Dust And Breath
Chris Holm | JAN 4, 2026
Scripture: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality #1
Series: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality
Categories: Become Like Jesus, Healing and Wholeness, Discipleship
Sermon summary
Sermon Summary
We begin the year asking ourselves a crucial question: one year from now, how do we want to be different? This new series, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, explores why spiritual maturity and emotional health cannot be separated.
Many of us experience a gap between the abundant life Jesus promises in John 10:10 and our actual reality. We might be exhausted, anxious, or struggling in relationships despite our spiritual disciplines. The problem isn't God's promise. The issue is we've been pursuing spiritual growth while ignoring 90% of who we are.
Like an iceberg, only 10% of our lives is visible (behaviors, attendance, service). The other 90% remains hidden (how we process emotions, childhood coping mechanisms, unspoken fears, unnamed shame). Traditional discipleship often leaves this 90% untouched. We can read our Bibles daily and still explode at our kids. We can serve in ministry and still have marriages dying from emotional distance.
God created us as integrated beings with bodies, minds, wills, emotions, and spirits. All of these reflect His image. When we suppress our emotional lives in the name of spirituality, we don't become more like God. We become less human.
Jesus promises rivers of living water flowing from the center of who we are (John 7:38). But when our hearts remain hard, anxious, wounded, or shut down because we've never addressed emotional health as a discipleship issue, that river gets blocked.
The invitation is simple but scary: "God, you can have my emotional life." What would happen if we let Jesus into the rooms we've kept locked?