By J. Alasdair Groves
My Personal Takeaways →Groves and Smith argue that emotions are gifts from God that reveal what we love, what we fear, and where we need growth. Rather than suppressing feelings or being ruled by them, the book teaches how to understand emotional patterns and respond with biblical wisdom, honesty, and love.
The central move of the book is treating emotions as data, not drivers: your anger, fear, or sadness reveals something true about what you value or believe — but it does not dictate what you should do. Read this if you tend toward either emotional avoidance or emotional flooding. Implement it by learning to name emotions precisely, trace them to underlying beliefs or loves, bring them to God in honest prayer, and then choose a response grounded in character rather than feeling. This is one of the most practically useful books on emotions from a Christian perspective.
By J. Alasdair Groves and Winston T. Smith
The way you respond to your emotions, including how you feel about how you feel, is of vital importance to your relationship with God and others in your life. Our emotions are one of the most common and commonly misunderstood opportunities in our lives to grow in maturity and love. They have the power to deeply enrich our relationships or drive wedges into them.
Here are a few of the critical truths we will be exploring together: Emotions are an essential way we bear God’s image. God expresses emotions, and he designed us to express emotions too.
In the Gospels we witness Jesus’s compassion for suffering and heartache. We see his anger as he speaks to callous religious leaders. We hear his groans as he grieves over unbelief and death. As we live in relationship with him, he actually begins to work in us to give us hearts increasingly like his own, hating what he hates and loving what he loves.
Standing with Mary, the sister of his close friend Lazarus, and staring at her brother’s fresh grave, Jesus is stabbed by grief and breaks down in tears (John 11:32–36). Now think about this: As God, Jesus controls the entire universe and can change anything at any time. In fact, he is going to raise Lazarus from the dead in around five minutes. Why on earth would Jesus weep when he’s about to do an amazing miracle and fix the problem? Because he’s perfect. He cries at the death of his friend and is deeply moved by Mary’s anguish because that is what love does when confronted with loss. Jesus is the only perfect human being who has ever lived, and that is why he does not refuse to share the pain of those he loves. Not even for ten minutes. Not even when he knows their sorrow is about to turn to astonished exultation.
The basic reason we need negative, unpleasant emotions is that we live in a fallen world. God made us to respond to things as they actually are. Human beings should be distressed by what is distressing, horrified by violence and abuse, deeply concerned (we’d call it “anxious”) about the possibility of injury to someone or something we love, angry at arrogant injustices. To not feel grief when someone we love dies, to not feel discouraged when we find ourselves falling into the same pattern of sin yet again, to not be upset when our children lie or hurt each other would be wrong. Even Job, the man who lost everything in a day and still worshiped God and submitted in faith to God’s control, “arose and tore his robe and shaved his head [a sign of grief] and fell on the ground” when he heard about the death of his children and the ravaging of his vast wealth (Job 1:20). You were made in the image of God himself, and that means you were made to see the world as he sees it, to respond as he responds, to hate what he hates, and to be bothered by what brings him displeasure.
It doesn’t stop with anger and grief. God is frequently “jealous” for the affection, loyalty, and worship of his people. In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus trembles and sweats blood from some combination of dread, anguish, and loneliness.
A day is coming when we will never again feel sorrow or anger or fear or disgust, because there will be nothing at which to be sorrowful or angry or afraid or disgusted. Until that day, however, it is only by entering into both the joys and the pains of God’s love for his children that we can live in honest, wise relationship with the One who made us. Only those who love the Lord enough to open their hearts to the pain in his world will be able to enter into his joy as well.
Understanding what “causes” emotions is a critical step in learning to deal with them.
So the wisest answer to the question Do emotions originate in the mind or the body? is “probably both.” Sometimes the body will seem to be the initiator or to even have the upper hand. At other times and in other situations our beliefs and interpretations will seem to be the most powerful factors. Understanding how to identify what factors are most in play and how to respond to them requires wisdom and practice.
Perhaps one of the most important things the Bible tells us about our emotions is that they are an expression of what we value or love.
There is a very real sense in which sharing our emotions with each other actually strengthens our relationships. Have you ever noticed this in your own life? Take a mental inventory of the people you feel closest to. It’s likely you’ve had some experiences with them in which you’ve shared some of your deepest thoughts and feelings, or at least both experienced strong emotions. There’s a very good reason for that. Sharing in the experiences of others is fundamental to the very nature of love. Paul writes in Romans 12:9, “Let love be genuine” and then follows that with a laundry list of the many ways genuine love is expressed in relationships. He describes one of those ways in verse 15: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” In other words, one of the ways sincere love is shared is by emotionally entering into the experience of others.
Remember from the last chapter how Jesus’s grief over Lazarus’s death revealed his heart? In the same way, Jesus’s willingness to enter into the grief of Lazarus’s sisters was an expression of his love for them. He literally mourned with those who mourned, grieving the ugliness of sin and death and entering into the way it touched those he loved.
Emotions serve a third purpose: they give us the physical energy and motivation to do things. If you’ve ever wrestled with anger, you’ve probably noticed that it can actually feel like a surge of energy. Your heart begins to pound, your temperature rises, and adrenalin begins to rush through your veins. Suddenly it’s like you’ve got to actually do something about your anger. It is a call to action. That’s why people so often show their anger with physical action, from shutting a drawer just a little bit harder than they needed to all the way to breaking plates and punching walls. It feels like there is energy inside demanding to be released.
Our emotions are an expression of worship.
The first great commandment describes our duty to worship. We should love God with all that we are, every element of our lives—heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second great commandment is like it in that it is an extension or application of the first. Our worship or love of God must be reflected in the way we treat others. So we can’t segment our lives into pieces and call one of those pieces worship. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t love people or things other than God. But our love for God should shape all our other loves or commitments.
Our emotions never come in single file! Life isn’t that simple. The vast majority of the time, human beings are awash with different, even conflicting emotions.
Confusion about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it is very normal. The reason is simple: you love lots of things. If what you love and care about shapes what you feel, then the fact that you love many things means you are always going to be simultaneously responding to different pieces of the world around you differently.
Or take Matthew 23, where Jesus lays into the Pharisees and teachers of the law for their hypocrisy and hard hearts with his most extended, sledgehammer-like rebuke. But then, after thirty-some verses of intense critique, Jesus gives voice to one of the most poignant laments in all of Scripture, his heart overflowing with compassion for the very people he has just chastised: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matthew 23:37).
The bottom line is this: mixed emotions are the right response to a mixed world. Life in this world means the delightful glories of God’s handiwork always get the muck of sin and suffering spattered on them.
We need to remember that we will never exhaustively understand all the streams from our hearts into our emotions, and we don’t need to! Instead, all we need to do is bring whatever we do manage to understand to God and entrust him with all the hidden corners of our hearts, loves, and feelings that we can’t see into but he knows perfectly.
Two particular influences on our emotions (other than God himself) especially stand out for the constancy of their influence on our lives from the day we are born till the day we die: our bodies and our communities.
Your emotions don’t happen in the abstract; they happen in your body. Responding with emotion to something literally causes a physical reaction in your skin, your brain, and your blood. Have you ever stopped to reflect on just how odd, how nearly magical this is? Someone can say words into a phone a thousand miles away and make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The simple sight of a photograph can reach into your chest and make your heart pound. That we can change the flow of another person’s blood and brain chemistry by using mere syllables is a testimony to how profoundly God has made us creatures of meaning, beings whose lives and loves matter. Our bodies are the messengers of our souls, and they cry aloud over and over again that we care deeply about the purpose, outcome, and experiences of our lives.
As common sense suggests, regular exercise, sufficient sleep, being warm (or cool) enough, having a full (but not stuffed) belly, and a hundred other physiological experiences make it easier for our emotions to line up with God’s.
Take about fifteen seconds and do three things: Consciously relax your shoulders. Tilt your head slowly backward as far as you comfortably can. Take several deep breaths. What did you notice? Did you find tension in your back, shoulders, neck, or chest? Were you consciously aware of the tension two minutes ago before you stopped and did this experiment? Did breathing and relaxing your muscles leave you feeling any different? For the vast majority of us, the back-and-forth between our bodies and our souls is happening in the background, and 99 percent of the time we don’t notice it at all. Yet every moment we spend unconsciously tensed reinforces to our bodies subtly that our lives are stressful. Further, the natural result of your body endlessly telling you that life is stressful is a deepening cycle of your body becoming just that much tenser.
Your body is the vehicle through which the passion of your soul flows. The basic point is this: no matter how much we come to understand about the biology of our brains, we will still always need to wrestle with our emotions as expressions of what we love.
Paul writes, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor. 12:26; cf. Rom. 12:15). The observation is simple but profound. To relate to one another the way God wants us to means to be fully engaged in the experiences of the other.
When you do notice emotion or even a surprising change in someone—a usually boisterous friend is reserved and distant, a sibling seems flustered—slow down and ask questions about what’s going on. Or, if questions don’t seem appropriate or welcome, stop and put yourself in the other person’s shoes and imagine what might make you feel that way.
That’s why not sharing emotions in a relationship is a problem. No matter how deeply you love and are connected to someone, a lack of emotional expression and connection communicates a lack of love, which can have a subtle corrosive effect over time.
The biblical goal of emotional connection is not that you follow a specific formula or phrasing; the goal is honest vulnerability about the things that are truly on your heart, and sincere interest in and empathy for the matters that excite or discourage your loved ones.
Imagine how you would feel if your spouse professed wholehearted love for you and handed you a dozen roses or a new watch, but did it all in a mechanical voice and with a look of total disinterest. You would probably wonder if your spouse really meant it. In fact, you might justifiably suspect that something was very wrong. The actions and words would communicate love, but the tone and lack of emotional expression would communicate apathy or manipulation. Emotions are not at the center of what love is, but they are a critical way of expressing it and connecting to others.
While emotional connection is not the only way we connect, this sharing of hearts and values and communicating a depth of care for others will be part of our delight for the rest of our lives, even our lives in heaven. All the images we have of heaven are of people sharing the joy of delighting in the King on his throne, singing together, expressing their collective passion for all he has done and who he is.
The author of Psalm 42 provides us with one of the clearest examples. He famously writes that his soul “thirsts for God” like a “deer pants for flowing streams” (vv. 1–2). What is less well known is that he spends the rest of the psalm wrestling with his emotions, twice asking, Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? (vv. 5, 11). Even as he fights to remember the good things God has done and urges himself to hope in the Lord, his feelings seem to stay stuck, doggedly resisting his efforts to change them. This lack of immediate change in the psalmist’s feelings, however, doesn’t mean his battle with his feelings is pointless. Nor does it mean he’s fighting poorly. It simply means that he is human, and that the world around him must change at a significant level for his significant emotions to change.
A vital, active relationship with a good and sovereign God matters a lot to your emotional life.
For this reason, part 2 of this book is not going to be full of tips for working directly on your emotions for the purpose of changing them. What it will do is give suggestions at many levels, including things you can do with body and mind, to participate with God in a process of ongoing heart change.
Just as cookies are a terrible nutritional center for your diet, so emotions make a terrible central priority for your life.
Presumably part of its popularity derives from the way mindfulness effectively pushes back against the dominant narrative of emotions-are-everything, which leaves people with no easy way to guard against the flood of emotions they feel. While we believe that the Bible offers something richer than mindfulness practices, our goal in raising the issue of mindfulness is not actually to critique it (or commend it). We are simply pointing out that, even in this emotion-worshiping culture, the hottest strategy for emotional self-regulation right now is actually on the stoic side of the spectrum.
The Bible’s model of engaging emotions means something very simple: when an emotion comes on your radar, you look at it, see what you find, and then (not before!) decide how to respond. The beauty of engaging is that it doesn’t judge your emotions ahead of time as either good or bad. When you engage something, you move closer and explore it, preparing yourself to deal with whatever you uncover.
If this is you, turn to someone you trust and ask, “What emotions do you see in me most often? What do they look like when I show them?”
For now, all we need to do is notice that Scripture’s first step in engaging emotions in the people it talks about is simply to identify their feelings.
In other words, examining emotions entails asking questions like Why am I feeling this? What am I reacting to? Why is this hitting me so hard? Why isn’t this affecting me the way it usually does? and How is this emotion making me want to behave?
Suppose you identify that you are feeling angry. As you examine your anger, you observe that you are mad about your wife breaking the lawn mower. When you first found out, you didn’t say anything, but you’ve been curt since and weren’t very talkative at dinner. Inside you keep thinking, She knows I always get to the lawn on Saturday; why couldn’t she just leave it alone? What can you learn about yourself from this? Here are a few possibilities. First, your anger is leading you to pull back (talking less than normal and less warmly than normal). Second, your emotion is leading to strain between you and your wife. Third, you value efficiency and comfort. Losing (you’d probably call it “wasting”) time or money on fixing the lawn mower pulls time and money away from other things you had wanted to accomplish or enjoy. If this is true, it makes you one of about 7 billion people on the planet who value having things go smoothly! Your anger is identifying this setback as a bad thing that should not have happened. Lastly, however, the frustrated thoughts running on loop in your head suggest that right now you care more about the inconvenience to you than the good intentions your wife showed in doing something to make your life better. You’re more concerned with the outcome than with her motives.
When you know that you are feeling, have named what you are feeling as best you can, and have decided which aspects of the feeling are good and which are bad, you are finally ready to act. While options for action are endless, proper responses to emotions fall into two fundamental categories. On the one hand, we want to embrace and nurture the loves of our heart and the behaviors that are good. On the other hand, we want to resist and even starve loves and actions that are bad.
All the internal self-awareness in the world doesn’t help if it doesn’t lead to change in relationship and action. He needs to begin by apologizing to her for being short. He may want to reassure her that it’s going to be okay. He should surely thank her for trying to take care of something for him. There may even be a place for him to make a gentle request that she get his input on lawn equipment in the future.
Psalm 62:8 captures it with profound simplicity: Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.
What does it mean to “pour out your heart”? The metaphor actually works nicely with our emotional paint-bucket analogy from chapter 3. Pouring out your heart simply means naming the colors you feel most strongly. It means bringing the sloshing mixture of churning paints to God and upending it into his hands one sentence at a time.
It doesn’t occur to us most of the time that prayer can and should include simply talking to God about what is on our hearts. Yet this is exactly what we observe over and over in the Psalms.
Countless verses echo the words of Psalm 71:3, Be to me a rock of refuge, to which I may continually come.
Scripture is full of similar promises. Why does Peter speak of “casting all your anxieties on him” (1 Peter 5:7)? Because, Peter tells us in the simplest of words, “he cares for you.”
If Jesus’s loves were perfect, then his emotions were perfect too. Doesn’t it seem like he shouldn’t have needed to bother with praying them? Yet pray them he did. Let’s start with the most vivid example: the garden of Gethsemane. When Jesus says, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38), what does he do? He doesn’t pull out an extra bottle of wine from the Last Supper and take the edge off. He doesn’t stand apart from his emotions to get some distance and seek to return to the calmness of his wise mind. He doesn’t even start reciting his favorite Bible verses and preach truth to himself so he can stay focused on doing the next task for God. Instead, he does two simple, relational things. He speaks honestly to his friends about the dread and ache he is feeling as he anticipates the coming twenty-four hours. (In some ways his choice to invite sinful humans into his emotions and ask their help in prayer is even more shocking than his need to bring his feelings to his Father!) Then, having asked for help from his disciples, he falls on his knees and pours out his heart to his Father, just as Psalm 62 urges.
The earnest tears of Gethsemane are the signature proof that our emotions, no matter how dark, are to be a door braced open between our innermost hearts and our Father’s throne room. If Jesus brought to his Father his desperate sorrow and urgent desire for a way out, how can we not also bring to our Father our muddled loves and the mixed feelings they produce?
Once you see Jesus’s engaging God in his emotions in the garden, you begin to see it everywhere. He engages God even in the unimaginable separation that takes place on the cross, using the words of Psalm 22:1 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He turns to his Father in Luke 10:21 and expresses joy that God brings the weak and lowly into the kingdom, setting a bar so low that even little children can enter (and the proud stumble over it).
Jesus actually needed to pray. He needed to bring his heart to his Father, to pour out his concerns—for himself, for those he loved, and for his mission—into the only ears that truly understand all, the only hands that can truly help.
If one of the core purposes of our emotions is to drive us to pour our hearts out to God, and if even Jesus needed to pour out his heart to God, why is walking through the open door toward God so hard for us? Several reasons spring to mind, but they are all variations on one central theme: we don’t fully trust him. But you will trust something. You will take your emotions to someone. At the end of the day, the only reason we ever fail to dash toward the Lord with any of our emotions is that we aren’t completely convinced it is worth it. The most common reason we escort our emotions elsewhere is that it never occurs to us to take them to God. We don’t trust him with our emotions because he seems irrelevant, or we assume we ought to get our act together before going to him. Many of us, even those of us who read our Bibles every morning, act as if our formal devotional time is the only slice of our day when we should or could interact with God.
Why is it such a big deal to bring your emotions constantly to God? Can he truly be asking us for even more than devotions in the morning, integrity in our business dealings, and refraining from yelling at the kids? It is a big deal to bring your emotions to God because reading your Bible, doing honest business, and keeping your cool as a parent are not the end goal of human life. Loving the Lord and walking with him is.
He has told you, O man, what is good; … to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)
Taking your emotions to God, walking through the open door, is as simple as talking to him throughout the day, turning to him with every blip on the emotional radar, every stronger eddy in the current of your feelings. Christian author and thinker Paul Miller once quipped that anxiety is wasted prayer. Was Miller saying that any experience of concern that bad things might happen is sinful? No. He simply meant that doing anything with our fears, especially chasing your thoughts on the hamster wheel of anxiety, short-circuits the very purpose for which God gave us the capacity to feel anxious. Our anxieties are meant to lead us straight to him. Every time.
We tend to make assumptions and launch accusations at the other person, which only lead to defensiveness and a counterattack from the other. Anger doesn’t have to be that way, but when we let it push its way to the front of the line, it tends to displace all the other emotions that help us connect initially—compassion, concern, and patience. So rather than leading with anger, slow down enough to connect with your genuine concern for the other person.
When you are working through your emotions with another person, it’s important to begin with your own vulnerability. Vulnerability extends an olive branch of charity instead of leading the conversation with accusations. If Roger were to initiate the conversation with vulnerability, he might say something like this to Jean: When we left the house, I felt like you were angry with me, and I didn’t want to be criticized. I wanted you to know I was upset, but I was so angry, I didn’t know what to say, and so I just retreated and got quiet. I’m sorry. I don’t want there to be icy silence between us. I want to be close to you. Can we talk about it?
Vulnerability is also very difficult; it feels much safer to hold back and blame each other than for each to take ownership of his or her own part in the conflict.
It takes two to keep a war going; when you lead with vulnerability, you are retreating from the battle by acting in humility, putting the good of restored relationship ahead of your own comfort or being “right.” Being the first to lay down your weapons and express a real desire to understand and be understood can be a scary thing to do. The willingness to take that risk on behalf of the other person, however, is precisely what makes vulnerability so powerful. You are signaling that it is safe for the other person to do the same. Might that person take that signal as a sign of weakness and choose to attack? Yes, but it embodies the grace that God has shown us in Jesus, and that is powerful.
Understand that God didn’t need to walk around in our world, but he did anyway. The best kind of love wants to walk around in the other’s world, to truly draw near even at the level of the heart. Part of vulnerability is saying in effect, “Let me get in your space so that I can truly understand you in love.”
You’ve got to credibly understand and articulately express the other person’s voice so that he or she knows that you know.
Both acknowledge their sins, repent, and ask forgiveness. But love requires them to look ahead. How can they make this less likely to happen again? Of course, no matter what they decide, there are no guarantees. In the moment, when emotions are running high, they may well have very similar responses, and the cycle will repeat. It will take courage for them not only to seek the Lord’s help and imagine how they might make different choices and respond differently but also to believe that they both will.
Most communication in any given conversation has much more to do with how something is said, than with the words themselves. In my experience, tone and facial expressions may be greater sources of misunderstanding and conflict than words. Words can be clarified with explanation, but if tone and facial expressions don’t line up with your words, or they even contradict them, then it’s going to be difficult to connect.
Watch out for eye rolling, heavy sighs, folded arms, and turning your body away from the other person. When trying to connect, keep an open heart and an open posture—sit down to talk, relax your face, face the other person, and even lean slightly toward him or her.
Our best relational moments—the ones we will look back upon with fondness as turning points and bonding moments with our loved ones—will be the times when we entered difficult emotional conflict by leading with vulnerability and empathy, following through with charity and patience, and letting them all frame the legitimate concerns anger may need to express.
This chapter, then, has a very simple goal: to lay out six accessible practices that will incubate and nourish a godly health and maturity in your emotions across the entire emotional spectrum. These suggestions are not tools for changing your emotions. Rather, they are ways to harness wise, normal, spiritual practices that will grow your love for what God loves and gradually mold your feelings to reflect the emotional life of our Lord.
Read Your Bible
How do the words of Scripture, in particular, alter your perspective for the better? In a thousand ways. They make you think about the trials and faith of the biblical characters, the similarity of your heart to theirs, and God’s faithfulness to them. God’s words soak your mind in explicit hopes, promises, comforts, reassurances, commands, reminders, and warnings. They call your attention to who God is, who you are, and how the world works. They engage your emotions directly through humor, lament, dry sarcasm, impassioned entreaty, and euphoric exaltation. They boost you up onto your mental tiptoes to peer through a window in history at God’s tender care for a young Moabite woman and her widowed Israelite mother-in-law, a youngest son whom God anoints to kill a giant and become a king, a self-righteous murderer who is knocked on his back and becomes a missionary. Words grab your attention and slip into your subconscious as they sing, preach, teach, and narrate.
Finally, the Bible impacts our emotions because when we encounter God’s words, we encounter God himself. To read the living Word of God is to relate to him. In Scripture, God both shares his heart and calls you to respond from yours. Reading Scripture is literally reading a message from God to you. It’s not solely to you, but when God speaks to his people—and if you are in Christ, you are one of his people—his words are intended to transform your way of life. One simple, practical way to respond to this relational aspect of Scripture is to write out your response to what you’re reading as if you were speaking directly to God.
Go Outside
We admit that ten minutes facing into the breeze or feeling the sun on your face won’t radically alter your mood most days. However, as with reading the Bible, it’s hard to overstate the value of regularly reminding your body and soul that you live on a larger stage and in a larger story than your messy house or the four walls of your office that surround you hour after hour.
The most important way I have put this into practice has been taking a walk during my work day—six minutes each way to the stone wall in the woods behind my office, a minute or so to stand, breathe, and watch the sunlight on the forest floor, then six minutes back through the pines and young maple saplings. This little stroll past growing plants and trees and singing birds pulls my mind and senses into contact with God. It reminds me that he is the giver of abundant life and has plans for renewing this world. It also reminds me to relax my tensed shoulders and inhale deeply.
Cultivate Good Negative Emotions
It’s telling that the sole example of a book of the Bible named after an emotion is not Joys but Lamentations. As counterintuitive (and countercultural) as it sounds, there are actually ways in which you should feel bad more often and more strongly than you do! We do not mean you should seek out melancholy moods for their own sake. Instead, we’re simply suggesting that as Christians we need to pour in time and effort to grow in godly guilt, grief, dismay, and the like because, as we have been saying since chapter 1, far too often we short-circuit God’s good purposes for our negative emotions. We crush them, deny them, or escape from them rather than letting them do their good and healthy work of driving us to him.
Probably the most important way to nurture uncomfortable emotions in our lives is by learning to lament. A lament is an honest, impassioned expression of sorrow, frustration, or confusion. Lament names a loss or injustice and the impact it has had. It is no accident that lament is the most common kind of psalm. The psalmists knew how badly our world is broken and turned instinctively and earnestly to God.
Psalm 13 is a good illustration of a lament. The author asks the Lord, “How long?” several times. He poignantly expresses feeling forgotten, abandoned, lonely, sorrowful, defeated, humiliated, and in deep despair. He asks God to hear him and see him and, implicitly, to have mercy on him. While he ends with clear hope, it is hope in a rescue that is not yet realized. In short, in the midst of anguish, the psalmist persistently pours out his heart to God. The psalms of lament take very seriously God’s promise that he cares for us.
Laments honor God in two ways. They stand with God and grieve the brokenness of the world as he does. God hates sin and suffering and will one day eradicate both. Laments yearn, ache, and call for the coming of that day. This orientation drives our souls to see the world as he does, a beautiful story in desperate need of the happy, heavenly ending that only he can bring.
Laments, however, are not the only way to engage God faithfully in our negative emotions. Guilt, for example, is a vital emotion to embrace. To experience in your gut that you have done wrong and that your only hope is to turn around and walk in the opposite direction is of enormous value. While guilt can easily misfire and lead to wallowing and ugly self-condemnation, its purpose is to turn us to the One who offers forgiveness.
Engaging godly doubt means bringing him your questions about the gap between the way he reveals himself to be perfectly good and just, on the one hand, and the way he allows terrible evil to befall people we know he promised to protect, on the other.
Build Altars
An altar is an acknowledgment that something important has happened and needs to be remembered. It serves as a long-term memory aid for who God is and what he had done (e.g., Genesis 28:10–22; Joshua 22:10–34; 1 Samuel 7:12).
Souvenirs compress a story into a single glance. Like souvenirs, altars communicate by reminding us of something: the great value and worth of the object of our worship. An altar can be a physical object or it can be any regular practice that reminds us of the value of the object of our worship. We need altars to God. They are reminders of his goodness and refreshing tastes of his kind and personal care for us. Our attention is so easily distracted, and our hearts so quickly forget all that he has done for us. It is no accident that Christ gave us bread and wine, elements we can smell, touch, see, and taste, to remind us over and over of his covenant. We consume them regularly until the day he comes back. We need to be told over and over and over again by all five of our senses that our God is with us. Every one of us needs to build altars that reorient us to God.
In summary, build altars in your life from whatever “stones” of God’s kindness and care are lying around. Such reminders can scale the walls of our distractions and lead formidable truths to capture our attention and hearts.
Cling to Corporate Worship
Unlike the highly personalized and private altars I just described, church services are public, obvious, and communal. Sunday worship moves our emotions because we are surrounded by other visitors to God’s house. In his house, surrounded by members of his family, we are tangibly reminded that we are not alone in this world.
The music of corporate worship can be transformative—which is exactly what many of us need.
“Singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength.
Watch for God on the Move
Lastly, seek out and seize every opportunity to hear about God’s work in the lives of others.
Similarly, Paul explains that those who have received “comfort” from God are now equipped to comfort others with the comfort they have received (2 Cor. 1:4). Simply hearing how God has tenderly cared for others can be a great encouragement.
Observe your community group and reflect on where they’ve grown in connecting with and caring for each other. Ask your spouse why he seems in such good spirits. Perhaps most basically, ask anyone what the Lord is doing in his or her life! ’Tis grace has brought us safe thus far, and tales of grace in others will help to lead us safely home.
Emotions would be so much easier if they were like an old western—if you could know the good guys by their white hats and the bad guys by their black hats. It would be simpler if we could just say that anger, anxiety, and depression are bad emotions, and happiness, contentment, and affection are good emotions. But as we’ve seen, that’s not how emotions work. We can’t just put black hats on some feelings and white hats on others. Like it or not, we have to do the work of listening carefully to the messages our emotions communicate and discerning what parts of the messages are true or false and responding wisely.
What to Say No To: Since we can’t give a blanket rejection of any particular emotion, here are four messages that we can say no to in every emotion.
“I Am My Emotions”
When we talk to people who feel the most overwhelmed by their emotions, they feel as if their emotions represent who they are, or their truest selves. But you are more than what you feel. No one can be reduced to what they feel. When emotions are intense, it can seem as if they take up all your interior space. In part, that’s because they are physiologically fortified. In other words, your body is working to maintain your emotional state, so your emotions often don’t yield easily to thoughts and beliefs that may feel very powerful at other times. But your emotions aren’t everything, important as they are.
He does not just cry. He cries to God. There is a world of difference in these two ways of responding to emotions. One cry is self-talk that may well leave us continuing to feel alone and overwhelmed. The other creates connection to one who cares, reminding us that God is with us even when our emotions are telling us that he isn’t.
“I Need to Act Right Now”
Interestingly, it’s God’s very nature to be slow and deliberate. Scripture describes God as “slow to anger” (Psalm 145:8). See how different God is from me? We could even say the same thing about joy. A manic sense of feeling good can compel us to make promises we can’t fulfill and purchases we can’t afford.
“Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.” The request to “shield the joyous” is significant. It puts joy in the category of sickness, weariness, sleepiness, labor affliction, and death—because joy can be as much of a blinder to God and reality as any other emotion.
Psalm 4:4 teaches this principle when David says, Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent.
Interestingly, Paul draws on Psalm 4 in Ephesians 4 as he counsels the church on how to deal with conflict and anger. He begins by quoting Psalm 4: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26).
“I Shouldn’t Be Feeling This”
We find it helpful to think of emotions as a kind of sixth sense. Think about it. The reason you have more than one sense is that each one—taste, smell, sight, hearing, feeling—serves as a check and balance on the others. For instance, you can read the expiration date on the milk carton with your eyes, but you won’t really know if the milk has soured until you smell it. Still not sure? Give it a taste. Your emotions shouldn’t operate independently either. So when we say, “Listen to your emotions,” we’re not saying, “Agree with them.” We’re saying, “Interpret them.” Become emotionally literate. Bring them into contact with your other “senses” and what you know about yourself, God, and others when you aren’t emotionally charged.
Don’t just silence your own anxiety. Make it work for you. For instance, I often feel anxious before I speak publicly or deliver a homily, but I don’t put myself down for it. I feel anxious because I’ve learned the hard way that I can really blow it if I’m not well prepared. So when I’m anxious about my homily, I think, Maybe I should spend more time working on this one. I don’t feel like I’m ready just yet. My anxiety is helping me to be responsible and wise.
“This Is All or Nothing”
Do Both
Fear, whether mild uneasiness or abject terror, has a simple message: something you value is under threat. Something bad might happen to something you care about. The future holds potential for loss. Because of this and because fear is so common to us, your fears are probably the single best map of what you actually value.
Fundamentally, however, whether our fears are as godly as Paul’s or not, we learn a great deal about our true values and deepest commitments when we look at the constellation of our fears. Where fear flourishes, there your heart will be also.
Our fears not only tell us what we love; they also push us toward extremes in relationships. Fear urges us to either jump back from others or cling to them like driftwood in a shipwreck, depending on our perception of what will most likely make us feel safe.
God does not expect or even want us to go it alone during our lives on this earth; he actually built us to need each other as well. He is enough, and yet he has chosen to use the fellowship we have with each other to encapsulate and reinforce his presence with us. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them,” Jesus said (Matt. 18:20). Thus, while there are exceptions to every rule, you will be better off in your fears when you vulnerably share them with a trusted friend.
Safety is great, until you cling so tightly to it that you are no longer willing to step out of your zone of perceived refuge even to love others or obey God.
The Bible even has an extremely high view of control, if by “control” you mean the right exercise of whatever strength and responsibility you have. Whether you are a business executive organizing deals or a three-year-old organizing dolls, bringing order and fruitfulness to your world is good. Indeed, Paul spills a great deal of ink calling church leaders to direct and shape the growth of their congregations’ faith and community. In short, the problem is not with self-protection or the desire to bring order and predictability to the world around us. Instead, the caution we want to give is simply this: in this fractured life, you will never be completely safe, fully in control, or 100 percent certain of what is coming next. You were never meant to be. Instead, dangers, dependence, and uncertainties are signposts that point us not to a strategy but to a Person: the One whose control and utterly certain character are our only real safety.
Your only path to real safety lies in trusting God by engaging him in your fears.
Physically, strong fear tends to cause shortness of breath, increased heart rate, clammy palms, tensed muscles, and racing thoughts. Nervous twitches (in the face or a constant fidgeting of hands or legs) are not uncommon too. Milder, more baseline fear might show up as digestive issues (ulcers and irritable bowel syndrome can both result from long-term anxiety), headaches, fatigue, and, frustratingly, a whole host of other difficult-to-pin-down symptoms. Basically, given enough time, fear can gnaw on pretty much any part of your body.
Perhaps the simplest telltale sign of fear in your life is a tendency to ask what if questions: What if we don’t have enough money to cover this or that? What if we get there and they’ve already left? What if no one likes my project? What if I’m not ready when they call on me? What ifs look to the future and import all the angst of possible dooms while writing the presence and help of God out of the picture.
Now that you’ve identified some form of fear in yourself, it’s time to look at what is going on in that fear. Our examination will hunt especially hard for traces of two things: what you are caring about and what you are actively doing (or not doing) to deal with the fear.
In what contexts do I feel this fear? This first question is asking what factors are pressing your fear’s buttons. Is there a particular location that makes you nervous every time you’re there?
Another kind of context is time. Certain seasons, events, or times of day can produce anxiety.
Still other fears swirl around people and activities. Are there particular people in whose presence you immediately tense up?
What are you doing about your fear? The second question follows on the heels of the first. What do you find yourself doing in response to the places, people, times, or activities that spark your fear? Do you self-medicate, or escape with alcohol, Facebook, mindless smartphone games, daydreams and fantasies, or overwork? Do you plunge deeper into the swirl of your anxious thoughts, racing endlessly to solve problems in your head, like a hamster on a wheel? Do you get irritable and critical of those around you? Do you turn honestly and desperately to prayer?
What are you valuing? The simplest form of this question is Why would I care if X happened? Listen to your fears. They are telling you something very important about the shape of your hopes, your dreams, and, most fundamentally, your worship. Examining your fear is a chance to put names on your treasures, to listen to what they are communicating.
It is easiest to start by evaluating your reaction to your fear rather than the fear itself. Ask, Is my reaction to this fear godly and constructive, or am I acting in destructive and sinful ways?
The Bible offers us a reorienting hope in our fears: no matter what the danger or what we are valuing, God can be trusted with our treasures, and every fear ought to drive us straight toward the Lord in prayer, obedience, and fellowship! A second, slightly harder evaluation question follows: How likely will the feared event come to pass? Fear is a notorious exaggerator and false prophet of doom.
What then should you do about your fear? It depends.
First, and foremost, learn to turn to Scripture. We’ve mentioned how Psalm 27 speaks to our anxieties. Even a literal host of heavily armed men trying to slash and stab you cannot overcome the “stronghold of your life” and his protection, in this life and the next. First Peter 5:7 is stunningly simple: hurl your fears straight into his hands; lay your fragile treasures in his lap; give him your anxiety. Why? Because he cares for you. He “cares” in both senses: he thinks about you, feels for you, has an interest in how you are doing; and he looks out for you, acts on your behalf, takes care of you. He promises to be with his children no matter what, till the end of time and beyond (Joshua 1:9; Matthew 28:20). He promises that he will always see your obedience, and not even a cup of cold water given out of love for Christ can be wasted (Matthew 10:42). He invites you to come to him when you are exhausted and overwhelmed (Matthew 11:28–30). He forgives your sins (Exodus 34:6–7). This is not a list of abstract truths to memorize (though memorizing them might be very wise!). These are real words from a real God who really can and will do everything he promises. These commitments from a Person you can trust with your very life is an unparalleled reason for hope in the face of fear.
On the other end of the spectrum, it probably doesn’t hurt to get your breathing under control. Anxiety may be your heart’s way of communicating that your treasure is under threat, but, as we said in chapter 4, it writes that message on the slate of your body. Taking deep, measured, slow breaths and exhaling slowly is a common-sense way to preach the truth of safety in Christ to a body quivering with dread.
Some exercise wouldn’t be a bad idea either. Someone once quipped that “exercise is the most underused anti-anxiety medication.” Going for a run rarely makes your fears go away, but just as taking a deep breath or two exerts a check on a pounding heart, so regular physical exertion can reduce anxiety’s ability to commandeer your body’s systems and convert them into a megaphone for a story of doom.
Ironically, many anxious people struggle to rest as well. Busyness, be it work or play, can drown out the “eternal inner murmur” that things aren’t going to be okay. For those who build endless moats of activities to keep fear at bay, rest can feel like putting down the drawbridge and welcoming the invader into the castle keep. It is hard to rest when everything inside you cries out that a successful career, a growing bank account, well rounded children, a flourishing women’s Bible study, or a satisfying leisure schedule, any of which take effort from you, is the thing keeping you safe! Anxiety pushed many onto a treadmill that never slows down. If this is you, however, you can’t afford not to slow down. For you, slowing down is faith.
When you stop checking email in the evening, step down from a leadership role, or even take five minutes to breathe or go for a walk, you implicitly entrust yourself and the things you care about into God’s hands. By choosing to rest rather than throw yourself into the fray, you are literally, actively placing the battle and its outcome in God’s hands. This doesn’t mean self-indulgence or laziness is a virtue. It does mean that refusing to run endlessly and choosing to rest, even in the smallest ways, are a profound declaration that your hope is in God rather than yourself.
On the flip side, many anxious people struggle with procrastination, which is just as fear driven as workaholism. The procrastinator fears the discomfort of doing the work, the uncertainty of the outcome, or both. When you find yourself instinctively punting the most important projects in order to rearrange the sock drawer or play one more game (or read one more paragraph or send one more text or … ), your need is exactly the same as the anxious worker bee above: to entrust yourself and your work to God. It’s just that the application is the opposite. For you, faith will be pressing into what you are responsible to do. In doing so, you entrust the pain of the process (usually overblown in your mind anyway) and the eventual success or failure of your project into his hands (where it has been from the beginning).
Second, go on the offensive against any area in your life where you are self-medicating. Resist, cut back, give it up. It’s amazing what you learn about yourself when you get rid of a crutch you’ve been leaning on.
Actions always reveal our core beliefs and confidence. We always ultimately vote with our feet. You can choose to make any of the changes in this chapter by simply saying, “Okay, I’ll try it.” But you won’t sustain any change in your life unless the love of your heart changes along with your actions.
Anger wants results fast.
Anger says, “That is wrong.” It is a fundamentally moral emotion. In fact, you could say it is the moral emotion. When you are angry, what is happening inside is this: your heart is observing the scene before you and crying out that something you love is being treated unjustly. Anger always passes judgment (and judgments, unlike a judgmental spirit, can be right as well as wrong).
Anger is right to say that some things are terribly wrong. Yet such anger, like all emotions, flows from love. This is why there is such a thing as good anger. While it is counterintuitive to most of us, the Bible actually presents God himself as the angriest character in all of Scripture. Yet he is the angriest precisely because he is also the most loving character in all Scripture. Remember where we started the book: Jesus standing with tears of anger and grief running down his face as he sees the hideous way death rends the fabric of his Father’s creation.
Many famous voices in the past century—C. S. Lewis, Mahatma Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and G. K. Chesterton, to name a few—have proclaimed the inseparability of love and hate. The opposite of love, they tell us, is not hate but apathy. As English philosopher Edmund Burke is often quoted to have said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Anger at its best communicates protective love for what God loves. Because it delights deeply in the relationships, people, structures of justice, beauties of creation, and material blessings that God has given, it targets anything that would divide us from God or one another and anything that would destroy what is right, lovely, and fruitful. At its worst, anger conveys unadulterated self-interest and issues an ultimatum: obey my law and my will or suffer my wrath. Sinful anger still seizes the moral high ground, but it is a high ground manufactured by my own sovereign preferences.
Thankfully, God’s great gift is the transforming work of his Spirit. He kindly changes our very hearts so that we grow in love for him and for our neighbor in ways that allow love-driven anger to bear redemptive fruit.
While there is indeed much to be angry about in our world, anger should not perpetually dominate your emotional landscape. No one can live near a bonfire that never goes out without getting burned.
Anger’s instinct is to punish and attack whatever (or whomever) it perceives as wrong. It is what makes angry people unpleasant to be around.
To make matters worse, angry people almost never know they are angry people. This makes sense if you think about it: anger says, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” When you feel deeply right, it is extremely difficult to step back and say, “Maybe I am the problem here.” Knowing this about us, Jesus gives us one of his most famous instructions: take the log out of your own eye (i.e., deal with your own faults) before you take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye (i.e., point out a failing in your neighbor). People who are angry struggle greatly to perceive their own flaws.
Anger, more than any other emotion, demands to be satisfied with action.
Given that anger demands action in response to your judgment that someone has committed a moral offense, we expect to find anger anywhere we find someone in attack mode. Physically, this usually looks like quickened breathing, flushed face, tensed muscles (perhaps even balled fists). When you are angry, your body feels tight. Long term, anger’s seeds sprout up into nearly as many symptoms as spring from fear: hypertension, digestive issues, and high blood pressure, just to name a few. Now please remember that all these experiences hold true for righteous anger as well, even potential long-term physical damage!
One last thought about identifying anger. We have heard people countless times say something like “I’m not angry; I’m just frustrated.” Or “irritated.” Or “annoyed.” While common English usage does indeed reserve the word anger for more intense situations than words like frustrated connote, do not be deceived: frustration, irritation, and annoyance are anger. They just haven’t fully blossomed yet. So do not draw a line in your mind between frustration and anger! Frustration is anger, and it inevitably becomes anger that rightly bears the name if left unchecked.
The first question to ask is Why am I angry? While this is designed to help you begin to deal with your anger, we’ve been encouraged at how simply examining the source of one’s anger by saying, “I’m angry because …” can itself defuse wrath.
What wrong am I perceiving? is another way of asking the same question. Asking the question this way helps you put words on the sense of injustice you feel.
Another helpful question is this: What is the outcome of my anger? Is my world or the world of those I care about getting better as a result of my being angry, or is my wrath hurting me and others?
Are you upset about what God is upset about? If so, you still face a challenge: how will you seek redemptive justice and avoid the temptation to exact destructive vengeance?
You are in the greatest danger when you are right, because being right about someone else’s sin so easily blinds you to your own. Nothing makes it harder to take the log out of your own eye than being able to say, “But she shouldn’t have done that; it was wrong!” This means that you must be exceedingly careful not to rush straight from evaluating something around you as wrong to unsheathing your sword.
Righteous anger—anger that aligns with God’s—is most common when the object of the anger is someone else, not yourself. Jesus, for example, is agonized but not angry when he himself is nailed to the cross. However, he is incensed when flipping over the tables of money changers in the temple who are exploiting his brothers and sisters (“den of robbers” he calls them—Matthew 21:13) and insulting his heavenly Father (“Do not make my Father’s house a house of trade”—John 2:16). This doesn’t mean anger at sin against oneself is wrong! God’s anger, both in the Old and the New Testaments, is aroused when his people betray him. The examples in Scripture, however, are weighted heavily toward righteous anger that focuses on the injustices others face.
James 1:20 sums up the danger well, saying that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”
If you want to live out of righteous anger, you need to start by slowing down.
You will almost never go wrong by pausing before you act when you are angry.
“Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger,” he urges (James 1:19). Or, as pastor and author Zack Eswine put it, we need to “wait out our racing thoughts and emotions until we can choose good, even for an enemy.”
Thankfully, there are a lot of ways to slow down. Count to ten in your head before you respond. Take a deep breath. Talk about the matter later, after you’ve cooled down. In short, slowing down means taking time to think before you act when angry.
Another really basic yet surprisingly helpful response to anger is to simply acknowledge that you are angry.
To name anger rather than spray it at everyone around you is a great step of maturity and tends to help you respond to your anger rather than respond in your anger.
Remember, God’s anger is fiercer than yours or mine ever could be, yet look what he does with it. He disciplines his people in order to bring us back. He rebukes in order to convict our hearts and turn us to repent. Our God ultimately poured out his wrath on Christ, unleashing his fury without restraint one time and one time only, so that those with whom he is angry might be restored. True love attacks evil with vigor, and yet the attack is always a rescue mission.
Ultimately, the best thing you can do about anger in your life is to cultivate humility. Humility empowers the healthy anger that treats others as more important than yourself. Humility protects others while exposing and undercutting the unhealthy anger that enthrones you as judge from a moral high ground only you perceive.
What are the earmarks of humility in the face of anger? Humility speaks honestly about what it knows and what it doesn’t. You’ll often hear humility say things like “It seems to me …” and “My concern is …” rather than “You always …” or “I can’t believe you would… .” It asks real questions, and listens to the answers, whereas self-righteous anger seizes the microphone and rants. Humility assumes that others might have good reasons for doing things that have bothered us. Even when the fault lies entirely on the other side, humility recognizes the log in one’s own eye and extends grace to offenders (which doesn’t mean erasing all consequences), because it knows that Jesus has shown us grace beyond compare.
When you’re grieving, you may feel many different emotions, some of which may surprise you—like anxiety, anger, or even relief. C. S. Lewis was surprised by what he called “the laziness of grief” after the death of his wife. He wrote, “I loathe the slightest effort.”
For instance, you’ve probably heard about different “stages” of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—based on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-known theory of bereavement. But try not to think about grief as a series of fixed steps. Instead, think of these five emotions and the many others you are experiencing as the swirling paints on a collage framed and entitled “Grief.”
Though God’s work in the midst of our grief often includes times when we need to process our grief alone, in general, we seek the presence and comfort of others. When our losses remind us of the unique connection to the person or thing we loved, we can feel isolated and alone. As a result, we rightly yearn for the simple presence of others who represent relationship and love that hasn’t been lost, and the hope of recovery.
It’s pretty basic, but it’s a critical foundation for relating in the midst of grief: grief can feel all kinds of ways. Understanding and accepting this is vital in helping us move toward one another during seasons of grief.
This is a simplistic analogy for grief, but we still think it rings true: Do you remember, when you were a little kid, how for a day or two after you lost a tooth, you kept sticking your tongue into the socket where to tooth once was? You just couldn’t help it. There was this weird fascination with the hole where the tooth used to be. But eventually you were no longer fascinated by it. You had explored it, accepted the new situation, and moved on. Of course, there’s nothing really tragic about losing a tooth in most cases, and the significant losses of our lives are more complicated. But, in a basic sort of way, that’s how we engage grief. We identify and begin to absorb the loss by exploring and naming the contours of what was there, emotionally pressing into the grooves and holes left behind, and sharing the experience with others who love us well.
Of course, part of our time was spent in prayer and thinking about what the Bible has to say about grief and loss, but much of our time was spent identifying and naming the losses by talking about and telling stories about those we missed: “Tell us who this person was and what he or she meant to you. What were the joys of the relationship? What do you miss the most?”
Reconnection and healing happen when we are able to identify the loss and share it with people who care.
David’s experience illustrates the many forms of grief.
The grief of guilt.
In Psalm 51 David pours out his grief before God and pleads for forgiveness: Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. (vv. 8–9)
Grief may be an occasion for reflecting on our own failures or sin.
The grief of death.
He fasted and “lay all night on the ground.” He couldn’t be persuaded to get up, and he wouldn’t eat until after the child had died (2 Samuel 12:15–23).
Death will likely prove to be one of the most powerful experiences of grief you ever have. Expect to need a lot of help and companionship to find the words to express it.
The grief of betrayal.
My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me… . For it is not an enemy who taunts me— then I could bear it; it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me— then I could hide from him. But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend. We used to take sweet counsel together; within God’s house we walked in the throng. (Psalms 55:4–5, 12–14)
Though it may feel like too much for words, God has spoken the unspeakable and invites us to use his words as we pour out our hearts.
Grief of any kind.
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away. (Psalms 31:9–10)
Grief can come to us in many shapes and forms, but when you examine it, don’t feel pressured to categorize it. Sometimes grief can just be grief. Whatever losses you experience, you will find the Bible full of words to help you examine and express them.
Paul instructs the Thessalonians so that they will “not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). In Christ, no matter what we’ve lost, no matter how severe the grief, we have hope.
In short, our hope is this: Jesus was raised from the dead and so conquered death. Think about the implications of that for your grief. It’s more than the promise of life after death or your own resurrection. It actually means that Jesus has conquered all losses and will ultimately heal and restore them.
It’s not wrong to want grieving people to feel better. It’s a sign that you love them and wish they weren’t in so much pain. It’s understandable that grief seems like a problem that needs to be fixed, and it’s difficult not to let the desire to provide care degenerate into “fixing.” But a better approach is to view helping not as “making it better” but as being someone’s companion in the journey through grief to healing. Be a companion, not a fixer.
Care for the grieving by reminding them that they’re allowed to feel one way one day and a different way the next day, or even ten minutes later. You might say, “You’re probably feeling all kinds of things that you weren’t expecting.” And then be silent and let them respond to that. Sometimes there will be anger, sometimes fear, and at other times even relief.
Engaging grief wisely requires us to be flexible and make room for those varied experiences, especially when different people are grieving the same thing at the same time but in very different ways. Be compassionate and patient with the bereaved, help them connect with God and others by inviting them to share their grief in their own time and in their own way. And know that God “gets” our grief. Every page of Scripture speaks to both the pain of grief and the hope we have in Christ. But above all, remember that Jesus has overcome every loss and gives us his power and love to find life even after the most terrible losses.
Guilt communicates, “I’ve done something wrong.” Shame communicates, “Something is wrong with me and others can see it.”
If I have sinned, both guilt and shame can help me to see that I have. To be called “shameless” is not a good thing. Also, if you have been mistreated and sinned against by others, shame rightly alerts you to the wrongness of their actions, just as a sharp pain in your abdomen alerts you to a rupturing appendix.
Biblically, our goals are always relational. Jesus has taught us that the whole of the law can be summarized in two commandments: love God and love neighbor (Matthew 22:34–40; Mark 12:28–31). Guilt, reflected in a healthy conscience, provides guardrails to help us know when we’re acting against God or neighbor. Guilt, in itself, doesn’t tell us that we are fundamentally unable to love; it tells us when we’ve failed to do so.
Sometimes it’s hard to hear the good intentions of guilt and shame, so we try to shut them up by dulling our consciences with denial and escapism. We avoid people we would normally enjoy. We indulge in activities that produce more-pleasant feelings. But this road is a lie. Simply suppressing the voices in these emotions is the road to death.
In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve choose to hide after sinning against God by eating the forbidden fruit. When God calls them out, Adam points at Eve and exclaims, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). It seems that one of the basic reflexes of sin is to deflect guilt and shame onto another.
God doesn’t just want to remove our guilt; he wants intimate relationship with us. He is not just trying to fix a dent in his reputation that we’ve caused. His purpose is deeper than that. He wants to heal our identity by identifying with us, by becoming one with us. Restoration with God means being restored to our status as his beloved children.
There the Pharisees and teachers of the law mutter about Jesus mingling with the guilty and shamed. Jesus tells his critics that God is like the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to find the one that has wandered away. And what does he do when he finds the stray? Is he angry and punishing? No, he puts it on his shoulders, carries it home, and asks his friends and neighbors to rejoice with him. “I have found my sheep that was lost,” he exclaims (Luke 15:1–7).
Not going it alone. With the hope of God graciously connecting us to himself, honoring us, forgiving us, restoring relationship with us, and claiming us utterly and eternally as his, there is one enormously important action step we can take as a response in faith: talk about your guilt and your shame with someone else you trust. Do not listen to the voice inside that tells you to hide. Confessing your guilt and sharing your shame with a brother or sister in Christ has enormous power to free and heal your heart. Both guilt and shame were meant to drive us to step more fully into the light, cling more closely to Christ, and associate ourselves in word, deed, and identity with the One who has embraced us. But just as both guilt and shame lead to growth when exposed to light, both guilt and shame tend to fester in the dark.
Isaiah goes on to list reasons why God’s final coming will make tears obsolete. Our beloved children will not be in danger (Isaiah 65:20). Everyone will live out a fullness of days (which we learn in the New Testament means eternal life, not just dying at a ripe old age! There will be perfect blessing on our work and our leisure (vv. 21–22). Nothing will threaten our peace or happiness. Families will be together forever without rebellion, separation, or tragedy (verse 23). God will be in immediate contact with us and never distant (verse 24). Danger and death and pain and injury and evil will vanish forever (verse 25).
He will indeed wipe away every tear when he returns (Revelations 21:4), but, at the same time, he promises to keep your tears in a bottle because of his love and compassion for you (Psalms 56:8). Somehow heaven will be a place where our sorrows are both utterly and completely comforted and deeply and eternally remembered. We named this chapter “A Museum of Tears” with this exact tension in mind.
Somehow, in some way, the depths of which we will never sound in this life, every emotion will one day resolve into joy.
A God who has chosen to bear scars is a God we can trust with our wounds, knowing that all joys now are a mere foretaste, and all tears now are a precious prelude to complete comfort.
It really matters both that God has emotions and that they are different from ours in important ways.
So let us be clear: God does understand, and he does care. Hopefully we’ve made it clear all along that Jesus provides the clearest understanding of both our emotions and God’s. In particular, Jesus’s role as High Priest demonstrates God’s commitment to relating with us emotionally.
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet was without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:15–16)
God’s Emotions Are Different: But impassibility matters for other reasons as well. Some important attributes of God are at stake. In particular, whatever similarity exists between God’s emotions and ours ought not undermine God’s unchanging character (immutability), which undergirds his faithfulness and ability to save us.
If we are equating emotions with the old sense of passions, then God doesn’t have emotions. But if we are talking about affections, he does. God’s emotions are cognitive affections. Most of what we call emotion in God is his evaluation of what is happening with his creation.
DeYoung goes on to capture the core beauty of God’s impassability by saying that God “is love to the maximum at every moment. He cannot change because he cannot possibly be any more loving, or any more just, or any more good.
God is energetically enthused and emotionally invested in creation by his own free and consistent choice, but God’s emotional life does not compromise his character or change his essence.
All Christian doctrine is at some point an expression of mystery. God is not just a different version of us; he is distinct from us as the Creator. Whether you are talking about the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation, or the problem of evil, everything is going to have a mystery at its bedrock. The goal of this appendix is not to say everything that can be said, but merely to point out that in order for us to know God as God, we must admit that we are knowing someone who transcends our complete understanding. While we affirm that what can be said about God can be said truly and accurately in so far as God has revealed himself to us, we must draw the line of mystery where God stops speaking.
When you’re suffering, does God care? Of course God cares if you’re suffering. Not only does he care; he cares that you know he understands. Because Jesus is our High Priest, Jesus in his human nature understands suffering existentially and physically. Because of both Jesus’s purity and his human passion, God is uniquely qualified to empathize with you in Christ.
In order to keep a balanced view of God’s emotional life, always return to the Trinity as the picture of the divine emotional life. The Father sympathizes with you and sends Christ to take an active role in your life. The son empathizes with you directly through his human nature. And the Holy Spirit empathizes imminently through his indwelling in you (Romans 8:26).