I'm preaching a series right now called "The Magnificent Love of God," in which my purpose is to convince our folks that God does indeed love them and that this is the greatest thing in the world.
So far we have looked at God's general benevolent love for everyone vis-a-vis His particular saving love for His people, we have looked at God's love for the wayward and today we looked at God's love for the broken.
Next Sunday (3/29/09) I'm preaching on "God's Love for the Bewildered" and I will address God's love for us even when we are at our most mentally and emotionally confused, depressed and angry. The text will be Psalm 73:21-26(NIV):
21 When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
22 I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you.
23 Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will take me into glory.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.
My main point will be that God loves us when we are at our worst, mentally and emotionally. Here you have a catalogue of negative emotions - grief, bitterness, senselessness, ignorance, to the point that we are beastly before God. In this Psalm the writer is not hungry for God, is not desiring God, is not pursuing God, is not loving God or any other thing we ought to do when it comes to facilitating our relationship with God. He is mired in the deepest despair, yet the love of God still reaches him - "yet I am always with you, you hold me by my right hand."
This passage reminds me of the words of Brian Chappel, president of Covenant Seminary at the funeral of his friend Petros Roukas. I am told that Brian said that when you can no longer hold on to God, God will hold on to you if you are his child. Or it may have been that when you can no longer hold on to the gospel the gospel holds on to you.
So I have been giving a good deal of thought to the subject of emotions recently, especially in light of recent events in my life that have brought me new emotions and the rediscovery of many old buried emotions.
For most of my Christian life I believed that the mind was to rule the emotions, emotions are untrustworthy and must be disciplined by the mind. That bubble was burst when I learned about the noetic effects of sin. "Noetic" comes from the Greek word which is transliterated in English as "nous" and it means mind. The noetic effects of sin are the effects of sin on the mind. In other words, our minds have been corrupted by sin as has the rest of our being. Thus, it behooves us to ask why we think our minds are any more trustworthy than our emotions.
At the same time, just as all of life is to be brought under the Lordship of Christ, so it is with our minds and emotions. We can and must subject them to the Lordship of Christ. That's fairly easy to see when it comes to the mind. As we read, study and memorize Scripture we are training our minds, we are renewing our minds (Romans 12:2), and we tend rightly to see the mind as something we can and should discipline.
Emotions, well, not so much. We tend to see emotions as if they just are. We feel what we feel, we can't help it. We can work with or around our emotions, but in general we don't believe we can discipline them.
Those who are depressed or grief-stricken or in the grip of some other powerful emotion, may submit that emotion to medication, but they generally don't submit that emotion to discipline.
Yet, the Scripture teaches that we can and should command and discipline our emotions. In Genesis 4:6-7 God challenged Cain's emotion of "downcast."
6 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.”
God found an improper emotion in Cain and commanded him to repent and to change his behavior and in so doing to reign in the "downcast" emotion.
There are sinful emotions. There is sinful grief, sinful depression, sinful anger and a whole host of emotions driven by sin for which we ought to repent. I suppose I should also note that there is sinful joy, sinful happiness, sinful elation, sinful warm-fuzziness and a whole host of positive emotions which are driven by sin and for which we ought to repent.
But saying what I just said doesn't tell the whole story of emotions. In some cases like that of Cain, it is clear that the emotion is driven by sin and can and must be challenged. In other cases these same emotions of depression, grief, anger and other things are appropriate responses to the trials and tragedies of life in a fallen world. Thus we ought not to rebuke those emotions. Yet, while not rebuking them, we can still command that they be exercised and expressed in a godly manner.
In Psalm 73 the Psalmist describes all of these negative emotions but does not repent of them nor indicate in any way that they are sinful. They just are, but in saying that they just are, that doesn't mean that they are left unattended or untouched by the word of God.
They "are" but they "are" to be disciplined by God's Word. In Psalm 73 there is a higher principle guiding the Psalmist than his emotions, it is his knowledge of the character and ways of God. While he does not chastize the emotions he does not allow those emotions to govern his understanding of God nor his obedience to God.
There is a "higher principle" that can guide us so that we are not governed by our minds or emotions and that is the Word of God as ministered to us by the Holy Spirit. Of course we process the Word of God through our minds and emotions but we must always be ready to let the word of God challenge our thinking and feeling.
Here's an example of how this is working my life. I've run the gamut of emotions since I found out I had cancer back in December. Right now I am going through chemotherapy every other week. My treatments begin Monday and conclude on Wednesday and it is almost like clockwork that I start going downhill some time on Wednesday afternoon. On a scale of 1-10 let's use 6 as a baseline for feeling "average." On Mondays and Tuesday's I'll be 6, feeling average. In fact, sometimes on Tuesdays I'll spke a bit to a 7 or 8 because I have these steroids going in me that are like uppers. But since that's a drug induced 7 or 8 we won't count it. On Wednesdays I'll usually start at a 6 and by bedtime will be down to a 4 or 3 by bedtime. Thursdays I'll usually wake up at about a 3 and stay there till Friday evening, sometimes knocking on the door of a 2. Saturdays I usually begin an upward climb, sometimes I'll still be around a 3 when I wake up, sometimes a 4, but by evening I'll usually be a 6. On Sunday's of treatment week I would say that I average anywhere from a 5 to a 7. Sometimes I'll dip down to a 4 or a 3 after preaching but I usually will rise back up to a 5 or a 6 by bedtime as long as I get a good nap. On Mondays of non-treatment week I usually start the upward climb. I would say that by Tuesday I am usually back to at least a 6 but from Wednesday through the following Sunday I will often go up to an 8 or a 9. Today I feel like a 9.
And by the way, a 9 for me is probably like a 6 or a 7 for you, because at my best I'm not at my best or at your best. But it feels so good to feel reasonably good that I am just delighted.
Back to the emotions - my emotions tend to track with my physical feelings. When I'm a 5 or below I'm usually fairly depressed, when I'm a 7 or higher I'm fairly elated. When I'm a 7 or above I am thinking about my future, thinking and planning about all of the fun things I am going to do and things I am going to accomplish after the treatment is over. When I'm a 4 or below I'm often wondering what my funeral is going to be like and how my wife and kids are going to cope when I'm gone.
It would be easy to simply challenge those emotions and on the good days remind me to not be presumptuous about the future and on bad days to tell me not to be so depressed.
But I can discipline these emotions. It's actually a good thing to have the emotions I have when I am a 4 or below. As the Puritans told us we ought always to think on our death and we should not plan on a long life. These days, and the depressed emotions that come with them give me the opportunity to contemplate eternity and my preparation for it. When I am depressed, rather than letting my feelings cause me to question the goodness of God or charge Him with giving me a raw deal I can turn those depressed feelings in godly productive direction. I can contemplate eternity, I can think on how this gives me the chance to identify in some small way with the sufferings of Christ. I can let this remind me that there are others who hurt and can feel compassion on them. This by the way is a biggie with me. Before cancer I was fairly immune to the sufferings of others, I don't think I was completely heartless, but I just didn't identify well with those who suffered and as such I was not nearly as empathetic or as pastoral as I could be.
In any case, it would be inappropriate (I think!) to simply say "snap out of it, quit being depressed," or "don't worry, you'll be fine" when I am feeling sick and emotionally down. But by the grace of God I can still channel those emotions in a godly direction.
The same goes with the good days. When I'm as elated as I am today, I would err if I felt like Superman or invincible. There is a temptation when I am feeling as good as I am today to think this was all just a bad dream and maybe I really don't have cancer and I'm just going to snap out of this and go on my merry way. But nor do I need to temper that joy by reminding myself that I'm not healthy and this is not going to last more than a few more days. I can thank God for today's joys and enjoy these joys as joyfully as possible, giving great thanks and praise to God for them.
Along those lines I think that is one thing I have noticed over the last few months - I am starting to feel more deeply. Before last December I can't remember the last time I cried. I cry fairly often these days but don't begrudge it. But I also think my laughter is heartier and I enjoy my joys more. Just today at lunch our family was together talking all kinds of foolishness and nonsense and I was just eating it up, enjoying the moment.
So when I say that we can govern our emotions I mean to say that we can submit our emotions to God's government. We're not looking for some stoic middle ground that enables us to avoid all negative emotions or restrains us from the excess of our positive emotions, we're simply letting them all be channeled by God in godly directions. Godliness is the goal in all of our thinking and feeling.
Another awesome, encouraging post, thanks so much.
I think the Chapell quote you referred to could be this:
When Petros stands before the throne of judgment, he will have nothing of his own that he can claim as his ticket to heaven. All he has preached, and lived, and shared will not make up for the wrong of what he has done. But someone else can make it up; the One who promises the kingdom to those who are too poor in spirit to make any claim for themselves.
(Petros committed suicide.) I couldn't find a link to the sermon but had posted this quote on my blog awhile back, HT to iMonk.
Posted by: Bonnie | March 22, 2009 at 11:37 PM