Helping Others Take An Inside Look

Excerpt from BOOK: Inside Out by Larry Crabb

Bible Verse Collection: The Inside Look/The Inward Journey (Quizlet)

 INWARD: The Inside Look

Through these practices you will help elevate the importance of an inside look. When you and others are going there and facing what's going on inside the soil of your hearts, it makes it easier for the rest of the people to step into it. If you are an advocate for the need to strengthen your interior life, with Holy Spirit's help, then you can become one who helps develop this needed emotionally-healthy paradigm in others.

Creating a Paradigm for an Inside Look

1. Share Biblical Principles that Call for an Inside Look as a Life Habit

Help develop a paradigm for a continual inside look with the help of Holy Spirit.  (Quizlet Key Bible Verses Set: The Inside Look: The Inward Journey)

2. Give Practical Tools for Stepping into an Inside Look

3. Share Your Personal Stories with Them, that Reveal the Need for an Inside Look 

And by this I mean not just sharing the glory stories of breakthrough but especially sharing the process and challenges and the pressing in, over time, to get there. This is what believers really need to hear. They need to hear the pain you had to live with; that comfort and resolution to the issues or breakthrough did not always come immediately,  but had a process you walked through over time. 

4. Normalize the Need for an Inside Look by Doing Small Group Activations of Guided Self-Reflections, Where There's Room For Personal Sharing  

5. Highlight Inner Healing Prayer as a Helpful Option to Expose and Help Deal with the Brokenness and Junk Inside of Us

Introduce inner healing and the purpose and benefits of it for a believer.  Make it clear that this is a viable ministry to bring clarity to the issues plaguing our lives and to activate the healing and restoring process of Jesus.  

Encouraging and Strengthening Steps to Help Individuals with an Inside Look

6. Pray for Them for Inner Strength and for Insight in the Inward Look

Cover them in prayer for the things they are facing and ask God to give them the strength and courage to go there with Holy Spirit. Foresee the struggle they will face as they deal with the pain in their heart. Pray for this. Ask God to release wisdom and understanding, with divine revelation to guide them in the process. (FELLOWSHIP Prayer, TRUST Prayer & Apostolic Prayers). Also let them know you are praying for them. This will add to the sense they are not alone. 

7. Love on Them Through the Process

Your job will never be to rush them out of the process they need to go through, or out of the pain they must face; You job is merely to be a support for them through the ministry of presence.  Cause them to feel that you are near and love them in the midst of their internal struggle. That they are not alone but have both encouragers and prayer people backing them up. 

Job's friends initially displayed the wonderful ability to be present with him in the midst of his pain and trouble. This was a loving thing to do:  "When Job’s three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was." - Job 12:11-13

8. Give a Listening Ear to Help Them Process their Inside Stuff

Be a good listener and ask clarifying questions, with rephrasing of what you hear. This helps the person not only know they were heard but can often give them opportunities to clarify themselves. This in turn can give them more clarity about what's going on the inside.

9. Believe in Them When It's Hard for Them to Believe in Themselves (Spiritual Parenting)

Whatever internal issues/challenges they are facing or working through that can seem insurmountable, impossible, and downright scary, impart the faith you have that they will get to the other side. It is like spiritual parenting: you have gone through your own challenges and hard battles  in life and have seen God come through. These life experiences are assets you have that impart hope to others to believe they too will make it through some day.   

10. Give Words of Affirmation to Encourage Them Along the Inward Journey (What You See)

Words of affirmation have great power to help a person gain perspective of the big picture of who they are. Though we are outsiders to an individual's inside experience,  we also may see things they may not. We look at individuals from the outside in, whereas they look at themselves from the inside out. We see this individual's interactions with other people, we see their responses, we sense and discern some of what may be going on. And on top of that, we have rich life experiences where we have learned how people deal with issues of life, in good and unhealthy ways. We see, hear, and sense much about that person. 

I have noticed so many times how helpful and encouraging it is for that person to hear how others see them. People need to see themselves as reflected back by others who are there for the purpose of honest encouragement. We think we may know ourselves but in reality, we are often blind to some things. And in fact, the enemy is constantly sending deceiving messages of what's really going on inside of us and in relationship to others.  We need the honest words of affirmations of friends who will reflect back to us what they have seen in us, over time. It will strengthen us for the inside journey. 

11. Seek God's Revelation (Prophetic Words) for How He Feels and Thinks About Them and Share It with Them (What God Sees)

True prophetic revelation comes from God. There are times He will open our eyes to see a person through His eyes and from the passion of His heart for them. It is like Gideon in Judges 6 who is hiding in a winepress in insecurity and fear, and the angel of Lord comes to him and speaks a better word: "The Lord is with you mighty warrior," later adding, "Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?”These are the words from heaven. Often completely other than our broken perceptions of where we are at and how others, including God, sees us. 

In 1st Corinthians 14:3 we see that prophetic words have clear divine purposes: "But the one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort."  And so we can ask God to reveal to us His heart for a particular individual and then speak it or text it to them. This is divine encouragement, delivered by a caring brother or sister in the Lord. Powerful! 

12. Show Them Practical Ways to Strengthen Themselves in the Lord

13. Encourage Them to Journal What's Being Revealed

Journaling has lots of beneficial impacts on one's faith, especially in helping one maintain an attentiveness and attuneness to what God is doing and addressing in my life.  It is a written record that I can have access to to not forget and to remind me of the process God is taking me through.