Road to Maturity - 8 April 2008

We have been following a course in our small group called “Road to Maturity“ by Mary Pytches. It addresses some of the baggage we carry around which may inhibit our moving on to Christian maturity - it has been good and I’d recommend it. One of the main points of the course is that there are Activating events in our lives forming our Beliefs that lead to Consequences in how we live out our lives. The activating events are often things in our childhood both good and bad. They form the image we have of ourselves, which is not necessarily how God sees us. A fairly trivial example of this model might be if someone says we are no good at cooking, we may believe we are no good at cooking and hence do no cooking. Too often the examples are more serious than this where we’ve been told that we’re “no good” or “useless”. God does not see us like this. We need to recognize these things as lies.

This is called an iceberg model, where the “c” is the visible tip of the iceberg above the sea, and “a” and “b” are layers of the iceberg below the water line.
Often the consequence is all that is visible to other people, but there are a lot of other invisible things behind that. Perhaps be reminded of that today in the behaviour you see in others.

Maybe also think today how you view yourself. Is this how God sees you?
Who have been the major influences on your life, both good and bad?
Maybe seek out a Christian friend to talk this through.