Emotions Are Powerful Things

...and also quite fleeting.

I actually started this post before I came across Jollyblogger's and Adrian Warnock's discussion of the role of emotions in faith, but in his latest entry, buddy David says so much of what I intended to say that I have to reorient completely.

One of the most refreshing things about coming to a reformed point of view was the objective orientation of reformed theology. In other words, it affirms that Christianity is not about what I do for God, nor what I feel toward God, but what God has done for me in Christ. Christianity says "look outside of yourself to Him" rather than "look inside at your feelings."

Many of us fled evangelicalism mysticism with its subjective emphases and finally found peace in the reformed tradition with it's objective emphases. It gets tiring to continually take your spiritual temperature by your feelings because they are all over the map. What we need is to constantly be reminded of our inclusion in the beloved because of the work of Christ on the cross. It reminds us that even when I am feeling bad, because of Christ I am still as close as I can be to the Father.

Insofar as Adrian and Piper and Edwards affirm that, I am all for it. Insofar as they say "look to the cross and let the cross shape your emotions," that's great. But I think they need to be careful about making emotions the measure of spirituality.

I have something to add, but find that I must disclaim any specific personal aiming point for my comments since I have now placed them in the context of David and Adrian's discussion. They are not aimed at Adrian.

It is quite appealing in a ministry role to manipulate emotion. In my day in Young Life we were masters at it. Not only is it easy to manipulate emotion, it's really easy in adolescents. Like counting butts in pews, emotional response is another tempting, but misleading, method to measure ministry effectiveness.

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis says

Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.

In ministry we seek to help people develop genuine faith. That is terribly hard work. Frankly it is work only the Holy Spirit can do, reducing us as ministers to simply placing ourselves in that same Holy Spirit's hands to use and to produce result.

It is so tempting to control "the weather," by building a nice facility with all the right programs and technology, and help people have "good digestion," Starbucks in the Narthex - lunch after service, and achieve the emotional result we desire, an emotional result that produces the illusion of genuine faith, but a faith that disappears with the change in weather and the lousy meal.

Will faith in Christ change our emotional state? Absolutely, but our emotional state DOES NOT produce faith in Christ. We cannot afford to substitute mere emotional manipulation for genuine ministry. We cannot allow the temptations of the measurable to substitute for the reality of God's immeasurable grace.

Related Tags: faith, emotions, moods, minstry, manipulation