Abiding in the Vine Produces the Fruit of the Spirit (growth).
It takes emotional health to consistently abide in the vine.
In the Body of Christ, it’s common to consider “Abiding in the Vine” in order to be fruitful. What is less common, however, is a detailed description of what that looks like and how to get there.
Obviously spending time with God and loving your neighbor as yourself sums things up well. Yet, what if you are having trouble spending time with God and loving your neighbor because of unresolved issues in your heart?
Picture beautiful juicy fruit coming to ripeness on the vine in the gentle spring sunshine. Emotional health is this gentle spring sunshine that empowers you to love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.
The concept of emotional intelligence will help give you the definition you need to blossom forth into greater fruitfulness.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence refers to a place of awareness of your emotions as they occur. This awareness enables you to treat yourself with care and respect and empowers you to live intentionally. This is also a place of perceiving other people’s emotions as they occur, so as to respond in helpful and loving ways.
“Self-management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to actively choose what you say and do.” Emotional Intelligence 2.0
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is becoming huge in the corporate world. Business people in Fortune 500 companies are paying $4000 to $6000 for a two-day training program. Why? Businesses realize that everything from individual job performance and initiative, to managers that can motivate and lead from a respect base all work from good EQ.
In the Body of Christ we have better tools than the world for helping people develop their EQ or better yet, their ability to walk in the Fruit of the Spirit in every area of life.
Prayer Ministry Tool
Our emotions are part of our design.
God gave us our emotions as a barometer. They show us fluctuations in our “emotional weather.” We have too often had over-balanced teaching about denying our emotions and acting in faith. While there clearly is a place for that, there is also a place of acknowledging emotions to see what is going on in our hearts. For example, if I cannot acknowledge that a person made me angry, how can I bring the anger to God and deal with it?
I either have peace in a given relationship with others, myself, and God – or I do not. I can either look at some painful event that occurred with total peace – or not.
If not, I need to find out why. Prayer Ministry is a tool to accomplish this. With the Cross, the Blood, and the Name of Jesus, we can take things so much further than the business world working with emotional intelligence exercises alone.
At Fountains of Life we use Discovery Prayer Ministry. We do not try to fix people, or even try to figure out their problems. We simply seek to facilitate people moving into their God-given design. Most people really do know what they feel when given a little support and encouragement. This empowers them. In this way we are not in a position of trying to be a savior, and they are no longer victims needing something to come from the outside to fix or rescue them.
As I minister to people day by day, I see them learning to love well. If you want to go deeper in loving God and others, contact us today. We would love to see you abiding in the vine and producing much fruit for God’s kingdom.
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