The Spirit and Our Emotions, Part 1

Today Chuck Swindoll talks about the spirit and our emotions. I think you will realize that the spirit of God does in fact ignite feeling and sometimes it is the feeling that becomes the final assurance that God is in it. There are occasions in my life where the feeling happened to be the most sensitive touch of the spirit of God on any given day. Our emotions run the gamut from sorrow to bliss from churning to chilled out from suspicion to certainty.

So here's the question. Can we really trust our emotions or is it wise to ignore them. Perhaps we should insist on facts and stifle or today on Insight for living.

Chuck Swindoll offers biblical wisdom on the essential role of our emotions, you might be surprised to learn that God often uses our feelings as a means for getting her attention. Chuck titled today's message the spirit in our emotions. I don't how you were raised as a little file I can only myself. There were a number of lessons that were drilled into me. Perhaps you have the same kind of upbringing. In fact, on occasion, they will come back and play themselves in the recorder of my mind, one of them was don't slam the door. Sounds like some of you had the same thing drilled and you eat everything on your plate. Remember that one. You can take whatever you wish, but whatever you take, eat as I got a little older one that came home to her to roost on a number of occasions and it was repeated again and again, especially by my mother was you cannot trust your feeling. You cannot trust your feeling the thought went something like this. Emotions are unstable. You can't rely on them.

What you really want son is the facts as I became a Christian.

This was affirmed and reaffirmed by various teachers and pastors right up through my years in seminary you cannot rely on the feeling sits as if the feelings don't even exist and if they do discount or ignore them. What you really want is facts and as you build a life in Christ you want faith to accompany the facts, but get them in line 1st facts and then on the basis of the facts faith and in the feelings will catch up feelings will fall in line. Interesting. I was reading this past week of a man who heard as a little boy an old story that was passed along to him that that sort of reaffirmed the same things I've been I've been saying. He said that he was taught about a story regarding Mr. faith Mr. facts and Mr. feelings. He said they were companions together along the tricky pathway. The first to follow facts, who was in the lead story taught me writes the author that objective truth facts was what mattered, and that my eyes of faith should be banned on facts rather than on my emotions. Mr. faith. You may remember, was often bothered when Mr. feelings got into difficulties.

However, when he took his eyes off facts and turned to help Mr. feelings he himself invariably got into trouble until he remembered that his job was to follow facts, not to worry about feeling them according to the story. Sooner or later the feelings would catch up. Well, I have lived long enough to learn that the story is both true and false. I know my mother met well I know that my faith must begin with the facts of the gospel. I know that I have lived long enough to realize that facts must precede faith. However, I am not sure feelings always catch up in factor something within me that that rebels against the idea that the feelings are sort of unimportant parts of our lives to be ignored to be discounted to be questioned, as if feelings are never from the spirit of God.

It is as if the Lord ignites facts. It is as if the spirit empowers faith but but there's no place in our theology for feeling I was raised like that. Maybe you were to agree with that.

I don't think that supported in the Scriptures as a matter of fact before I'm through today. In this particular talk. I think you will realize that the spirit of God does in fact ignite feelings and sometimes it is the feeling that becomes the final assurance that God is in it and I think it is erroneous to live our lives, ignoring, discounting and questioning the presence of feeling on the contrary, there are occasions in my life where the feelings happen to be the most sensitive touch of the spirit of God leading me or stopping me are causing me to question cautioning me and sometimes rebuking me see, God has made us whole people.

We are not simply a great big intellect.

We are not simply body of faith acting on intellect we are whole people, and in the process of maturing and growing in Christ both mind and heart go together as well as the whole presence of will show you that got hold of a Bible and turn to Genesis chapter 1, which is of course the great creation chapter of the Bible recorded in this first chapter are those things God created it is a general summary of the six days of creation before he sets aside the seventh day for rest. God, in no particular order that I am naming them created the universe the sun the moon and the stars separated day from night created land and the vast waters about the land created life plant life.

The fish of the sea, the fowl of the air and all the way through these five days of creation God paused to say that's good, that's good, that's very good, and then on the sixth day. Verse 26 the Godhead together agrees that there will be the crowning point of creation, the father the son the spirit agreed to make mankind to make humanity Homo sapiens. Unlike the beasts of the earth. Unlike the birds of the sky.

Unlike the fish of the sea, all of whom are created after their kind, and according to their specie.

God creates man let us make man in our image, according to our likeness intriguing words.

Everything generally speaking, God gave mankind something he did not give the animal kingdom. He did not give the plant kingdom. He did not give the stellar spaces he did not even give angels when he created man and I use that in the broadest generic sense when God created man, he gave man a personality like unto his own in his own image, he created them male and female he created them. Let's analyze that for a few moments.

First of all, God has a mind God has intellect and so when he created Adam, he created a being with an intellect of mind. Adam was given intelligence higher intelligence than that which was found among all the other creative life. Adam chapter 2 verse 20 gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky and every beast of the field. So Adam had a mind, and with the mind he exercised intellect and he was able to look at and give a name to the other created things in those other species of life when God gave Adam and Eve. Adam perceived in his mind and communicated about her verse 23 of chapter 2 Adam looks at this marvelous creation. This woman even eat. He says this is not how it is in the Hebrew. It's like now at last. Finally, this is at last bone of my bone and flesh of my flight. He communicates about what you what he witnesses in this lovely the presence of this lovely being who is to be his wife and in his intellect he sees and he makes statements about her. Ultimately, Adam was to use his mind to know is God. Mankind knows God unlike any beast of the field bird of the air or fish of the sea, or plant within the ground. None of those things. None of those creatures. None of those growing things worship only man with an intellect to know God knows the joy the privilege in the and and has an understanding of of his God. So Adam was given a mind and the reason he was given a mind was that in initially and, of course, ultimately, he was to know is God now. Secondly, God has a heart and I use that again is a symbol for emotions and so God created Adam with a heart when he created him in his own image. He gave mankind the capacity to feel not only intellect the capacity to think gave him the ability to feel not referring to the organ that pumps blood understand, but to a capacity to experience emotions. The full range of emotions from intense love and joy to intense anger and rage wrath the full spectrum of emotion. Adam loved and was affectionate with his wife.

There was an intimacy about their relationship. That sin has interrupted an intimacy that we cannot duplicate today because at times.

I envy the relationship. Adam and Eve had to get before Santa encroached upon the relationship. There was a naked unguarded lack of self-consciousness that gave them such access to one another's hearts that their relationship was absolutely intimate. No reservations.

No holding back. No struggle with one another.

No one upmanship no fighting for authority no battle with the will, in those in those days of of of innocence. Adam and Eve had these feelings for one another. The emotional capacity within humanity has been given that Adam might use his emotions to love his God stay with me through this is terribly important isn't just theology.

This is theology that gives you a foundation for what were going to be developing man was given a mind to know God. Man was given a heart he was given emotions to love God, you already anticipate the third God has a will on his pollution. God acts God decides God moves God directs. These are all activities of the will and so when God created Adam in his own image. He gave Adam something you did not give animal plant, fish, or foul life. He gave pollution the ability to make decisions. The ability to overpay to carry out God's plan. See chapter 2 verse 16 the Lord God commanded the man up there had not been a will, within man. The command would have fallen flat would've been a futile statement, but he commanded the man, he addressed his intellect.

He called upon his will and he said from any tree of the garden you may eat freely, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you show not eat for the day that you eat from it you shall surely die. God appeals Adams will in giving this command.

Do not eat of this tree you cut an entire garden to enjoy enjoy all of it when you come to this particular growing tree. Do not eat from it.

Ultimately, Adam was to use his will to obey his God man is been given a mind to know God emotions to love God and the will to obey God. My point, I think, is now obvious.

We are not whole in the sense of complete and God in our God-given personality unless all three are present and at work in us and in our walk with Christ. We are not giant creatures of intellect or creatures with giant intellect and wills that follow we are people with intellect. People with wills and people with emotion, all of which are part of being a whole person and even though the emotional part of our being is the most fluctuating and then that my mother was exactly right.

You cannot trust those feelings there up and down there hi there hello there hot there cold, whereas those facts stand firm like a spear in a blizzard. They won't fluctuate. They won't change. They can be proven. Hang onto those facts build your faith on your fat. However, there are places in the Christian life where the spirit of God ignites our emotions and prompts our feeling and when he does that I have been in occasions where it is nothing short of electrifying. I am certainly not the first to recognize the value of one's emotion. This is not virgin soil that I am plowing all of us have known these things we just perhaps having given ourselves permission to see them or to think them for the spirit of God is obviously present for he is doing his work of cleansing and convicting where he is bringing joy and delight and praise. We know firsthand the experiences of revival and there cannot be revival without emotions cannot be Jonathan Edwards, one of the early revivalists and one of the brilliant men of God in the 1700s grappled with all that was happening in the revival that was sweeping across New England. If you read the works of Jonathan Edwards. You will read a virtually a blow-by-blow account of his wrestling's with God's feelings about his is learning from God regarding revival that was coming across and happening in the land in the region of New England he found in his study that there was a parallel track between will and emotion. Then they traveled together. Edwards, a man of enormous intellect, graduating in his teens from his university, the highest level of his university studies. He's not a man who is a sort of half-baked stumbling into theology.

He is a man who writes deeply and and feels deeply about his about his theology.

He uncovers this parallel track of emotion and will he believe that teachers are in great error.

If they are for discarding all religious affections as having nothing solid or substantial in them. Edwards taught. He taught that emotions and volition were parallel motions of the soul toward or away from something referring. For example, to fear. One of the many emotions he he develops in his writings. He expressed that people tremble at God's word. They fear before him. Their flesh trembles because of because of him.

They are afraid of his judgments. His as his spirit falls upon them. He also declared and I quote from the works of Jonathan Edwards, a treatise concerning religious affections.

There never was anything considerable brought to pass in the heart or life of any man living by the things of religion that had not his heart deeply affected the those thing until somehow. Your will attaches itself to the feelings of your being.

Nothing will be changed in your heart.

Nothing deep, nothing lasting say the same for myself. All this leads us to some examples in of God's creative work within us, what he made us liken to himself and provides us with the reason to go into some of these God-given emotions now turn next to second Corinthians chapter 4 you do that second Corinthians chapter 4 when you get there. Hold your place and also observe first Corinthians chapter 2 on a look at that two verses side-by-side. First Corinthians 2 and second Corinthians to nine and 46. I want to show you that God's work in salvation is directed to the heart, not just the mind that when the Lord does a saving work in the life of the center. He addresses the heart of an individual.

Second Corinthians 46 for God, who said light shall shine out of darkness, is the one who has shown in our there it is in our emotions in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face crimes God's work of salvation is directed to the heart stated near Christianity is not just the cold, calculating decision of the mind are his time. In fact, first Corinthians to nine state things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him were not quite finished with this study from Chuck Swindoll. There's much more to learn about the spirit in our emotions. To learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit us online@insideworld.org. Inside for living ministries. It pleases us that God uses this daily program is a channel for communicating his truth especially when it comes to these important issues of discernment such as learning to hear God's still small voice to that and were pleased to equip you with helpful Bible study tools. For instance, every sermon in the study about the Holy Spirit is accompanied by an in-depth guide that you can freely download to help you search the Scriptures using the same method Chuck uses. In fact we call these resources are searching the Scriptures.

Studies all the details can be found@insight.org/studies.

In addition to the study notes.

Chuck is written the book about the Holy Spirit. It's titled embraced by the spirit. Let's face it, most of us are intrigued by this third person of the Trinity, but we hold back because were afraid of mistaking our emotions for the voice of God. Well, in his book Chuck brings clarity to topics like this one using Scripture as the guide to purchase a copy of embraced by the Spirit. Call us if you're listening in the United States, call 800-772-8888 or visit insight.org/store word of thanks to those who give generously to insight for living you're making it possible for us to provide these daily Bible teaching programs and I can assure you. Your donations are truly making a difference. I just saw this encouraging note from a loyal friend said God has used inside for living to save my life and my marriage. We listen and study every single day with Pastor Chuck. Well as you can see as you get to insight for living. You are truly making it to give a donation today by speaking with one of our ministry reps give us a call if you're listening in the United States, call 800-772-8888 and for online giving, go to insight.org/travelers who want to take a tour to Israel have lots of choices, but if you measure up to the thoughtful journey prepared by insight for living ministries with the proper mix of historical information and biblical context.

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When Chuck Swindoll continues his message about the spirit in our emotions tomorrow on insight for living.

The preceding message the spirit and our emotions was copyrighted in 1993 and 2003 and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2003 by Charles R. Swindoll. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited