The Spirit and Our Emotions, Part 1

Today, Chuck Swindoll talks about the Spirit and our emotions. I think you will realize that the Spirit of God does, in fact, ignite feelings. And sometimes it is the feeling that becomes the final assurance that God is in it. We happen to be the most sensitive touch of the Spirit of God. On any given day, our emotions run the gamut from sorrow to bliss, from churning to chilled out, from suspicion to certainty.

So here's the question. Can we really trust our emotions or is it wise to ignore them? Perhaps we should insist on facts and stifle our feelings. Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll offers biblical wisdom on the essential role of our emotions. You might be surprised to learn that God often uses our feelings as a means for getting our attention. Chuck titled today's message, The Spirit and Our Emotions. I don't know how you were raised as a little child.

I can only speak for myself. There were a number of lessons that were drilled into me. Perhaps you had the same kind of upbringing.

In fact, on occasion, they will come back and play themselves in the recorder of my mind. One of them was, don't slam the door. Sounds like some of you had the same thing drilled into you. Eat everything on your plate.

Remember that one? You can take whatever you wish, but whatever you take, eat. As I got a little older, one that came home to roost on a number of occasions, and it was repeated again and again, especially by my mother, was you cannot trust your feelings. You cannot trust your feelings.

The thought went something like this. Emotions are unstable. You can't rely on them.

What you really want, son, is the facts. As I became a Christian, this was affirmed and reaffirmed by various teachers and pastors right up through my years in seminary. You cannot rely on the feelings. It's as if the feelings don't even exist, and if they do, discount or ignore them. What you really want is facts, and as you build a life in Christ, you want faith to accompany the facts.

So get them in line. First, facts, and then on the basis of the facts, faith, and then the feelings will catch up. The feelings will fall in line. Interesting, I was reading this past week of a man who heard as a little boy an old story that was passed along to him that sort of reaffirmed the same things I've been saying. He said that he was taught about a story regarding Mr. Faith, Mr. Facts, and Mr. Feelings. He said they were companions together along a tricky pathway. The first two followed Facts, who was in the lead. The story taught me, writes the author, that objective truth, Facts, was what mattered, and that my eyes of faith should be pinned on facts rather than on my emotions.

Mr. Faith, you may remember, was often bothered when Mr. Feelings got into difficulties. However, when he took his eyes off Facts and turned to help Mr. Feelings, he himself invariably got into trouble until he remembered that his job was to follow Facts, not to worry about Feelings. And according to the story, sooner or later, the feelings would catch up. Well, I have lived long enough to learn that the story is both true and false. I know my mother meant well. I know that my faith must begin with the facts of the gospel.

I know that. I have lived long enough to realize that facts must precede faith. However, I am not sure Feelings always catch up. In fact, there's something within me that rebels against the idea that the Feelings are sort of unimportant parts of our lives to be ignored, to be discounted, to be questioned, as if Feelings are never from the Spirit of God.

It is as if the Lord ignites Facts. It is as if the Spirit empowers faith, but there's no place in our theology for Feelings. I was raised like that.

Maybe you were too. I don't agree with that. I don't think that's supported in the Scriptures. As a matter of fact, before I'm through today in this particular talk, I think you will realize that the Spirit of God does, in fact, ignite Feelings. And sometimes it is the Feeling that becomes the final assurance that God is in it. And I think it is erroneous to live our lives ignoring, discounting, and questioning the presence of Feelings.

On the contrary, there are occasions in my life where the Feelings happen to be the most sensitive touch of the Spirit of God, leading me or stopping me or causing me to question, cautioning me, and sometimes rebuking me. You see, God has made us whole people. We are not simply a great big intellect. We are not simply a body of faith acting on intellect. We are whole people. And in the process of maturing and growing in Christ, both mind and heart go together as well as the whole presence of will.

Let me show you that. Get a hold of a Bible and turn to Genesis chapter 1, which is, of course, the great creation chapter of the Bible. Recorded in this first chapter are those things God created. It is a general summary of the six days of creation before he sets aside the seventh day for rest. God, in no particular order that I am naming them, created the universe, the sun, the moon, the stars, separated day from night, created land, and the vast waters about the land, created life, plant life, the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and all the way through these five days of creation, God paused to say, that's good. That's good.

That's very good. And then on the sixth day, verse 26, the Godhead together agrees that there will be the crowning point of creation. The Father, the Son, the Spirit agreed to make mankind, to make humanity, homo sapiens, unlike the beasts of the earth, unlike the birds of the sky, unlike the fish of the sea, all of whom are created after their kind and according to their species. God creates man. Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.

Intriguing words, aren't they? Generally speaking, God gave mankind something. He did not give the animal kingdom. He did not give the plant kingdom. He did not give the stellar spaces.

He did not even give angels. When he created man, and I use that in the broadest generic sense, when God created man, he gave man a personality like unto his own. In his own image, he created them. Male and female, he created them.

Let's analyze that for a few moments. First of all, God has a mind. God has intellect. And so when he created Adam, he created a being with an intellect, a mind. Adam was given intelligence, higher intelligence than that which was found among all the other created life. Adam, chapter 2, verse 20, gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and every beast of the field.

So Adam had a mind, and with the mind, he exercised intellect and he was able to look at and give a name to the other created things in those other species of life. When God gave Adam Eve, Adam perceived in his mind and communicated about her, verse 23 of chapter 2. Adam looks at this marvelous creation, this woman, Eve, and he says, this is now.

It is in the Hebrew, it's like now at last. Finally, this is at last bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. He communicates about what he witnesses in this lovely, the presence of this lovely being who is to be his wife. And in his intellect, he sees and he makes statements about her. Ultimately, Adam was to use his mind to know his God. Mankind knows God unlike any beast of the field, bird of the air, or fish of the sea, or plant within the ground.

None of those things, none of those creatures, none of those growing things worship. Only man with an intellect to know God knows the joy, the privilege, and has an understanding of his God. So Adam was given a mind and the reason he was given a mind was that initially and of course ultimately he was to know his God. Now secondly, God has a heart and I use that again as a symbol for emotions. And so God created Adam with a heart. When he created him in his own image, he gave mankind the capacity to feel.

Not only intellect, the capacity to think, he gave him the ability to feel. Not referring to the organ that pumps blood, understand, but to a capacity to experience emotions. The full range of emotions from intense love and joy to intense anger and rage and wrath.

The full spectrum of emotions. Adam loved and was affectionate with his wife. There was an intimacy about their relationship that sin has interrupted and an intimacy that we cannot duplicate today because of sin. At times I envy the relationship Adam and Eve had together. Before sin encroached upon their relationship, there was a naked, unguarded lack of self-consciousness that gave them such access to one another's hearts. That their relationship was absolutely intimate.

No reservations, no holding back, no struggle with one another, no one-upmanship, no fighting for authority, no battle with the will in those days of innocence. Adam and Eve had these feelings for one another. The emotional capacity within humanity has been given that Adam might use his emotions to love his God. Now stay with me through this.

This is terribly important. This isn't just theology, this is theology that gives you a foundation for what we're going to be developing. Man was given a mind to know God. Man was given a heart. He was given emotions to love God.

And you already anticipate the third. God has a will. God has volition. God acts. God decides. God moves. God directs.

These are all activities of the will. And so when God created Adam in his own image, he gave Adam something he did not give animal, plant, fish, or foul life. He gave volition.

The ability to make decisions. The ability to obey, to carry out God's plan. See chapter 2 verse 16. The Lord God commanded the man. Now if there had not been a will within man, the command would have fallen flat.

It would have been a futile statement. But he commanded the man. He addressed his intellect. He called upon his will and he said from any tree of the garden you may eat freely. But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.

God appealed to Adam's will in giving this command. Do not eat of this tree. You've got an entire garden to enjoy.

Enjoy all of it. But when you come to this particular growing tree, do not eat from it. Ultimately Adam was to use his will to obey his God. Man has been given a mind to know God, emotions to love God, and a will to obey God.

My point I think is now obvious. We are not whole. In the sense of complete in God in our God given personality unless all three are present and at work in us and in our walk with Christ. We are not giant creatures of intellect or creatures with giant intellect and wills that follow. We are people with intellect, people with wills, and people with emotions, all of which are part of being a whole person. And even though the emotional part of our being is the most fluctuating and in that my mother was exactly right, you cannot trust those feelings.

They're up and down, they're high, they're low, they're hot, they're cold. Whereas those facts stand firm like a steer in a blizzard. They won't fluctuate, they won't change, they can be proven. Hang on to those facts.

Build your faith on your facts. However, there are places in the Christian life where the Spirit of God ignites our emotions and prompts our feelings. And when he does that, I have been in occasions where it is nothing short of electrifying. I am certainly not the first to recognize the value of one's emotions.

This is not virgin soil that I am plowing. All of us have known these things, we just perhaps haven't given ourselves permission to say them or to think them. Where the Spirit of God is obviously present, where he is doing his work of cleansing and convicting, where he is bringing joy and delight and praise, we know firsthand the experiences of revival. And there cannot be revival without emotions.

There cannot be. Jonathan Edwards, one of the early revivalists and one of the brilliant men of God in the 1700s, grappled with all that was happening in the revival that was sweeping across New England. If you read the works of Jonathan Edwards, you will read virtually a blow-by-blow account of his wrestling with God, his feelings about his learning from God regarding revival that was coming across and happening in the land of in the region of New England. He found in his study that there was a parallel track between will and emotion, and they traveled together.

Edwards, a man of enormous intellect, graduating in his teens from his university, the highest level of his university studies. He's not a man who is sort of half-baked, stumbling into theology. He is a man who writes deeply and feels deeply about his theology. He uncovers this parallel track of emotion and will. He believed that teachers are in great error if they are for discarding all religious affections as having nothing solid or substantial in them.

Edwards taught that. He taught that emotions and volition were parallel motions of the soul, toward or away from something. Referring, for example, to fear, one of the many emotions he develops in his writings. He expressed that people tremble at God's word. They fear before him. Their flesh trembles because of him.

They are afraid of his judgments as his spirit falls upon them. He also declared, and I quote, from the works of Jonathan Edwards, a treatise concerning religious affections. There never was anything considerable brought to pass in the heart or life of any man living by the things of religion that had not his heart deeply affected by those things. Until somehow your will attaches itself to the feelings of your being, nothing will be changed in your heart, nothing deep, nothing lasting.

And I'll say the same for myself. All this leads us to some examples of God's creative work within us, what he made us like unto himself, and provides us with a reason to go into some of these God-given emotions. Now turn next to 2 Corinthians chapter 4.

Will you do that? 2 Corinthians chapter 4. When you get there, hold your place and also observe 1 Corinthians chapter 2. I want to look at two verses side by side. 1 Corinthians 2 and 2 Corinthians 4.

2, 9, and 4, 6. I want to show you that God's work in salvation is directed to the heart, not just the mind. That when the Lord does a saving work in the life of the sinner, he addresses the heart of an individual. 2 Corinthians 4, 6. For God who said, light shall shine out of darkness is the one who has shone in our, there it is, in our emotions, in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. God's work of salvation is directed to the heart, as stated here. Christianity is not just a cold, calculating decision of the mind. The heart is touched. In fact, 1 Corinthians 2, 9 states, Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.

We're not quite finished with this study from Chuck Swindoll. There's much more to learn about the spirit and our emotions. To learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit us online at insightworld.org. Here at Insight for Living Ministries, it pleases us that God uses this daily program as a channel for communicating his truth, especially when it comes to these important issues of discernment, such as learning to hear God's still, small voice. To that end, we're pleased to equip you with helpful Bible study tools. For instance, every sermon in this study about the Holy Spirit is accompanied by an in-depth guide that you can freely download to help you search the scriptures using the same method Chuck uses. In fact, we call these resources our Searching the Scriptures Studies.

All the details can be found at insight.org slash studies. In addition to the study notes, Chuck has written a book about the Holy Spirit. It's titled Embraced by the Spirit.

Let's face it, most of us are intrigued by this third person of the Trinity, but we hold back because we're afraid of mistaking our emotions for the voice of God. Well, in his book, Chuck brings clarity to topics like this one using scripture as the guide. To purchase a copy of Embraced by the Spirit, call us.

If you're listening in the United States, call 800-772-8888 or visit insight.org slash store. Let me add a word of thanks to those who give generously to Insight for Living. You're making it possible for us to provide these daily Bible teaching programs, and I can assure you your donations are truly making a difference. I just saw this encouraging note from a loyal friend that said, God has used Insight for Living to save my life and my marriage.

We listen and study every single day with Pastor Chuck. Well, as you can see, as you give to Insight for Living, you are truly making a difference. To give a donation today by speaking with one of our ministry reps, give us a call.

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