I’m an extremely emotional individual; I always have been. Even as a young child, I felt everything with extreme depth and poignancy. Through a formula of heart-hardening ingredients, I was taught that my emotions were arrogant back seat drivers. They called out from the back row of the minivan, but reason was at the wheel and only seldom did he make a wrong turn.
But then I met Jesus in another man’s life in college. I’ve been un-learning and re-learning ever since. One of the ways I’ve been flying upside down unawares, was in thinking that emotions played a tertiary role in life.
Let’s consider both Reason and emotion. I’m in control of Reason. At least more so than is true with my emotions. I can guide and choose to engage Reason in my mind. I can work through a hard situation and turn it over and over, probing and examining things. And when I’m done, I can leave Reason, on some level, and return to life. In contrast, I find myself almost completely unable to do that with my emotions. They just arrive. I used to view them like the uninvited party guest who dominates every conversation. And their timing? Usually poor. Even if I succeed in stuffing them, they are either thudding in the background like a headache or continually pushing their way up front. They overshadow and influence my experience…until they feel obliged to leave.
But do you ever try to feel otherwise than you do? It’s impossible. It can be maddening if you try for too long. But I’m picking up that it seems that neither Reason, nor emotion are meant to be in the driver’s seat. Christ is. And both my Reason, and my emotion serve Him but they cannot drive.
The goal of life, according to the Bible, is to Love God with everything at my disposal and to likewise Love my neighbor [Deuteronomy 6:5, 10:12; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27]. God and Jesus use the word “heart” which I’ve taken to mean the seat of my emotions (the place where feelings exist). I’m realizing that both my Reason [my ability to reason/discern God's will enabled by the renewing of my mind in Christ through the scriptures Romans 12:2] and my emotions [the inclination of my heart to feel something: remorse, contrition, sadness, joy, loss etc] find their appropriate place in serving to enable worship in my life. Without both Reason and emotion, my ability to worship God is truncated.
In fact, emotions in the sense that I’m speaking of them, find their ultimate purpose and end in the worship of God. I use the definition of worship as John Piper does: “worship is a way of gladly reflecting back to God the radiance of His worth” [Desiring God, p92]. Without emotions, my worship becomes something akin to duty. And mere duty, is lacking in beauty. As Piper reasons, it does not stir a man’s wife to give her gifts out of a heart of duty. It most honors a man’s wife when he is moved by emotion to purchase her flowers and dote upon her. Similarly, in the history of the United States people have at times been outraged by the draft of young men into the military. The governmental compulsion or duty to serve one’s country does not so easily stir hearts. However, the willful, and perhaps even joyful, enlistment of a man to serve something greater than himself is the subject of countless films, documentaries, and television shows. And this pulls at the heart strings of many Americans, and on some level even those with moral objections to war.
Similarly, it most honors God, when my emotion meets and marries Reason resulting in passionate worship. In fact that is true worship: the written Truth of God in the person of Jesus renewing the mind and causing rebirth which in turn sparks the emotions resulting in the willful and consummate overflow of joy, love, peace, patience, kindness etc [John 4:23-24]. And that is the proper place for my emotions: as a vehicle for gladly reflecting back to God the radiance of His worth.
It is a marriage of emotion with Reason, that seems the appropriate end for both entities. It is the consummation of worship.