Transcript:

Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.

Emotions are unavoidable. What should do with them?

We should spend more time in the book of Psalms. The Psalms are the Bible’s song book, and as such, it is not surprising that they deal with the full gamut of our human emotional experience.

The great John Calvin put it this way:

“I have been accustomed to call this book ‘An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul’; for there is not an emotion…which is not here represented as in a mirror.”

Now, since these Psalms are divinely inspired, we can be assured that they show us the proper way to process our emotions before God. We are emotional creatures, and that is a good thing. Our emotions were meant to drive us to relationship with God and positive relationship with one another. However, because of sin our emotions can be out of whack. They can be misleading.

Therefore, like everything else in our human experience, our emotions need to be reoriented according to God’s design. We need to be led by the Word of God and not by the voice of our emotions. In some instances, this will mean that we are affirmed in our emotions (e.g. it is right for you to feel a sense of fear at your own frailty). However, in other instances we will need to be corrected in our emotions (e.g. just because you feel your frailty does not mean that you cannot walk in faith before God).

Our emotions were meant to drive us to God, not away from Him.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
and by night, but I find no rest.
Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried and were rescued;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame.
But I am a worm and not a man,
scorned by mankind and despised by the people.
All who see me mock me;
they make mouths at me; they wag their heads;
‘He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him;
let him rescue him, for he delights in him!’
Yet you are he who took me from the womb;
you made me trust you at my mother's breasts.
On you was I cast from my birth,
and from my mother's womb you have been my God.
Be not far from me,
for trouble is near,
and there is none to help.”

~ Psalm 22:1-11 (ESV)