Minds and Emotions
I have nearly completed my second reading of Charles Swindoll’s Flying Closer to the Flame. As he moved into the second half of his book he raised the issues of emotions in the body of Christ, at least the 20th Century body of Christ. The gist of what he related was the tendency among Evangelicals to discount emotions. Feelings, emotions were to be relegated to the closet, or up grandma’s stairs and into her attic. At best emotions were treated as second-class citizens.
He related seeing men go into seminary with a passion for God only to come out the other side sterile. Facts were so pounded into the minds that emotions were pounded into granules. If you want to dive further into his take on these matters pick up a copy of that book. Chapter 8 is entitled “The Spirit and Our Emotions.” Good stuff there.
Toward the end of the book he gets into healing ministry. One of his chief tenets in regard to emotional situations as those present is to start with the facts given us in the scriptures. Emotions are very important, but listening to them without grounding in God’s word sets many people adrift.
I do not want to run too far afield into these matters, but only to broach them. Having done that let us follow Swindoll’s advice and look back at the 13th verse of Ephesians 2. Paul says, “Don’t lose heart.” That is emotion, and his point is that they might keep their emotions up. Suffering surely is a damper on emotions; empathy for Paul in Ephesus can be too. Paul wants them to stay heartened, so to speak by properly looking at the bigger picture. “Rest your eyes on God’s constructions,” he said, “and be encouraged. Yes I am suffering, but those very God-ordained things have fostered glory in your lives. Be satisfied with God’s take. Live there.”
How do we see our circumstances?
Those in my class when we speak of these things will not be in jail. That does not mean other things will not be pressing in and around them, around me, around us. Do we look at things like Paul? Can we say, “I am who I am by the direction of Jesus Christ.”?
I have made little secret that being a physician was not where I wanted to head with my life. Neither have I hidden my perception that medicine was the profession God would have me pursue. So, here I am all these years from 1992 with the unpleasantness of the formalin-ridden anatomy lab and some rather bleak years of study at the Medical College of Georgia. As I look back over those unfolded days little imagination is required to see how God fit me to his plan.
So Paul was a prisoner of Christ Jesus. As best I can tell it is legitimate for me to say, “I am an ophthalmologist of Christ Jesus.” Did Paul chafe at what God did? Maybe at one point years earlier. Maybe while sitting in the dark listening to God those 3 days until Ananias would arrive. Maybe sometimes while sitting in some dark prison cell. We do not have access to Paul’s mental chewings though we do have access to his concludings.
What rises in your mind as personally confining? What thing seems like your big stigma? A question for you to chew upon is this: Are you in that place despite obedience to Jesus Christ? Or, have you gone your own way and are in that place? If you have obeyed and feel under the crush don’t lose heart, but pray and wait for God to turn the crush to a crutch. Eventually, the crutch will be a cinder block and you will find God takes you safely out the other side (which might be in eternity, by the way).
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