I was recently asked a question: Can a person be emotionally immature and still be spiritually mature? Why or why not?
Good question. there are 4 areas or gauges in our life that we must monitor. They are: 1. Physical health (our fuel gauge). We must take care of our bodies in order to live healthy and active. To not get proper rest and exercise diminishes all other aspects of our lives. 2. Spiritual health (our temperature gauge). Are we hot or cold? If we are lukewarm then God says He will spew us out of His mouth in Revelation 3:16. If we are cold, we are at the bottom of the barrel of our lives and we will naturally look up to God for help. If we are hot, we are in touch with God and ready to serve Him. 3. Mental health (our volt meter) What is it that charges us up. We need a level of stimulus that comes from new information and new knowledge. If we quit learning we quit maturing. The Bible is the best source of knowledge for everyday living – 2 Timothy 3:16-17. You can study it over and over and never exhaust it’s depths or the challenges it presents. 4. Emotional health (our pressure gauge). This gauge is often ignored until the pressure becomes so great we blow a gasket. Stress is one of the greatest causes of collapse in the other areas of our lives. We need a certain amount of pressure (eustress, good stress) to challenge us and help push us to grow in areas that we would not on our own. Too much stress, however, redlines our emotional gauge and results in an explosion that can have devastating results with a lot of collateral damage. We hurt not only ourselves, but also those around us; the closer the relationship, most often, the more damage - Matthew 11:28-30.
To answer your question more specifically: Each of these areas, physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional, are so tied together that to suffer in one makes an impact on the others. If we are not taking care of our bodies, we shorten our lives and are not able to grow and serve. In the specific case of being emotionally immature and spiritually mature, both of these need to rise together or the one that is ignored will not be able to be fully accomplished. If we do not follow Jesus’ admonition to not worry (an emotion) then ultimately the problem is in our lack of trust in God to handle the situations that we are worrying about (a spiritual problem). If we are consistently angry (an emotion) with people then we are not successfully loving them (a spiritual problem) as we are admonished to by Jesus in John 13:34-35.
All of us have room to grow in all the arena’s of our lives. Because they are interconnected we cannot expect to mature in one area and ignore the others. Spiritual growth is so interconnected with emotional well being that both need to be raised or neither will be as healthy as they can be. Spiritual maturity is often confused with knowledge of spiritual facts (Bible, doctrine, and traditions) and not the wisdom that comes with the practical application of that knowledge. In applying the knowledge we enter into the other three areas of our lives including the emotional. We cannot have wisdom without application. Thus, our spiritual maturity will be stunted without maturing in the other areas of our lives.
Sometimes we don't monitor our gauges well and the idiot light comes on. Hopefully we will stop and see what is wrong before we are not able to go forward or make progress. If we carelfully watch the gauges on the dashboard of our lives we will be able to continue to grow into the mature person that God has designed for us to be. Don’t wait for the check engine light to come on. Check where you are Spiritually, Physically, Mentally, and Emotionally.
