to understand when you're feeling your own emotions versus someone else's or when you're trying to manage something for someone else versus being mature and responsible for yourself.

It takes that emotional maturity to let someone around you be sad or be angry to feel however they feel instead of needing them to feel a certain way for you to be okay.

It takes emotional maturity to see what's yours and what someone else's. If you're feeling sad or overwhelmed or scared or whatever, having the emotional maturity to practice discernment to see is this mine? Is this current, or is it feeling what someone else is feeling? Is it a spirit? Is it something from the past? Having that emotional maturity then allows you to ask the Lord for spiritual insight of why you are responding the way you are.

I talk about all this in more depth in this week’s podcast.

00:00 Why Emotions Matter
00:38 Slow to Anger Skills
02:15 Empathy in Romans 12
02:53 Compassionate Perspective
03:51 Safe Conversations
05:15 Discern Your Emotions
07:38 Faith Culture and Feelings
09:13 Childhood Roles Reversed
11:52 Unlearning Neglect Messages
14:46 Grace for Your Parents
15:46 Practice and Get Support
17:07 Closing Encouragement

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Transcript

Emotional Maturity Meets Scripture

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Emotional maturity is key to your spiritual growth. That's why in my work with myself and with others, I start with the heart and the skills for emotional maturity when pursuing spiritual growth. It takes emotional maturity to carry out the spiritual instructions we're given in the Bible. For example, when we read a passage like James 1, 19 and 20 about being slow to anger, you might think or have been told that you need to be more spiritual to do that. But you don't need to just be more spiritual. You need emotional maturity as well. James 1, 19 and 20 in the Amplified says, Understand this, my beloved brothers and sisters. Let everyone be quick to hear, be a careful, thoughtful listener, slow to speak, a speaker of carefully chosen words, and slow to anger, patient, reflective, forgiving. For the resentful and deep-seated anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God, that standard of behavior which he requires from us. Being a careful listener when someone is confronting you or questioning a decision takes emotional maturity to listen without taking it personally, without defending yourself. You need emotional maturity to listen and form that slow response, your carefully chosen words, rather than just reacting to what was said. Yes, we have the fruit of the spirit, one of those being self-control and patience. But along with learning to walk in the spirit is learning that emotional maturity and emotional regulation for yourself. So that you can bring that to the Lord and say, What's going on here in this part that wants to defend myself or wants to attack? Do I need healing or correction? In Romans 12, 15, we're told to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. To be able to see someone else's rejoicing and rejoice with them, regardless of our own circumstances, takes emotional maturity. It also takes emotional maturing to be able to sit with someone who is mourning and actually mourn with them and not try to fix it, not try to explain it away, not try to cheer them up or fix them, but actually being able to sit with them in their mourning and mourn with takes a tremendous amount of emotional maturity. Ephesians 4.32 says, be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Being kind and compassionate to one another requires being able to see things from their perspectives, which is an emotional maturity thing. We don't naturally know how to see things from someone else's perspective. We have to grow into that and learn. That people are going to see things differently than we do because they've had different experiences than we've had. And it takes the capacity to be curious and not feel threatened by someone being different than you. To be able to gain that understanding, to be able to have compassion because you actually understand their situation, rather than just pitying them for what you think is going on or for what you see on the surface. It requires emotional maturity to not need people to understand you or need people to be like you in order to love them, to not take it personally if they don't understand what you're saying, and be able to be curious, be able to stay in the conversations until there is understanding of how the other person thinks. There's a reason that they think the way they do. It could be their experience, it could be teaching. But you don't know that if you can't stay in the conversation long enough to find out, and if you can't be a safe place for someone to share different ideas and different perspectives. Because once someone feels understood, then they're open to what that person has to say because they're a safe and trustworthy person. Where if you've been interrupting and arguing and defending your perspective before they feel that you've fully understood their perspective, you're probably not going to get anywhere. You're not going to build a relationship, you're not going to change any ideas. Another aspect of emotional maturity is understanding when you're feeling your own emotions versus feeling someone else's emotions or a spirit emotion. And even whether the emotion you're feeling is a present emotion or a past emotion. It takes a lot of discernment and like being able to emotionally regulate yourself so that you can quiet your soul to hear the spirit, so that the spirit can guide you through all of this. Because if that's new to you, that could sound very overwhelming to be like, wait a minute, I don't know what to do with my own emotions. And now you're telling me they could be someone else's, they could be a spirit, they could be from the past. That sounds kind of crazy and very overwhelming. The good news is that as you learn to listen to your own emotions, you learn to feel them and feel what it feels like in your body. Then you learn, then you can learn and practice these other things as well of being able to like check in with yourself and be like, oh, like I don't actually have anything to be that sad or that mad about. Holy Spirit, where is this coming from? You're picking it up from another person? Is it a spirit train to trap you into something? In episode 125, what if your overreaction is old pain talking? I talk about that idea of how your overreaction is you really feeling emotions from the past that are just something in the present reminded you of those past emotions. So you can listen to that episode for for more on that. For this episode, I want to focus on that idea of how interconnected your emotional maturity and your spiritual maturity and your spiritual growth, how they're so tied together because our emotions are just designed to be part of everything we do. That's what God made them for. Like He's relational, and we don't have relationship without emotion. Um, but often in my experiences and the experience of so many women I talk to, emotions were not an acceptable part of the Christian life. Um, unless it was joy. Joy was good. But everything else was kind of off limits. So that keeps you emotionally immature, and it keeps you from walking in all the things that God wants you to walk in. So a big part of that spiritual growth is using that emotional maturity to be aware of, oh, I'm reacting to something from the past, or I'm picking up someone else's emotions and trying to carry it like it's my responsibility. Having the emotional maturity to see that, the discernment to see that, and then be able to bring it to the Lord to say, do I need healing? Do I need correction? Do I need to just drop this? And then doing what he says, like that's how you're spiritually maturing, is by building that relationship with the Lord, bringing things to him, hearing what he says, responding to that. They're just so interconnected, and for most of my life, um, that just wasn't the perspective that I was given. Um instead, the perspective was more you're responsible for other people's emotions, and your emotions don't matter, would be better if they didn't exist. So if you grew up in an environment where it was your job to keep the adults happy and make sure they're okay, like don't do this because it will make them mad. Or being told, like, you're making me mad. It's not a child's job to regulate the adult's emotions. It's actually the adult's job to regulate their own emotions and to help the child regulate their emotions. That's so often in our culture, it's flipped around where the child is expected to regulate both. When they do not have the brain capacity, they don't have the skills, they don't have the resources to be able to even manage their own emotions because the adult is supposed to be helping with that, modeling that, teaching, training, providing the space for that. So if that was backwards for you growing up, then you have to unlearn that, and you have to start to learn the things that ideally you would have learned in a healthy Christian home of how to make room for your emotions, how to listen, how to bring hard things to the Lord, how to celebrate, how to mourn, all of those kinds of things. And oftentimes it even feels like there's an added layer to that of your emotions aren't okay at home, and then at church, it's all about Jesus. And in loving Jesus well, it means you love everyone else well. So it's all about Jesus, and then it's all about other people, and then there's you last. Like you may have even heard that song or saying whatever growing up, Jesus and others and you, then it's the way to spell joy. Well, if you're coming to it with a mindset that's been shaped by childhood emotional neglect, what you hear is it's all about Jesus, and I need to make him happy, which again is a misnomer because he's in charge of his happiness. And to make Jesus happy, I need to love other people, which also means making them happy. And that means there's nothing left for me. And then I'm left really confused because I don't feel joyful and just feel that much more defective or spiritually inept or whatever it is, because I'm loving Jesus, I'm doing what other people want, and I still don't have joy. Often those childhood emotional neglect messages are reinforced in the religious culture and sometimes even in the teaching. Because there's that twisted idea. Like last week's podcast, 126, was about how boundaries are misunderstood. And within that, like the idea of what it means to be loving is misunderstood. Being loving does not mean giving someone what they want. But if that's what you've been taught, then like what else are you gonna do? Because how do we know if we're not taught? And we as children absorb things. So even if they're not directly told to us, things are demonstrated to us. And as children, we think like children, we draw our own conclusions from what happens to us, how adults respond, and that kind of thing. And as any of you who have been around children know, children's understanding and perception of what happens is not always accurate. Sometimes it's very funny. Sometimes it's harmful. And the times where it's funny is great and celebrate and enjoy kids that like they see the world so differently. And it's great to listen to their perspective and be like, oh yeah, if you see things that way, then like, oh, that makes so much sense why you're doing what you're doing. Where it becomes harmful is when the enemy is there and he's always there to help shape how the child is interpreting the events and the situations that have happened. So if you're in an environment where you're being told that your behavior dictates if the adults in your world are going to be happy or not, then if an adult comes home and they're not happy, or you're around them and they're not happy, even though you didn't do anything, the enemy's there to help you draw that conclusion that you're still responsible somehow. And that can even like get to the point of like just my very existence must be the problem because I didn't even do anything, and they're not happy, and I can't make them happy and never be good enough. Like, that's how that kind of thing gets in there and gets started. So without being taught and instructed and actually practicing emotional maturity, and there's like specific skills that you can practice that should be practiced in a healthy family. However, if they weren't, which isn't shaming and blaming your parents, your parents probably didn't have anybody teach them either. They probably didn't even know these things existed. Like there's so much more knowledge now than there was for our parents. So it's not about blaming them or shaming them. It's a place to practice emotional maturity and say, oh, if I know your story, I know the resources you had, I know the environment you were brought in, what expectations were put on you, I can see that you did an amazing job with what you had. And I'm so grateful for that. And you can see the impact of the negative side of things as well. It's not an either-or. There's both. And being able to celebrate the good and forgive the bad. And then in your present life, find people who you can practice healthy emotional skills with so that you can mature emotionally and spiritually. And if you want someone to walk through that with you really closely, I do that with my one-on-one clients. To hear your story, to know where you came from, to know what was taught, to uncover those places where the enemy came in and helped you set up a worldview that wasn't quite accurate and that doesn't actually fit with what God says about you or who God really is, those kinds of things. So that we can see the skills that you're missing. So you can start to practice those, and you can practice them in relationship with me. Could build that safe space to practice these skills that you didn't get before. And ideally, you have one or two people in your life that you also can start practicing these skills with because they're meant to be done in relationship. So if you want to know if you want to know more about that, you can schedule a call at the link below. I appreciate you listening. I would love to hear your thoughts. Remember that your healing heals generations.