True Feelings

What do you think about your emotions: a curse or a blessing? I personally know very well what it means to feel overwhelmed by your emotions – positive and negative.

In their book „True Feelings“, Carolyn Mahaney and Nicole Whitacre write:

Did you know that our emotions are a gift from God?…He embedded emotions in our humanity to serve a useful purpose in our lives…Stifling our emotions is like marking „return to sender“ on God’s good gift… God created our emotions to work in harmony with our other two most fundamental faculties: the mind and the will. 

[But] sin disrupted the balance of our faculties. The mind, will, and emotions…now fight against each other. The emotions aren’t inherently bad or unruly, but sin has devastated our emotions…The good news is: through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God…empowers us to resist the temptation to sinful emotions, and enables us to express godly emotions (2 Cor. 5:17). 

So what do godly emotions feel like? When we believe what God commands us to believe and value what God commands us to value, we will have godly emotions.

[Because] emotions are reporters of the soul. They tell us who we really are. In other words, our emotions tell us what we value and believe…Our emotions don’t necessarily tell us the facts about the situation, rather they tell us our interpretation of the facts…Your feelings rise and fall based on what you believe about a situation… 

We may not be able to trace the source of every emotion, but we can know what God wants us to do with every emotion: bring them to him.

Love,
Mirjana Joy

P.S.: This is just a brief excerpt from the first chapters. The subject of „feelings“ is of course very complex.