Spiritual Pathways || Phase 1 | Lesson Eight

So many times in my addiction I wanted to stop and I wanted to quit and I would go to church services or worship services and I would have these like emotional experiences where I would feel like okay now I'm good I'm done and I would leave those things and end up back out in this life that I was living and eventually it would build back up on me or whatever and I would get back to a place where I felt like I needed something to change the way I felt and man it was like this never-ending cycle of feeling shame and then coming into something and having this emotional kind of experience and thinking okay this is gonna be it and man it wasn't until I was blessed with the opportunity to go to treatment that I was able to understand there was a lot more going on and I was able to there's a lot more to engaging God than just an emotional experience in a worship service and it was really where I was introduced to this idea of spiritual formation and you may hear a phrase like spiritual formation and think okay man what in the world is that or is it that's some kind of a kind of advanced stuff that's not for me you know or maybe you you have some experience at church and spiritual formation to you is simply just Christian habits or disciplines of journaling or prayer or things like that I need to do more of these things and and so but it wasn't until I really was introduced to spiritual formation from a whole concept that it really helped me see how I can really believe that God is interested in more than my just my behaviors God doesn't just sit in heaven with that that tally sheet of marking the goods and the bads and watching me do all the things that God is really interested in more than my behaviors that I can I can believe that because God created all of me and for this section of our spiritual pathway what we're unpacking is really just God's design like God's setup for how he made us and in your participant guide you've got this these these circles that come from a book called renovation of the heart by Dallas Willard and it lays out all the things how God made all of us in Psalm 139 verse 13 it says where you created me and my inmost being you knit me together in my mother's womb that God created all of us and understanding that how and all the different pieces of that was the

foundation for me of being able to step out and learning how to live a life of sobriety to learn how to to function in this life and embracing that it a spiritual formation can be kind of abstract or hard to grasp you know what the definition we like to use of it comes from a quote by a guy named Andy Stanley and it says this a spiritual formation is simply the process of me wanting to want what God wants more than what I want the spiritual formation is just the process of me growing to want what God wants for me more than what I want for me and the first way that we the first piece we get to unpack in this pathway that a piece of us that God made is our spirit and spirit and soul it's kind of a can be kind of hard to understand and so to understand spirit from the context of Scripture is what Jesus was saying things like in Mark chapter 7 verse 21 he said out of our hearts come this thing he uses the word heart and spirit they're kind of interchangeable in John 4 24 says I will you will worship me in spirit and in truth realizing that our our spirit is is this place where our heart is this place where our pie our ability for passion comes and our ability to create comes and our ability our initiative and our drive and really the difference between you know the kind of understanding what the spirit is is it's the blueprint of what you have the potential to be so what would your life look like if you understood this inside part of you this heart part of you the spirit part of you if that was in line with who God made you to be you know in step four of the twelve and twelve it talks about how that we have inside of us these God-given instincts or these God-given desires and and that when fear is in charge of us that those instincts far exceed their natural structure the natural way they're supposed to be so that we end up grasping for more I'm afraid I'm gonna lose something that I've got or I'm afraid I'm not gonna get something that I want and so those instincts just kind of run riot or go completely out of control what would it look like if our hearts were were brought to a place where our will our spirit our ability to create in our passion were brought to a place where we we allowed God to be the one who decides what we do with those what we do with

that you know one thing that we've us addicts and alcoholics have never had trouble with is initiative. The creative ways that we went about getting our next one or the effort or energy that we put into it to find in that next fix, man, that that passion that we have for that, that drive that we have for that, knows no bounds. A couple weeks ago I was, there was a big rain storm that came through and I was supposed to chair one of my home groups, a 12 and 12 meeting at a clubhouse and, you know, I got up that morning and I looked outside and it was kind of pouring down rain and the wind was blowing really hard and I had this thought of like, oh man, I do not want to get out in this. And then what the goodness of God as he brought that memory to my mind of what it was like when I was in my addiction, that there was literally one time during the COVID lockdown there was a pouring down rainstorm and I walked to a liquor store to get a pint of vodka. And it was like, man, I'll walk in a rainstorm during a lockdown to get my next one. I can get up now and get myself to this meeting. How much different would your life look if you stepped into a place where that initiative, that drive, that passion that you have, the energy that you have, if you brought that into a place where you let God be the one who drives that? We've never been short on putting energy into things. We've never been short on having a passion and drive and a desire. We've never been short on doing whatever it takes to push ourselves to get to that. What would your life look like if you step into a place where those God-given instincts, that God-given desire to create, is brought into alignment with what his will is for your life? Realizing, again, more than anything, that spiritual formation is not trying to get good at the dos and to stop doing the do-nots. Spiritual formation is that simply meets the process of me wanting to want what God wants for me more than what I want for me. And if we take that same passion that we had when we were pursuing whatever the thing was that we were after and we let God have control of that, how much different would our life look? Matt talked with us about how our passions and our God-given drive is

truly that. It's God-given. In the same way we've talked about how our emotions are also God-given. He gave those to us to move us to action. One thing that we often overlook, though, is what about things from the past that have created strong emotion or maybe even been messages that we took on about ourselves that aren't necessarily true? And today in your workbook you're gonna have an opportunity to walk through an exercise that will help you practically think through that one step at a time. But as we finish up our lesson for today, I want you to picture for a moment that you have a beach ball or some sort of a ball. Mine's not a beach ball, but some sort of a ball. And I want you to pretend like you're swimming. And anytime you have a ball in a body of water and you push it down, we're able to hold it there for a while, right? We can keep it under for a little bit, but what do we know that's gonna happen? Eventually that ball is gonna pop out somewhere, some way, with who knows how much force hitting or splashing people with water on its way up. We don't have any control over that. But when we think about our past experiences, maybe some trauma, some grief, some anger, whatever it might be as the beach ball that we're trying to keep buried in our life, I want you to consider for a moment pulling that beach ball up and dealing with it as you're bringing it up. Not letting it just stay under there till it can't stay anymore and explode out of the water, but you bringing it up with a trained counselor, care team member, that can work through those strong emotions and messages from the past to help you get clear around what is true. What's unfortunate for a lot of us is that sometimes we take those messages and we bury them and we carry them and carry them and they get heavier and eventually they not only just impact us, but they impact other people around us. And so what we encourage you to do in this season of your recovery is lean into the care team, the clinicians, the counselors that you have around you and be able to slowly bring up those beach balls in your life so that you can address those, get healthy narrative around those, gain some tools that can help you be able to unpack, get the truth around. on those and be able to step forward in a healthy manner

so that you can love well those around you each day.