Imagine you’re driving home from work. It’s Friday, you’re looking forward to the weekend, and you’re in a good mood. Suddenly, a driver swerves in front of you, forcing you to slam on the brakes. Your tires squeal as the rear of the car fishtails. Inexplicably the other driver makes a vulgar gesture at you as he speeds away.

Wait, what?! 😧😡🤬 That was his fault, not yours! Fear and relief are quickly swallowed up by indignation and fury. Minutes later you pull into your driveway and walk through the front door.

The family dog faithfully greets you, jumping up on you as he invariably does, pawing at your legs, licking your fingers, and getting dog hair all over your office clothes. You immediately scream, “Get down, you idiot! You are ruining my clothes!” Fido slinks away and your family looks up wide-eyed and dismayed. Your reaction even shocks you.

Fido didn’t do anything he doesn’t do every day. He always yips and dances when you walk through the door. It usually warms your heart, even if it is a bit irritating. But today, road rage has followed you home.

Emotions are important.

Recap

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.

Mark 12:30–31

We’re not meant to perfectly separate out which part is which—the point is that we’re to love him with everything that makes us who we are. Including the things in our heart, how we feel… what we would call emotions.

In modern translations of the OT, when it’s clearly talking about the place where our feelings/emotions reside inside us, it’s translated “heart”. But if you happen to be reading the King James, you might see that it says bowels, because that was the seat of the emotions back then.

That would change some love songs, wouldn’t it?

We’re talking about loving God with all our heart, all our emotions.

Back to that story, you know that Fido isn’t the one who cut you off, but your body and mind are engaged in a complicated emotional dance. [Your body is still “angry”—your heart rate is still elevated, you feel hot, and adrenaline is still coursing through your veins. Your body is ready for a fight. (And your brain, by the way, is part of your body, so it’s also shaping the way you think.)

You are responding not just to the other driver, but to everything with an angry mindset. It really does irritate you when Fido jumps on you, but your body has amplified your normal irritation, which usually dissipates moments after he bounds off.

Making a tidy distinction between mind and body and assigning one as the source of emotions just doesn’t fit.

How do you feel about how you feel?

God has emotions.

God is an honest judge.
He is angry with the wicked every day.

Psalm 7:11, NLT

We need to have a theology of emotions—understanding them from God’s perspective—if we’re going to love him with all our hearts.

Our emotions reflect His image

You are emotional because you are made in the Image of God himself.

This is what separates us from animals.

They say time takes its toll on a body
Makes a young girls brown hair turn gray
But honey, I don’t care
I ain’t in love with your hair
And if it all fell out
I’d love you anyway

Randy Travis, Forever and Ever, Amen

If a dog gets sick in the wild, what does the rest of the pack do? Abandon and/or kill it.

Our emotions reveal what we love.

Maybe you can relate to taking a car full of small children through the drive-through window at the local bank, also known as free-lollipop land. It’s quite the eye-opening lesson on how human emotions express love.

Most days the sounds of crinkling wrappers fill the car as excitement solidifies into the emotion of happiness; my children are united with the object of their love.

What happens when the middle child drops her lollipop on the floor and can’t reach it? I’ll tell you: weeping and gnashing of teeth!

And what if the child realizes that she’s dropped it because her sister was playing with the armrest and bumped her arm? Mourning morphs into anger in a flash.

While driving, you reach back, just about run off the road.

Now reunited with her lollipop, the once-angry child feels a nameless emotion somewhere in the neighborhood of mollified but still moody.

The point is that even as young children…

What you care about shapes what you feel. Your emotions are always expressing the things you love, value, and treasure, whether you understand them or not.

All negative emotions aren’t bad…

Did you notice most of those were what (we would consider) “negative emotions?” And yet God feels them, so they weren’t negative in that case!

You were made in the image of God himself, and that means you were made to see the world as he sees it, to respond as he responds, to hate what he hates, and to be bothered by what brings him displeasure.

Seeing good in our negative emotions becomes somewhat easier when we realize God displays a whole range of negative feelings in the Bible.

Untangling Emotions

and all positive emotions aren’t good.

Mixed emotions are the right response to a mixed world.

Untangling Emotions

Our emotions invite us to intimacy with God.

When relationships are only about facts, there’s not much relationship there.

2 Pitfalls to Avoid

Emotions are everything

We live among a people whose actions proclaim over and over again that what you feel is the most important thing about you.

This can even happen in a church setting—emotionalism.

Emotions are nothing

Much more common in SOIL.

This instinct says that emotions ought to be treated like a stray rabid dog that has wandered into your living room.

Given the way our culture’s worship of emotion is often in opposition to truth or obedience, it’s easy to understand why many Christians take this stoic, stuff-it approach.

We need a third way, a way that takes our emotions seriously without handing them the keys to our lives.

How to we deal with emotions? Engage

You see David doing this all through the Psalms.

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so I long for you, God.
I thirst for God, the living God.
When can I come and appear before God?

Psalm 42:1-2

That sounds so happy and hopeful. Coffee mug verse.

Not so much when you read the rest of his song…

Why, my soul, are you so dejected?
Why are you in such turmoil?
Put your hope in God,
for I will still praise him,
my Savior and my God.
I am deeply depressed;
therefore I remember you

Psalm 42:5–6

Does it get better by the end?

Why, my soul, are you so dejected?
Why are you in such turmoil?
Put your hope in God, for I will still praise him,
my Savior and my God.

Psalm 42:11

Trust in him at all times, you people;
pour out your hearts before him.
God is our refuge.

Psalm 62:8

Be to me a rock of refuge,
to which I may continually come;

Psalms 71:3 ESV

If you trust God, David tells us, then pour out your heart to him. Or, put another way, trusting God necessarily includes pouring your heart out to him.

Untangling Emotions

Pouring out your heart simply means naming the colors you feel most strongly. It means bringing the sloshing mixture of churning paints to God and upending it into his hands one sentence at a time.

All of us are easily presumptuous, blind to the privilege offered us in God’s call to pour out our hearts. Imagine, the Father himself cares what you think, invites you to earnest conversation with him at any time, for as long as you need. A stunning honor—and yet we mostly see prayer as a tiresome duty. (Even the familiarity of the term prayer can work against us.)

It doesn’t occur to us most of the time that prayer can and should include simply talking to God about what is on our hearts. Yet this is exactly what we observe over and over in the Psalms.

The importance of emotions in our relationship with God shouldn’t really surprise us. Relationships need emotions like fires need oxygen. It stands to reason, then, that if our emotions are the way our hearts were made to align with God’s, our relationship with him actually ought to be the most emotional relationship we have.

We need new hearts more than new feelings.

1. Identify

The point in this first step is simply to become aware that something is occurring inside you.

Guys, lets be honest, most of us are not good at this.

Has your wife ever asked you how you feel about something, and your answer was (shrug) “I dunno.”

Or maybe you responded like I have “How I (or worse, you!) feel doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t change anything.”

In one sense, that’s true.

But it does change our reactions to reality. And it’ll for sure, you’re reality is about to change based on her reaction in that moment!

We’ll talk more next week about emotions & relational health, but it is not a sign of maturity or masculinity to not know what’s going on in your own heart.

Does he care about facts? Absolutely, but maybe not so cold and hard. Does he care about truth? Absolutely, but it’s to be shared in love. And yet he feels more than any of us.

Jesus is our perfect example, and he expressed his emotions.

Do you know what I figured out? A lot of the time when I say I don’t know when I’m feeling, it’s much more likely that deep down I do know, and I don’t want to admit it and/or I don’t want to feel it.

  1. Identify

2. Examine

  1. Evaluate
  2. Act

Your emotions are always telling you something about what you are valuing, caring about, or loving. What are they telling you?

  1. Identify
  2. Examine

3. Evaluate

  1. Act

God actually uses the frustrations in our work to remind us of the pervasive poisoning impact of sin and to leave us longing for the return of his Son to restore all things.

  1. Identify
  2. Examine
  3. Evaluate

4. Act

Remember, this does not mean focusing primarily on changing the emotions themselves! Changing your feelings is not your biggest goal. Instead, we want to let our evaluation of our emotions drive us to act in ways that will actually have an impact on the deep loves and treasures of our hearts.

It doesn’t end with the command to trust God by pouring out your heart. It ends by telling you why you can pour out your heart and why you can trust him. God is your refuge.

Unless you know God is trustworthy, you won’t entrust yourself to him, especially not the precious treasures of your inmost heart.

The most vivid example: the garden of Gethsemane. When Jesus says, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38), what does he do?

Instead, he does two simple, relational things. He speaks honestly to his friends about the dread and ache he is feeling as he anticipates the coming twenty-four hours. (In some ways his choice to invite sinful humans into his emotions and ask their help in prayer is even more shocking than his need to bring his feelings to his Father!) Then, having asked for help from his disciples, he falls on his knees and pours out his heart to his Father, just as Psalm 62 urges.

Ultimately, our goal is not to feel bad more often but rather to be willing to face, and even step into, the uncomfortable and distasteful parts of this world we live in. Each time we do, we can be sure it will mean feeling distressing emotions if our hearts share God’s affections and priorities. To love what he loves will mean to hate what he hates and mourn what he mourns.