Emotionally Healthy Discipleship Study Guide

Emotional health and spiritual maturity cannot be separated. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.

When we ignore the emotional component of our lives, we move through the motions of Christian disciplines, activities, and behaviors, but deeply rooted behavioral patterns from our pasts continue to hinder us from an authentic life of maturity in Christ.

We often neglect to reflect on what is going on inside us and around us (emotional health) and are too busy to slow down to be with God (contemplative spirituality).1 As a result, we run the high risk of remaining stuck as spiritual infants, failing to develop into spiritually/emotionally mature adults in Christ.

Jay, one of our church members, described it best: “I was a Christian for twenty-two years. But instead of being a twenty-two-year-old Christian, I was a one-year-old Christian twenty-two times! I just kept doing the same things over and over and over again.”

Peter Scazzero and Geri Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Workbook, Updated Edition: Discipleship That Deeply Changes Your Relationship with God (Grand Rapids, MI: HarperChristian Resources, 2017).