Following Jesus with Our Whole Selves - Over and Under the Waterline [Ryan Ashley]
Jeremiah 17:9, John 4:3-30
"noverim me noverim te"
“Let me know myself, let me know you.”
Augustine – Confessions
1. You Have A Story
2. You Are A Whole Person
Social, Intellectual, Spiritual, Physical, and Emotional
Jeremiah 17:9
The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
“The reason we don’t want to feel is that feeling exposes the tragedy of our world and the darkness of our hearts. The route to facing what we feel is not by valuing the darkness of what we feel, but by valuing the deep structure of why we don’t want to feel. Once we face why feeling is so hard, then we can move beyond what we feel to the deeper energy within is that keeps us from grappling honestly with our emotions. Then we will not only feel more deeply, but more importantly, we will feel our feelings in a way that exposes our struggles with God.”
Tremper Longman and Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul
Johari Window Graphic
1. God is An Emotional Being
contempt, despise, weep, bewail, weeping, dread, rejoice, rejoicing, abhor, loathe, tears, murmur, growl, roar, be boisterous, be indignant, indignation, raging, rage, love, pity, look upon with compassion, burning anger, rage, compassion, delight in, delight, pleasure, burn, be kindled, anger, be attached to, love, howl, make a howling, be vexed, indignant, angry, provoke to anger, vex, vexation, comfort, be sorry, console, rue, repent of, ease oneself, infuriated, overflow, arrogance, fury, exult, vexed in his heart, jealous, ardour, zeal, jealousy, be wrath, and make wrathful
2. You an I Are Made in the Image of God
The personality that emerges from the Gospels differs radically from the image of Jesus I grew up with, an image I now recognize in some of the older Hollywood films about Jesus. In those films, Jesus recites his lines evenly and without emotion. He strides through life as the one calm character among a cast of flustered extras. Nothing rattles him. He dispenses wisdom in flat, measured tones. He is, in short, the Prozac Jesus. In contrast, the Gospels present a man who has such charisma that people will sit three days straight, without food, just to hear his riveting words. He seems excitable, impulsively "moved with compassion" or "filled with pity." The Gospels reveal a range of Jesus' emotional responses: sudden sympathy for a person with leprosy, exuberance over his disciples' successes, a blast of anger at coldhearted legalists, grief over an unreceptive city, and then those awful cries of anguish in Gethsemane and on the cross. He had nearly inexhaustible patience with individuals but no patience at all with institutions and injustice.
Philip Yancy – The Jesus I Never Knew
John 4:3-30
3 So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.
4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.[a])
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
17 “I have no husband,” she replied.
Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true."
19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
27 Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people,29 “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”30 They came out of the town and made their way toward him.
“Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality; listening to our emotions ushers us into reality. And reality is where we meet God.”
Tremper Longman and Dan Allender, Bold Love
Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.”
Peter Scazzero – Emotionally Healthy Spirituality
