I read an amazing book over the Christmas break that I would like to highly recommend. The book is Inside Out by Dr. Larry Crabb. Crabb defines spiritual growth and describes the process of real change. He defines spiritual growth as coming to know God better and asserts that this necessitates growing in one’s ability to relate deeply with others which includes loving others in a non-defensive way. The central message of Christianity is the need for restoration of relationship with God and with others. Crabb identifies the ways that we fail to love others well. We violate love and therefore sin when we distance ourselves from others in an effort to protect ourselves from pain. This relational sin of self-protection is the sin in our hearts that must be addressed in order to experience growth. We must give up our dependance on our own resources and shift toward dependence on God. This means trusting that God will preserve our life rather than relating from a stance of self-preservation. When we pursue personal safety, we do so at the expense of freely loving others. Crabb encourages us to identify our unmet longings and give up our demand for them to be met and rest in the fact that our deepest longings can only be met in God. Next, he directs us to identify the ways that we protect ourselves such as how we communicate with our spouse, interact on a committee, or socialize after church, and then repent of our failure to love others. As we learn to love others without self-protection, we move closer toward the promised abundant life. We must put aside our crisp, business-like, distanced, intellectual ways of relating and begin to vulnerably share ourselves with others and deeply relate at the level of the heart rather than just the head. We must risk the pain of judgement, ridicule, and rejection and trust God with our souls because life without deeply relating is not life at all.
Review of Inside Out
