In this episode Andy examines the emotions of the spiritually mature Christian. We want our emotions to be like Christ’s, appropriate and constrained by the word of God.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? And we believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections, knowledge, faith, character, and action. Today, we’re going to look at the fifth aspect of character or the Christian heart. We’re going to talk about our emotional life, emotions, what you feel. Now in Ancient Greece, the Stoics posited a god who was utterly devoid of all passion. He was a pure thinking machine. And they desired, the Stoics did, to imitate this god whom they worshipped. They strove to strip themselves of all human passions, seeing them as some form of weakness. They responded with equal calm, what we would call stoic calm to both positive and negative circumstances. They despised the weakness of human emotions, and they sought to ascend to the level of pure thought.
However, like all of the Greeks, the pagans, they worshipped a false god, an idol of their own imagination. As we come to the God of the Bible, we find that he is a passionate being. He is an emotional being. And we are created in his image. We are to have appropriate emotional responses to things. Now, the God of the Bible expresses joy. For example, in Zephaniah 3:17, it says, “The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save; he will take great delight in you; he will quiet you with his love; he will rejoice over you with singing.” God also expresses compassion. We see very plainly how God was concerned about the Israelites and their bondage and their slavery. In Exodus 2, he said to Moses, “I have heard their lamentations and their cries and I’m compassionate on them” (Exodus 3:7, paraphrase). Or Psalm 103:13 says, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.”
God also has a passionately angry reaction to sin and evil and wickedness. He expresses wrath. He is a righteous judge. “A God who expresses his wrath every day,” Psalm 7:11. God is also a God who expresses grief. The Lord was grieved when he saw the wickedness and the sin of the human race before the flood of Noah. He was grieved and his heart was filled with pain.
Now, these verses teach us so many things about God. And they reveal that God is an emotional being. And we, as created in his image, reflecting his nature, we are created emotional as well. However, unlike our emotions, God’s emotions are always perfect. They are a perfect reflection of his nature. They’re a perfect reflection of his mind, his purposes, his will, his plans. God is never surprised by circumstances. He’s never overwhelmed by unforeseen events. He therefore is never trapped into some emotional display that he has to later repent from, etc.
Quite the contrary, God sometimes rationally chooses to defer his emotions until the appropriate time. Isaiah 48:9, he says, “For my own name’s sake, I delay my wrath; for the sake of my praise, I hold it back from you so as not to cut you off.” So, I will wait to get angry at you, God effectively is saying to the Jews, to Israel, there in Isaiah 48:9. God knows when it’s the right time to get angry. And oftentimes he waits, even in the face of great wickedness. God is never overpowered by emotions like we are. His emotions are always a part of his plan, a perfect part of his plan. Most delightfully for us, God rejoices exceedingly when a single sinner repents. Jesus said, “There’s more joy in the presence of the angels of heaven over one sinner that repents than over 99 that don’t need to repent” (Luke 15:7). And that joy in the presence of the angels, it’s not joy by the angels, I think they do show that, but that’s not what the verse says. The joy is in the presence of the angels. The Father rejoices over a single sinner that repents.
If you look at the parable of the lost things, for example. The parable of the lost sheep, and the shepherd goes and finds it. And when he finds it, he puts it on his shoulders comes back and says to all of his friends and family and neighbors, “Rejoice with me, I found the sheep.” Or the woman who lost that coin and looks everywhere and searches for it and finds it. And then when she finds it again, she gathers all her friends and says, “Rejoice with me. I found my coin.” And then the parable of the prodigal son, the father gathers his whole estate together, his whole household together and says, “Rejoice with me. The son of mine was lost and is now found; he was dead and is alive again” (Luke 15:24). So, it is God in all three cases, the one who sought and found the lost sinner, that is rejoicing. And the angels then join with him in his rejoicing. So, our God is a passionate being. He’s an emotional being.
what is spiritual maturity? And the answer could be summed up in one word, Christlikeness.
Then his only begotten Son our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, too, it says in Hebrews 1:3, “Is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,” is also an emotional being. And he perfectly reflects the emotions of his heavenly Father. But he’s also perfectly human, and so we can see therefore in Jesus a perfect emotional life. Now in Sanctification Monday, as we just think sanctification, we’re asking over and over the question, what is spiritual maturity? And the answer could be summed up in one word, Christlikeness. Christlikeness. We want to be conformed to Christ; therefore, we want to have a healthy emotional life like Jesus Christ. We want our emotions to be just like his. We want to react with the proper emotions in every situation. Now, by far, the most frequent emotions that Jesus showed in his life was compassion. Again and again, Jesus is moved by compassion. Like the leper that comes to him says, “Lord, if you’re willing, you can make me clean” (Luke 5:12). And you think about what lepers were like back then and what their life was like. They were entirely social outcasts, religious outcasts. They had to live on their own. And they were cut off from family and friends and from a normal life. And Jesus was moved with compassion, the scripture says, and he said, “I am willing.” And he reached out his hand and touched him and said, “Be clean.”
So, we see again and again Jesus’s emotion at the widow at Nain who is in the procession. There’s a funeral procession, and she’s burying her only son. She’s alone in this world. And Jesus goes to her first. The entire procession stops, and Jesus goes to the widow and says to her, “Don’t cry.” And then he raises the young man from the grave or from the dead. He was in the procession, and he just raised him from the dead. And so, we see Jesus’s compassion there. It’s the most common emotion he had, compassion. But that’s not his only emotion, he was moved by love for certain people. It says, Jesus loved the man and answered him, et cetera, in Mark 10:21. He felt joy in the Holy Spirit over his disciples who came back with amazing stories about how even the demons were subject to them in his name. And it says, “He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit” (Luke 10:17).
He felt a pure holy anger at the sinful abuse of the animal sacrificial system by Annas and Caiaphas and all of their henchmen as they’re making huge money out of the religious sensibilities of the Jewish people (John 2: 14-16). And he cleansed the temple, made a whip. And even just the making of the whip shows it was not a spasm of passion that came over Jesus. He sat down and carefully, patiently made a whip. And then he drove those animals out. And he overturned the tables of the money changers, scattered their coins. And said, “Get out of here. How dare you turn my Father’s house into a marketplace?” Again, notice that his anger there was not self-directed, but it was totally God-directed. He was filled with zeal, as John 2:17 tells us, “Zeal for God’s house will consume me.”
And so, he had an anger. And you see a lot of emotions in Luke, sorry, in John 11, you remember the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. We see all kinds of emotions. We see emotions we couldn’t have predicted. Jesus says, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake, I am glad” (John 11:15). So how do we understand the gladness of Jesus? But he’s glad not at the death of his friend, but that the display of his power, Jesus’s power, would put his disciples on stronger footing of faith. And he’s glad about that. And also, he is deeply sorrowful over the agonies and the grief of Martha and Mary at their brother’s death. The shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. We see that. We also see mysteriously a word that says he was enraged within himself in John 11:33, a very interesting Greek word. So, he’s a very emotional being and his emotions are perfect.
So, as we look at that, what then should be the emotional life of a Christian? How shall we understand our emotions? Almost every emotional life or almost every emotional moment in the Christian life, we can find roots of it in Christ and in scripture. And yet our emotions are so frequently messed up, so frequently flow from faulty understanding, so frequently flow from our faulty hearts and our faulty characters. So, we need to try to understand Spirit-filled or Spirit-led emotions constrained by the word of God.
One of the things I’ve learned about emotions, and this is important, is that in emotions flow from perceived reality, not necessarily actual reality. I remember a number of years ago I watched a movie entitled We Are Marshall, and this is about the tragedy that happened I think in the year 1970 where the entire Marshall football program went down in a plane crash. Almost everybody connected with that program, all the players, coaches, etc. And it tells a story. The lead is played by Matthew McConaughey, and how they tried to rebuild that football program. It’s interesting in the story, an assistant coach did not get on the plane with the rest of the team. And called to tell his wife he was going to go on a recruiting trip, but he didn’t get her on the phone. And I guess they didn’t have answering machines back then. So, he called a neighbor lady and said, “Please tell my wife I’m not getting on the plane. I’m going to be two more days doing some recruiting in West Virginia.” But she forgot to tell the wife.
And then when the plane crashed, the wife went to the site of the crash, which is right near where they lived, saw that there were no survivors, and immediately her worst fears were confirmed. And she believed that she was now a widow, that their children had no father. And she was weeping based on perceived reality, but the reality wasn’t true. It was appropriate to what she thought was true, but it wasn’t reality.
And so, I think our emotions are frequently like that. We think of things a certain way and we react. And we have to be transformed by the renewing of our mind so that we can see things properly and then react properly. But even when we see things properly, we don’t necessarily react properly. Our emotions are damaged. So, we want to see a healing work done in our emotional life. We want our emotions to be spiritually mature and controlled, constrained by the word of God. Many Christians think that they can’t control their emotions. It’s just how I feel. It’s nothing I can do to control, its just how I feel.
Well, that’s not true. We see in the story of Joseph when he saw his brothers after so many years, and it’s one of the most emotional stories in the entire Bible (Genesis 42). His brothers had conspired to sell him as a slave. They were going to kill him, to sell him as a slave into Egypt, all the cold-heartedness and the hatred. Now, many years later Joseph has ascended to be the number two man in all of Egypt, and God is at work. He begins to see the incredible providence of God. Seeing his brothers there and remembering their treachery, it says that he controlled himself. He controlled his emotions and had his servants serve the food. And so, emotions can be controlled. We don’t have to just give full vent to what we feel. We have to see the Lord through the Holy Spirit transform our emotions and make them healthy and appropriate.
Sometimes we underreact. We’re told to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. Sometimes we just don’t care about other people. So, we need to be healed so that we actually show appropriate levels of compassion to others. Other times we overreact, especially in anger. Sinful anger, we erupt into anger. And so, we want to have our emotions controlled by the Holy Spirit.
Now, let’s zero in on five key emotions in the Christian life. First, joy. Joy. I want to talk about joy first. Our God is a happy being. It says in Psalm 115:3, “Our God is in heaven. He does whatever pleases him.” It also says, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful in a few things; I’ll now entrust you with many things. Enter into the joy of your master.” He says that, Matthew 25:21, we are to enter into the joy of God.
we want to be joyful like God is. We want to be joyful because we know God, because we know Christ.
And so, we want to be joyful like God is. We want to be joyful because we know God, because we know Christ. We want to have a joy that never ends. We want to rejoice always, as Paul says. And again, I say rejoice. We want our salvation to bring us consistent joy. And so, in life, we’re going to sometimes have sorrow. We’ll talk about that in a minute. Sorrowful, you’re always rejoicing. But rejoicing is there day after day. Sorrow may stay for an evening, but rejoicing comes in the morning (Psalm 30:5). And so, we want to rejoice consistently and trust in what God is doing. We want to put our happiness in Christ on display.
I also want to talk about sorrow as the second of the five emotions. There is an appropriate time to be sorrowful. As I just said, 2 Corinthians 6:10, “Sorrowful yet always rejoicing.” Whenever I hear that verse, I tend to put in some extra words to help me understand it. Sometimes sorrowful, but always rejoicing. Sometimes sorrowful, but always rejoicing.
There are sometimes that we’re going to have sorrow in the Christian life. We think about Jesus dying on the cross. And it said he did so, “For the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising its shame” (Hebrews 12:2). There was a deep sorrow in dying under the wrath of God for Jesus. Separated from God mysteriously, he said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Matthew 27:46). So, there is an appropriate sorrow in the Christian life.
I think especially when I think about our sinfulness. We sometimes just need to, as James says, “Grieve, mourn and wail. Change our laughter to mourning and our joy to gloom” (James 4:9). The Puritan, Thomas Watson and his great book on repentance said, “There’s no way you can genuinely repent without feeling deep sorrow for sin.” So, there is an appropriate sorrow that comes over our sin. But not only that, there’s an appropriate sorrow that comes from the sinful state and actions of others. We can just be sorrowful over the general state of immorality in our country or in our city. “This Lot was greatly grieved by what he saw day after day. His righteous soul was tormented by the lawless deeds he saw and heard,” it says in 2 Peter 2:8 about Lot. And so also Paul was in great sorrow and unceasing anguish over the lostness of the Jewish people who were rejecting Christ. He wished that he could exchange his own salvation for theirs if that could be possible. We know that Jesus wept over Jerusalem. So, there is an appropriate sorrow in the Christian life.
There’s also compassion, as we said this, the number one emotion that Jesus showed. And we want to be compassionate. I mentioned just a moment ago, “Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn” (James 4:9). We should genuinely care about what’s going on in other people’s lives. Our love should be sincere, Romans 12:9. That is unhypocritical. We should genuinely be sympathetic and feel what other people feel.
And then there’s fear. There is an appropriate healthy fear in the Christian life. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). We should have a fear of our own internal sinfulness and what it might do to our lives. We should fear the Lord’s discipline in relation to our sins. We should have a genuine fear for the lost people around us who themselves don’t fear that they’re heading toward hell, but we should fear that they’re heading toward hell. We should fear on their behalf.
And yet for all of that, we should be delivered from fear of man. We should fear God. As Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body and after that can do nothing to you. But I’ll tell you who to fear, fear the one who has the power to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). So healthy fear is part of the Christian life.
There should be a fiery love for the glory of God and for the souls of others and for holiness, our personal holiness. These things should be inflamed within us.
And then finally, zeal. Zeal is a relentless energy, a passion for the glory of God and for the benefit of our neighbors. Zeal consumed Jesus. Zeal for God’s house consumed him. As I mentioned, there was a fire inside him. Paul said, “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor serving the Lord” (Romans 12:11). There should be a fiery love for the glory of God and for the souls of others and for holiness, our personal holiness. These things should be inflamed within us. We should not be indifferent about them, bored or mellow or maintain an even strain about those things. There should be a fiery zeal inside our hearts. So those five emotions I think are things we should see developed.
What about faulty emotions? Remember I mentioned about that movie, We Are Marshall, and how often our emotions are tied to a faulty perception of reality? And therefore, they’re messed up. We are very messed up people and therefore our emotions are messed up. But the Bible is filled with human beings who display faulty emotions, messed up emotions. Let’s take for example, Jonah being very angry that God forgave the Ninevites. Remember that? He said, “I’m angry enough to die” (Jonah 4:9). I’ve never seen a preacher in history or heard of a preacher in history that was so successful in his preaching ministry and so angry about that success. He really just wanted God to wipe out the Ninevites. So, we need to be corrected from sinful anger. Our anger is like moral filth, James says, we need to be corrected from that.
We need to be corrected from faithless sadness. There’s sometimes that we get sad when it’s not appropriate to be sad. Look at Mary in front of the empty tomb. She’s weeping (John 20). And the angels that are there to say, “He’s not here. He has risen.” The angels are there and they’re saying, “Woman, why are you weeping?” And she says, “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him” (John 20:13). She thinks he’s still dead, the corpse is missing. And so therefore she has this faulty sadness. And so also the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, “We had hoped, they said, “that he was going to be the one that would redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21), but now our hopes are dashed, they were saying. They had a faithless sadness, and they both had to be corrected from faulty sadness.
What about discouragement? We need to be corrected from being discouraged. I think in the hymn What a Friend We Have in Jesus it says, “We should never be discouraged, take it to the Lord in prayer.” I think that’s absolutely true. I want to say more about that in just one minute, at the end of this podcast.
We need to be corrected from sinful fear. Fear of man is a snare. And we need to not fear people so much that we don’t share the gospel with them. We need to be corrected from anxiety. Anxiety is a faulty use of imagination. You think of what could happen in the future and you get anxious, but we’re told, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7).
We need to be corrected from a lack of shame over sin. We need to be corrected from a lack of Christian affection for others. We are in need of healing, emotionally, emotional healing. We want our emotions to correspond to biblical truth and to the appropriate circumstance and to be conformed to Christ.
Now, one last thing I want to say about emotions. When we do get depressed, when we do get discouraged, we need to take ourselves in hand and preach to ourselves. There was a great book that I read, Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Spiritual Depression. And he zeroes in on Psalm 42 and 43 in which the psalmist says repeatedly, “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God for I’ll yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”
So, what Lloyd-Jones says in that book is so often spiritual depression comes because we listen to ourselves rather than preaching to ourselves. We need to take ourselves in hand, our souls in hand and say, why are you downcast? Has Christ not died for your sins? Has he not been raised from the dead? Has he not promised that you’ll live with him for all eternity? Don’t listen to yourself saying, oh, what a terrible day, what a bad thing. All this murky stuff that’s going on. Instead, preach biblical truth to yourself. I feel like for myself as a regular preacher of the word, one of the things I’m doing is to teach the men and women of my congregation to preach well to themselves, to preach biblical truth to themselves throughout the week.
Well, we’ve looked today at the emotional life of the Christian and how we are to be conformed to Christ in our emotional life. And as we conclude today, I want you to go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything you experienced this week to sanctify you and to bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? And we believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections, knowledge, faith, character, and action. Today, we’re going to look at the fifth aspect of character or the Christian heart. We’re going to talk about our emotional life, emotions, what you feel. Now in Ancient Greece, the Stoics posited a god who was utterly devoid of all passion. He was a pure thinking machine. And they desired, the Stoics did, to imitate this god whom they worshipped. They strove to strip themselves of all human passions, seeing them as some form of weakness. They responded with equal calm, what we would call stoic calm to both positive and negative circumstances. They despised the weakness of human emotions, and they sought to ascend to the level of pure thought.
However, like all of the Greeks, the pagans, they worshipped a false god, an idol of their own imagination. As we come to the God of the Bible, we find that he is a passionate being. He is an emotional being. And we are created in his image. We are to have appropriate emotional responses to things. Now, the God of the Bible expresses joy. For example, in Zephaniah 3:17, it says, “The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save; he will take great delight in you; he will quiet you with his love; he will rejoice over you with singing.” God also expresses compassion. We see very plainly how God was concerned about the Israelites and their bondage and their slavery. In Exodus 2, he said to Moses, “I have heard their lamentations and their cries and I’m compassionate on them” (Exodus 3:7, paraphrase). Or Psalm 103:13 says, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.”
God also has a passionately angry reaction to sin and evil and wickedness. He expresses wrath. He is a righteous judge. “A God who expresses his wrath every day,” Psalm 7:11. God is also a God who expresses grief. The Lord was grieved when he saw the wickedness and the sin of the human race before the flood of Noah. He was grieved and his heart was filled with pain.
Now, these verses teach us so many things about God. And they reveal that God is an emotional being. And we, as created in his image, reflecting his nature, we are created emotional as well. However, unlike our emotions, God’s emotions are always perfect. They are a perfect reflection of his nature. They’re a perfect reflection of his mind, his purposes, his will, his plans. God is never surprised by circumstances. He’s never overwhelmed by unforeseen events. He therefore is never trapped into some emotional display that he has to later repent from, etc.
Quite the contrary, God sometimes rationally chooses to defer his emotions until the appropriate time. Isaiah 48:9, he says, “For my own name’s sake, I delay my wrath; for the sake of my praise, I hold it back from you so as not to cut you off.” So, I will wait to get angry at you, God effectively is saying to the Jews, to Israel, there in Isaiah 48:9. God knows when it’s the right time to get angry. And oftentimes he waits, even in the face of great wickedness. God is never overpowered by emotions like we are. His emotions are always a part of his plan, a perfect part of his plan. Most delightfully for us, God rejoices exceedingly when a single sinner repents. Jesus said, “There’s more joy in the presence of the angels of heaven over one sinner that repents than over 99 that don’t need to repent” (Luke 15:7). And that joy in the presence of the angels, it’s not joy by the angels, I think they do show that, but that’s not what the verse says. The joy is in the presence of the angels. The Father rejoices over a single sinner that repents.
If you look at the parable of the lost things, for example. The parable of the lost sheep, and the shepherd goes and finds it. And when he finds it, he puts it on his shoulders comes back and says to all of his friends and family and neighbors, “Rejoice with me, I found the sheep.” Or the woman who lost that coin and looks everywhere and searches for it and finds it. And then when she finds it again, she gathers all her friends and says, “Rejoice with me. I found my coin.” And then the parable of the prodigal son, the father gathers his whole estate together, his whole household together and says, “Rejoice with me. The son of mine was lost and is now found; he was dead and is alive again” (Luke 15:24). So, it is God in all three cases, the one who sought and found the lost sinner, that is rejoicing. And the angels then join with him in his rejoicing. So, our God is a passionate being. He’s an emotional being.
what is spiritual maturity? And the answer could be summed up in one word, Christlikeness.
Then his only begotten Son our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, too, it says in Hebrews 1:3, “Is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,” is also an emotional being. And he perfectly reflects the emotions of his heavenly Father. But he’s also perfectly human, and so we can see therefore in Jesus a perfect emotional life. Now in Sanctification Monday, as we just think sanctification, we’re asking over and over the question, what is spiritual maturity? And the answer could be summed up in one word, Christlikeness. Christlikeness. We want to be conformed to Christ; therefore, we want to have a healthy emotional life like Jesus Christ. We want our emotions to be just like his. We want to react with the proper emotions in every situation. Now, by far, the most frequent emotions that Jesus showed in his life was compassion. Again and again, Jesus is moved by compassion. Like the leper that comes to him says, “Lord, if you’re willing, you can make me clean” (Luke 5:12). And you think about what lepers were like back then and what their life was like. They were entirely social outcasts, religious outcasts. They had to live on their own. And they were cut off from family and friends and from a normal life. And Jesus was moved with compassion, the scripture says, and he said, “I am willing.” And he reached out his hand and touched him and said, “Be clean.”
So, we see again and again Jesus’s emotion at the widow at Nain who is in the procession. There’s a funeral procession, and she’s burying her only son. She’s alone in this world. And Jesus goes to her first. The entire procession stops, and Jesus goes to the widow and says to her, “Don’t cry.” And then he raises the young man from the grave or from the dead. He was in the procession, and he just raised him from the dead. And so, we see Jesus’s compassion there. It’s the most common emotion he had, compassion. But that’s not his only emotion, he was moved by love for certain people. It says, Jesus loved the man and answered him, et cetera, in Mark 10:21. He felt joy in the Holy Spirit over his disciples who came back with amazing stories about how even the demons were subject to them in his name. And it says, “He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit” (Luke 10:17).
He felt a pure holy anger at the sinful abuse of the animal sacrificial system by Annas and Caiaphas and all of their henchmen as they’re making huge money out of the religious sensibilities of the Jewish people (John 2: 14-16). And he cleansed the temple, made a whip. And even just the making of the whip shows it was not a spasm of passion that came over Jesus. He sat down and carefully, patiently made a whip. And then he drove those animals out. And he overturned the tables of the money changers, scattered their coins. And said, “Get out of here. How dare you turn my Father’s house into a marketplace?” Again, notice that his anger there was not self-directed, but it was totally God-directed. He was filled with zeal, as John 2:17 tells us, “Zeal for God’s house will consume me.”
And so, he had an anger. And you see a lot of emotions in Luke, sorry, in John 11, you remember the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. We see all kinds of emotions. We see emotions we couldn’t have predicted. Jesus says, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake, I am glad” (John 11:15). So how do we understand the gladness of Jesus? But he’s glad not at the death of his friend, but that the display of his power, Jesus’s power, would put his disciples on stronger footing of faith. And he’s glad about that. And also, he is deeply sorrowful over the agonies and the grief of Martha and Mary at their brother’s death. The shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. We see that. We also see mysteriously a word that says he was enraged within himself in John 11:33, a very interesting Greek word. So, he’s a very emotional being and his emotions are perfect.
So, as we look at that, what then should be the emotional life of a Christian? How shall we understand our emotions? Almost every emotional life or almost every emotional moment in the Christian life, we can find roots of it in Christ and in scripture. And yet our emotions are so frequently messed up, so frequently flow from faulty understanding, so frequently flow from our faulty hearts and our faulty characters. So, we need to try to understand Spirit-filled or Spirit-led emotions constrained by the word of God.
One of the things I’ve learned about emotions, and this is important, is that in emotions flow from perceived reality, not necessarily actual reality. I remember a number of years ago I watched a movie entitled We Are Marshall, and this is about the tragedy that happened I think in the year 1970 where the entire Marshall football program went down in a plane crash. Almost everybody connected with that program, all the players, coaches, etc. And it tells a story. The lead is played by Matthew McConaughey, and how they tried to rebuild that football program. It’s interesting in the story, an assistant coach did not get on the plane with the rest of the team. And called to tell his wife he was going to go on a recruiting trip, but he didn’t get her on the phone. And I guess they didn’t have answering machines back then. So, he called a neighbor lady and said, “Please tell my wife I’m not getting on the plane. I’m going to be two more days doing some recruiting in West Virginia.” But she forgot to tell the wife.
And then when the plane crashed, the wife went to the site of the crash, which is right near where they lived, saw that there were no survivors, and immediately her worst fears were confirmed. And she believed that she was now a widow, that their children had no father. And she was weeping based on perceived reality, but the reality wasn’t true. It was appropriate to what she thought was true, but it wasn’t reality.
And so, I think our emotions are frequently like that. We think of things a certain way and we react. And we have to be transformed by the renewing of our mind so that we can see things properly and then react properly. But even when we see things properly, we don’t necessarily react properly. Our emotions are damaged. So, we want to see a healing work done in our emotional life. We want our emotions to be spiritually mature and controlled, constrained by the word of God. Many Christians think that they can’t control their emotions. It’s just how I feel. It’s nothing I can do to control, its just how I feel.
Well, that’s not true. We see in the story of Joseph when he saw his brothers after so many years, and it’s one of the most emotional stories in the entire Bible (Genesis 42). His brothers had conspired to sell him as a slave. They were going to kill him, to sell him as a slave into Egypt, all the cold-heartedness and the hatred. Now, many years later Joseph has ascended to be the number two man in all of Egypt, and God is at work. He begins to see the incredible providence of God. Seeing his brothers there and remembering their treachery, it says that he controlled himself. He controlled his emotions and had his servants serve the food. And so, emotions can be controlled. We don’t have to just give full vent to what we feel. We have to see the Lord through the Holy Spirit transform our emotions and make them healthy and appropriate.
Sometimes we underreact. We’re told to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. Sometimes we just don’t care about other people. So, we need to be healed so that we actually show appropriate levels of compassion to others. Other times we overreact, especially in anger. Sinful anger, we erupt into anger. And so, we want to have our emotions controlled by the Holy Spirit.
Now, let’s zero in on five key emotions in the Christian life. First, joy. Joy. I want to talk about joy first. Our God is a happy being. It says in Psalm 115:3, “Our God is in heaven. He does whatever pleases him.” It also says, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful in a few things; I’ll now entrust you with many things. Enter into the joy of your master.” He says that, Matthew 25:21, we are to enter into the joy of God.
we want to be joyful like God is. We want to be joyful because we know God, because we know Christ.
And so, we want to be joyful like God is. We want to be joyful because we know God, because we know Christ. We want to have a joy that never ends. We want to rejoice always, as Paul says. And again, I say rejoice. We want our salvation to bring us consistent joy. And so, in life, we’re going to sometimes have sorrow. We’ll talk about that in a minute. Sorrowful, you’re always rejoicing. But rejoicing is there day after day. Sorrow may stay for an evening, but rejoicing comes in the morning (Psalm 30:5). And so, we want to rejoice consistently and trust in what God is doing. We want to put our happiness in Christ on display.
I also want to talk about sorrow as the second of the five emotions. There is an appropriate time to be sorrowful. As I just said, 2 Corinthians 6:10, “Sorrowful yet always rejoicing.” Whenever I hear that verse, I tend to put in some extra words to help me understand it. Sometimes sorrowful, but always rejoicing. Sometimes sorrowful, but always rejoicing.
There are sometimes that we’re going to have sorrow in the Christian life. We think about Jesus dying on the cross. And it said he did so, “For the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising its shame” (Hebrews 12:2). There was a deep sorrow in dying under the wrath of God for Jesus. Separated from God mysteriously, he said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Matthew 27:46). So, there is an appropriate sorrow in the Christian life.
I think especially when I think about our sinfulness. We sometimes just need to, as James says, “Grieve, mourn and wail. Change our laughter to mourning and our joy to gloom” (James 4:9). The Puritan, Thomas Watson and his great book on repentance said, “There’s no way you can genuinely repent without feeling deep sorrow for sin.” So, there is an appropriate sorrow that comes over our sin. But not only that, there’s an appropriate sorrow that comes from the sinful state and actions of others. We can just be sorrowful over the general state of immorality in our country or in our city. “This Lot was greatly grieved by what he saw day after day. His righteous soul was tormented by the lawless deeds he saw and heard,” it says in 2 Peter 2:8 about Lot. And so also Paul was in great sorrow and unceasing anguish over the lostness of the Jewish people who were rejecting Christ. He wished that he could exchange his own salvation for theirs if that could be possible. We know that Jesus wept over Jerusalem. So, there is an appropriate sorrow in the Christian life.
There’s also compassion, as we said this, the number one emotion that Jesus showed. And we want to be compassionate. I mentioned just a moment ago, “Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn” (James 4:9). We should genuinely care about what’s going on in other people’s lives. Our love should be sincere, Romans 12:9. That is unhypocritical. We should genuinely be sympathetic and feel what other people feel.
And then there’s fear. There is an appropriate healthy fear in the Christian life. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). We should have a fear of our own internal sinfulness and what it might do to our lives. We should fear the Lord’s discipline in relation to our sins. We should have a genuine fear for the lost people around us who themselves don’t fear that they’re heading toward hell, but we should fear that they’re heading toward hell. We should fear on their behalf.
And yet for all of that, we should be delivered from fear of man. We should fear God. As Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body and after that can do nothing to you. But I’ll tell you who to fear, fear the one who has the power to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). So healthy fear is part of the Christian life.
There should be a fiery love for the glory of God and for the souls of others and for holiness, our personal holiness. These things should be inflamed within us.
And then finally, zeal. Zeal is a relentless energy, a passion for the glory of God and for the benefit of our neighbors. Zeal consumed Jesus. Zeal for God’s house consumed him. As I mentioned, there was a fire inside him. Paul said, “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor serving the Lord” (Romans 12:11). There should be a fiery love for the glory of God and for the souls of others and for holiness, our personal holiness. These things should be inflamed within us. We should not be indifferent about them, bored or mellow or maintain an even strain about those things. There should be a fiery zeal inside our hearts. So those five emotions I think are things we should see developed.
What about faulty emotions? Remember I mentioned about that movie, We Are Marshall, and how often our emotions are tied to a faulty perception of reality? And therefore, they’re messed up. We are very messed up people and therefore our emotions are messed up. But the Bible is filled with human beings who display faulty emotions, messed up emotions. Let’s take for example, Jonah being very angry that God forgave the Ninevites. Remember that? He said, “I’m angry enough to die” (Jonah 4:9). I’ve never seen a preacher in history or heard of a preacher in history that was so successful in his preaching ministry and so angry about that success. He really just wanted God to wipe out the Ninevites. So, we need to be corrected from sinful anger. Our anger is like moral filth, James says, we need to be corrected from that.
We need to be corrected from faithless sadness. There’s sometimes that we get sad when it’s not appropriate to be sad. Look at Mary in front of the empty tomb. She’s weeping (John 20). And the angels that are there to say, “He’s not here. He has risen.” The angels are there and they’re saying, “Woman, why are you weeping?” And she says, “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him” (John 20:13). She thinks he’s still dead, the corpse is missing. And so therefore she has this faulty sadness. And so also the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, “We had hoped, they said, “that he was going to be the one that would redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21), but now our hopes are dashed, they were saying. They had a faithless sadness, and they both had to be corrected from faulty sadness.
What about discouragement? We need to be corrected from being discouraged. I think in the hymn What a Friend We Have in Jesus it says, “We should never be discouraged, take it to the Lord in prayer.” I think that’s absolutely true. I want to say more about that in just one minute, at the end of this podcast.
We need to be corrected from sinful fear. Fear of man is a snare. And we need to not fear people so much that we don’t share the gospel with them. We need to be corrected from anxiety. Anxiety is a faulty use of imagination. You think of what could happen in the future and you get anxious, but we’re told, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7).
We need to be corrected from a lack of shame over sin. We need to be corrected from a lack of Christian affection for others. We are in need of healing, emotionally, emotional healing. We want our emotions to correspond to biblical truth and to the appropriate circumstance and to be conformed to Christ.
Now, one last thing I want to say about emotions. When we do get depressed, when we do get discouraged, we need to take ourselves in hand and preach to ourselves. There was a great book that I read, Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Spiritual Depression. And he zeroes in on Psalm 42 and 43 in which the psalmist says repeatedly, “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God for I’ll yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”
So, what Lloyd-Jones says in that book is so often spiritual depression comes because we listen to ourselves rather than preaching to ourselves. We need to take ourselves in hand, our souls in hand and say, why are you downcast? Has Christ not died for your sins? Has he not been raised from the dead? Has he not promised that you’ll live with him for all eternity? Don’t listen to yourself saying, oh, what a terrible day, what a bad thing. All this murky stuff that’s going on. Instead, preach biblical truth to yourself. I feel like for myself as a regular preacher of the word, one of the things I’m doing is to teach the men and women of my congregation to preach well to themselves, to preach biblical truth to themselves throughout the week.
Well, we’ve looked today at the emotional life of the Christian and how we are to be conformed to Christ in our emotional life. And as we conclude today, I want you to go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything you experienced this week to sanctify you and to bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
