Emotions - Engaging God with All of You Part 1
Notes
Transcript
Handout
Engaging God with All of You.
What are emotions?
Dorner defines emotions as “a compound of feeling and impulse. They belong to the natural constitution of man, and are distinguished from both intelligence and moral volition.”
(A. Dorner, “Emotions,” in Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, John A. Selbie, and Louis H. Gray (Edinburgh; New York: T. & T. Clark; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908–1926), 283.)
How are emotions formed?
Emotions are formed through a complex interaction of biological, psychological, and social processes.
How many here have emotions?
We all have comfortable and uncomfortable emotions.
How many here struggle with emotions?
We all struggle with emotions in one form or another. We may struggle to cultivate comfortable emotions, or we may struggle not to be consumed by emotions. We may also struggle to recognize our feelings. The struggle with emotions is quite varied.
How many here know that God loves us and has empathy for all our emotions?
Jesus wants us to come to him with every emotion we have.
Maybe some of you guys are like me and struggle with having a positive attitude about emotions. Like me, you find logic and mental reasoning much more predictable and controllable.
Perhaps you, like me, do your best to manage and even form your emotions with reason, yet as we all know, this often is not sufficient because emotions are not contingent on logic, but serve to guide us in every aspect of decision-making and daily life. The idea of living in pure logic is impossible, because your emotions color your logic and are often unaffected by it.
You then, like me, turn to denial and burial of your emotions, which subdues them in the moment but causes them to fester and cause a variety of other problems in your body and relationships.
With the practiced denial of my emotions, my emotional intelligence has decreased. In my not-so-distant past and sometimes my present, if you asked what I felt, I would not know. If you pressed me, I would define myself with these three emotions: happy, mad, or sad. This is not sufficient to cultivate strong, meaningful relationships, especially when there are 27 to 87 emotions, depending on which study you look at.
The Holy Spirit has been convicting me about my emotional denial for a while, and I have been resisting by telling Him the lie that “I am just not an emotional person”. Praise God, on my trip to Washington, he got through as Joella and I were learning about how our personalities work together. He showed me how much my emotional denial was hurting Joella and my other relationships.
So here, before you all, I confess that I have lived the majority of my life in emotional denial, hurting myself and those I love in the process. I am sorry for the damage I have caused, and am willing to do the hard work of restoration in the breaches that have been made.
Thus applying Paul’s command in Colossians 3:12-14
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
I invite each of you, dear friends, to join me on this journey of engaging God with all that we are. This, of course, includes our emotions. About 40% of the Bible is written in narrative. We all know that every engaging narrative is full of emotions.
We are going to begin this journey by looking to Jesus, our example.
Hebrews 2:14-17
14 Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil,
15 and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.
16 For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham.
17 Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
We will look at Jesus' emotions to understand how to engage God with all we are.
There are seven core emotions of Jesus that we will look at in the Gospels. They are illustrated by this emotion wheel.
As we discover each of our emotions as experienced by Jesus, we will receive the sympathy/empathy of Jesus (Hebrews 4:15) and discover his redemptive work in each of our emotions.
I am excited because each of us will grow in our emotional intelligence and be able to engage God with all that we are.
I pray that each of us will grow in our emotional intelligence in order to love Jesus and each other well.
