Sunday Service | Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Week 4: October 11, 2020
Welcome to Week 4 of our series on Emotionally Healthy Spirituality!
Mary opened up with a liturgy on gathering together from Every Moment Holy.
Emily Rattle shares about an upcoming event benefiting her workplace, Safe Haven Family Center. Their 16th Annual Hike for the Homeless is coming up on November 7, and this year it will be a virtual fundraiser seeking to raise $150,000 to help house and empower the families in their care facing homelessness and needing help. Let's all join in for this cause. Learn more here:
https://www.classy.org/campaign/16th-annual-hike-for-the-homeless/c287921
And Brian continues our journey through learning about emotionally healthy spirituality by teaching about "the wall,” where we face a crisis of faith and must begin an inward journey to give up our power and control to encounter God.
Jesus is leading us in emotionally healthy spirituality because our world needs to know deep love. Because we need to know deep love. We all need to experience Jesus’ good news in the core of who we are and to experience freedom regardless of circumstances, so that we are empowered to deeply love ourselves, and him, and others.
So what is “the wall”?
The wall is what the early church leaders called “the dark night of the soul.”
We often are asked to classify our spirituality as a before and after photo: life before Jesus and life after Jesus. But the reality is that it is so much more complicated than that! It is a journey, seen in every character of the Bible all the way to us today. We are engaging with so much more along our journey: belief, doubt, failure, growth, cultures, conflicts, etc.
We see in Jesus’ parable of the four soils that we too have stages of growth: we grow, we resist growth, we mature in our relationships, we become hardened, we stagnate in growth.
6 Stages of our Faith
1: Life-changing awareness of God
Beginning of our journey with Christ
Aware of our need for mercy
Begin our relationship with him
2: Discipleship
Learning about God and what it means to follow him
Engaging with community
Life of Christ becoming our life
3:The Active Life
The “doing” part
Discovering and using our unique giftings and talents to serve, lead, and grow
4: The Wall + The Journey Inward
*where we are focusing today
God brings us to the wall as an important invitation
5: The Journey Outward
Move past the crisis of faith and inner journey
Back to “the active life,” but it looks very different now--it’s from a grounded sense
of who we are, who God is, how God loves us, with a deep inner sense of quiet
6: Transformed Into Love
God continues to send everything our way to grow us, keep us moving forward
God’s love becomes our love and casts our fear
Seasons may be a better way of describing this instead of stages, because stages sound like something we can control and make come & go. We cannot control the seasons. The walls come whether we like it or not when they need to.
Let’s look at the Wall.
The wall comes through a crisis that turns our world upside down. Examples might include:
Divorce
Job loss
Death of a loved one
Cancer diagnosis
Disillusioning church experience
Shattered dreams
Infertility
Singleness
Loss of joy
The wall is real and it hits us at our core. We question who we are in the midst of it. We even question who God is. Our faith doesn’t seem to be working for us. Our foundation feels shaky.
Can you relate? If you feel any of this, hear this:
You are not crazy.
You are not “of little faith.”
You are not alone.
This is a part of our journey, and it is exactly where Jesus wants to meet us. There can be real healing and growth when we push through.
This is where faith comes alive. Though, it may not feel like it--because we are not in control. The Lord is. And he will lead us and tell us when to walk away and when to push through.
This idea of the wall in language originated in early Christianity with the words “the dark night of the soul,” but it appears in the Bible early on with Abraham.
Abraham met many walls throughout his journey with God. He is the father of our faith, and it is in his story where we first hear of the revelation of a Messiah coming to save us. Still, he faced walls, including:
Moving away from his family at an old age
Conflict with his brother Lot
Receiving many promises from the Lord
Waiting on those promises
Trying to speed up those promises
Receiving the promises
Battling for control in many circumstances
But his greatest wall was met in Genesis 22, when Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac, to sacrifice the promise. God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
How do you think Abraham heard these words? How would you hear this? What feelings might come up?
Disillusionment
Doubt
Anger
Questions
How might Abraham’s image of God be challenged by this word from God?
Walls often reveal something deeper than they seem to at first. For Abraham, Isaac had become his identity, his purpose, his reason for living. This was the promised child of God, the beginning of fulfilling Abraham as the “father of many nations,” but it became an idol to him.
We can relate. Where are our idols--who or what is defining our identity or purpose or wholeness? What is your wall?
God is trying to engage with you right in that spot. And his goal is freedom & wholeness.
Abraham’s example shows him trusting God and seeing a new side of God on that mountain as he almost plunges a knife into his promised son. God says “Stop,” and provides a ram.
The truth is: Isaac was never the intended sacrifice. Abraham’s doubt was the sacrifice.
The Lord brings us to walls like these to bring us freedom from the things in our heart keeping us from growing in him. He is rewiring our hearts.
Abraham came to know God as provider in the most dire of circumstances--and he learned that God is his true promise, the promise that will outlast all others.
Walls will come, we don’t even have to look for them. It is always intended as a journey of change, not a quick pit stop. Jesus leads us through it, all the way.
Becoming emotionally healthy allows us to identify the walls and the feeling it brings up honestly with God and with others. We can be faithful AND--in conflict, hurting, etc.
How do we know if we’re hitting a wall?
The joy of God’s presence evaporates
We feel barren, doubtful
The disciplines we used to feel close to God aren’t “working”
Little fruit, hard to see what God is doing
These are signs that God is doing a deeper work, not that something is “wrong.” We think, “Oh, there’s a disconnect,” and yes, that’s true--but not where you think. It’s not “your fault” and something you need to make happen; we just have to follow God into the deeper places.
One of those deeper places is where feelings become gods to us. The wall is intended to protect us from worshipping our feelings. We tend to mistake our feelings for God, so then we hit a wall and feel these things, we doubt that God is there to guide and help up. In reality, these feelings are signals that growth is coming, not that we’ve been abandoned.
Recognizing these moments is huge and we must turn to Jesus.
What does it look like when we are moving through the walls?
Short answer: we are changed. Here are 4 areas in which we see those changes:
1: A greater level of brokenness
The wall reveals that we don’t know as much as we thought
and that we need a lot more than we often admit
We become less judgemental and less offendable
We have less of a need to be in control
2: A greater appreciation for holy unknowing (mystery)
God is mysterious, and we need to embrace him for who he is
The more we know of God, the less we really know
We become childlike in wonder and in receiving God’s mysterious and often offensive love
3: A deeper ability to wait for God
Our need for productivity breaks at the wall--that deep desire is broken within our hearts
Even Jesus waited for 30 years--take heart from his example
4: A greater detachment (from the world)
We gain an awareness that though we live like the world in many ways, we have
eternity in our hearts and minds
False identities and the “shoulds” and “oughts” fall away at the wall
The wall is real. These are tried and true ways Jesus leads us through it. If we’re honest about these things, we can move forward, and that is what Jesus wants for us most of all: to keep moving forward through every step, every mistake, and every wall.
Always, always remember:
You belong.
You are loved.
You are pleasing to him.
A prayer for the wall:
Heavenly Father, teach me to trust you even when I do not know where you are going. Help me to surrender and not turn inward into myself out of fear. The storms and winds blow strongly all around me. I cannot see in front of me. Sometimes I feel like I am going to drown. Lord, you are centered, utterly at rest and peace. Open my eyes that I might see you are with me on the boat. I am safe.
Awaken me, Jesus, to your presence within me, around me, and below me. Grant me grace to follow you into the unknown, into the next place in my journey with you.