Henry Cloud - Growth Has No Boundaries: The Christians Secret to a Deeper Spiritual Life

ZONDERVAN

Growth Has No Boundaries

2001 by Henry Cloud and John Townsend

Derived from material previously published in How People Grow.

Abridgment by Kris Bearss.

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Epub Edition October 2019 9780310108214

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Contents

I t was my first day on the job in a Christian psychiatric hospital. I (Henry) was like a kid on Christmas morning. I had been taking college and seminary classes and reading all I could about Christian counseling for about four years, and I was ready to put my knowledge into practice. I showed up at the medical center in Dallas early, all geared up to teach the patients how to find the life I knew awaited them as soon as they learned the truth I had been taught.

The unit was bustling with early-morning activity. I saw patients talking with their doctors, nurses taking patients vital signs, and groups beginning their sessionsthe typical activities of a busy psychiatric unit.

I looked down the hall, and a woman in a pink bathrobe walked out of her room. She extended her arms outward and exclaimed, I am Mary, Mother of God!

Here I am, brand new at Christian counseling, and thinking that all I had to do was come in and tell people God loved them, and if they would understand more of what he has said, they would be well. But when I heard what this woman said, I thought: This is going to be harder than I thought. It was a thought I would have many times in the year to come.

Four Models of How People Grow

In Christian circles at the time, there were basically four popular ways of thinking about personal growth: the sin model, the truth model, the experiential model, and the supernatural model.

The sin model said that all problems are a result of ones sin. If you struggled in your marriage or with an emotional problem such as depression, the role of the helper was to find the sin and confront you, urging you to confess, repent, and sin no more. If you did that, you were sure to get better.

The truth model held that the truth would set you free. If you were not free, if some area of your life were not working, it must be because you lacked truth in your life. So the helpers role was to urge you to learn more verses and more doctrine (particularly your position in Christ), and then all this truth would make its way from your head to your heart, and ultimately into your behavior and emotions.

The experiential model held that you had to find the abuse or the hurt in your life and then, in a kind of emotional archaeology, dig it up and seek healing through prayer or imagery or just clearing out the pain. Proponents of the more spiritual versions of this model either took the pain to Jesus or took Jesus to the pain.

The supernatural model had many variations. Charismatics sought instant healing and deliverance; others depended on the Holy Spirit to make the change happen as he lived his life through them. Exchanged-life people (those who hold that you just get out of the way so Christ can reproduce his life in you) trusted God to lead them and make changes in them.

While I saw value in and practiced all four models to some degree, it wasnt difficult for me to decide which one made the most sense. After all, I was heavily into theology and studying the Bible. So I found the most truth in the truth model. I believed in the power of the Bible and knew that Gods truth could change any life.

Yet, at the medical center, I saw people who had walked with God for years, and many who knew more about Gods truth than I did. These people had been very diligent about prayer, Bible study, and other spiritual disciplines. Nevertheless, they were hurting, and for one reason or another, they had been unable to walk through their valley.

The woman in the pink bathrobe was a missionary who had been called off the field because she was out of touch with who she was and where she was in time. She and hundreds of other clients that I encountered had tried the things they had been taught for dealing with marital, parenting, emotional, and work struggles, and they felt as though these spiritual answers had let them down.

It wasnt that people werent gaining some relief through these methods. I often saw people improve, and prayer, learning Scripture, and repentance were very powerful elements in healing many clinical conditions. But something was missing. The feeling that there has to be more nagged at me.

Being Born Again, Again

I continued to work in Christian counseling, and something happened in the next four to five years that turned my world upside down: I saw people grow past their stuck places. Instead of depressed people coping better with depression, I saw depressed people become un-depressed. Instead of people with relational problems coping better, I saw them grow in their ability to make relationships work. I saw processes that actually changed peoples lives. But they were paths of growth I had never been taught. So I was faced with a dilemma.

It seemed to me that there was the spiritual life, where we learned about God and grew in our relationship to him, and then there was the emotional and relational life, where we learned how to solve real-life problems.

But it made no sense to me that there were answers other than spiritual ones. My theology taught me that God answers all of lifes problems (2 Peter 1:3). How could there be spiritual growth and then other growth? Didnt it make sense that spiritual growth should be influencing these functional areas of life as well as the spiritual ones?

I had to find the answer to this problem; I could not live the life of a counselor helping people with problems, and then the life of a Christian, with a spiritual life that had value but did not solve the problems for which my clients were coming to me. Therefore I studied the Bible again to discover: How does spiritual growth address and solve lifes problems?

The only way I know how to describe what happened at this point is to say that I was born again, again. Here is what happened: