I encountered a reel on Instagram the other week. Our intellectual (in a button-up) yet approachable brother (down-to-earth visible mic) summed up his conviction crusade with a simple caption thesis: “Emotions are dangerous.” And a few years ago, I probably would have affirmed everything he said.
I was raised believing that “feelings” were second to intellect and never to be trusted—in a word, dangerous. Frankly, I can’t say why, except perhaps that they fluctuated and produced uncomfortable things like “tears.” I learned that feelings should be kept under strict control, could be rationally produced, and were the reward for diligent duty—you might not feel like reading your Bible today, but do it enough and by gosh golly you’ll make yourself feel the joy of the Lord! Quietly. Reverently. With a deep sense of your own unworthiness before the holiness of God.
Plenty of people have struggled to reconcile a biblical principle (“Scripture defines [y] about reality”) with an experience (“So why is [x] happening to them?”). Asaph the psalmist even writes about this tension in Psalm 73 (CSB): “For I envied the arrogant,” he says. “Look at them—the wicked! They are always at ease. … Did I purify my heart and wash my hands in innocence for nothing?”
When faced with this tension, the reformed circles I grew up in had a simple solution: deny your own experience.
We didn’t know how to hold in tension the two realities—God is good and I’m in pain—which turned into platitudes and a denial of experience. Jesus gave you peace, therefore you should not feel distress. If you do, and if it persists, you’re probably in sin.
*One may grieve something as harsh as death for a short time, but even to say you’re sad needs to be followed by an immediate “but” that negates and resolves all unhappy feelings: but God is good. But God is faithful. But I’m growing in trusting him. If you don’t do it for yourself, the partner in conversation will do it for you: I once told a friend about my struggle with depression, and she said, “But it’s amazing to see what God can raise from the ashes! I’m sure you’re learning so much about his faithfulness.” No, actually; if I were feeling progress and hope, I wouldn’t be …depressed. She gave me no sitting-with, no empathy, just jumped to the comfortable conclusion that God was doing something immediate and visible through my pain.
I want to repeat this point: for me, for a long time, the Bible defined reality at the expense of experience. If my experience of reality contradicted (our interpretation of) a biblical principle, my experience was wrong. My feelings were wrong. My feelings needed to “sit down and shut up” (this is a real quote). Do you see where this goes?
This means if you have an anxiety attack, if it’s acknowledged as anxiety, you are to “be anxious for nothing” and repent. Next, remember your peace is found in Christ. He says he gives it (John 14.27) and therefore you have it, whatever this feeling is. You objectively have peace. Start feeling it. Repent of your unbelief. Tell your emotions to sit down and shut up.
‘Talking to yourself’ to cure sinful feelings is the main thesis of the D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones book Spiritual Depression, a staple reader of my youth in church. Lloyd-Jones says,
The main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. … The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down’—what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’—instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way.
Only then, he concludes, dusting his hands together tidily, can you “defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with [the psalmist David]: ‘I shall yet praise Him’” (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures, pp. 20-21. Not an endorsement). When you follow this logic, your difficult emotions (here, your depression and unhappiness) are caused by your wrong thinking—fix the thinking, and the feelings will follow, proving to everyone when the depression refuses to lift that you’re just not “taking yourself in hand” enough, and refusing to think the truth.
Unfortunately, when we follow this line of reasoning, we end up not merely in judgment of one another (instead of burden-bearing and encouragement), we also go where Paul David Tripp did in his study Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands: “Because the power of sin has been broken and the Holy Spirit has been given, we can say no to powerful emotions and powerful desires.” (p28)
We can say no to powerful emotions?? Is that really what Christ came to save us from? Did he really send his spirit to sanctify us out of deep feeling, so that mature believers can think themselves out of powerful desires? Of course not. This is ridiculous, if not dangerous itself. Tripp is addressing the intensity of the emotion, instead of the scope; Lloyd-Jones assigns the wrong root (thought) for the scope. Our yet deep and intense emotions can be sanctified and directed right, when they spring not from a certain line of thought, but from a renewed nature that is indwelt by the spirit of God.
Because emotions are part of humanness, and therefore God-given. If God-given, they are redeemable and sanctifiable. God anthropomorphizes himself with emotion; Christ has emotions; there is no reason to contradict God’s wisdom and try to un-emote ourselves. They are just another tool God has given us to learn from and grow in, that help us understand and navigate the world. They’re actually a gift.
Just because emotions can be misused doesn’t mean they will be, and doesn’t mean we’re safer without them. To run from anything that can be misused or abused is foolish. We’re called to steward what we’re given—emotions included—not to bury them deep in our bodies, useless.
And here’s my radical next point: Emotions can teach us the nuances of scriptural truth. Feelings don’t need to stem from absolute truth to still point to truth. Emotions indicate “larger motions of the mind and soul” (my husband’s phrase)—they point to complexity that calls for further examination. What better, more complex subjects than the words God spoke and the people he’s created to know?
I want to make this last point super clear. When we feel something that scripture seems to contradict, instead of believing only one ‘truth’ can stand (and therefore we have to throw the other out entirely), what if we believed that both were true—and then reshaped interpretation to accommodate these realities?
Life at some point doesn’t match up with our interpretation. The righteous are rewarded, we read; we see righteous people; and bad things happen to them. Some people respond rejecting one truth, saying, “Then God lied!” Some reject the other truth, like Job’s friends, and say, “Then these ‘righteous’ must actually be wicked!” You already see how both can be true, how the righteous can be rewarded and yet suffer in this moment: because the problem isn’t with the reality that someone is righteous or scripture’s promise of reward, the problem is our interpretation. In this case, the faulty interpretation could be
a mistaken definition of “reward”: maybe we expect the righteous to get earthly riches.
a mistaken definition of “righteous”: maybe we are looking for the wrong signs of following God.
a mistaken definition of “are”: maybe we think that means now, on our own timeline.
Feelings create a tension with our assumptions of meaning: the feeling that this is unjust, that something is broken, that this scripture is misaligned. But when we sit in that tension, cry out to God in it, the emotions in our bodies can clarify the full reality—as written and as lived.
Because I was taught that ‘Christ is enough’ for the believer, I struggled with struggling with loneliness for a lot of my teenage years. I was achingly lonely, but repented constantly of my longing for friends and a heart companion who was there for me—I must not be seeking my all in Christ. Reality was: He is enough. My experience was: I lack. Because I thought the two couldn’t be true at once, I must be wrong.
This is the problem with relying on our static interpretation of any biblical principle. When the principle ‘Christ is enough’ must always mean ‘I feel satisfied in all my relationships, or lack thereof’, then when I don’t feel satisfied, I must not believe the principle.
This is so wrong.
My encounter with the Bible needs to be dynamically informed by my experience. Reality: He is enough. Experience: I lack. Now I need to reframe my interpretation of “enough” in accordance with my experience. What must Christ’s sufficiency mean when I feel lonely? Several straight-laced orthodox reasons spring to mind.
It could mean spiritually, in terms of sin. I don’t need another mediator, because his righteousness satisfies.
It could mean spiritually, in terms of wisdom. I can never know everything about him and his character and his design—he is enough because he is limitless.
It could mean spiritually, in terms of hope. I may suffer now, but I am confident that the day will come when suffering is gone, because he will in glory “satisfy my deepest longings, / meet, supply my every need”.
I’m sure there are more, more gracious yet. But Christ’s sufficiency can’t mean ‘I never need human relationships,’ because clearly, I do. (And if you still want Bible to back it up, look. Even our perfect first parents needed each other, before the Fall.)
My church experience tied our interpretation of scripture so closely to scripture that there was no room to redefine once it was stated. Narrow definitions weren’t up for a broader redefinition even if new information was presented—no alternate perspectives, no other lived experience. Our definitions were basically scripture: the Second London Baptist, Calvin, Spurgeon, and Lloyd-Jones already laid it out for us. Reformed interpretations were sacrosanct. And our religion became gnostic, hyper-spiritualized individualism.
Scripture is not negated by my feelings. It is enriched and expanded and taught to me by the emotions of a broken world and a healing life. When we read that something is true, but see around us a different reality, we can let our feelings describe the tension and point us to a better understanding of what is, without denying our experience or the truth of God’s word.
Back to that Instagram reel. If emotions (and not a sinful heart) are dangerous, then the goal would seem to be getting rid of emotions and converting to Buddhism. But ultimately, I think we can rely on the Holy Spirit to sanctify our emotions: as he sanctifies our will, not eliminating it, but aligning it to righteousness. I think we should also recognize that our emotions—our feeling happy or sad or disturbed or grieved—are part of the human experience and integral to maturity. What else do we learn with age, but the nuance of situations and circumstances and responses, and grace where we once held judgement?