Editor’s Note: This microtalk is from SOLA Conference 2021. Find more resources and videos here.
As we see in the Psalms, no feeling is meant to be excluded from our relationship with God. In fact, every emotion is designed to turn us toward God and assist us in bringing our hearts and lives before him. Yet in this extended season of suffering, the waves of sorrow, anxiety, and depression have rolled through our lives and drawn our hearts away from God. In this seminar, we will consider from the Psalms how God teaches us to build emotional health in our churches as we engage what we feel and learn to draw near to God with even the most painful emotions.
Below is a transcript of the microtalk. It has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the audio here.
Hi everyone, thanks so much for tuning into this SOLA MicroTalk. My name is Tim St. John. I am the counseling pastor at Lighthouse Community Church in Torrance, and I’m so thankful that we still get to share our sessions through video with you this year.
The title of this session is “Engaging Our Emotions: What Do I Do With How I Feel?” And this is a really important topic because over this past year, we have all felt a lot of things. We’ve been angry, hopeless, grieved, confused, and worried. So we wanted to offer you a brief session at this year’s SOLA Conference to help you take a step back and examine your heart. In the midst of everything you’ve been feeling, what’s going on inside you?
So how do you feel right now? Today? Can you take a moment and be honest with yourself about how you’re feeling? I would say that for many of us, we don’t know how to be honest about what we’re feeling. We don’t know where to be honest about what we’re feeling. We don’t know why to be honest about what we’re feeling. And we certainly aren’t ready for others to be honest about how they’re feeling, with us. But I’d like you to see that idea. How you are feeling is a topic that matters to God immensely, so it has to be significant to us.
Every emotion you feel was designed by God to send you sprinting before His throne with words that express what you’re feeling: “Help me. Thank you. You’re awesome. Why, God?” As we can see in the Psalms, no feeling is meant to be excluded from our relationship with God. And every emotion is designed to turn us toward God and assist us in bringing our hearts and lives before him. So when you read the Psalms, you see this beautiful collection of moments with God across a spectrum of emotions. And God has given that to show us that there is nothing you ever feel or face that God wants you to face alone, apart from him.
According to the Psalms, God numbers the hairs on your head, he counts every tear you shed, he lists all our sleepless tossing, and he examines every word we speak. When we sit down and rise up, he knows and he cares. When we sleep, he stays awake and present in our lives. Now you might be thinking that Alexa also knows all of those things. But hear me out. God will not only know always infinitely more about you than Alexa, but also, everything he knows–everything he understands about you–is tied to his infinite love for you. The Psalms are really meant to be the evidence of God’s love touching the entire spectrum of what you feel.
So what do you bring to God? Can you truly say that you bring everything to him because you know his love wants to touch everything in your life? Without this foundation, we will lose what is at the core of how we live and grow as Christians–that honest and open relationship with God. So brothers and sisters, we must not minimize the importance of our emotions to our God.
Then, once you recognize the importance of your emotions, the next step is to rightly engage what you feel. In our counseling ministry that I helped oversee, we interact with what people are feeling every day. We really need a definition of emotional health, to help us measure how people steward this part of their lives. So here is my definition of emotional health: emotional health means you understand what emotions you’re feeling, how they impact you, and how to engage them in a way that honors Christ.
It does not mean being happy all the time. That is not emotionally healthy at all. You might feel pressure to be happy all the time, but that is not what God wants from us. That’s not what he wants for us. Now, there are so many reasons to engage what you feel. But one vital reason is to help you understand the worship of your heart–that connection between you and God. As you engage your emotions, you will better understand what your life is centered on. Emotions are these wonderful servants designed by God to help us see the reality of our hearts–what’s going on in our hearts.
The picture I like to use in counseling for engaging emotions is lights on a dashboard. So imagine you’re driving down the street in your car. And there are people in the car with you, there are people coming in the opposite direction in their cars, and you see people on the sidewalks. You’re trying to drive very carefully in light of all the people who are around you. But all of a sudden, a light on your dashboard flashes on. How you understand and respond to that light will not only determine your health and safety, but it really impacts the well-being of everyone around you. So think of your emotions as lights on the dashboard, and we’ll look at three different ways people understand and respond to those lights when they flash on their dashboard.
1. The first response is to think emotions are everything
So, I just stare at that light. Now, there are people who stare at that light, who focus on what they’re feeling and ignore everything else. They’re willing to take their eyes off of the road and stare at the light. It can cause them to miss a lot of the things that are happening around them. They think that the most important thing about me is how I feel, and I need to express how I feel at all costs. This is why there is this extreme value placed on authenticity right now, in our culture. The end goal is to be ever vigilant about how I feel and make whatever changes necessary in order to feel good.
2. A second response is to think emotions are nothing
So, I ignore the light on my dash. These are people who ignore the light to focus on driving and focus on all the people who are depending on them. But eventually, if the light isn’t addressed, what’s going to happen? The car is going to break down. This approach to emotion says: emotions are not to be trusted. In this thinking, we respond to emotions with this tough-guy attitude or what-would-Spock-do stoic philosophy. This understanding can be popular among Christians actually because we want to appear nice—like we have no problems. Or perhaps we genuinely feel that there’s no safe place, no safe relationship, no safe outlet to share how we feel. Or maybe we want to be led by truth. But to do that, we think we have to discard our emotions as irrelevant or unimportant.
3. A third response is to think emotions are opportunities to understand and engage my worshiping heart
So the third response involves slowing down, pulling your car over, looking under the hood, and addressing the light. Perhaps having a friend help you do that. Biblically, when an emotion comes on our dashboard, we need to listen to what it’s saying. We need to examine what we’re hearing. And then, and only then, decide how to respond to it. When you engage what you are feeling, you start to understand what your heart treasures. Our emotions reveal our hearts. They help us see what we worship.
So rather than minimizing emotions, it’s good to find as many emotions as we can, so that we can listen to them and see what they’re saying. Understanding our emotions allows us to better understand our hearts, better understand the lies we’re tempted to believe, and better understand the things that have taken God’s place in our lives and in our hearts. And it really is the beginning of how we turn back toward him.
A clear example of this would be godly sorrow versus worldly sorrow in 2 Corinthians 7:10. In that verse, the apostle Paul is teaching the Corinthians that when you feel guilt and conviction, you need to slow down and pull the car over and ask: Is this sorrow over my sin moving me closer to God or farther away from Him? Is this sorrow assisting my repentance and leading me toward life, or is it heaping condemnation on me and destroying me? Is it godly sorrow or worldly sorrow? In other words, Paul is saying, when we experience sorrow over sin, we need to pull the car over and actually consider our emotions—whether the sorrow is a gift from God to help us, or the work of our deceitful hearts to harm us to shame us.
To make this even more practical, I’d like to leave you with four steps for engaging your emotions.
1. First, identify
The first step is to identify what you’re feeling. Recognizing what you are feeling might feel incredibly simple for you, and for others, it might be terrifying. But as I said at the beginning, if I said to you, “How have you been feeling today,” how would you answer? Now, you don’t need an exhaustive glossary of emotional labels to consider how you’re feeling and to describe it. Just talk honestly about it. What would you say about how you’re feeling? Would you say, “I’ve been on edge lately”? Or, “My mind has been racing with the situation and I’m starting to feel overwhelmed”? How often do you identify what you’re feeling before God or before trusted friends? We must identify what we’re feeling. It’s that first step of being honest about how we’re feeling.
2. The second step is to listen
Your emotions reveal what you treasure, what you love, what you trust, and what you worship. They’re always talking about the things that you care about. So what are they talking about? What are they saying about what’s important to you? What are they saying about God, yourself, your relationships, and your circumstances? Emotions are terrible masters, but they are wonderful servants to help us see into our worshiping hearts. So listen to how they talk about and interpret your life.
3. Third, evaluate
The third step is to evaluate. Engaging our emotions really means that we need to engage with God about what we’re feeling. Once you’ve identified that something is going on inside you and you’ve drawn near and listened to what it’s saying, then you’re ready to prayerfully consider which aspects of what you feel are good and godly, and which are destructive or selfish, dangerous. David does this when he asks himself in Psalm 42:5–Why are you cast down on my soul? And why are you in turmoil within me? Here you see David evaluating his emotions. So we need to stop and ask: How much of what I’m feeling right now is a right response? And where am I being tempted to turn away from God, maybe to be drawn in towards sin?
4. The fourth step is act
Once you have identified what you’re feeling, and you’ve listened to what your emotions are saying, and have evaluated what aspects of that emotion are good and which are bad, you are finally ready to act. The goal here is not to change how we feel. Changing your feelings is never the biggest goal. Instead, we want to get back on the road and drive with this greater awareness of what our heart worships. Knowing our own hearts better frees us to love God and to love others, with an awareness of ourselves, and how our hearts can be drawn away from God.
Emotional health is not always knowing how to just feel better. Emotional health is knowing how to come to God as a complete person, no matter what you’re facing. It is not about immediately having God take away all the bad feelings. In fact, as I look at scripture, the way I see God working to mature us emotionally is to transform how we worship, so that our hearts learn to center on Christ as we engage with the things that we feel, face, and experience in this life. So let us come boldly before God with all of our feelings, knowing that he will change our hearts and help us to worship Him more and more with all we are. Thanks so much for watching.
For more resources from SOLA Conference 2021, click here.