Loving God with our Emotions

Our emotions are not simply unhelpful, rather they are God-given faculties which can be used along with our reasoning to help us to love God. Join Malcolm as he explores how we can manage dangerous emotions and press into helpful ones to better love God and others in 2025.
Introduction
Two perspectives on emotions
The traditional Christian perspective
feelings come and feelings go,
Feelings are deceiving;
I’m trusting in God’s word,
Naught else is worth believing.
The modern perspective
What is a Biblical perspective?
What are emotions for?
Emotions and our relationship with God
It is true, of course, that people sometimes “follow their feelings,” rather than thinking responsibly. But it is also the case that people sometimes follow rationalistic schemes that run contrary to what they know in their “guts” (feelings) to be true. God gives us multiple faculties to serve as a sort of internal system of checks and balances. Sometimes reason saves us from emotional craziness, but emotions can also check the extravagant pretenses of reason.
Writing book reviews is one of the more “intellectual” tasks that I perform. But it is interesting to see the role that emotions play even in that activity. After reading the first chapter of a book, I often have “a certain feeling” about the book: I like it or I don’t like it or I have a reaction that is somewhere in between. I then try to think it through. Why do I have this feeling? My rational reflection may lead to a change in feeling, or it may enable me to defend and articulate the feeling. Still, the feeling plays a crucial role. I cannot imagine doing academic work at all without having some feelings of that sort. If I had no feelings about the book I was reviewing, I would simply set it aside. The feeling guides my reflection; my reflection refines my feelings. Those refined feelings provoke additional reflection, and so on. The goal is a satisfying analysis, an analysis I feel good about, one with which I have cognitive rest, a peaceful relation between intellect and emotion. That relation seems to me to be involved in all knowledge.