Introduction — How Do You Feel about How You Feel?
The way you respond to your emotions — including how you feel about how you feel — is of vital importance to your relationship with God and the people in your life. Emotions are one of the most common and most commonly misunderstood opportunities we have to grow in maturity and love. Among the truths we will explore is this foundational one: emotions are an essential way we bear God’s image. God expresses emotions, and he designed us to express them too. In the Gospels, we witness Jesus’s compassion for suffering, his anger as he speaks to callous religious leaders, and his groans as he grieves over unbelief and death.
Chapter 1 — Sometimes It’s Good to Feel Bad
Standing with Mary at her brother Lazarus’s fresh grave, Jesus is stabbed by grief and breaks down in tears (John 11:32–36). Think about this: as God, Jesus controls the entire universe and is going to raise Lazarus from the dead in around five minutes. Why on earth would Jesus weep when he is about to do an amazing miracle? Because he is perfect. He cries at the death of his friend and is deeply moved by Mary’s anguish because that is what love does when confronted with loss.
The basic reason we need negative, unpleasant emotions is that we live in a fallen world. God made us to respond to things as they actually are. To not feel grief when someone we love dies, to not feel discouraged when we fall into the same pattern of sin again, to not be upset when children lie or hurt each other — that would be wrong. Even Job, who still worshiped God after losing everything, “arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground” when he heard about the death of his children (Job 1:20). You were made in the image of God himself, and that means you were made to see the world as he sees it. Only those who love the Lord enough to open their hearts to the pain in his world will be able to enter into his joy as well.
Chapter 2 — What Exactly Are Emotions?
Perhaps one of the most important things the Bible tells us about our emotions is that they are an expression of what we value or love. Paul writes in Romans 12:15, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” Sincere love is shared by emotionally entering into the experience of others. This is exactly what Jesus modeled at Lazarus’s grave: he literally mourned with those who mourned, grieving the ugliness of sin and death. Emotions also give us the physical energy and motivation to act — anger can feel like a sudden surge of energy demanding release. Most fundamentally, our emotions are an expression of worship. Where our emotions run, our worship is not far behind.
Chapter 3 — Emotions Don’t Come in Single File
Our emotions never come in single file. Life is not that simple. You love lots of things, and the fact that you love many things means you are always simultaneously responding to different pieces of the world in different ways. Consider Matthew 23, where after thirty-some verses of intense critique of the Pharisees, Jesus gives voice to one of the most poignant laments in all of Scripture: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets… How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matthew 23:37). Anger and grief, judgment and tenderness, inhabiting the same moment. Mixed emotions are the right response to a mixed world.
Chapter 4 — Emotions Happen in Your Body
Your emotions don’t happen in the abstract; they happen in your body. Someone can say words into a phone a thousand miles away and make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The simple sight of a photograph can reach into your chest and make your heart pound. Take about fifteen seconds: consciously relax your shoulders, tilt your head slowly backward, and take several deep breaths. Did you find tension you were unaware of? Every moment spent unconsciously tensed reinforces to your body that life is stressful — and the natural result is a deepening cycle of becoming just that much tenser. Regular exercise, sufficient sleep, and being warm enough make it easier for our emotions to line up with God’s.
Chapter 5 — You Relate to Others When You Feel with Them
To relate to one another the way God intends means to be fully engaged in the experiences of the other. Not sharing emotions in a relationship is a problem. No matter how deeply you love someone, a lack of emotional expression communicates a lack of love. Imagine how you would feel if your spouse professed wholehearted love and handed you a dozen roses, but did it all in a mechanical voice and with a look of total disinterest. The actions would communicate love, but the tone would communicate apathy. Emotions are not at the center of what love is, but they are a critical way of expressing it and connecting to others.
Chapter 6 — Why Can’t I Control My Emotions?
The author of Psalm 42 famously writes that his soul thirsts for God like a deer pants for flowing streams — then spends the rest of the psalm wrestling with his emotions, twice asking, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” Even as he fights to remember God’s goodness, his feelings seem to stay stuck. This lack of immediate change doesn’t mean his battle is pointless. It simply means he is human — and that the world around him must change at a significant level for his significant emotions to change. What matters is participating with God in a process of ongoing heart change — at the level of body and mind, of habit and community, of prayer and honest examination.
Chapter 7 — Two Pitfalls
Just as cookies make a terrible nutritional center for your diet, emotions make a terrible central priority for your life. One pitfall is treating them as everything — the dominant cultural narrative that leaves people with no easy way to guard against the flood of feelings they experience. The other pitfall runs in the opposite direction: dismissing or suppressing emotions as though they are obstacles to be overcome rather than signals to be understood. Both extremes miss the mark. The Bible offers something richer than either.
Chapter 8 — Engage: A Better Option
The Bible’s model of engaging emotions is simple: when an emotion comes on your radar, you look at it, see what you find, and then decide how to respond. Scripture’s first step is simply to identify your feelings. The second is to examine your emotions by asking: Why am I feeling this? What am I reacting to? How is this emotion making me want to behave? Suppose you are angry because your wife broke the lawn mower. When you examine this, several things surface. Your anger is creating strain, and the frustrated thoughts on a loop suggest you care more about the inconvenience to yourself than about the good intentions your wife showed in trying to help.
When you know what you are feeling, have named it, and have discerned which aspects are good and which are bad, you are ready to act. Proper responses fall into two fundamental categories: embrace and nurture the loves and behaviors that are good; resist and starve loves and actions that are bad. In the lawn-mower example, acting means beginning by apologizing for being short, reassuring her that it is going to be okay, thanking her for trying to take care of something for you. All the internal self-awareness in the world doesn’t help if it doesn’t lead to change in relationship and action.
Chapter 9 — Engaging Emotions Means Engaging God
Psalm 62:8 captures it with profound simplicity: “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.” Pouring out your heart means naming the feelings you have most strongly — bringing the churning mixture of emotions to God and upending it into his hands one sentence at a time. In the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus says, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38), what does he do? He speaks honestly to his friends about the dread and ache he feels, then falls on his knees and pours out his heart to his Father. The earnest tears of Gethsemane are the signature proof that our emotions, no matter how dark, are to be a door braced open between our innermost hearts and our Father’s throne room.
Why, then, is walking through that open door toward God so hard for us? The reasons are all variations on one central theme: we don’t fully trust him. But you will trust something — you will take your emotions to someone. The most common reason we escort them elsewhere is that it never even occurs to us to take them to God. Many of us act as if formal devotional time is the only slice of the day when we should interact with God. Loving the Lord and walking with him is the end goal: “He has told you, O man, what is good; to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). As Christian author Paul Miller once quipped, anxiety is wasted prayer — doing anything with our fears other than taking them to God short-circuits the very purpose for which God gave us the capacity to feel anxious.
Chapter 10 — Engaging Relationships
Rather than leading with anger, slow down enough to connect with your genuine concern for the other person. When you are working through your emotions with another person, begin with your own vulnerability. Rather than attacking, you might say something like: “When we left the house, I felt like you were angry with me, and I didn’t want to be criticized. I was so angry I didn’t know what to say, so I just retreated. I’m sorry. I want to be close to you. Can we talk about it?” Vulnerability is very difficult; it feels much safer to hold back and blame each other than to take ownership of your own part in the conflict.
When you lead with vulnerability, you are retreating from the battle through humility, putting the good of restored relationship ahead of your own comfort or being right. The willingness to take that risk on behalf of the other person is precisely what makes vulnerability so powerful — you are signaling that it is safe for the other person to do the same. Most communication has far more to do with how something is said than with the words themselves. Keep an open heart and an open posture — sit down to talk, relax your face, face the other person, and lean slightly toward him or her.
Chapter 11 — On Nourishing Healthy Emotions
Six accessible practices will incubate and nourish godly health in your emotions. These are not tools for directly changing your emotions — they are ways to harness wise, ordinary, spiritual practices that will grow your love for what God loves and gradually mold your feelings to reflect the emotional life of your Lord.
The first practice is to read your Bible. Scripture soaks your mind in hopes, promises, comforts, reassurances, commands, and warnings. It engages your emotions directly through humor, lament, impassioned entreaty, and euphoric exaltation. The Bible impacts our emotions most fundamentally because when we encounter God’s words, we encounter God himself. The second practice is to go outside. A six-minute walk to a stone wall in the woods, a minute to watch the sunlight on the forest floor — a stroll past growing plants and singing birds pulls mind and senses into contact with God. It nudges you to relax your tensed shoulders and inhale deeply.
The third practice is to cultivate good negative emotions. It is telling that the sole book of the Bible named after an emotion is not Joys but Lamentations. A lament is an honest, impassioned expression of sorrow, frustration, or confusion. It is no accident that lament is the most common kind of psalm. Laments honor God in two ways: they stand with him and grieve the brokenness of the world as he does, and they yearn for the coming day when he makes all things right. The fourth practice is to build altars — acknowledgments that something important has happened and needs to be remembered, like souvenirs that compress a story into a single glance. We need altars to God because our attention is so easily distracted and our hearts so quickly forget. It is no accident that Christ gave us bread and wine to remind us over and over of his covenant.
The fifth practice is to cling to corporate worship. Sunday worship moves our emotions because we are surrounded by other visitors to God’s house, tangibly reminded that we are not alone. The music of corporate worship can be transformative — singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength. The sixth practice is to watch for God on the move. Seek out and seize every opportunity to hear about God’s work in the lives of others. Ask your spouse why he or she seems in such good spirits. Ask anyone what the Lord is doing in his or her life.
Chapter 12 — On Starving Unhealthy Emotions
There are four specific lies you can say no to in every emotion. The first is “I am my emotions.” When emotions are most intense, they can seem to take up all your interior space — but you are more than what you feel. The second lie is “I need to act right now.” Scripture describes God as “slow to anger” (Psalm 145:8) — his very nature is slow and deliberate. Psalm 4:4 teaches, “Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent.” The emotion is permitted; the impulsive action is not.
The third lie is “I shouldn’t be feeling this.” Become emotionally literate. When we say “listen to your emotions,” we don’t mean “agree with them” — we mean “interpret them.” Bring your emotions into contact with what you know about yourself, God, and others when you aren’t emotionally charged. If you feel anxious before speaking publicly, let that anxiety make you responsible rather than ashamed. The fourth lie is “this is all or nothing.” As a mixed person living in a mixed world with other mixed people, you may well respond to complexities with complicated and mixed emotions. That is not a failure of faith. It is a faithful response to reality.
Chapter 13 — Engaging Fear
Fear, whether mild uneasiness or abject terror, carries a single message: something you value is under threat. Because of this, your fears are probably the single best map of what you actually value. Where fear flourishes, there your heart will be also. Our fears not only tell us what we love; they push us toward extremes in relationships — urging us to either jump back from others or cling to them like driftwood in a shipwreck. Perhaps the simplest telltale sign of fear is a tendency to ask what if questions. What ifs look to the future and import all the angst of possible dooms while writing the presence and help of God entirely out of the picture.
When examining fear, hunt for two things: what you are caring about, and what you are actively doing or not doing in response. Ask what contexts press your fear’s buttons — particular places, certain seasons, specific people. Ask what you are doing about your fear: Do you self-medicate or escape with alcohol, social media, or overwork? Do you plunge into racing thoughts? Do you turn honestly and desperately to prayer? Your fears are telling you something important about the shape of your hopes, your dreams, and your worship.
Turn first to Scripture. First Peter 5:7 is stunningly simple: hurl your fears straight into his hands, because he cares for you. He promises to be with his children no matter what, till the end of time and beyond (Joshua 1:9; Matthew 28:20). He invites you to come to him when you are exhausted and overwhelmed (Matthew 11:28–30). Take deep, measured breaths to preach the truth of safety in Christ to a body quivering with dread. Exercise: someone once quipped that it is the most underused anti-anxiety medication. For those who build endless moats of activity to keep fear at bay, rest is a profound declaration that your hope is in God rather than yourself. For those whose fear drives procrastination, faith means pressing into what you are responsible to do, entrusting both the pain of the process and the eventual outcome into his hands.
Chapter 14 — Engaging Anger
Anger is a fundamentally moral emotion — in fact, you could say it is the moral emotion. When you are angry, your heart is observing the scene before you and crying out that something you love is being treated unjustly. There is such a thing as good anger. The Bible actually presents God himself as the angriest character in all of Scripture — but he is the angriest precisely because he is also the most loving. At its best, anger communicates protective love for what God loves. At its worst, anger conveys unadulterated self-interest and issues an ultimatum: obey my law and my will or suffer my wrath. Even so, anger should not perpetually dominate your emotional landscape. No one can live near a bonfire that never goes out without getting burned.
Angry people almost never know they are angry people. This makes sense: anger says, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” And do not draw a line in your mind between frustration and anger — frustration, irritation, and annoyance are anger. They just haven’t fully blossomed yet. When examining anger, ask: Why am I angry? Simply saying “I’m angry because…” can itself defuse wrath. Ask also: What wrong am I perceiving? And: What is the outcome of my anger? Is your world getting better as a result, or is your wrath hurting you and others? The greatest danger comes when you are right, because being right about someone else’s sin so easily blinds you to your own.
You will almost never go wrong by pausing before you act when you are angry. “Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger,” James urges (1:19). Count to ten. Take a deep breath. Simply acknowledge that you are angry — to name anger rather than spray it at everyone around you is a great step of maturity and helps you respond to your anger rather than in your anger. God’s anger is fiercer than ours ever could be, yet look what he does with it: he disciplines his people in order to bring them back; he rebukes in order to convict hearts; he ultimately poured out his wrath on Christ so that those with whom he was angry might be restored. The best thing you can do about anger in your life is to cultivate humility. Humility speaks honestly about what it knows and what it doesn’t — “It seems to me…” rather than “You always….” Even when the fault lies entirely on the other side, humility extends grace, because it knows that Jesus has shown us grace beyond compare.
Chapter 15 — Engaging Grief
When you are grieving, you may feel many different emotions, some of which will surprise you — like anxiety, anger, or even relief. Try not to think of grief as a series of fixed steps. Instead, think of the many emotions you are experiencing as the swirling paints on a collage framed and entitled “Grief.” We seek the presence and comfort of others. Reconnection and healing happen when we are able to identify the loss and share it with people who care — by talking about and telling stories about those we miss: “Tell us who this person was and what he or she meant to you. What were the joys of the relationship? What do you miss the most?”
Grief comes in many forms. In Psalm 51, David pours out the grief of guilt before God and pleads for forgiveness. In 2 Samuel 12, he fasts and lies all night on the ground when his child falls ill. The grief of betrayal speaks in Psalm 55: “It is not an enemy who taunts me — then I could bear it… But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend.” Paul instructs the Thessalonians so that they will “not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). In Christ, no matter what you have lost, you have hope. A better approach than making grief go away is to view helping as being someone’s companion in the journey through grief to healing. Be compassionate and patient. Help them connect with God and others. And know that God gets our grief. Jesus has overcome every loss and gives us his power and love to find life even after the most terrible losses.
Chapter 16 — Engaging Guilt and Shame
Guilt communicates, “I’ve done something wrong.” Shame communicates, “Something is wrong with me and others can see it.” If you have sinned, both can help you to see that you have. Guilt, reflected in a healthy conscience, provides guardrails to help you know when you are acting against God or neighbor. It doesn’t tell you that you are fundamentally unable to love; it tells you when you have failed to do so. Simply suppressing the voices in these emotions is the road to death. In Genesis 3, after sinning against God, Adam and Eve choose to hide, and Adam points at Eve. One of the basic reflexes of sin is to deflect guilt and shame onto another.
God doesn’t just want to remove our guilt; he wants intimate relationship with us. He wants to heal our identity by identifying with us. Jesus illustrates this beautifully — he tells the Pharisees that God is like the shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find the one that has wandered away. And what does he do when he finds the stray? He puts it on his shoulders, carries it home, and asks his friends to rejoice: “I have found my sheep that was lost” (Luke 15:1–7). With the hope of God graciously connecting you to himself, there is one enormously important action step: talk about your guilt and your shame with someone you trust. Do not listen to the voice inside that tells you to hide. Confessing your guilt and sharing your shame with a brother or sister in Christ has enormous power to free and heal your heart.
Chapter 17 — A Museum of Tears
Isaiah lists reasons why God’s final coming will make tears obsolete: children will not be in danger, everyone will live out a fullness of days, nothing will threaten our peace, families will be together forever, God will be in immediate contact with us, and evil will vanish forever (Isaiah 65:20–25). He will indeed wipe away every tear when he returns (Revelation 21:4). But at the same time, he promises to keep your tears in a bottle because of his love and compassion for you (Psalm 56:8). Somehow heaven will be a place where our sorrows are both utterly comforted and deeply remembered. A God who has chosen to bear scars is a God we can trust with our wounds, knowing that all joys now are a mere foretaste, and all tears now are a precious prelude to complete comfort.
Appendix — Does God Really Feel?
Jesus’s role as High Priest demonstrates God’s commitment to relating with us emotionally: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet was without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:15–16). The doctrine of divine impassibility matters here. Whatever similarity exists between God’s emotions and ours ought not undermine his unchanging character. God’s emotions are cognitive affections: most of what we call emotion in God is his evaluation of what is happening with his creation. Kevin DeYoung captures the core beauty: God “is love to the maximum at every moment. He cannot change because he cannot possibly be any more loving, or any more just, or any more good.” To keep a balanced view of God’s emotional life, always return to the Trinity: the Father sympathizes with you and sends Christ to take an active role in your life; the Son empathizes with you directly through his human nature; and the Holy Spirit empathizes intimately through his indwelling in you (Romans 8:26).