Feelings Emotions: Biblical and Unbiblical Ways to Handle Our Feelings

Note from Bob: You’re reading Part 4 of a blog mini-series on emotions. For Part 1, read Emotions: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. For Part 2, read Emotions: Why Do We Feel What We Feel? For Part 3, read Emotions: Gone Bad and Mad.

Stuffing Our Feelings: Over-Controlled Emotional Suppression 

For most people, especially us as Christians, “spearing of emotions” seems like the worst possible scenario. Additionally, many Christians seem to assume that the opposite extreme is actually a healthy emotional response: “stuffing our feelings”—over-controlled suppression of our feelings. That’s not the biblical approach to healthy, Christlike feelings. 

The psalmists model how to handle our feelings maturely. The psalmists faced their feelings face-to-face with God, candidly and boldly shared their feelings with God, and they soothed their soul in their Savior God.

Instead of being like the psalmists, many times as Christians we think we are supposed to be like Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame. He tried to repress his emotions, deny them, if he could, eradicate them. And we try to live without pathos, without passion and feeling, thinking somehow that this is the Christlike way to manage our moods.   Continue at Bob Kellemen

Twelve Ways Pastors Went from Burnout to Vision

There are few vocations that can engender burnout like the pastorate. The demands on a pastor’s time, emotions, and energy can be overwhelming. When I was a pastor, I often felt at least the symptoms of burnout.

I recently spoke with 17 pastors who had experienced burnout, or who felt they came precariously close to burnout. The good news about these pastors is that they moved out of burnout; and now they are re-engaging in exciting and visionary ministries.

So I asked them the obvious question. What did you do to reverse the dark spiral of burnout? The question was open-ended, so they could respond with as many answers as they desired. When it was all said and done, I tabulated twelve different responses from the 17 pastors. Obviously, many of them gave similar answers.

Here are the twelve responses ranked in order of frequency. Each answer has a representative quote from one of the pastors.

1. Spent more time in prayer and the Word. “Slowly over time, I spent less and less time in the Bible and in prayer. I succumbed to the tyranny of the urgent. When I committed to reversing that pattern, my life and leadership began to renew.”
2. Dreamed again. “When I first arrived at this church, I had great visions and excitement. But I got caught up in negativity and trivial things, and I lost my vision. But recently I asked God to restore my dream and vision for my church, and He’s already answering that prayer.”
3. Stopped comparing. “One of the most freeing things of my ministry was to stop comparing myself to other pastors, and my church to other churches. I finally got it that God doesn’t love pastors of larger churches more than He loves me.”   Continue at Thom Rainer

Those Who Received His Word - Passion 2013

Welcome back, especially you, One Star Hater.

Yesterday, I told the story of one hypothetical kid who went to Passion 2013, got very fired up about something he could stake his life on, and who agreed with Jefferson Bethke about the event.  But then I went and spoiled the whole thing by asking a pretty simple (and it seems to me: obvious) question about the whole thing: Continue at Frank Turk 

Don't Sanitize the Psalms

In some churches, if our public worship and prayers echoed what we find in the Psalms we might find ourselves called before the church board for correction. Unlike the stoic legalist or safe churchman, the psalmist expressed the full range of emotions in worship. He felt no need to pretend that he had it all together. He did not limit himself to safe clichés about God.

Yet God's people's deeply cherish the Psalms because they openly express many of the emotions we feel. Sometimes the psalmist expressed deep anxiety and fear; other times he was plagued with a sense of despondency and discouragement. He vented anger over injustices and admitted a loss of perspective when he envied the prosperity of the ungodly.

The psalmist reminds us that the language of lament is permitted in worship. Christopher J. H. Wright suggests,

It is precisely those who have the closest relationship with God who feel most at liberty to pour out their pain in protest to God---without fear of reproach. Lament is not only allowed in the Bible; it is modeled in abundance. God seems to want to give us as many words with which to fill out our complaint forms as to write our thank-you notes. (The God I Don't Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith)

The Psalmist's Full Range of Emotions

Although the psalmist pondered dark questions out loud---even expressing feelings of helplessness and despair---more often, he overflowed with joy and praise to the God who is his "mighty rock and refuge" (Psalm 62:7). His astonishment at the compassion and unfailing love of God resounds throughout the psalms as one amazed that God "does not treat us as our sins deserve" (Psalm 103:10).   Continue at Steve Cornell

Feelings and Emotions

One characteristic of modern Western Christianity is the focus on feelings and emotions.  Many people gauge their faith by their feelings; they also judge worship based on how it makes them feel.  The former can lead to depression (i.e. if you don’t feel saved maybe you’re not).  The latter can lead to superficial emotionalism divorced from doctrine (i.e. worship becomes a matter of getting a good feeling usually based on ambiguous emotional songs).  Lloyd Jones has a good word on this.

“Avoid the mistake of concentrating overmuch on your feelings.  Above all, avoid the terrible error of making them central.  Now I am never tired of repeating this because I find so frequently that this is a cause of stumbling.  Feelings are never meant to take the first place, they are never meant to be central.  If you put them there you are of necessity doomed to be unhappy, because you are not following the order that God himself has ordained.  Feelings are always the result of something else, and how anyone who has ever read the Bible can fall into that particular error passes my comprehension.” Keep Reading...

Real Passion vs. Artificial Enthusiasm

When we consider Christ as the very incarnation of divine glory, it ought to put all our other passions in proper perspective. It ought to make us ashamed that our focus is so far off and we are not really passionate about the one thing that ought to excite us the most.

We imitate all the world's passions. We invent gimmicks to try to win worldly people by appealing to whatever mania has captured our culture's attention at the moment. We devote our energies and our emotions to things that are not even worthy of our attention. We do things to stir artificial passion—which is an especially sinister form of false worship.

Our passions should not need to be whipped up by spiritual cheerleaders and stadium chants. We shouldn't have to be worked into an emotional state by hype and melodrama and musical manipulation. If we can get pumped to a fever pitch by some rock-star pastor's antics rather than by the truth of the biblical message, then whatever we are feeling isn't even a legitimate passion in the first place. Continue Reading>>>

The Gospel and My Emotions

Our Culture Downplays Knowledge In Favor Of Emotions By John MacArthur

Faithful Feelings Rethinking Emotion in the New Testament

Created in the image of our passionate and compassionate God who experiences deep joy and profound sadness, we are emotional beings who experience life deeply and internally. God created us to feel. God loves emotions. Jesus wept, and so do we. The Spirit grieves, as we do. The Father rejoices, as do we. We have the emotional capacity to respond to our outer world based upon our inner actions, choices, goals, beliefs, images, longings, and desires.

However, the Christian world sometimes makes emotions “the black sheep of the image bearing family.” Some people view emotions as primarily negative, typically unreliable, and best when ignored or “controlled.” Pastors and counselors at times pit feelings against beliefs by viewing emotions as “irrational passions.”

Because of our often faulty views of emotions, New Testament scholar Matthew Elliott wrote Faithful Feelings to challenge us to rethink emotions biblically. Elliott seeks to determine how emotions were perceived by the writers of the New Testament, and what role they thought emotions should play in the life of the believer. His purpose is to explore the importance of emotions to our faith. Read the rest HERE

Emotions?