Taking Care of Your Spiritual Health

How healthy are you...spiritually? Yikes. Depending on the criteria you use to judge a person's spiritual health, it's likely that most of us will come up lacking in one way or another. Employing the basic spiritual disciplines as criteria, you could assess your spiritual growth based on how often you go to church, read your Bible or pray. Using community based criteria, you could judge your growth based on whether or not you attend a small group, serve regularly in your church or volunteer in your community. And to some extent, these measures would be accurate.

But how does God look at it? What does He use to measure my spiritual health? I think it's less about my practices and more about my heart. I think God looks upon our hearts and minds, searching for those who wholeheartedly worship and adore Him. I think He cares that I'm growing into the best Sandy Johnson He made me to become - one who displays the heart and character of Christ more and more each day.

Uh, oh. I sense a tension point here. Though spiritual practices are never the measure of a heart solely devoted to Christ, the more I become like Him, the more I will want to participate in the life He has to offer. The more I desire to grow, the more I will realize that growth requires me to put myself into positions to be taught and stretched by God. Some of these are spiritual practices.

It's easy to forgo reading the Bible or praying. It's simple to stay home on Sunday mornings or skip serving. Personal stagnation requires little to no effort on our part. Taking care of yourself spiritually requires more. It means placing yourself in positions to become more like Christ. And it means every time you encounter more of His truth, you yield more of yourself to that truth.

If you're the leader of an arts ministry, consider how you can work toward spiritual health yourself. Then lead your teams there. Artists who minister on the platform and behind the scenes must be yielded to Christ. There is no other option, if we are to draw people to God.