You are NOT Responsible for Your Feelings

I was listening to the Stand To Reason podcast today, and Greg Koukl answered a question of a listener who said she had trouble trusting God to provide for her and had been told by some in her church that it meant she did not have saving faith.  Greg answered this wonderfully, and I linked to the podcast above so you can hear how he answered, but I think I would like to develop on the response to this.

First of all, his general answer was that having problems trusting God does not mean she isn't saved.  He said all believers struggle with trusting God and that, in fact, the very fact that she struggles with this is very good evidence that she has the Holy Spirit to convict her.

I completely agree, but I would like to look at this from a slightly different angle:

You are not not responsible for your feelings; you are responsible for how you respond to them.

This is a very difficult thing to get our heads around sometimes.  Our emotions feel so much like they are part of our conscious soul, but for the most part, our emotions are biochemical signals to our brain... We have very little control over them.

We learn in grade school about our five senses.  We have these different organs that sense the world around us and send signals to our brain that we interpret and use in decision making...  One of these is sight.  Is it a sin if we see something that tempts us?  (Assuming we didn't go looking for it.)  In the story of David and Bathsheba, had David seen her on the rooftop bathing and decided to turn around and not act on that temptation, would he have sinned by seeing her?  I'm fairly confident that all of us would answer "no."  Of course, those of us who know the story (Found in 2 Samuel chapter 11) know that David did sin, but he did so because he dwelt upon and acted upon the temptation.

Much like our 5 senses, our emotions are an input.  And like our senses, they can tempt us to sin.  Unfortunately, unlike our senses, we can't as easily escape our emotions.  We can close our eyes, we can plug our ears, and we can spit out food that offends us, but if we attempt to suppress an emotion, we often end up feeding it.

Anyone who has ever struggled with mental illness can attest to the fact that our emotions don't always reflect our actual desires.  I've dealt with anxiety, depression, and more, but one of the most eye opening events in my life was when I had a bad reaction to an antidepressant and experienced suicidal thoughts.  It only affected me briefly and I can tell you that I had absolutely no true desire to kill myself, but my feelings had gone rogue due to a biochemical reaction. 

It was after that point that I started to understand that these emotions were simply an input.  They didn't define me, they were simply a signal that I had no control over.  My reaction to them was what I was responsible for. It brought me back to the words of Christ in the Gospel of Mark:

"There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”   -- Mark 7:15

To bring this back to the original question this started with, I'm fairly certain when somebody says they struggle with trusting God, they aren't usually talking about the choice to trust, they are talking about the feeling of trust.  If I ever go under the knife, I have to choose to trust my surgeon, but I will probably still feel scared.  There is a very important distinction there, and I don't know if it gets hit on often in church because it isn't pleasant to think about. 

Unfortunately, we live in a culture where we are constantly bombarded with the notion of "Follow your heart."  (A very unwise bit of advice for any of us.)  This is a culture that focuses more on the feeling of love than the act of love.  We can see the results of this mindset by looking at divorce statistics...

I guess the best conclusion I can bring this to is this:  If you struggle with anxiety, it doesn't mean you don't trust God.  If you struggle with depression, it doesn't mean you can't have joy.

 Job cried out to God in Job chapter 30 and he absolutely laid out his heart.  He felt God had abandoned him and told God as much in his prayer saying, "I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me. You have turned cruel to me; with the might of your hand you persecute me," (Job 30:20-21) but when the book comes to a close, God upholds Job and even says that Job spoke rightly. This doesn't mean Job was right, as God had not turned cruel, but God considered nothing Job had said to be sinful.

Even Christ was overwhelmed in Gethsemane saying, "My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death," (Mark 14:34) but we know that Christ's feelings were certainly not sinful. 

Your emotions are inputs, and do not define you any more than your 5 senses do.  You can only be responsible for how you choose to respond to your emotions.  And like Job, sometimes the best response is to cry out to God and let Him know the burdens of our heart.