Emotions Were Given To Us By God

John 22:39-44

"And coming out, He went to the Mount of Olives, as He was accustomed, and His disciples also followed Him. When He came to the place, He said to them, 'Pray that you may not enter into temptation' And He was withdrawn from them about a stones throw and He knelt down and prayed, saying 'Father, if it is Your will, remove this cup from Me, nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.' Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. And His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground..."

Even our Lord Jesus Christ had emotions in His fully human and fully God state.  He suffered everything that we have and more as human beings.  We do not need to pretend we have no emotions in order to appear more spiritual than anyone else. We are free to express our emotions as we trust Him through them.  

God said that we were to "weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh."  We are to share in the difficulties and the joys of our Christian brothers and sisters.  God says that we do not have the spirit of fear, this is true, but that does not mean that we never feel fear if we are spiritual.  We give those fears to the Lord and proceed in obedience in spite of them.  We do not walk a lifestyle of fearfulness; we know where we are going and Who is in charge.

Fear is an emotion, we feel happiness over good things that happen to us and we feel sadness or fear over difficult things, this is the human condition and while Christ was on the earth He too experienced fear and sadness, but obeyed the Father anyway.  That is our challenge, to obey in spite of our emotions.  

There are those who would tell you that if you fear you do not have faith and you are sinning.  This could not be farthest from the truth.  God sometimes takes away our fears and other times He leaves them in tact to strengthen our resolve to obey Him in spite of whatever we must go through.  There is no faith required to do a thing if it has no fear or difficulty in the process.  Faith is demonstrated when we obey no matter what we may have to endure.  Faith is present through the tears, fear and danger; this is the mark of a spiritual believer, one who obeys no matter what the feelings are.  

Feelings are emotions, God gave them to us, but they are not indicators of our spirituality.  Our actions and heart attitudes are the real indicators not the feelings.  

If we were not to have the feeling of fear, then we would not have the feeling of happiness, joy or peace.  These are all a part of the equation in the Christians life.  If we should deny any of them then we would have to deny all of them, the joy, happiness and peace too, not just the fear and sadness.  

Such silliness in thinking that we are not spiritual if we admit our feelings.  Those who are prideful and want to pretend that they are more spiritual than others by denying feelings, a natural experience of the human condition, are in a sense lying.  They claim that if we are walking in faith we never feel fear, disappointment or sadness, but they like to embrace the other feelings of happiness, joy and peace.  Did God make a mistake when He gave us all these feelings, did He not mean it when He says He catches all our tears in a bottle.  Did He lie to us when He said "with great wisdom comes great sorrow."   

If we love God, the closer we walk with Him and grow in holiness the worse the sin in the world around us will appear. God told us to focus on Him and His principles, the more we do that the blacker the world looks and the more we are grieved over what we see.  

The deep down joy that the Lord gives us never leaves us because He lives in us, but the emotions still play a large roll in the shaping of our character.  How can a friend ever display tenderness and compassion if we are expected to never need their comfort.  God clearly stated that we should comfort one another in our troubles.  If sadness and fear were unspiritual then our Lord would have never wept over Jerusalem.  He would have never shed tears like great drops of blood at Gethsemane, nor would he have felt a sense of betrayal from Judas.  He felt all of that just as we feel those things when are faced with this life.  

Our comfort to one another should be, "we can get through this together with Christ."  Never should we intimate to a broken and bleeding soul that they are being unspiritual for having feelings.  When we share an emotion with our brother or sister we are showing the greatest kind of love, Christ's kind of love.