By DeAron Washington
God has given us the gift of emotions, yet sometimes we leave them in the wrapping paper. We attempt to conceal and carry them from our heavenly Father.
To be fair, in the classroom of life, we are often taught to keep our feelings under wraps as opposed to experiencing them. The tears must retreat even if pain is flooding your soul. Anger must be masked and smothered like a biscuit in gravy. Grief can be discussed, but it can’t seep out in public.
Sadly, our churches can become places where our emotions are left outside the steeple to be picked up once it is in the rearview mirror. If we are honest, I believe we could all confess our carefully crafted personal statements that stop people from knowing about our feelings, like “I’m good,” “We are fine,” “God is good,” and “But I’m blessed.” The results are that our gifts are rarely seen, and we look ungodly.
I submit to you that God has emotions, and we can reflect Him best when we display our feelings as opposed to always concealing them. I invite us for a moment to consider God and emotions. I hope that through this, we can expand our beliefs about our affections.
How Does God Feel?
The conversation about emotions and God has filled many books and dissertations. To avoid veering into the weeds of the conversation, I ask you to consider how God feels about you and the condition of the world. Is He a callous and stoic deity idly watching the world? Is His heart deaf to the cries of man? Moses would answer the questions with a resounding “no” and tell about God’s grief for the wretchedness that plagued Noah’s time (Genesis 6:6). David would add to the conversation by reminding us of God’s anger over sin (Psalm 7:11). Moses would chime in again and say God is jealous for His people (Exodus 20:5).
God is emotional. I know that phrase is a stretch for some because we have been indoctrinated with the false dichotomy of reason and emotion. So I would like to pose these questions: Could it be that emotion and reason are only seemingly opposed to each other? Or can emotions make sense?
Let me return to the main content. It seems as though the sinless God had emotions. Before you come to a conclusion, let’s consider Jesus.
What About the Prince of Peace?
We could spend the entirety of this article exploring the emotions of Jesus. I will only mention a few instances of Jesus’s emotional expressions. Jesus displays anger at the misuse of the house of God (Matthew 21:12-13). He looks out at crowds of lost people and has compassion (Mark 3:5). He feels a deep sorrow and grief in the garden (Matthew 26:36-46). He experienced the pain on the cross.
It is reasonable to believe Jesus was emotional. His emotional expressions were holy and pleasing to the Lord. The Father and the Son openly displayed their emotions. The scripture is saturated with examples of God showing and telling us how He feels. If we are image bearers, maybe there is something godly about being emotional.
Feel, Don’t Conceal
Due to the effects of the fall, our feelings have the potential to lead us into temptation. However, they also possess the ability to lead us into godly imitation. Expressing joy, anger, sadness, and other emotions seems godly when I look at the Lamb of God. I agree with the words of Solomon, that there is a time and season for all things (Ecclesiastes 3:1). But if the time never comes to rejoice, lament, or be angry, then we are not acting like Jesus.
But what do we do? I would argue we must read the Psalms and allow them to shape our attitude toward emotions. The psalter can give us a model of what to do with our emotions and how to express them.
Learn to feel the desperation in Psalm 42. Let the joy of Psalm 100 fill you. Allow the lament in Psalm 13 to give you some prayer language. Lean into Psalm 73 and acknowledge your envy. Unwrap your gift and, like a child on Christmas Day, show it to your Abba Father.
Washington is a member of Parkway Church, Clinton.
