Spiritual Growth Articles for
|
Unlike the strong-willed intellectual, you don’t begin with a created ideal image. Instead, you walk within a lifestyle that becomes your image.
SUPERHIGHWAY vs. WORN PATH
| The strong-willed intellectual envisions a plan for a superhighway and then begins recruiting others to help him bring this highway into fruition. These intellectuals all hop on the band wagon and cruise along on their created superhighway. Conversely, strong-willed emotional people don’t set out to create an image; their intellectual logic is weak. Instead they continue to walk along in a routine for a few decades, wearing a path that begins to be noticed by others who call it spiritual. |
not who you really are but, rather,
how you want others to perceive you.
Once you believe you have arrived—because others perceive you in a certain way—your life then becomes focused on promoting this image with you as its standard, its leader, its authority, its guru. Deep inside, you are still empty. You feel that vacancy, void, nothingness deeply; but this new image—the way people perceive you—masks that emptiness. You must never let anyone break through the façade and see the empty you.
The image gives you an identity, a self-worth you never experienced before. As with the weak-willed emotional person, it is an image that focuses on you. You misinterpret Scripture and then believe you live within the image you think it promotes. In reality because you are emotionally dominant, everything that happens in your life is about you. Your flesh manifests as extreme self-centeredness, although you believe you are and promote yourself to be God-centered.
You still cannot connect with people in relationship because of the distance you put between them and your inner void. If there is a relational problem—and there are many relationship issues in your life—because you believe are never wrong, you don’t examine your own contributions to the problem. This irresponsibility manifests in other areas of your life as well.
You continue to compare. If someone doesn’t live as you do, train their children as you do, submit to their husband as you do, wear what you wear, practice the hyper-spirituality that you do—if they don’t walk in your worn path—you have only condemnation for them. Grace is lacking, if it exists at all. As you observe the lives of those around you, you continue to exaggerate and over-spiritualize your life as you condemn theirs.
You still lack the discipline for trained thought and tend to ask others—perhaps your own husband—to think for you. You base your doctrine on emotions rather than fact. You judge others’ processes by your emotions instead of fact.
Your faith centers on your self-created lifestyle, which you believe others should embrace. Sadly, weak-willed people try to embrace your lifestyle and become oppressed through that process because they believe that your self-proclaimed successful spiritual life is actually a reality. You believe it is too.
your spiritual life is counterfeit.
Rather than shoring up your ideal image, like a strong-willed intellectual would, you shore up your sense of self-worth through self-proclaimed successes, although in reality there are few, if any. This artificial image of yourself builds an exaggerated sense of confidence in your life, a fragile shell, around that emptiness that haunts you.
and damages relationships.
Until a strong-willed emotionally dominant person sees her need to be unbound from this fragile shell, she will continue in her self-glory—calling it godliness or spirituality—instead of facing her emptiness.
which is why love is preached but is absent in practice.
The appearance of godliness and practice of hyper-spirituality become your identity. Since you are a person of emotional extremes, you may even begin to believe you are god, as many cult leaders do. In reality though, your dominant emotions and strong will serve you as you try to fill the void, the emptiness, with self-centered “love” and expect others to feed that self-centeredness. If they can’t control them with your emotional manipulation, you remove them from your life.
BY STRONG-WILLED EMOTIONALLY DOMINANT PEOPLE: Most likely, if you have read this article to this point, you know someone, are reading the materials of someone, or have placed yourself under the authority of someone who is strong willed and emotionally dominant. will begin to loosen the binding death clothes that oppress you and that you will desire to move forward with the Lord. The Spiritual Growth section of this Christian website offers insights into your personal growth process—a process that will release you to love. |
If you are a strong-willed emotionally dominant person, you most likely don’t see yourself in these insights because you cannot face the reality of your emptiness. Your self-protection through emotional hyper-spirituality binds you and deceives you about the reality of who you are. I pray not. Instead, I hope that you are willing to respond to the Holy Spirit’s wooing and are willing to change, to allow Him access to the emptiness you must keep covered through your masquerade. If so, please continue on with the Spiritual Growth section of this Christian website. If you are feeling overwhelmed and fearful because you are coming brought Life from emptiness when He created the world; and He can do the same with the gnawing void in your life. Will you allow our gentle God I pray you will, |
Release women from the death clothes of oppression and oppressing.
Release them to Your Life and love.
holding to a form of godliness.
~2 Timothy 3:2-5.
Return to Images that Bind Articles Page
