Hello! Thank you to those who texted or emailed and joined me in prayer for last weekend! I preached on Psalm 19:7-11 and discussed The Posture and Pace of Discipleship.
RECAP
This quarter, we’re in a series focused on three dimensions of life that we offer to God daily so that we might become who He made us to be. These dimensions are our attention, our emotions, and our limits. I’m bulletpointing the weeks in this series below for quick reference, as we have new members weekly.
Life with God and Attention
Common obstacles to life with God (speed of life, attachment, and expectations).
The gift of our attention (your most precious commodity) and how it is manipulated for profit.
Cultivating a transformed heart with the tension of insight and practice
This week, we turn to emotions and will spend three weeks engaging what we feel, the need for ongoing reinterpretation, and then a word on suffering and mental health.
Of all the research I’ve done in the last few years, the work on emotional intelligence has consistently been the most widely applicable. What we feel hourly about and toward God, ourselves, others, and life circumstances determines how we weigh the quality of our lives. Moreover, the default lens through which we see and interpret God, ourselves, others, and life circumstances substantially shapes how we react to and engage with all of it.
Each of us has experiences where we wondered if what we felt, or thought was normal because we’re the only ones living inside our heads. We’ve sought assurance from others by asking for it outright or figuring out more subtle ways to belong.
By the time we get to our late teens / early twenties, we have formed a sense of who we need to be to be loved, accepted, and valued. Depending on the circumstance of your family of origin, this can look a thousand different ways, but the core desires of our hearts are all the same. We want to be seen and appreciated for who we are and want to know a type of love that makes us feel stable, secure, and loved. This is the God-designed desire within our hearts, and as Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they find rest in God himself.
So, we are on two overlapping tracks in much of our early life. In one, we are trying to make sense of life in the world, looking for instruction, direction, and belonging. We learn to survive in the family system we grow up in; we learn how to make friends, gain acceptance, and play well with others. The second track is the deeper one, the fundamental desire of our hearts to know and be known by God and others in relationships of love where we delight in God and honor him in life together.
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