God Has Emotion

It’s a slow day of rest, and I am soaking in peace right to my bones. We found a slightly leaning pine tree and strung it with lights our kind landlady gave us. Yesterday I slowly dried thin sliced oranges and Rafael and I simmered some pine, cranberries, and orange to get our senses aligned with the cheer of the season.

Have you ever pondered the fact that God created us with five incredible senses to see, taste, hear, smell, and touch the world? I find it awe-inspiring that He would think of all of those ways to awaken us to a world of wonder, giving us the permission to continually exercise emotional delight. Eve and Adam had everything they needed to feast with all of their senses, and yet they felt like they needed to taste something more. Their capacity for sin drove them to allow desire to taste what was forbidden to overcome what they knew to be true.

The abundance and intimacy of Eden was a place of good and holy emotion. The good created parts of Adam and Eve’s sense and emotion were manipulated by a crafty serpent and the sin brought fast and devastating consequence. Their lack of emotional intelligence however, did not deter God from coming to them again with a strong rebuke accompanied by the promise of a Redeemer. God knew their emotions and desires had been tampered with by a serpent. He also knew that their created identity was to feel fully with all of their senses and to experience strong emotion for the purpose of intimate connection with Him.

He came to them while they are ashamed and confused, hiding from a presence that had never frightened them before. Distorted desire always results in shame and the desperation to hide ignites a deep fear of exposure. The clash of emotion in those times is confusing especially after years of living in fear as a habit. We often have no idea where we are and who we are anymore. That’s why God knowing exactly where Adam and Eve were hiding in the garden comes to them gently asking, “Where are you?”

“I heard the sound of you and I was afraid and naked, so I hid.”

The reality of our negative experiences often slowly dulls our senses and we spiral into negative emotion. We stay hidden in our fig leaves even when we hear the persistent and gentle voice of God in the garden of our devastations, “Where are you?”

And when we answer, we enter into a dialogue of understanding ourselves and Him.

It was risky for Adam to answer God’s question. It could have felt easier to just sit sewing fig leaves desperately trying to be good enough to be in conversation with God.

That’s why the healing process of looking up in our vulnerable, naked state to say, “Here I am, I’m scared, naked, and hiding” often looks like the outlet of what is true about every human being; a tsunami of very strong and interesting emotion.

When we disassociate from our physical senses they can slowly lose their strength over time. If we decide to sew fig leaves for the rest of our lives instead of answering our Father we get really weary. When strong emotion is suppressed and discouraged we turn robotic over time with the reality about ourselves slowly sacrificed on the altar of perfection and performance. That’s why so many believers today spend hours striving for approval from God with desperate activity instead of simply looking up and telling God, “I’m scared.” Much of this phenomenon is because the intimacy of honesty feels dangerous, and as a method of self-protection we strive to hide every imperfect part of us.

God helped Adam and Eve clarify what they were feeling, even if He knew exactly what they were feeling because God wants a dialogue of relationship versus a monologue of performance with His children. Some of us have been hearing the sound of Him since childhood, but in our fear and nakedness, we hide desperate not to be exposed.

God addresses the serpent first after the fall and through his prescribed punishment and before talking about Adam and Eve’s consequences for sin, He references the redemptive plan through Jesus, “He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heal” in Genesis 3:15. A crafty serpent still manipulates us through our physical senses and emotion today, but God’s redemptive plan is established to bring us back into right emotional relationship. Our distorted desire has the capacity to destroy us but without good and healthy emotion, we are left barren of our created capacity for intimacy.

What I find somewhat alarming is the expansive amount of Christian literature and one-liners subtly denying the reality of our emotional selves. The reason God designed us with the capacity to sense so much is so we could fully live in delight and joyful relationship. Denying emotion means denying a part of our created being and translates into living in a state of unreality and ultimately without the intimacy of healthy relational connection.

“Emotions are not facts” some say.

Or as John Piper writes, “Your feelings are not God, God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God’s word defines truth.”

What they say is true, but not the full truth because God has given us feelings that help us understand what is true. If we constantly suppress and speak loud truth over our feelings they don’t automatically disappear. We have to regard them as important parts of us, because we are created in the image of a good God with good emotion who is not afraid of the truth of our emotional parts.

I remember a leader I was working for calling me “very emotional.” At the time I took it as a jab to calm down and get my tears under control. Recently, I’ve heard numerous comments about our emotional selves such as “She’s very sensitive” or “He’s just overly emotional in worship” and I wonder if a very emotional God is just dancing in the back right with him and beckoning to the suppressed places in the rest of us.

One of the most reiterated comments I hear on the work of the Holy Spirit is that it’s “just an experience” and “it’s all just emotional” and I wonder if we really understand the good strategy plan of a God who looks down on pews full of disassociated and suppressed believers with real experiences of depression and anxiety saying, “They need an overcoming experience with me.” Jack Deere comments in his in his book Why I am Still Surprised by the Voice of God, “It was hard to shake the feeling that my feelings were enemies to be defeated, not something God could use to reveal the truth about me.”

If our feelings, emotions, impressions, and imagination are all enemies to be defeated instead of avenues that God uses to speak to us through His Spirit we will always struggle to hear Him, and be in a constant inner war with the truth about ourselves.

I can hear the critique of what I’ve written so far very well (with both of my ears). Please don’t hear me say that the chronically weeping and raging believers are always healthier then the intellectual pragmatic ones or that those who are visibly emotional in worship are healthier believers. What I am not saying is that all emotion is healthy or presents in a good way. What I am saying is that all true emotion about you deserves a listen and might direct you to some truth about yourself that could help you understand God more fully instead of being fully at war with your own self. God is not afraid about what is true within you and not too weak to align your negative emotional with His created goodness.

Our feelings are not the source of truth. We know that Jesus is the truth in John 14:6. But what is true about us needs to be dealt with in honesty in order for us to truly see our need of Him. What is true about us needs to be acknowledged and spoken so we can be in a dialogue of healthy relationship with Him.

We can suppress our emotion but it means denying a part of Him, because God is in fact emotional. If He wasn’t there would be no world of wild delight and colour and no you and me intricately formed in His image with the real capacity to love and hurt. Imagine falling in love with your spouse with no warm feelings of intimacy, just a contract or commitment to a marriage. The lack of emotional health in relationships often results in the disintegration of commitment. The lack of emotional health in our view of God often slowly chips away at our commitment to Him. We can be doggedly committed to service for God without the healthy intimacy of being in friendship with God.

Jack Deere says, “The rationalism of western culture is offended by knowledge that bypasses the logical workings of your mind.” And yet we see so often in scripture that God uses senses like Nehemiah felt when “God put it into his heart to gather the nobles” in Nehemiah 7:5 and feelings such as when Jesus encountered the women with the issue of blood “Someone deliberately touched me, for I felt healing power go out from me.” in Luke 8:46. We know the logical response of Peter when Jesus asked who touched Him. “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you!” Can’t you see everyone is touching you? But Jesus had a feeling, a sense, a “knowing” within Him that power had gone out of Him. Something miraculous had happened.

Maybe our fear of emotion hinders the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in our lives because we want reality in what we can see and rationalise instead of surrender to God speaking through a good impression or sense, feeling or emotion.

Are your emotions surrendered to God? Can He can “put something in your heart” and you can call it good?

This is very different then being controlled by our feelings and emotions and letting them “sit in the drivers seat” like Peter Scazzero says. It is the humble surrender of all our being to God and the commitment to the full truth about our whole being. Like my friend Mel says, ” Post-enlightenment, rationality became the gold standard to the exclusion of emotion. It’s helpful to think about emotions and rationality existing on a spectrum. On either end is mental illness.” On one end, the logical and practical side of us feels more in control when we can reason and dialogue about everything till it makes perfect sense with our minds. On the other end is a sort of soul-ish driven experiential existence with very little theological underpinning. And we keep swinging the pendulum back and forth through generations.

I find it interesting that one of the greatest topics of disagreement in the church today is the “dead doctrine” of the reformed and the “emotional experientialism” of the charismatics. The truth is there are strengths and weaknesses on both sides and parts of each argument help us understand the reality of God more fully. I recently spoke to a well-known speaker who was raised with an emphasis on superficial and emotional experience without the deep grounding of good theology. She found it safe and comforting to engage in deep intellectual study of the word of God. I know others who were raised with incessant doctrinal dialogue (or monologue!) and so much emphasis placed on right doctrine there was no space for right emotion.

The doctrine of total depravity (a Calvinist doctrine that has had influence in the church at large) plays into this discussion because if we believe that every part of our person is depraved from birth we may have a hard time accepting the value of certain parts of our emotion and imagination. We hang “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made” banners in our nurseries but if we were completely integrous with our theological framework we might hang “Completely and Absolutely Depraved” instead. The way some parents punish and suppress children’s healthy emotion by “Don’t be sad” and “Stop your anger” and “Don’t be dramatic” or “You’ll be ok” is a good indication they would rather just have performance and perfection then the time it takes to guide and talk through genuine feelings. This is not to say we don’t guide and discipline our children and teach them how to express emotion in a healthy way but doing this takes time to acknowledge that their emotions (even anger, frustration, and disappointment) can’t just be disciplined out of them. If there is nothing good about our emotional part as created in the image of God how can we know anything about how we think and feel is good and true? This has so many implications in how we pastor churches and guide our children or talk to our spouses and deal with conflicts.

The belief that everything about me is innately bad results in many desperate individuals fighting lonely battles wondering why the word of God doesn’t have power over their very real emotions of depression, rage, and grief. I’ve sat with many individuals who are desperate to feel God and hear from Him, but are physically and emotionally suppressed. Emotions feel dangerous and uncontrollable and maybe unlike the God they’ve known. The unacknowledged emotions are like ticking time bombs within them that don’t disappear. Instead they grow more calcified and leak out in outbursts no one expects. We call them triggers sometimes.

That’s why we can push through tragic grief like a robot but explode in anger when we stub our toe. Or we bypass the grieving process with some nice Christianise but slowly shut down in relationships. And it’s normally why most individuals avoid conflict, they are afraid of the emotions they haven’t faced and afraid of the emotions that surface with that level of intimacy.

My friends would tell you that I have been the queen of sinners on this topic. It has been much easier for me to speak the truth and create good content than to do the deep transformational work of holistic healing. I know I have hurt people in the process. I also know I have grace-filled friends like Jo who told me over coffee last week, “Wow, you’re not doing that spiritual-bypassing anymore.” I’m slowly learning.

It can be much easier to drop a truth bomb that sounds intelligent than to ask a question that gets to the heart of a personal reality someone is facing. If we care for the truth we will learn to care for the whole truth about ourselves and give that personhood to others. Many churched people enhance the fragmentation survivors of trauma are facing by speaking only to the spiritual and bypassing the emotional and physical parts. This is extreme in cases when deep grief resulting in anguish is met with fiery prayers for deliverance or when an individual shaking with a panic attack is told they have a demon when in reality they just need a quiet presence.

Disregarding the truth about our emotions translates into a hurried trample over the truth of other’s experiences. It’s faster, but much more damaging and in many cases abusive. Think about the plethora of literature and insinuations on the emotional side of females. In many environments women are thought of as dangerous or easily deceived primarily because they are “more emotional.” The female shut-down under the name of biblical headship has resulted in a partial display of God’s image in the church. The practical and doctrinal sides of churched men often override the experiential and emotional side of women.

Do you hear me saying all emotions in women should be considered good? No.

Healthy emotion in women is to display God more fully in the world.

Healthy emotional experiences we have through the work of the Holy Spirit is so we can know God and make Him known more fully in this world.

Environments that are cautious and critical towards women are often cautious towards the work of the Holy Spirit. The nurturing and comforting presence of Mothers and daughters and sisters displays the soft and gentle character of God. When their voice is not heard or valued there will be brokenness in the church. The Holy Spirit is our promised Comforter and was sent to dwell right inside of us so we are never alone and guided into truth and when He is quenched and grieved continually there will be perpetual brokenness in the church.

The denial of the truth regarding our whole being results in fragmentation and brokenness. The denial or quenching of part of the Trinity will result in brokenness. Half of God shown in the world will have good impact with a side of confusion about Him, but the whole image of God displayed through His creation will bring transformational glory with the knowledge of Him.

Fear of a true part of ourselves keeps us from looking up into the face of God when we’re sad and anxious and only exacerbates the gnawing longing for relationship within us. A trip to a conference doesn’t generally have the power to break these patterns because they have been exercised for a lifetime. Seeing God rightly and learning to hear from Him is a process of learning to have a relational dialogue with Him. If God is exemplified to be unapproachable when we are in emotional distress and we can only come to Him in good terms, we need to learn to know David’s God in the Psalms, who cried out in pain with his pillow soaked with tears (Psalms 6:6). The word of God represented rightly gives us the permission to enter into honest dialogue with God. The Spirit of God, when received fully gives us the comfort and power to walk into wholeness because we see a more full picture of God.

In the word of God we see intense emotions can be very good. At least if we call a jealous, weeping, faithfully-loving, angry, God “very good.” God is jealous and angry in Deuteronomy 6:15, “weeping and wailing” in Jeremiah 9:10 and offering “steadfast love for thousands” in Exodus 34:7. Jesus was said to be a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” in Isaiah 56:3 and enduring the cross because of the “joy set before him” in Hebrews 12:2. We’re exhorted not to “grieve the Holy Spirit” in Ephesians 4:30.

The Holy Spirit has emotions that can be grieved?

How real was Jesus’ emotion in Gethsemane in Luke 22:42 when He agonised, begging his friends to stay awake with him? How real was the reality of his pain when He cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” in Matthew 27:46…even though He knew the truth of a promised resurrection.

Knowing the truth does not bypass the reality of our pain. Knowing the truth gives validity and words to our emotion and invites a God who understands every part to be with us. There is a very interesting thing that happens when we are understood on a deep and emotional level and when feelings are put into words and given value in the presence of a grace-filled Father. We see this in Job as he engages in chapter after chapter of raw and honest emotional disclosure with God. God listens and replies with chapters of questions in Job 38-41 to help Job understand His overcoming power in light of his grief to which Job replies in chapter 42. “I have uttered things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. Hear and I will speak. I will question you, and you make it known to me. I have heard you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

The depth of emotion loses its rawness somehow when we can express it honestly and dialogue about it and remarkably enough we often actually calm down and repent when we need to. God is happy to dialogue with us in the process. He truly is the God we read about in Zephaniah 3:17.

“He will quiet you with His love.”

So maybe we should change our tactics in the church from calling women dramatic and emotional or easily Jezebel and easily deceived and tune into what they’re really saying.

Maybe some are asking for the value and personhood God has already given them, and desperate for the permission to enter into honest dialogue with their Creator.

And maybe if women were given permission to show their emotional sides, men would start too and we’d find that emotions are a gift to every created being and when we commit to the truth about them we can see God more fully and make Him known more strategically. Maybe if we ceased our subtle judgement toward the man waving his hands in the back, lost in worship and praise and started expressing the depths of what is true about our emotions some of our shattered places would start coming into wholeness.

Maybe more of us would be dancing in the back.

Because the whole truth about God will allow you to be honest about the whole truth about you. Being honest about every part of us doesn’t automatically heal us but we have the truth to work with instead of unreality, which is profound. Inviting a gentle God into the negative truth about ourselves and allowing Him to guide us into repentance when we need it and understanding where we crave it has the power to deeply transform our innermost parts. It’s then that we can truly “taste and see” like it says in Psalms 34:8, that He is abundantly good.

Being honest about our whole person gives us the capacity to experience sorrow and joy in fuller measure because we can truly experience and hear a good God asking us a powerful question.

“Where are you hiding today?”

Maybe you can’t hear his voice.

Just look up to Him and say with Adam, “I’m here, I’m naked, and I’m afraid.”

And He might ask you, “Who told you that you’re naked?”

And you enter into dialogue with Him. The closer He walks the more you stop sewing leaves and start seeing Him. The nearer He feels the less fear keeps you controlled. And the more honest you talk, the less shame you feel.

The fig leaves drop.

Your eyes lift.

And all you feel with all of your good sense and good emotion is the radical love in the eyes of a Redeemer who has never lifted His gaze. The freedom from shame and fear births the deepest delight we can know because we’re living in our created identity…the one God called very good.

And we dance on in deeply delightful relationship with Him.

References

Deere, J. S. (2022) Why I am still surprised by the voice of God: How God Speaks Today Through Prophecies, Dreams, and Visions Zondervan

Scazzero, Peter (2023) Emotionally Healthy Discipleship https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/your-church/

English Standard Version Bible, 2001, https://www.biblegateway.com/

*Photo of me with my friend Mali, who gives me full permission to express my joys and sorrows in this dance of life.