Cups running over referred to something other than God’s blessings at a breakout session on emotional fitness during the Healthy Leaders Healthy Churches conference March 8–9.
David and Teresa Ferguson of Intimate Life Ministries, Austin, Texas, used a cup to illustrate how painful emotions build up inside one’s internal “cup” and overflow into behaviors that may not be understood or accepted by others.
Negative responses in church, the home or at work are not always about a specific incident. Often they are about everything else that is going on in a person’s life that has not been dealt with in an appropriate way. Negative emotions come because believers keep the emotions from past events or problems. These emotions could be hurt, guilt or anger.
Learn to live in the present
By emptying their cups of negative emotions and living in the present, people can live in God’s abundance, the Fergusons said.
“If [the devil] can keep a believer’s heart bound up in the past, it robs us of present abundance in Christ,” David Ferguson said.
Christians can be bound by emotions related to the future as well. Emotions such as fear, worry or insecurity over things yet to come or imagined can debilitate a person in the present.
This lack of what David Ferguson calls “emotional fitness” can lead to symptoms such as physical complaints, controlling/obsessing, escaping into work, drugs, irritability/hostility, sleeping/eating disorders or being emotionally numb.
These outward characteristics aren’t always visible in church. Church members typically gather to shake hands and sing hymns during gatherings at church and attempt to cover the negative emotions that reside inside them. This hinders true worship.
“We can preach some of our best sermons but these things are choking out the Word,” David Ferguson said.
Members failing to deal with emotions can cripple a church and rob it of its joy, David Ferguson said.
“You’ll find that sometimes the saints aren’t being excitedly filled with the gratitude and wonder of getting on with the things of the Kingdom because their hearts are filled up with painful emotions,” he said.
Teresa Ferguson said her life was typical of what most people do with their negative emotions. “Growing up we didn’t know what to do with our hurt; we were told you were supposed to forgive your offender, which I did, but I didn’t know what to do with all the rest of it. We were told to put the past behind us and keep going — I did. I stuffed it down and kept going, and we were the leaders in our church,” she said.
“It’s normal folks. We’ve got stuff in us and we don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “I had stuffed for so long that there was no room for any positive emotion.”
“Church answers” didn’t seem to work, she explained. “We were told to pray more, fast, memorize Scripture and rebuke the devil and the symptoms would go away, but they didn’t. Instead I had more condemnation and guilt from questions like, ‘What’s wrong with me that I can’t get rid of my sin? Why can’t I overcome it?’ ”
She said symptoms of poor emotional fitness can be escaping to computers to avoid relationships, reliance on medications, depression, loss of physical health, controlling behavior and loss of emotions such as love, joy, patience or affection.
Release negative emotions
“When negative emotions crowd into the cup we’re not going be able to pour out the positive emotions,” she said.
The result is the spilling over of negative emotions, particularly impatience.
The church is not the place to gloss over negative emotions present in its members, but it is the place to address them working through “truth in love,” the Fergusons said.
“Jesus Christ ought to be our model of experiencing abundance. He is the only Person who lived every moment of every day in the present,” David Ferguson said. Jesus’ heart was not filled with hurt, anger, fear or condemnation.
In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus was experiencing sorrow that His disciples fell asleep rather than praying with Him. He didn’t just shrug His shoulders and say, well that’s just how it is, denying His feelings, but He was venerable with Peter, James and John. He didn’t let His emotion explode in anger nor did He pretend it didn’t hurt, according to David Ferguson. “He shared the truth in love, asking Peter, ‘Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?’ ”
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