Introduction — How Do You Feel about How You Feel?
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 the people in your life. Emotions are one of the most common and most commonly misunderstood opportunities we have to grow in maturity and love. They have the power to deeply enrich our relationships or drive wedges into them.
Among the truths we will explore together is this foundational one: emotions are an essential way we bear God’s image. God expresses emotions, and he designed us to express them too. In the Gospels, we witness Jesus’s compassion for suffering and heartache, his anger as he speaks to callous religious leaders, and 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.
Chapter 1 — Sometimes It’s Good to Feel Bad
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 is about to do an amazing miracle and fix the problem? Because he is 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 about the possibility of injury to someone or something they love, and 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 — that 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 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 does not 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.
Chapter 2 — What Exactly Are Emotions?
Understanding what causes emotions is a critical step in learning to deal with them. The wisest answer to the question of whether emotions originate in the mind or the body is “probably both.” Sometimes the body will seem to be the initiator or even to have the upper hand. At other times, beliefs and interpretations will seem to be the most powerful factors. Understanding how to identify what is most in play in any given situation, and how to respond wisely, requires practice and discernment.
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. Take a mental inventory of the people you feel closest to. It is likely you have had experiences with them in which you shared some of your deepest thoughts and feelings, or at least both experienced strong emotions together. 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 with a catalogue of what genuine love looks like in practice, including verse 15: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” Sincere love is shared by emotionally entering into the experience of others. This is exactly what Jesus modeled when he entered into the grief of Lazarus’s sisters: he literally mourned with those who mourned, grieving the ugliness of sin and death and letting it touch him the way it touched those he loved.
Emotions also serve a third purpose: they give us the physical energy and motivation to act. If you have ever wrestled with anger, you have probably noticed that it can feel like a sudden surge of energy. Your heart begins to pound, your temperature rises, adrenaline rushes through your veins, and suddenly it feels as though you have got to do something about it. That is why people so often express anger through physical action, from shutting a drawer just a little harder than necessary all the way to breaking plates and punching walls. It feels like energy inside demanding release.
Most fundamentally, our emotions are an expression of worship. The first great commandment calls us to love God with all that we are — heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second is its extension and application: our love for God must be reflected in the way we treat others. We cannot segment our lives into pieces and call one of those pieces worship. Our love for God should shape all our other loves and commitments. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t love people or things other than God — but it does mean that where our emotions run, our worship is not far behind.
Chapter 3 — Emotions Don’t Come in Single File
Our emotions never come in single file. Life is not that simple. The vast majority of the time, human beings are awash with different, even conflicting emotions, and confusion about what you are feeling and why is perfectly normal. The reason is straightforward: 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 simultaneously responding to different pieces of the world around you in different ways.
Consider 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, he 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). Anger and grief, judgment and tenderness, inhabiting the same moment in the same heart.
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 will never exhaustively understand all the streams flowing from our hearts into our emotions — and we do not need to. All we need to do is bring whatever we manage to understand to God and entrust him with all the hidden corners of our hearts, loves, and feelings that we cannot see into but he knows perfectly.
Chapter 4 — Emotions Happen in Your Body
Two particular influences on our emotions — beyond God himself — stand out for the constancy of their presence from the day we are born until 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. 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, crying aloud over and over again that we care deeply about the purpose, outcome, and experiences of our lives.
Take about fifteen seconds and do three things: consciously relax your shoulders, tilt your head slowly backward as far as you comfortably can, and take several deep breaths. Did you find tension in your back, shoulders, neck, or chest? Were you even aware of it before you stopped? 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 spent unconsciously tensed reinforces to our bodies subtly that our lives are stressful — and the natural result is a deepening cycle of becoming just that much tenser.
As common sense suggests, regular exercise, sufficient sleep, being warm or cool enough, and having a full but not stuffed belly — along with a hundred other physiological experiences — make it easier for our emotions to line up with God’s. Your body is the vehicle through which the passion of your soul flows. No matter how much we come to understand about the biology of the brain, we will still always need to wrestle with our emotions as expressions of what we love.
Chapter 5 — You Relate to Others When You Feel with Them
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:26, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” The observation is simple but profound: to relate to one another the way God intends means to be fully engaged in the experiences of the other. When you notice emotion or a surprising change in someone — a usually boisterous friend who is suddenly reserved and distant, a sibling who seems flustered — slow down and ask questions about what is going on. Or, if questions don’t seem appropriate, put yourself in the other person’s shoes and imagine what might make you feel that way.
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 communicates a lack of love, and that absence has a subtle corrosive effect over time. The biblical goal of emotional connection is not following a specific formula or phrasing; the goal is honest vulnerability about what is 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 and handed you a dozen roses, but did it all in a mechanical voice and with a look of total disinterest. 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.
This sharing of hearts and values, this communicating a depth of care for others, will be part of our delight for the rest of our lives — even 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.
Chapter 6 — Why Can’t I Control My Emotions?
The author of Psalm 42 provides one of the clearest examples of this struggle. 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 doesn’t mean his battle is pointless. It doesn’t mean he is fighting poorly. It simply means 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 enormously to your emotional life. But what follows from that truth is not a list of tips for working directly on your emotions for the purpose of changing them. What matters is participating with God in a process of ongoing heart change — at the level of body and mind, of habit and community, of prayer and honest examination. That is the work the rest of this book is about.
Chapter 7 — Two Pitfalls
Just as cookies make a terrible nutritional center for your diet, emotions make a terrible central priority for your life. One pitfall is treating them as everything — the dominant cultural narrative that leaves people with no easy way to guard against the flood of feelings they experience. The other pitfall runs in the opposite direction: dismissing or suppressing emotions as though they are obstacles to be overcome rather than signals to be understood. Both extremes miss the mark. It is worth noting that even in this emotion-worshiping culture, the most popular strategy for emotional self-regulation — mindfulness — sits on the stoic end of the spectrum. Whether the culture is pushing you toward emotionalism or stoicism, neither is the way forward. The Bible offers something richer than either.
Chapter 8 — Engage: A Better Option
The Bible’s model of engaging emotions is 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. You move closer and explore, preparing yourself to deal with whatever you uncover. Scripture’s first step is simply to identify your feelings. If you struggle to notice what you feel, 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?”
The second step is to examine your emotions by asking questions like: Why am I feeling this? What am I reacting to? Why is this hitting me so hard? How is this emotion making me want to behave? Suppose you identify that you are feeling angry because your wife broke the lawn mower. You didn’t say anything when you found out, but you have 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? When you examine this, several things surface. Your anger is leading you to pull back — talking less than normal, less warmly than normal. It is creating strain between you and your wife. And the frustrated thoughts running on a loop suggest that right now you care more about the inconvenience to yourself than about the good intentions your wife showed in trying to help. You are more concerned with the outcome than with her motives.
When you know what you are feeling, have named it as best you can, and have discerned which aspects are good and which are bad, you are ready to act. Proper responses fall into two fundamental categories: on the one hand, embrace and nurture the loves of your heart and behaviors that are good; on the other, resist and even starve loves and actions that are bad. In the lawn-mower example, acting means beginning by apologizing for being short, reassuring her that it is going to be okay, thanking her for trying to take care of something for you, and perhaps gently requesting that she get your input on lawn equipment in the future. All the internal self-awareness in the world doesn’t help if it doesn’t lead to change in relationship and action.
Chapter 9 — Engaging Emotions Means Engaging God
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.” Pouring out your heart means naming the feelings you have most strongly — bringing the churning mixture of emotions to God and upending it into his hands one sentence at a time. It doesn’t occur to most of us 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 Psalm 71:3: “Be to me a rock of refuge, to which I may continually come.” Peter speaks of “casting all your anxieties on him” and gives the simplest of reasons: “he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).
If Jesus’s loves were perfect, then his emotions were perfect too — so it might seem like he shouldn’t have needed to bother with praying them. Yet pray them he did. In 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 take the edge off with a distraction. He doesn’t stand apart from his emotions to regain calm. He doesn’t start reciting Scripture to stay focused on the task. Instead, he does two simple, relational things: he speaks honestly to his friends about the dread and ache he feels as he anticipates the coming twenty-four hours, and then, having asked their help in prayer, he falls on his knees and pours out his heart to his Father. 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.
Once you see Jesus 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 the lowly into the kingdom. 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.
Why, then, is walking through that open door toward God so hard for us? The reasons 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. The most common reason we escort them elsewhere is that it never even occurs to us to take them to God. He seems irrelevant, or we assume we ought to get our act together before going to him. Many of us, even those who read the Bible every morning, act as if formal devotional time is the only slice of the day when we should or could interact with God. But 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). As Christian author Paul Miller once quipped, anxiety is wasted prayer — doing anything with our fears other than taking them to God 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.
Chapter 10 — Engaging Relationships
We tend to make assumptions and launch accusations at the other person, which only leads to defensiveness and a counterattack. Anger doesn’t have to work 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. 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, begin with your own vulnerability. Vulnerability extends an olive branch of charity instead of leading the conversation with accusations. Rather than attacking, you might say something like: “When we left the house, I felt like you were angry with me, and I didn’t want to be criticized. I was so angry I didn’t know what to say, 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 very difficult; it feels much safer to hold back and blame each other than to take ownership of your own part in the conflict.
It takes two to keep a war going. When you lead with vulnerability, you are retreating from the battle through 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 frightening thing to do. The willingness to take that risk on behalf of the other person is precisely what makes vulnerability so powerful — you are signaling that it is safe for the other person to do the same. They may take that signal as a sign of weakness and choose to attack. But it embodies the grace that God has shown us in Jesus, and that is powerful. 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 and truly draw near, even at the level of the heart. Part of vulnerability is saying, in effect, “Let me get in your space so I can truly understand you in love.” You have to credibly understand and articulately express the other person’s voice so that he or she knows that you know.
Most communication in any given conversation has far more to do with how something is said than with the words themselves. Tone and facial expressions may be greater sources of misunderstanding and conflict than words. Watch out for eye rolling, heavy sighs, folded arms, and turning your body away. 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. Your best relational moments — the ones you will look back upon as turning points and bonding moments — will be the times when you 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.
Chapter 11 — On Nourishing Healthy Emotions
Six accessible practices will incubate and nourish godly health and maturity in your emotions across the entire emotional spectrum. These are not tools for directly changing your emotions. Rather, they are ways to harness wise, ordinary, spiritual practices that will grow your love for what God loves and gradually mold your feelings to reflect the emotional life of your Lord.
The first practice is to read your Bible. In a thousand ways, the words of Scripture alter your perspective for the better. They soak your mind in 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 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 anointed to kill a giant and become a king, a self-righteous murderer knocked on his back who becomes a missionary. But the Bible impacts our emotions most fundamentally because when we encounter God’s words, we encounter God himself. To read the living Word is to relate to him. One simple, practical response is to write out what you are reading as if you were speaking directly to God.
The second practice is to go outside. Ten minutes facing into the breeze won’t radically alter your mood most days, but it is hard to overstate the value of regularly reminding your body and soul that you live on a larger stage than your messy house or the four walls of your office. A six-minute walk to a stone wall in the woods, a minute to stand and breathe and watch the sunlight on the forest floor, then six minutes back through the pines and young maple saplings — a stroll past growing plants and trees and singing birds pulls mind and senses into contact with God. It reminds you that he is the giver of abundant life and has plans for renewing this world, and it nudges you to relax your tensed shoulders and inhale deeply.
The third practice is to cultivate good negative emotions. It is telling that the sole book of the Bible named after an emotion is not Joys but Lamentations. As counterintuitive and countercultural as it sounds, there are ways in which you should feel bad more often and more strongly than you do. Far too often we short-circuit God’s good purposes for negative emotions — crushing them, denying them, or escaping from them rather than letting them do their healthy work of driving us to him. The most important way to nurture uncomfortable emotions is by learning to lament. A lament is an honest, impassioned expression of sorrow, frustration, or confusion. It names a loss or injustice and the impact it has had. It is no accident that lament is the most common kind of psalm. In Psalm 13, the author asks the Lord “How long?” several times, poignantly expressing feeling forgotten, abandoned, sorrowful, and in deep despair. While he ends with hope, it is hope in a rescue not yet realized. The psalmists knew how badly the world is broken and turned instinctively and earnestly to God. Laments honor him in two ways: they stand with him and grieve the brokenness of the world as he does, and they yearn and ache for the coming of the day when he makes all things right. Godly guilt and honest doubt also belong here — guilt whose purpose is to turn us to the One who offers forgiveness, and doubt that brings its hard questions about God’s goodness straight into his presence.
The fourth practice is to build altars. An altar is an acknowledgment that something important has happened and needs to be remembered — a long-term memory aid for who God is and what he has done (Genesis 28:10–22; Joshua 22:10–34; 1 Samuel 7:12). Like a souvenir, an altar compresses a story into a single glance. It can be a physical object or any regular practice that reminds you of the value of the object of your worship. We need altars to God because our attention is so easily distracted and our hearts so quickly forget. 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. Build altars from whatever stones of God’s kindness and care are lying around your life.
The fifth practice is to cling to corporate worship. Unlike private altars, church services are public and communal. Sunday worship moves our emotions because we are surrounded by other visitors to God’s house, 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. As one writer puts it, singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength.
The sixth practice is to watch for God on the move. Seek out and seize every opportunity to hear about God’s work in the lives of others. Paul explains that those who have received comfort from God are now equipped to comfort others with the comfort they themselves have received (2 Corinthians 1:4). Ask your spouse why he or she seems in such good spirits. 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.
Chapter 12 — On Starving Unhealthy Emotions
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 to just say that anger, anxiety, and depression are bad emotions, and happiness, contentment, and affection are good ones. But as we have seen, that is not how emotions work. You cannot give a blanket rejection of any particular emotion. You have to do the work of listening carefully to the messages your emotions communicate, discerning what parts are true or false, and responding wisely. There are, however, four specific messages you can say no to in every emotion.
The first is “I am my emotions.” When people feel most overwhelmed by their feelings, they feel as if those feelings represent who they are — their truest selves. But you are more than what you feel. No one can be reduced to what they feel. When emotions are intense, they can seem to take up all your interior space, partly because your body is physiologically working to maintain your emotional state. But they aren’t everything, important as they are. Consider the difference between two ways of crying: one cry is self-talk that may well leave you feeling alone and overwhelmed; the other — crying to God — creates connection to one who cares, reminding you that God is with you even when your emotions are telling you that he isn’t. There is a world of difference between those two ways of responding.
The second lie is “I need to act right now.” Scripture describes God as “slow to anger” (Psalm 145:8) — his very nature is slow and deliberate. The same caution applies to joy: a manic sense of feeling good can compel you to make promises you cannot fulfill and purchases you cannot afford. An ancient prayer of the church asks the Lord to “shield the joyous” — placing joy in the same category as sickness and affliction, because joy can be as much of a blinder to God and reality as any other emotion. Psalm 4:4 teaches, “Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent.” Paul draws on this in Ephesians 4:26: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” The emotion is permitted; the impulsive action is not.
The third lie is “I shouldn’t be feeling this.” It helps to think of emotions as a kind of sixth sense. The reason you have more than one sense is that each one serves as a check and balance on the others. You can read the expiration date on the milk carton with your eyes, but you won’t really know whether the milk has soured until you smell it. Still not sure? Give it a taste. Your emotions shouldn’t operate independently either. When we say “listen to your emotions,” we don’t mean “agree with them” — we mean “interpret them.” Become emotionally literate. Bring your emotions into contact with what you know about yourself, God, and others when you aren’t emotionally charged. If you feel anxious before speaking publicly, don’t put yourself down for it — that anxiety may be helping you recognize that you need more preparation. Let it make you responsible rather than ashamed.
The fourth lie is “this is all or nothing.” God created the world good, but it is fallen, along with everyone in it. As a mixed person living in a mixed world with other mixed people, you may well respond to the complexities of the people and situations around you with complicated and mixed emotions. That is not a failure of faith. It is a faithful response to reality. Saying no to these four errors is one way of obeying the command “Let not your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1) without developing an unhealthy shame over your emotional life. Do not let your hearts be troubled — and at the same time, cry out to the Lord as David does in Psalm 142. Do both. And God in Christ will carry you through an experience that may be impossible for you to understand in the moment.
Chapter 13 — Engaging Fear
Fear, whether mild uneasiness or abject terror, carries a single 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, your fears are probably the single best map of what you actually value. Where fear flourishes, there your heart will be also. Our fears not only tell us what we love; they 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 us to go it alone. He actually built us to need each other. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them,” Jesus said (Matthew 18:20). You will generally be better off in your fears when you vulnerably share them with a trusted friend. The Bible has an extremely high view of bringing order and fruitfulness to your world — whether you are a business executive organizing deals or a three-year-old organizing dolls, that impulse is good. But 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. Dangers, dependence, and uncertainties are signposts pointing not to a strategy but to a Person: the One whose control and utterly certain character are your only real safety.
Physically, strong fear causes shortness of breath, increased heart rate, clammy palms, tensed muscles, and racing thoughts. Milder, more baseline fear might show up as digestive issues, headaches, and fatigue. Given enough time, fear can gnaw on pretty much any part of your body. Perhaps the simplest telltale sign is a tendency to ask what if questions: What if we don’t have enough money? What if no one likes my project? What ifs look to the future and import all the angst of possible dooms while writing the presence and help of God entirely out of the picture.
When examining fear, hunt especially hard for two things: what you are caring about, and what you are actively doing or not doing in response. Ask yourself what contexts press your fear’s buttons — particular places, certain seasons, specific people in whose presence you immediately tense up. Ask what you are doing about your fear: Do you self-medicate or escape with alcohol, social media, or overwork? Do you plunge into racing thoughts like a hamster on a wheel? Do you turn honestly and desperately to prayer? Then ask what you are valuing — simply put, why would you care if X happened? Your fears are telling you something important about the shape of your hopes, your dreams, and your worship.
Begin evaluating your fear by looking at your reaction rather than the fear itself. Is your reaction godly and constructive, or are you acting in destructive and sinful ways? The Bible offers a reorienting hope: no matter what the danger or what you are valuing, God can be trusted with your treasures, and every fear ought to drive you straight toward the Lord in prayer, obedience, and fellowship. Also ask, honestly: how likely is the feared event to come to pass? Fear is a notorious exaggerator and false prophet of doom.
As for what to do — turn first to Scripture. First Peter 5:7 is stunningly simple: hurl your fears straight into his hands, because he cares for you. He thinks about you and feels for you; 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 invites you to come to him when you are exhausted and overwhelmed (Matthew 11:28–30). These are real words from a real God who really can and will do everything he promises — an unparalleled reason for hope in the face of fear. Alongside that, take deep, measured breaths to preach the truth of safety in Christ to a body quivering with dread. Exercise: someone once quipped that it is the most underused anti-anxiety medication. Regular physical exertion can reduce anxiety’s ability to commandeer your body’s systems and convert them into a megaphone for doom.
Learn to rest. For those who build endless moats of activity to keep fear at bay, rest feels like putting down the drawbridge and welcoming the invader into the castle keep. But you cannot afford not to slow down. When you stop checking email in the evening, or step down from a leadership role, or take five minutes to breathe, you are implicitly entrusting yourself and the things you care about into God’s hands. Refusing to run endlessly and choosing to rest — even in the smallest ways — is a profound declaration that your hope is in God rather than yourself. For those whose fear drives procrastination rather than workaholism, the application is the opposite: faith means pressing into what you are responsible to do, entrusting both the pain of the process and the eventual outcome into his hands. And wherever self-medication has crept in — resist it, cut back, give it up. It is remarkable what you learn about yourself when you get rid of a crutch you have been leaning on. Actions always reveal your core beliefs. You always ultimately vote with your feet.
Chapter 14 — Engaging Anger
Anger wants results fast. 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. The Bible actually presents God himself as the angriest character in all of Scripture — but he is the angriest precisely because he is also the most loving. Remember where this book began: 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.
C. S. Lewis, Mahatma Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and G. K. Chesterton are among the famous voices who have proclaimed the inseparability of love and hate: the opposite of love, they tell us, is not hate but apathy. As 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 your own sovereign preferences. God’s great gift is the transforming work of his Spirit, who 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. Even so, anger should not perpetually dominate your emotional landscape. No one can live near a bonfire that never goes out without getting burned.
Angry people almost never know they are angry people. This makes sense: 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.” Jesus gives one of his most famous instructions precisely because of this: take the log out of your own eye before you take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. Physically, anger tends to show up as quickened breathing, flushed face, and tensed muscles. Long term, its seeds sprout into hypertension, digestive issues, and high blood pressure. And do not draw a line in your mind between frustration and anger — frustration, irritation, and annoyance are anger. They just haven’t fully blossomed yet, and they inevitably become anger that rightly bears the name if left unchecked.
When examining anger, ask: Why am I angry? Simply saying “I’m angry because…” can itself defuse wrath. Ask also, What wrong am I perceiving? — this helps put words on the sense of injustice you feel. A further helpful question: What is the outcome of my anger? Is your world or the world of those you care about getting better as a result, or is your wrath hurting you and others? The greatest danger comes when you are right, because being right about someone else’s sin so easily blinds you to your own. The examples in Scripture are weighted heavily toward righteous anger that focuses on the injustices others face. Jesus is agonized but not angry when he himself is nailed to the cross, yet he is incensed when flipping over the tables of money changers who are exploiting his brothers and sisters and insulting his heavenly Father. James sums up the danger plainly: “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (1:20).
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,” James urges (1:19). Pastor Zack Eswine captures the practical challenge well: we need to “wait out our racing thoughts and emotions until we can choose good, even for an enemy.” Count to ten. Take a deep breath. Talk about the matter later, after you have cooled down. Simply acknowledge that you are angry — to name anger rather than spray it at everyone around you is a great step of maturity and helps you respond to your anger rather than in your anger.
God’s anger is fiercer than ours ever could be, yet look what he does with it: he disciplines his people in order to bring them back; he rebukes in order to convict hearts and turn them to repentance; he ultimately poured out his wrath on Christ, unleashing his fury without restraint one time and one time only, so that those with whom he was angry might be restored. True love attacks evil with vigor, and yet the attack is always a rescue mission. 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. It speaks honestly about what it knows and what it doesn’t — “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. Even when the fault lies entirely on the other side, humility recognizes the log in one’s own eye and extends grace, because it knows that Jesus has shown us grace beyond compare.
Chapter 15 — Engaging Grief
When you are grieving, you may feel many different emotions, some of which will 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.” You have 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 of grief as a series of fixed steps. Instead, think of these 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 grief often includes times when we need to process alone, in general we seek the presence and comfort of others. When our losses remind us of the unique connection we had to the person or thing we loved, we can feel isolated. We rightly yearn for the simple presence of others who represent relationship and love that hasn’t been lost, and the hope of recovery. Think of how, as a child, you kept sticking your tongue into the socket where a lost tooth once was — fascinated by the hole where it used to be. Eventually you explored it, accepted the new situation, and moved on. Of course, the significant losses of our lives are more complicated. But in a basic way, that is 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. Reconnection and healing happen when we are able to identify the loss and share it with people who care — by talking about and telling stories about those we miss: “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?”
Grief comes in many forms. In Psalm 51, David pours out the grief of guilt 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). In 2 Samuel 12, he fasts and lies all night on the ground when his child falls ill, refusing to eat until the child has died. The grief of betrayal speaks in Psalm 55: “It is not an enemy who taunts me — then I could bear it… But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend. We used to take sweet counsel together” (vv. 12–14). And sometimes grief resists all categories. Psalm 31:9–10 gives voice to it plainly: “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also.” When you examine your grief, don’t feel pressured to classify it. Sometimes grief can just be grief, and the Bible is full of words to help you examine and express it.
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 you have lost, you have hope. Jesus was raised from the dead and so conquered death — and the implications go further than the promise of your own resurrection. It means that Jesus has conquered all losses and will ultimately heal and restore them. It is not wrong to want grieving people to feel better. 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. Remind grieving people that they are allowed to feel one way one day and a different way the next, or even ten minutes later. Say, “You’re probably feeling all kinds of things you weren’t expecting” — and then be silent and let them respond. Be compassionate and patient. 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. Jesus has overcome every loss and gives us his power and love to find life even after the most terrible losses.
Chapter 16 — Engaging Guilt and Shame
Guilt communicates, “I’ve done something wrong.” Shame communicates, “Something is wrong with me and others can see it.” If you have sinned, both guilt and shame can help you to see that you have. To be called “shameless” is not a good thing. And 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.
Our biblical goals are always relational. Jesus taught that the whole of the law can be summarized in two commandments: love God and love neighbor (Matthew 22:34–40). Guilt, reflected in a healthy conscience, provides guardrails to help you know when you are acting against God or neighbor. Guilt doesn’t tell you that you are fundamentally unable to love; it tells you when you have failed to do so. Sometimes it is 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 — avoiding people we would normally enjoy, indulging 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, after sinning against God, Adam and Eve choose to hide. When God calls them out, Adam points at Eve: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). 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 merely trying to fix a dent in his reputation. His purpose is deeper: 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. Jesus illustrates this beautifully. When the Pharisees and teachers of the law mutter about Jesus mingling with the guilty and shamed, he tells them that God is like the shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find the one that has wandered away. And what does he do when he finds the stray? 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” (Luke 15:1–7).
With the hope of God graciously connecting you to himself, honoring you, forgiving you, restoring relationship with you, and claiming you utterly and eternally as his, there is one enormously important action step you can take: talk about your guilt and your shame with someone 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 you to step more fully into the light, cling more closely to Christ, and associate yourself in word, deed, and identity with the One who has embraced you. Just as both guilt and shame lead to growth when exposed to light, both tend to fester in the dark.
Chapter 17 — A Museum of Tears
Isaiah lists 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 the New Testament reveals means eternal life, not merely 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 (v. 23). God will be in immediate contact with us and never distant (v. 24). Danger and death and pain and injury and evil will vanish forever (v. 25).
He will indeed wipe away every tear when he returns (Revelation 21:4). But at the same time, he promises to keep your tears in a bottle because of his love and compassion for you (Psalm 56:8). Somehow heaven will be a place where our sorrows are both utterly and completely comforted and deeply and eternally remembered. 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.
Appendix — Does God Really Feel?
It really matters both that God has emotions and that they are different from ours in important ways. God does understand, and he does care. 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).
The doctrine of divine impassibility matters here because some important attributes of God are at stake. Whatever similarity exists between God’s emotions and ours ought not undermine his unchanging character — his immutability — which undergirds his faithfulness and his ability to save us. If emotions are equated with the old sense of passions — uncontrolled impulses that sweep over a person — 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. Kevin DeYoung captures the core beauty of impassibility this way: 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 his 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 discussing the Trinity, the incarnation, or the problem of evil, everything rests on mystery at its bedrock. What can be said about God can be said truly and accurately insofar as God has revealed himself, but we must draw the line of mystery where God stops speaking. When you are suffering, does God care? Of course he does. Not only does he care; he cares that you know he understands. Because Jesus is your High Priest, he understands suffering existentially and physically through his human nature. To keep a balanced view of God’s emotional life, always return to the Trinity as its picture: 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 intimately through his indwelling in you (Romans 8:26).