Emotions: Friend or Foe?

Christian Working Woman Transcript

Monday, December 18, 2006

Do you often feel that your emotions are your enemy? One of my biggest struggles is to keep my emotions from running the show. I think that's probably true for many of us. But it's also true that it's possible for some people to ignore their feelings and emotions, and that can cause problems as well.

Emotions can be troublesome, but we need to understand that God gave us our emotions woven into the fabric of our personalities, and it was not a mistake. When they work together with our will as they were intended to by God, they produce in our lives the best and highest purposes God has for us.

Let's see if we can understand the role that God intended for our emotions to play. Look at the perfect example of this in our Lord, as found in Matthew 14. In this passage, Jesus has just been informed of the death of John the Baptist, who was beheaded. This was His cousin and His partner in ministry, so obviously He was grieved. We read there that "When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick."

Notice the sequence of events that led to the healing of the sick. Jesus saw the crowd. He was confronted with the truth of this group of people, who had great needs. This truth excited His emotions: "He had compassion on them," and that in turn led Him to heal them. This is the way God has planned for our emotions and our will to work together. When we are confronted with truth, that should cause our emotions to motivate us to set our will for the proper action.

So, the pattern is clear and simple: Truth in some form or another invades our minds and our senses. This truth then touches our emotions. The feelings and emotions that are stirred by the truth we’ve received then motivate us to do something. This is God's plan. You can see that emotions are the middleman, so to speak. Emotions are the spark plug that connect truth to our will and cause us to act. Without those emotions, we might take in lots of truth but never react to it.

But problems arise when our emotions and our will are out of balance or out of sequence. Has that ever happened to you?