Emotional Dependence
As created beings we cannot, in reality, find lasting fulfillment apart from a loving and secure relationship with our Creator. We are created to know him and we simply lack the capacity to fulfill ourselves in a lasting and meaningful way. To be healthy we need godly integrity, emotional strength, real security, unfailing love, and inner peace; and these come from God alone.
Unfortunately, we can, and do, become emotionally dependent on ourselves, or on others, or on things we think will bring fulfillment to our our lives. By nature we want peace, but by design, we lack the wherewithall to find real peace or real meaning apart from a secure emotional relationship with our Heavenly Father. To be healthy we must both love Him and enjoy Him, and we must sense His love and enjoyment for us. Our love for God and His love for us are the foundations of emotional and spiritual health, and they are found only in the Person and work of Christ.
God extends His love and reaches out to us through Christ. People commonly look to personal accomplishments, appearance, self-image, success, power, money, or physical pleasures to meet and satisfy their emotional/spiritual needs. However, if one lives long enough, they find that nothing in this world - no accomplishment, no pleasure and no relationship, has the power to meet and provide the lasting satisfaction for which we so desperately search. Christ, the Water and the Bread of Life. He alone satisfies. And this is not by accident, we are designed to love and enjoy the Lord first, and then everything else in its place.
Our emotions are a gift of our creation that we might have the capacity to feel our love for the Lord. Emotions help us to feel and enjoy, how cruel would it be for God to command that we love but not give the capacity to enjoy love? And again, what kind of existence would it be to be under obligation to love but not have the capacity to find pleasure in the one you love? For love to be meaningful we must enjoy who or what we we love; love and enjoyment are two sides of the same coin. Our emotions reveal the handiwork of God for He gave us the capacity to experience pleasure which means we can enjoy who or what we love.
We are hardwired to love pleasure and the desire for pleasure is the driving force behind our love for God: in His presence is fullness of joy! Psa 16:11. Yes, we love Him, we love His presence, and we love the joy in loving Him. The challenge for the Christian is to allow the Lord to have final say over their pleasures. For sure, we are going to seek pleasure, but if we submit to Him, He will lead us into pleasures that bring emotional and spiritual wholeness. Pleasures are powerful, they build or they destroy, they have a moral and spiritual dimension, and the pleasures we embrace reveal the condition of our heart.
God is motivated by pleasure. Yes, that's right, pleasure! For example, He finds pleasure in redeeming His people from sin! Have you not read that He does whatsoever He pleases, meaning whatsoever brings Him pleasure. Of course, God finds pleasure in the good and the holy. And, His will for His people is that they also find their highest pleasure in Him and in His redemptive work on their behalf. This is the key to a joy that fulfills and a joy that brings emotional and spiritual wholeness. Remember, "the joy of the Lord is your strength!"
Darkness has twisted the whole concept of pleasure. Darkness would have us find our highest pleasure in our own appetites rather than a relationship with Jesus Christ, whom the Scripture refers to as both Lord and God. We are created to love and enjoy the Lord by finding our highest pleasure in Him; we are not to serve ourselves. Herein lies the problem, we, by nature, are not motivated by the things of the Lord. By nature we are self-seeking, rather than God seeking, and become emotionally dependent on our personal appetites, rather than what pleases God. We get caught in a circle of fleshly thinking, of fleshly striving, and of fleshly wanting. For many, their hope lies in their ability to find fulfillment in the circumstances and people of their life. Reality is, lasting satisfaction and real peace comes from walking out the redemptive victories of Jesus Christ over emotional and spiritual confusion.
If we are empty it is because we are filling our lives with emptiness - things or people that cannot satisfy.Jesus said He was the Bread and Water of Life. He was speaking to the topic of bringing Life to the hungry and thirsty soul. He alone can meet our need for Life! If we are not fulfilled by the blessings of the Gospel and the Person of Jesus Christ, it is because we are looking within rather than to God. Our self-image, our appearance, our circumstances, our accomplishments, our family, spouse, peoples opinions, material things, the wisdom of this world, etc., can neither satisfy nor fulfill. When we seek personal fulfillment from anybody or anything other than Jesus Christ then we open our lives to the wisdom and influence of Spiritual Darkness; if we are not fulfilled by Christ, then Darkness uses the emptiness of our fleshly nature to gain an emotional foothold in our life. When Darkness has input then we become spiritually dysfunctional, unhappy, unfulfilled, and confused. We become dependent on people and how they treat us, we become materialistic because we look to this world for satisfaction and be become confused because nothing works. If we are not happy and fulfilled with the blessings of Salvation, it is because our lives are filled with other things!
If our emotional health is not rooted in the Gospel then we will never be able to live in emotional or spiritual health; our chronic un-fulfillment, rather than the Word of God, will rule our thinking and our behavior.
To be healthy, we are to choose Christ and His redemptive victories as the foundation of our emotional and spiritual health.
Christians are to find their pleasure and their fulfillment in the work and person of Christ. This is the meaning of the scriptural admonition to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength.
What is Quality of Life?
The Scriptures tell us we have an enemy that attempts to confuse our values and choices through "fleshly lusts". These lusts are emotional "wantings" that drive our thoughts and our behavior. We want and want and want, but never find. Our fleshly lusts reveal the hopelessness of looking within for real meaning. Real meaning and real emotional wholeness are the result of emotional and spiritual dependence on Jesus Christ and His work for us. Where He is loved first, He brings peace. If we are born-again then our new nature directs our thinking toward Jesus and we develop an emotional dependence on what He says. When our new nature is in control then we have peace within and our greatest pleasure is found in our relationship with Him. To love Him with all our heart means the pleasures we find in loving Him are the greatest pleasures of our life; we love Him more than any thing, more than any family member, more than any other person, and more than ourselves. If Jesus Christ is indeed God, then it is right to love Him above all others!
Emotional Dysfunction
Every person is emotionally dependent on something or someone and that dependence either supports or opposes our walk with Christ. We all have witnessed people whose lives have fallen apart after a failure, a reversal, a rejection, or a betrayal. To be sure these are causes of enormous pain, but as Christians, our lives ultimately belong to Christ and we cannot allow our emotional health to be destroyed by the actions of another. Our sanity belongs to Christ and we cannot give it away over the actions of another. We cannot give people or things that kind of power over our emotional and spiritual health. A fleshly person, by definition, is emotionally dependent on the quality of their life, i.e., on their own self-fulfillment. For them, quality of life is everything; their self-fulfillment is their priority and their highest good. A spiritual person, by definition, is emotionally dependent on Christ and His work for them. Their highest good is to love Christ above all and then find their highest pleasures in the benefits of Salvation.
The problem with fleshly thinking is this - it leaves us empty for we are dependent upon people rather than God. Our life is a wandering in the desert, a listening to the empty wisdom of this world, and a looking to others to make us happy. The Scripture says "happy is the man whose God is the Lord."
If we do not find satisfaction from the blessings of redemption, then by default, we are dependent on people or things for fulfillment. A dependence on fulfillment from people or things leads one away from an emotional relationship with Christ. And, if we allow ourselves to be led away from enjoying Him, then we find ourselves in the land of emotional and spiritual emptiness. The Scriptures tell us that a a good man is satisfied from above, but a backslider in heart is filled with his own ways; a fleshly heart can never be satisfied by anything. Read Ecclesiastes. Self-fulfillment apart from Christ is a chasing of the wind.
We can attempt to fill our lives with accomplishments or with people or and with things, but with familiarity, once again, we find ourselves empty. As Christians, we plant our lives in the soil of God's Word which then becomes the source of our emotional and spiritual health. We are joined to the resurrected Christ and our New Identity is in Him. He is the Power and the Grand Purpose of our life. He is the only Sure Foundation and Salvation, the only True Path of mental/emotional/spiritual health. It pleases God, and we serve Him, by finding fulfillment in Him rather than finding fulfillment in this world or finding fulfillment in our own ways. We treat Him as God when we desire and enjoy what He says. God Himself has brought meaning to our lives through the new birth and the gift of salvation. The question becomes, are the blessings of God enough for you? Do the blessings of Salvation satisfy your emotional needs? If the answer is no then the question becomes, What is it you really want?
It is through His Word and His Spirit working within us that we are enabled to break the chains of a fleshly dependence on self-fulfillment, and come to real emotional health through emotional dependence on Christ; we have to find happiness in His work for us. As we previously said, it is a lie that we can find lasting fulfillment apart from Christ and His Word. If we build our lives on a lie, then the result will be emptiness with emotional or spiritual instability. Emotional instability drives poor thinking and poor thinking results in poor behavior. Good thinking and good behavior are the fruits of emotional dependence on Christ and what He says.
Jesus, and what He says, must be our highest pleasure and the reason for our happiness.
We Set Boundaries
Our emotional dependence on people must have limits; there is a point we cannot go beyond. Even with family members, we cannot allow ourselves to become more dependent on them than Christ. Though we love them, we cannot position them above Christ.
If we find ourselves having chronic emotional problems because of a family member, then we have become imbalanced through our dependence on them. There must be emotional boundaries to our love,i.e. we cannot allow ourselves to love others above Christ or His Word.
But if we love Christ first, then we can withstand the failures and rejections of people we love. The bottom line of our emotional life must be dependence on Jesus Christ and what He says. He is our source of strength and the source of our highest pleasure. When we are dependent upon Christ for our happiness, then emotional stability results and that stability enables us to relate to others in a wholesome and balanced manner. We can love others in a way that does not destroy us. He is God and it is right to love Him above all others, including family. There are many practical reasons to love God above all others, and it is sin to love others above Him.
We Choose To Love Christ First
This world, people, and things demand our love and our dependence. Christians have to choose emotional dependence on Christ. We make it a priority. The Christian can never love anything or anyone above Christ. We choose to be emotionally dependent on Christ and His redemptive work. He then becomes the source of our joy, stability, and peace.
Thank you Lord Jesus.
