Grown Up Emotions

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve seen a grown adult acting like a kid before? Think like the show Dance Moms. Anybody else feel kind of awkward during those moments?

[Communicator Note: Share a time when you had an awkward or funny encounter with an adult who was acting like a child, .]

In college, I worked at an amazing sleep-away camp called Carolina Creek Christian Camps. One week, a church rented out the camp and brought their own leaders, including a guy I'll call Tony. He introduced himself by bragging about his bulletproof suitcase—what do you even say to that? From there, it only got worse. While I helped kids settle in, Tony was out swatting and dunking on 3rd graders like it was the NBA. At the family style breakfast the next morning, instead of feeding the children, he piled four pancakes and all the bacon on his plate. No awareness for others at all! I remember thinking, “This guy is 40, but I feel like I’ve got another child to lead!”

TENSION

Here’s what I learned from my time with Anthony: Not all growing up happens automatically. He was an adult, a grown up with a family, a job, a mortgage, but over my week spent with him I learned that there were some parts of him that were not mature, were not grown up. Some growing up doesn’t happen when you get old, some growing up happens by choice. Growing up emotionally is a (hard) choice. Growing up physically happens to us, growing up emotionally is a series of choices that we make.

And what’s scary is, you can grow bigger and not grow in maturity. You can have an adult body and the emotions of a kid. God designed us to grow into maturity, to change over time and to be all that he put in us to be, and one of the things we want to remind you every week is that It is good to grow up. We live in a culture that makes it seem like growing up is a bad or scary thing, that “adulting” is something you have to endure and put off. The truth is that God’s best for us is always on the other side of the decisions we make to grow up.

If you were here last week you might remember the framework that we laid out for how God grows us into maturity, this is the framework we’re going to use as we talk about emotional maturity tonight:

Immaturity (others are responsible for me) Adulthood (I am responsible for myself) Maturity (I am responsible for others) That’s the framework that we’re going to use, and we’re going to plug emotional maturity into here, and here’s really the core question that I hope to help you with tonight:

What does emotional maturity look like, and what does it take?

TRUTH

Go ahead and open your Bibles to 1 Timothy 3:1-3. This is a letter that the Apostle Paul, who was one of the greatest leaders of the early church, wrote to his apprentice Timothy, and it’s a part of a group of writings called the Pastoral Letters where Paul shared his knowledge with Timothy. The passage we’re looking at is Paul listing out the qualifications necessary for somebody to be a church leader, check it out:

Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. (It’s good to grow up!) 2 Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. (1 Tim 3:1-3 NIV)

Production Note: Don’t highlight any of these on the initial slide, but have them highlight progressively as they’re hit on in the bulleted list (like Jason has done on Sunday mornings).

First off, I think it’s important to note that the Bible is clear, it’s good to want to take on responsibility! It’s good to want to grow up, to want to help people in the church. And maybe you’re looking at this list and the emotional maturity isn’t obvious here, let me point it out to you:

A person who is faithful to their spouse does not let their sexual desires control their decisions.

A person who is temperate does not let their emotional extremes lead them to extreme behaviors.

A person who is self-controlled is not controlled by their emotions.

A person who is not given to drunkenness, does not let their desire for pleasure or escape lead them to over-indulgence.

A person who is not violent but gentle, and not quarrelsome does not vent their anger at others and hurt them.

A person who isn’t a lover of money doesn’t let their desire for gain take over their life.

Emotional maturity is at the core of this passage. You may have giggled at some of these as I read them, and when I was your age I probably would have too 😊. But the truth is, emotional immaturity isn’t just non-ideal, it’s dangerous. We end up hurting others and being hurt when we fail to grow up emotionally.

It’s not funny when it’s our parent who is unfaithful to their spouse, or our spouse who is unfaithful.

It’s not funny when it’s our friends, teachers, or coaches who aren’t temperate or self-controlled and end up verbally lashing out at us.

It’s not funny when it’s our parent who is at the house getting drunk every night, or who is violent and not gentle, quarrelsome, obsessed with money so we have to walk on eggshells with every financial decision that we make.

Most of the hurt if not all of the hurt in our life is a result of a lack of emotional maturity in ourselves or in others, and based on this passage I think we can get a decent picture of what it looks like to be an emotionally mature person. If you’re taking notes, this is our definition of emotional maturity:

Emotional maturity is the degree of freedom your decisions have from your negative emotions and desires. All of us have bad moments. All of us experience negative emotions and desires, but we don’t have to let our negative emotions and desires affect the way we treat others.

So let’s plug this into our framework for maturity that we’ve been using for the series:

Others are responsible for my negative emotions and desires (Immaturity) I am responsible for my negative emotions and desires (Adulthood) I am safe enough to help others with their negative emotions and desires (Maturity)

This is God’s plan to grow you up emotionally, and based on your age and the season of life that you’re in, generally speaking you’re probably somewhere around the first arrow. Of course y’all are fantastic so you help people, and we have bad moments and good moments, but generally during your teenage years you are building the skills and vocabulary to identify complex emotions and desires within yourself and take responsibility for them.

When I was in sixth grade, I had no idea how to take responsibility for my feelings. Once, I started crying in the gym for no reason—nothing happened, nobody was mean to me, literally no reason! To make it worse, I was wearing my football jersey. Football players don’t cry! Mortified, I pulled the jersey over my head and walked all the way to homeroom peeking through the holes, like THAT was the best way to avoid attention. My go-to strategy for dealing with feelings was hiding and praying no one noticed. And that’s not take responsibility for my feelings.

I think that’s our default response to seeing negative emotions and desires in ourselves, we hide them and stuff them down. If there’s something we don’t want to feel, or a situation we want to avoid in life, we tend to try to go around it. That’s called emotional bypassing, and it’s the number one danger to your emotional maturity. In fact I want you to write that down:

The number one danger to your emotional maturity is bypassing negative emotions.

To bypass something is to find an alternate route. It’s like when a road is closed and you need to find a way around, or if you’ve got a problem with somebody at school and you plan your route to class specifically to avoid walking past that person’s locker haha. Nobody likes feeling bad, so anytime something bad happens in life, we’re tempted to avoid it, go around it, pretend like it didn’t happen. The problem is, the bad things that happen to you… happen to you. When you “bypass” negative emotions, you don’t leave them behind or actually avoid them, you end up burying them within yourself. If you’ve heard of Sigmund Freud, he has a great quote about this:

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”- Sigmund Freud Every emotion you bury gets buried alive within you, and learning to express negative emotions in a way that doesn’t make others responsible for them or hurt others is essential to growing up. So what does this look like in us? Here are a few ways we bypass negative emotions, which one sounds most like you?

[PRODUCTION NOTE: All one slide if there’s a framework underneath.]

We bypass negative emotions through tantrums and blame-shifting.

The Framework: Others are responsible for my emotions and desires. (Big period)

Sometimes we bypass negative emotions and the lessons God wants to teach us through them by making others responsible for how we feel. When you’re a kid, tantrums are discouraged but expected, but have you ever seen an adult throw a tantrum? Have you seen an adult lose control of their anger in a way that makes others responsible for what they’re feeling? It’s one thing to make another person responsible for their actions, it’s another thing entirely to make them responsible for how you express your feelings. Growing in emotional maturity means facing life, telling the truth, and taking responsibility for how we express emotions. Here’s another way:

We bypass negative emotions through distractions.

Whether it’s in a seemingly harmless way like making jokes, getting on social media, playing video games, or more harmful ways like pornography, drinking, risk-taking and attention seeking, most people have a couple go to ways to distract themselves from negative emotions. In small doses of good things, this can actually be healthy, but if we use distractions to escape and run from emotions instead of taking a breath in the midst of facing something too big for us at the moment, we end up burying emotions instead of working through them. Distraction from pain is the seed of many addictions and dependent behaviors. Here’s another way:

We spiritually bypass negative emotions by claiming emotional victory without fighting the emotional battle.

The Framework: What negative emotions and desires? God is good!

Do you know the Christian who has never had a bad day? Even when something bad happens, they’re quick to say, “God is good! The fruit of the Spirit is JOY so I should feel JOYFUL, Christians shouldn’t be sad! God has a plan!” They talk in bumper stickers haha.

In the New Testament, a friend of Jesus’s named Lazarus died. Jesus knew that He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead soon, but there’s a verse that’s an easy memory verse. It says in John 11:35 “Jesus wept.” If anybody could go around a sad moment to get to the happy, it’s Jesus, but he walked through it himself and was sad. Lament is a healthy part of the Christian life.

But I want to focus on one more way that I see a lot in high schoolers:

We bypass negative emotions through co-dependent relationships.

The Framework: Others are responsible for my negative emotions and desires I am responsible for my negative emotions and desires I am safe enough to help others with their negative emotions and desires

Co-dependency is so difficult because out first, it looks like it’s solving all the problems! I’m helping them with their stuff, they’re helping me, we love each other and are getting our needs met, what’s wrong with that?

In fact, it feels like maturity! It feels like I’m helping her, and God wired us to find joy, delight, and meaning in our life when we help other people, so I’m doing what God wants for me. We love each other!

The problem is, without realizing it, you’re both bypassing your own emotional health and— while the other person is relying on you for whatever need you’re meeting for them— you’re relying on them to carry the weight of your emotional baggage. I want to say this clearly: A person who has not faced the hurt in their past and taken responsibility for their negative emotions and desires is not yet safe to help others with their own. Does that mean you can’t be there for others if you’re not emotionally perfect, absolutely not! But sometimes we help others as a means to avoid our own pain, and we end up avoiding our problems by trying to take care of someone else’s and convince ourselves it’s healthy.

The truth is, whether it’s through tantrums and shifting the blame, through distracting yourself, through spiritually bypassing, or through co-dependent relationships, When you bypass your negative emotions, you bypass your emotional growth. When it comes to our emotions and maturity, the only way forward is through. So what do we do? Here are a couple thoughts:

APPLICATION

Identify how you are prone to bypass your negative emotions. Chances are you could find yourself somewhere on that list. If you couldn’t, that might be something to talk to your small group leader about, because no matter how emotionally healthy we are, everybody has moments where they fall into these patterns. Understanding how you’re tempted to go around negative emotions and desires is the first step to growing and learning to take responsibility for them. But there’s something else we need:

Invite God and God’s people into your painful moments. There’s a beautiful passage in the Bible that I tend to undervalue in Hebrews 4:15-16, listen to this:

15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. 16 Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

We tend to hide our hurt and our brokenness from God because we think we have to have it all together in front of Him. The truth is, God is the safest place to take your past pain and your present problems. God became fully man and experienced all the things that we experience. When you talk to God, you talk to someone with infinite love, power, and compassion, who has experienced everything that you experience. He is ready to extend the mercy and grace that you need. I’ve found that the first step to my emotional maturity has often been bringing my hurts to God, but the most powerful steps are bringing those things to my church family.

One of the reasons we have small groups is so that you’ll have a place to walk through those things, big or small, with friends who love Jesus and love you. This is a place you can be honest and be yourself. I’m going to pray for us, and then we’ll head to groups. Let’s Pray.