Once More, With Feeling

I've often been told that we need to watch our emotions when it comes to God.  That we should take care to not make an "emotional" declaration of faith.  The intent of this warning is to remind us of the very Biblical ideal of counting the cost of discipleship (Luke 14: 25-33).  I know people who have, at an emotionally charged moment, made a choice, only to later acknowledge it was a hollow decision.

So, the response has been that we need to better educate disciples.  Modern Discipleship is a class for new believers or new church members.  You learn everything you need to know about Christ and the Church so that you can be a better, more effective member of the Body of Christ.  And you KNOW you are saved.

In case you missed it, that was sarcasm.  Laid on liberally.

I am not opposed to education of disciples at all.  In fact, I encourage it.  But I cannot discount emotion.  I will not denounce the role it plays in our salvation, and our life in Christ.

The problem I have with the classroom approach to discipleship is that it is clinical, more impersonal than Biblical models of discipleship (think apprentices, with less Donald Trump), and that it is just plain lacking something.

Faith is not clinical.  It has never been, nor can it ever be.  It doesn't make sense in the clinical.  Clinical things are things that come from formula, from controlled environments.  Clinical things have their place, but not in faith.  I remember sitting in seminary classes as professors who had not pastored in decades, if ever, lectured us on the appropriate means of evangelism, discipleship, and church leadership.  I do not discount these men's intellect or knowledge.  But there were numerous times the very things they were teaching were being proved impractical, impossible, or just plain ridiculous by the work I was doing in the church.

The theories looked and sounded good.

But the variables in the real world that killed these theories were people.

Emotional people.

Students who knew, front and back, the message of abstinence from sex until marriage- even had made public commitments- still slept with each other.  No amount of 'book learning' could overpower their emotional drive and hormonal impulse.

How many of us know that the right thing to do is to have mercy and compassion on the poor, yet when the poor knocks on our door or walks up to our car at a stoplight, we ignore them?  Be it fear, or perhaps distrust, we just choose to ignore.

On the flip side, is it logic, is it knowledge of the Biblical ideal of "lay down your life for another" that makes a man risk his life to save another person from harm?  Sure, they know, but without some sort of emotional kick in the butt, we'd do nothing.

I'm just trying to make you feel.

What if God wants us to be emotional?  What if He wants us to react viscerally to the things in our lives?  Maybe God wants us to feel anger at injustice towards others.  Maybe He wants us overwhelmed with the FEELING of love toward the one we are married to, as well as the action of love.  Maybe He desires that we have an uncontrollable passion and emotion to cry out to Him in song, in hope, in fear, in tears, in doubt, and in despair.

David would weep and dance and shout before God.  Moses would grow defiant before God.  Jesus was brokenhearted and fearful before God- and also passionate.  Many have felt awe, or fear, or hope, or a welling up of an emotion that has no name when in God's presence. 

This is not bad.

We are human, and God made us to be emotional. To be stirred my the strings of a beautiful or haunting melody, to have tears leap to our eyes at the sight of a long missed loved one or the birth of a child.  He made us to get emotional over these lesser things- why then should we avoid emotion with Him?

He wants us to feel, because when we feel, we act.  Our emotions give fire to the facts in our head.  To live dispassionately is to be an encyclopedia- full of facts but only active as a doorstop.


I need to feel the emotions to remind me I am alive from time to time.  Yes, they are dangerous, unpredictable, and often illogical.

Just like the God who created them.