Submitting our Emotions to Jesus
“True freedom comes when we no longer need to be somebody special in other people’s eyes because we already know we are lovable and good enough.” Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality
I’ve been fairly upfront about my struggle with depression and anxiety in my early twenties. I went through a period of being controlled and overrun by my emotions in ways that sabotaged my peace, my purpose and my joy. During that time period, how I felt became the barometer of truth in my life, despite the fickle nature of my feelings from day to day. Friends would tell me that I just needed to “follow my heart.” The problem was that one day, I would feel happy and would show up to my life and work hard and serve others, but then the next day, following my heart and my feelings would have meant tossing in the towel, concluding that my life has no meaning and no one would even care if I disappeared. It turned out that even my most authentic self was actually more like a conglomerate of selves who desired opposite things, depending on the day.
I now understand the underlying root system of that much better and as it turns out, I am far from alone in these sorts of feelings. For me, it all stemmed from a felt sense of rejection at a core level - an orphan mindset which is actually an identity crisis. I had internalized the lie that I was not worth loving and that I was too much for anyone. I believed (and experienced) that inevitably, I would mess something up by being “too much,” and that would drive those I loved away. Each relationship that came and went further reinforced that I was not worth loving or committing to and that eventually, I would be left alone, again. Outside of the spiritual ramifications of that orphan mentality where I felt completely disconnected from God and wasn’t actually certain that He could be trusted, my mental and emotional health spun out of control. My whole person suffered in this time of my life; my felt sense of identity, my felt sense of worth, my sense purpose, all reinforced by feeling so up and down all of the time, which felt like slavery to my feelings. All that I wanted was to feel steady and to be whole.
What was my deal though? Of course I have all sorts of issues just like everyone else, but lots of people have had it far worse than me. What was driving the undercurrent of the emotions that would actually take me to the point of believing that my life had no worth and that no one would even miss me if I were gone? What convinced me in the deepest part of my mind that I had nothing to offer to anyone? I had a good family that loved me and I had lots of friends and yet, certain circumstances that seemed to happen over and over again left me feeling so rejected, so unloveable, and ultimately hope-less.
At this point in my Spiritual Journey I’ve been able to sift through all of those emotions and their derivatives with a bit more perspective than I had in the past. I’ve intentionally allowed myself to become teachable and humble enough to subject my inner life to deep introspection with the purpose of discovering more about myself, from the perspective of God.
At some point I came to recognize that without the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit working in and through my whole person, my best efforts were merely that. For a long time I took for granted the scripture that says that, “He will give us a new heart and a new mind,’’ assuming that by way of incorporation, as a child of God, that magically my mind would be transformed to be a less dysfunctional version of myself. Little did I know that unless I made and continue to make a conscious choice every single day to lay even the most insignificant details of my personhood before the throne of Christ, my life would remain unchanged in measurable ways. I had to invite Jesus to be King of my mind, my body, my resources, my talents, and ultimately King of my emotions, too.
Where does this idea come from in Scripture?
To be a follower of Jesus is to live a radically different life than the status quo. It is a completely different way to be human. Everything is to become re-centered around the life and teaching of Jesus - his rhythms, his lifestyle, his disciplines (habits), as well as adopting his way of thinking and relating and loving others.
Since we are thinking, feeling, expressive, and physical beings just like Jesus was (Scripture says that we are made in the image of God), Jesus models in his own life a concern and care for our (human) emotions, as well as the rest of our personhood.
2 Corinthians 1: 3-11 reflects Jesus’s concern for our feelings. In his letter to the church in Corinth Paul writes this:
Praise to the God of All Comfort
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 5 For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. 6 If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. 7 And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. 8 We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. 9 Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. 10 He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, 11 as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.” (NIV)
How can we connect this ancient text with our experience in 2018?
There is something going on underneath the surface for most of us. There is a root system within us that is made up of all sorts of variables, stories, circumstances, worldviews, pain etc. that are pushing so hard upon us that, depending on the moment or the stress, there can be an incredible falling apart. As humans, this is what our our circumstances and the subsequent emotions can do to us. This crisis within has become observably and statistically worse since the beginning the pandemic as we’re seeing mounting suicide rates and mental health catastrophes at an all time high. As believers, we acknowledge that there has to be a source beyond ourselves by which we rely on and trust in order to navigate the ever-demanding and often harsh environments and circumstances we find ourselves in.
For others of us, our emotions are dependent on what other people think of us. For many, our emotions state can rise and fall based on our performance, or the perception of performance by others. This sounds crazy to write out but there are countless studies out now that reveal that people’s emotional states will rise and fall with the number of likes that they receive on social media because we’ve assigned so much power and influence to it as a culture.
Particularly in the West, we have witnessed an unprecedented revealing of scandals. These scandals have highlighted (often times) very powerful people in politics, in entertainment and in business who are able to put forth a very successful exterior but who are suffering internally. They have a veneer that hides deeper layers of dysfunction and unhealthy ways of living, thinking and relating to others which inevitably end up shedding off in the perfect storm, leaving all kinds of painful collateral damage in their wake. These mainstream scandals are really just a mirror of what all of us deal with on some level.
Behind the facades there is a world of emotions and feelings that we all have. It does not matter what your socio-economic status is, what career you have, how influential your platform is, how attractive your spouse is, how religious you are, or how wonderful your family of origin is. We all have things going on underneath the surface that have a direct bearing on the state of our emotional, mental and spiritual life.
So if Jesus calls us to follow Him with everything that we have and with all that is within us, that in effect means that we bring our physical, our social, our mental, and our emotional aspects of our lives and lay them at his feet, which is where all true transformation begins. We bring our messes and our past, our brokenness and our pride and we ask him, on purpose, be our God and King over every square inch of our lives. In doing so we, in a vulnerable act of worship and submission, give him access and permission to begin a new work within us, inviting him to see us as we really are. This too is where we confront our anemic versions of what it means to be in relationship with him, by moving into deeper intimacy with him in order to allow him to transform who we are into what he has called us to be. We ask him to go into the depths off our souls with us so that we are not left to our own finite resources within ourselves, as if we could supply all of our own needs. I don’t know about you but for me, that has been tried and has been found utterly lacking. It is a refreshing and powerful concept that I do not have perform my own healing but that it is instead a partnership with God, where vulnerability and honesty are the prerequisites and wholeness and peace and joy are the byproduct of a lifetime spent in relational intimacy with Jesus.
If I only look within myself, I come up with scarcity because I am not the source of love nor the source of healing. I need the source of life and love itself or rather, the person of Jesus himself, to lead me to the streams of “living water” which is not only the exact thing that my soul needs and craves but its the exact thing that only he can provide. I am the creation, and in proper order, I need the creator himself to sustain what he has made and begun in me. To find sustenance within myself, independent of who designed me, would be like photosynthesis determining that sunlight or oxygen were unessential, as if it could produce those things within its own processes. It turns out that despite our best efforts to live in self-reliance, as if we don’t need God, our deepest need (the deeper need beyond the emotional felt-need in the moment), is actually to connect with the only reliable source of abundance.
A Third Way
The day-to-day spectrum of emotions are usually private feelings that we all know and have, but we don't often think about how those feelings bear down upon our relationship with Jesus. This is where some of our cultural scripts clash with a Biblical understanding of what our emotions are for.
What do I mean by scripts?
The West generally has two stories around emotions:
1) The Stoic Response to Emotions:
Humans are not to be overrun by emotions. We need to be in control and keep emotions well at bay. Emotions are thought to be simply driven by the ‘reason’ part of them. This works for some of us but then inevitably, there is this stuffing or shoving away of key emotions and processes that humans simply must feel and work through in order to be whole. Those emotions and processes if left unattended to or neglected can and will end up coming out in unhealthy ways. A glaring example of how the overly stoic response to emotions can end up backfiring is represented by the statistics and depression rates from the WWI & WWII era, especially in men.
2) Romantic Story: This clashes with the stoic story to where we are driven by our emotions - our feelings determine truth in our lives. What doesn’t feel good cannot be good or true for me and conversely, what feels good must be true and good for me. This is the rise of therapy, self-help, social media for venting, and overall looking to emotions as a super positive thing. It’s a move from stoic to hyper-emotional.
We’ve made some very necessary progress as a society when dealing with mental health but then also we’ve regressed in a lot of ways. What we see now is that we’ve continued to move from an unhealthy, overly stoic approach to emotions where there was hardly any acknowledgment or conversation about emotions, to now a highly emotional landscape where young people are totally overrun by their emotions and where we protect people from any bad experiences in order to protect our emotional states. The problem is that both extremes have massive limitations and often times, debilitating implications.
The two stories are:
1) Ignore your emotions
2) Run into them with total abandon
On the surface we’re able to get away with creating and maintaining an emotional facade to some degree. We can construct our online identities to appear however we’d like. There’s the ‘what you see is what you get,' and people can certainly catch the vibe that you're giving off through the identity you project, the words you say, the deeds you do, the clothes you wear, etc. All of that says something about yourself but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it’s a very different landscape driving us as human beings. Yet, sometimes the facade we work so hard to maintain often crumbles and we find ourselves sabotaged by undisciplined emotions.
The temptation there however is to assign our emotions to a category that is untrustworthy and not good. The overly stoic script taught several generations that emotions are bad, useless, and avoidable at best. But I think that Jesus has more for us than such a low view of a necessary and certainly beautiful aspect of our likeness of God. Did He not create us in His image and did Jesus not feel emotions deeply? Yes, Scripture affirms that he did. In fact I would argue that his feeling of love for us is what kept him nailed to the cross when he could have upended it all. So in the name of healthy spirituality, we begin to ALLOW our emotions to be a part of the whole of you. If you come from a more stoic family of origin, this should be wonderful news for you. I know it was for me.
What do we know about emotions?
Emotions are driven by:
1) Moments of pain
- A clear moment in the past that shaped your emotional landscape
- Something you struggle with continually
2) Families generative of emotional landscape
- Order of birth
- Lost a parent/sibling/divorce
- Family is place where identities are given to you that stick for the better or for the worse. They then (most often) shape the way you process your emotions
3) Experiences that shape you
- Bullying
- Mental health experiences
- Trauma/Abuse
4) Cultures and Contexts
- Children of Migrants/Immigrants
- Northern European heritage integrate with emotions in a similar way
There is a variety of scripts for how you respond to your emotions. The catalyzing effect on our humanity is that even if you're successful, those memories and experiences and contexts still shape you now. Things which then shape how we feel and shape the deeper layers of who we are then give birth to scripts which are often false narratives about who we are and about our worth and value, particularly if they are not brought under the Lordship of Christ. That is the crux of my story, that until these aspects were brought into the light for me to see clearly and to intentionally subjugate to my relationship with Jesus, I was at a loss within myself because the script I had was continually looping, self-defeating and did not correspond with the truth about my value as an image-bearer, as revealed in Scripture.
Examples of Scripts:
1) Hopeless: This is performance based. This is me in my early twenties. Nodding, but underneath is a script that says that I’m inevitably going to mess things up or say something stupid and make a fool of myself. Other times it’s an inner script that says that I’m not smart enough of good enough.
We’ve all got our different scrips:
There’s the loud one.
The quiet one.
The good daughter/son.
Perfect one.
Lonely One.
Problem child.
Black Sheep.
Not safe.
I can't show emotions.
To be perfectly clear, none of those are from God and yet, how easily we succumb to them and adopt them into our identities and live through those scripts because they’re deeply powerful.
What’s the formula, then?
In order to deal with these, the approach in the West is typically that we medicate.
The 21st century is a Cornucopia to make you addicted. It’s anything from materialism to alcohol and drugs (prescription and otherwise), sex, helping (yes, that’s a thing), working too much, screens, status, etc. These experiential and formative things can give you identities that are not of God and can often reinforce the scripts that are already wreaking havoc in our lives.
These scripts then float into our relationships that don't reflect God’s order for healthy distance from each other. This is where people blur relationships, looking to other people and things for what only God can give to us. This looks like having no boundaries in relationships. It’s where those dividing lines between us and others become blurred and co-dependent, fearful that people will leave us even though we live in a culture that is commitment-phobic. We demand to feel secure but do not want it demanded of us emotionally which all stems from fear and self-protection at its root. That is the crux emotional unhealth.
Some of us have a lack of boundaries from emotional unhealth. We’ve got to get stuff from people, or say things to impress people, or we maintain codependent relationships because we’re powerless as a result of the scripts (or lies) we’ve internalized. In our cultural moment, the online script is where we share EVERYTHING and its “normal,” to have a total lack of boundaries. That becomes dysfunctional because the emotional temperature of someone can effect everyone else even if it is set by unhealthy emotional realities. For example, when someone is upset online and shares their experience, it’s often the case that then others believe that they should be upset too, as we’ve witnessed in the social phenomena of group outrage.
"At times our false self has become such a part of who we are that we don't even realize it. The consequences—fear, self-protection, possessiveness, manipulation, self-destructive tendencies, self-promotion, self-indulgence, and a need to distinguish ourselves from others —are harder to hide.” Peter Scazzero
The wiring in the brain in our neural pathways are directly influenced by our emotions. As people who aim to take responsibility for our own lives, we all need to own, assess and manage our mental health in practical ways. We can even do all the right stuff such as live a balanced life, cut out alcohol, get exercise, and don’t overeat etc, but still comes back to the fact that in the core of our being, we are broken so any external fixes can only serve us so much. There was a profound change in my life when I began to give all of my emotions to Jesus in addition to making wise practical life choices that would induce healthier patterns of living. More generally speaking, this is not pushing away medical advise. This is doing healthy habits plus acknowledging that part of my sanctification process is/was to intentionally submit my emotions to Jesus, which has been profoundly transformative.
The way these Emotions work generally is that there are two extremes:
1) Those who retreat: No one knows and you suffer. You may be the life of the party, but then you suffer quietly inwardly. You’re smiling but it’s cracked and no one knows.
2) Those who are the “Skunks”: Everybody knows everything that you feel and everything that you do.
So what does God want you to do with your emotions?
Lets sketch out the landscape for some initial first steps for where God wants to take us while at the same time recognizing that there will continue to be blockage for many of us because of these emotional issues unless we go deep and dig them out of our root system.
Unforgiveness & Anger
You can cling to negative emotions like a security blanket. They can actually feel comfortable, good and safe even when not properly identified for what they are. Yet Jesus’ voice in Scripture is clear: "Do you want to get healing?" Where previously misery enabled you to stay at a distance from God and others and offered you an excuse, you now have the choice and the ability to ask yourself what Jesus asked the disabled man at the pool of Bethesda: "Do you want to get free?
In stepping into that question, some of you might be waiting for God to do something in you but the truth is that God is already doing stuff in you that you might not recognize as long as this under-layer continues to sabotage your true freedom.
Ecclesiastes 3:4 tells us that, “There is a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance…”
That is beautiful because it accounts for the sacredness of all of the emotions on the spectrum. In lament and mourning we need to be okay with God sitting with us in this sorrow. Lamentations is an entire book of the Bible dedicated to that idea.
Mindfulness and coloring books are great and perhaps helpful if you live in privilege, but what if you live in a war-torn region or in abject poverty?
The end point in Scripture is Jesus’s return. That is the point when every tear is wiped away. The Bible says that bad things are going to happen. Our contemporary approach is to push away bad feelings instead of fully integrating the human person with the backdrop of Jesus’s return. The scriptures say that life is emotions!
Plato's account of Socrates’s death was, “Face death with zero emotion.”
Contrast that with the story of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane.
He was so overcome with prevail and emotion that the blood vessels in his forehead broke. He was THE balanced human emotional figure, and his (and our) emotions are good. At moments we see him angry and frustrated, but his anger was controlled. If Jesus is the picture of us as redeemed people, we will not be without emotions.
The peace of God doesn’t get rid of emotions but promises something that transforms the human. Jesus is enveloped by the peace of God - the kind of peace that is beyond human wisdom. You don’t get this peace of God by going and reading self help and more mindfulness. This is beyond. “This peace will guard your hearts and minds."
So where this goes is not an eradication of emotions and it’s not a move from stoicism and romanticism. It is our emotions being transformed by the peace of God.
Until that time, our emotions need guarding. Stuff is going to come against you. It is human to struggle until Jesus returns, but the peace of God is there. Surrendering our lives in prayer, thanksgiving, abiding and connected to God is what transforms us. By doing this, we move towards healing, peace, and Kingdom life by submitting our emotions to Christ and His way.
Am I willing to put those feelings about that person on the altar? Am I willing to forgive my family of origin for things that occurred in my childhood? It’s saying, “Jesus I want to give to you the pain of that experience which I’ve never given to you, or that loneliness, that anxiety, and those trials - I hand them all to you.”
The difference is that this is not a social script that says you move from an emotionally unhealthy position to an emotionally balanced person. Instead you become the life of Christ in you, or rather your emotions in you are as Christ would have your emotions. This is transformation to Christ-likeness. In other words how Jesus would respond, you would respond.
Living your God-given life involves staying true to your true self, in Christ. It means that you learn to distinguish your true self from the demands and voices around you and that you learn to discern the unique vision, calling, and mission that God has given to you.
If you think about it, based on Scripture, it seems as though almost everybody had expectations or a false self to impose on Jesus's life. In living faithfully to his true self, he disappointed a whole bunch of people. He was not swayed however by their opinions of him. He was secure in his Father's love, in himself, and was then able to withstand an enormous amount of pressure. He left his family of origin and their expectations of him and became an inner-directed, completely separate adult.
He disappointed his friends, the twelve disciples. They had projected onto Jesus the type of Messiah that they wanted him to be. Jesus listened without reacting. He communicated without antagonizing, and still he disappointed the crowds when he wouldn't be and do what they were demanding of him.
Jesus was able to maintain a non-anxious presence even in the middle of stress. He was not self-less - He did not actually live as if only other people mattered. He knew his value and his worth. He had friends and He asked for help. Yet at the same time Jesus was not selfish. He did not live as if nobody else mattered. He gave his life out of love for others. From a place of deeply loving union with his Father, Jesus had a mature, healthy version of a true self. Jesus did not heal everyone. He did not come and serve at everyone’s request. He retreated to the wilderness and rested and then reengaged the culture he was called to. Boundaries are a large part of Jesus's model and that implies emotional, social, and physical boundaries which enabled him to maintain a healthy self.
Sometimes we have to go back in order to move forward.
The seed of your future is in your past. The scripts, identities, experiences, stories, moments, feelings shape how you respond. You can’t change what you don't know about. It’s just like how in pre-marriage counseling you go into it and into marriage like you're going to set the world on fire! And then you get home from your honeymoon and you start acting just like your parents and react in conflict just like your parents. Am I right?! It helps to understand, then, how your past shapes your future so that you can begin making changes that bring health and vitality to your relationships. Those scripts kick in at some point. When you’ve got a kid and you’re not sleeping, and there’s no boundaries and no margin. All of a sudden those deep emotional scripts kick in and you become someone that you do not want to be.
Prayerfully consider this:
There is a flip side to all of that. The seed of your future is that God has called you! There is another story in your past where the fingerprints of God are all over your life. The bounce backwards is undoing unhealthy scripts IN ORDER to find God’s sovereign foundations on your life. For me that meant that I finally realized that my life was not hopeless after all. The seed of your future is in your past, so give that to God and let Him do his best work in you.
Surrender the facade in order to nourish the character of Jesus in you.
Put down those facades that are not of God, even the ones that are even pretty and pretty darn impressive. You don’t need a facade. Jesus died for you. He knows your imperfections. You are a broken person, angry, jealous, cynical, person. But with Christ, we are washed anew. We get a brand new beginning in Him.
What defined you and me in the past does not have to define our future. What matters is that my primary identity is Christlikeness.
If your facade was ‘the pretty one, you’re just going to allow yourself to be accepted for who you are - He’s called you “holy.” Forget yourself and the facades. Just focus on Jesus. The true YOU comes out in doing so — the YOU that is not encumbered by the scripts. The truest version of you begins to emerge which is formed in Christ.
Embrace the healing power of limits
Limits between you and the relationships that you look to to fill your emotional pain
Limits in looking for love in the wrong places
Limits in medicating your pain to cope with emotional pain
Jesus goes to the quiet places, but why? It’s because he needed obscurity at times and escape from the hurry and the demands the crowd.
If you’re a leader, the crowd is seductive because the crowd tells you what you want to hear. Limits are something that helps you deal with emotional unhealth in every realm, leader or not.
Lastly:
Choosing to be disciplined in your emotions is choosing the opposite of the world. Meditate on the Word. Don’t fill your mind with what your feelings and emotions are saying, but instead fill it with what God is saying and he will direct your thoughts and your emotions towards the way of Jesus. You CAN put this down.
Psalm 1:3 is an image of the Spiritual life. It says, “That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither-- whatever they do prospers.”
My prayer for you and for me is that we are brave. Bring your past, bring your emotions and let God disciple all of you because He is the one, true loving being in the entire universe who can make you whole.