Emotion Wheel

(“Tile” is the slide series)

I am diving into a topic of which I know a little.

This series is going to be built a bit on my:

Knowledge of biblical stories

We will stand in the shoes of characters

Limited knowledge of psychology

I know a bit from trauma training

Personal experience

From robot to romance

Let’s think about how this can be abused:

An emotion comes forward without pre-thought

You judge that emotion as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ against your presuppositional belief system

How does culture perceive this emotion

How does this emotion cause me to act

How does my religious belief system perceive this emotion

If negative: I am likely to ‘stuff’ my emotion

Dislike myself

Do what I can to avoid it in the future

If positive: I am likely to ‘repeat’ my emotion

I like myself

Do what I can to make it happen in the future

If it is negative, then you might ask yourself, ‘Why did I feel/think this?’

Western Christianity has an answer for this:

Because you are a sinful creature.

You are powerless to overcome this emotion

Here are bible verses on what you should and should not ‘feel’

Unless you have the Holy Spirit you cannot change

But if you have the Holy Spirit and you cannot overcome it

Then you are a failure, faithless, perhaps not even a Christian.

Which might cause you to feel…anxious, afraid, etc.

What will friends think of me (lesser)

What will family think of me (lesser)

And the wheel of emotions begins again.

Sometimes your week goes like this:

Church-joy for a time-life out there through the week-sadness

Rinse and repeat.

Here is where most Christian’s land:

There are some emotions that God ‘approves’

There are some emotions that God ‘disapproves’

Thus, in addition to you judging yourself against:

What you want to be

What you think you should be

What others think of you

You then throw God in the mix

Or, at least, others will throw God in the mix for you.

Usually well meaning

But often failing to convey it well

Then, you start to think about how God might respond because of how you feel:

Will he help me

Will he reject me

Will he arrange things for or against me

Now…because we live in the land of the free where you are to pull up your boots and get to work, we have integrated that thought into our belief system about God and scripture.

We think that we must assemble the strength to push through things

To do that, often, we must push down or stuff our emotions

And we know that is not a healthy thing to do.

Try it sometime. It does not work and will eventually burst out!

My argument stems from this:

What we feel is by design

Why we feel is formed by belief

How we feel is by experience

There is a biblical author and character that had no shame recording precisely how he felt in all kinds of situations.

I am going to concentrate on a small section of one of his poems, which I don’t like to do, taking something out of context, so let me set it up.

Quickly, I want to take a look at situation David found himself in.

We are not going to concentrate on any single emotion today.

Rather, I want to give you some evidence that scripture is full of characters who go through emotional battles.

Psalm 55 is where we will be spending our time today.

God, turn your ear to my prayer, and do not hide in eternity from my plea.

Listen attentively to me and answer me. My lament causes me trouble and distress.

Because of the enemy’s voice, in the presence of wicked pressure,

they drop disaster and hostile anger on me.

My heart is in labor inside me and deathly terrors have fallen on me.

Fear and shaking have come to me and shudders overwhelm me.

I said, ‘Who can give me wings like a dove to fly there and settle there?’

Behold, I would flee far away from escaping. I will rest in the wilderness.

I will hurry to escape for myself, from the spirit of rage and from storms.

We learn that David is writing this poem when he is running from King Saul.

King Saul was like a father to David. Jonathan, Saul’s son, was David’s best friend.

But now Saul wants David dead.

So the context is intense, but David does not hold back on sharing what it feels like to be betrayed.

Sometimes emotions are like this.

Thoughts are like this

Feelings are like this

Beliefs are like this

People are like this.

David’s desire to escape is nothing unusual.

It is a godly desire (flee from evil)

What I wonder is this:

If you expressed this to a typical bible believing christian, how would they respond?

Emotion Wheel