Posts Tagged: emotions

Story — 3 Comments
3
Nov 10

Remember…

I want to remember.

I’m so prone to forgetting.

I was standing at one of the main sessions of the EFCA national conference overwhelmed with tears of affirmation.  God had been doing many things in my heart at that time.  This was a time of extraordinary revelation of God’s desire for my life.  Previous to the conference I had been preparing to raise support and join the Miami Crusade team.  One day, as I was praying and reading, I was struck with an abrupt doubt.  I remember saying out loud, “Could I have missed it?”  I felt this strong conviction coming over me that God did not want me to continue my internship with Crusade.  I felt Him say, “You haven’t asked me what I want you to do, you’ve simply assumed.”  Whether I should have stopped that summer to seek God for my next step is still unclear to me.  I was moving forward with the things that I felt he had set before me.  But nonetheless, he had interjected.

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Story — 3 Comments
9
Sep 10

The Tyranny of Unrighteous Anger

Anger as I speak of it, is unrighteous in nature.  This is not the anger exemplified by Jesus in driving out the unrighteous from the temple.  Nor is it the type of anger admonished by the psalmist and Paul: requisite is that it be free of sin [Psalm 4:4, 37:8; Ephesians 4:26].  The anger I speak of is tyrannical in nature.  It is the anger of a crazed king Saul [1 Samuel 20:30-31], or of the New Testament zealous persecutor by the same name [Acts 8:3].

As a man who struggles with bouts of anger, I am convinced that the root of most anger is pride of the worst kind.  It is pride that is deserving of death in the Kingdom of God [Prov 16:5].  Pride perverts the mind and perspective in such a way that a person actually thinks the world—people, objects, events—ought to be ordered in such a way as to serve that person at every turn [Prov 19:3].

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Story / The Word — No Comments
15
Jul 10

Emotion Meets Reason: a marriage

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.

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