Applying the Gospel Study Bible
Church & Ministry Resource Guide
What to Do When Your Feelings Don’t Line Up with God’s Word
Following Our Feelings
We live in a culture that tells us to follow our feelings. We hear things like Follow your heart or Do what makes you happy. We’re told to Live your truth, and that means that truth is defined by what you feel and what you think is true. There are some good impulses there that we want to pay attention to. We don’t want to stuff and ignore our feelings, but there can be a big difference between cultivating a healthy emotional life and letting our feelings begin to run our lives.
And so, as believers, we want to be careful to keep in mind what the Scripture says about our hearts—that they are deceitful above all things and desperately sick. And so when we realize that our hearts (our feelings, in other words) can deceive us, we need to be a little bit skeptical of them.
And so instead of just following them blindly and doing whatever our feelings would lead us to do, we want to line them up with Scripture and ask, Okay, I feel this, but what does God’s word say about that? And if we find that there’s a difference between what our feelings are saying and what the Scriptures say, then we have to submit our feelings to the word of God.
Turn Your Eyes
Winfree Brisley, Sharonda Cooper
Turn Your Eyes provides a structured, step-by-step method to help readers observe, interpret, and apply the Psalms, helping us turn to God in every season and circumstance of life.
Now, that’s easier said than done because, of course, just because we decide that our feelings about something might be misguided or not based on truth, it doesn’t mean that that feeling is going to immediately go away. It’s not quite that simple. And so what do we do when we realize we’re feeling a certain way about something but it’s not lined up with God’s word? I think there are a few things that we can do to work through that.
Paul often encourages us to set our minds on what’s true. He talks about whatever is lovely, whatever is pure, whatever is excellent, whatever is praiseworthy, think about such things. And so we can choose to focus our thoughts by finding a passage of Scripture or a particular truth that speaks to the issue that we’re dealing with, really meditate on that, commit it to memory, and choose to set our minds on that truth. But of course, we want our hearts to come along. It’s not just about how we think we’re dealing with our feelings, and so we also want to be prayerful to ask the Holy Spirit, who is indwelling us and who can change our hearts, to be working in us and to help our hearts to come along and to be aligned with the truth of God’s word.
If we find that there’s a difference between what our feelings are saying and what the Scriptures say, then we have to submit our feelings to the word of God.
A final encouragement I would give is that sometimes we also need to go ahead and act in accordance with what we know to be true, even if it’s not what we feel like we want to do. My dad, who is a retired pastor, has often said that sometimes we have to act ourselves into a new way of feeling. And so what he’s getting at there is that if we only ever do what we feel like, then we may not always be living in obedience to God’s word.
When we see in the Scriptures that God has called us to live in a certain way or do a certain thing and that’s not really how we’re feeling, we can still choose to act in obedience and to live in accordance with the truth of God’s word. And then we usually will find that as we do that, he is faithful to bring our hearts along. And so sometimes it’s as we’re setting our minds on the truth and as we are living in accordance with God’s word that the Holy Spirit will work in our hearts and help our hearts to come into alignment with God’s word.
Winfree Brisley is the coauthor with Sharonda Cooper of Turn Your Eyes: A Bible Study on the Psalms.
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