God's Gift of Emotions
J. Alasdair Groves
Emotions reveal what you love and fear — learn to understand them instead of suppressing or drowning in them.
Most people either suppress their emotions or are controlled by them. Groves teaches you to read feelings like a dashboard — each one pointing to something you value, something you've lost, or something you believe.
Everything Groves and Smith want you to walk away with
Jesus wept at Lazarus's grave even though he was about to raise him from the dead. He trembled in Gethsemane. He burned with anger at religious hypocrisy. Perfect humanity means feeling fully, not feeling nothing.
To not feel grief when someone dies, anger at injustice, or discouragement at repeated sin would be wrong. Even Job, who worshiped through loss, tore his robe and fell to the ground. You were made to see the world as God sees it.
What you care about shapes what you feel. Since you love many things, emotions never come in single file. Mixed emotions are the right response to a mixed world where God's glories always get the muck of sin spattered on them.
Just as cookies are a terrible nutritional center for your diet, emotions make a terrible central priority for your life. But stuffing them down is equally destructive. When an emotion appears, look at it, see what you find, and then decide how to respond.
Ask: Why am I feeling this? What am I reacting to? How is this making me want to behave? The angry husband who examines his frustration over a broken lawn mower discovers he cares more about inconvenience than his wife's good intentions.
Take fifteen seconds to relax your shoulders, tilt your head back, and breathe deeply. Were you aware of that tension? Every moment spent unconsciously tensed reinforces to your body that life is stressful, deepening the cycle.
Imagine a spouse handing you roses in a mechanical voice with total disinterest. The words say love, but the absence of emotion says apathy. Emotional connection is not the only way we connect, but it is a critical way we express care.
If Jesus brought his desperate sorrow to the Father in Gethsemane, how can we not bring our muddled feelings? The Psalms model this constantly. Psalm 62:8 captures it: 'Trust in him at all times; pour out your heart before him.'
The psalmist in Psalm 42 twice asks 'Why are you cast down, O my soul?' even while urging himself to hope. His feelings don't immediately change. That's not failure — it's being human. Significant emotions require significant changes to resolve.
You will take your emotions somewhere. The most common reason we don't go to God is that it never occurs to us. We assume we need to get our act together first. But loving the Lord and walking with him — not performing for him — is the end goal of human life.
These notes are inspired by direct excerpts and woven together into a readable guide you can follow from start to finish.
By J. Alasdair Groves & Winston T. Smith
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 to grow in maturity and love. They have the power to deeply enrich your relationships or drive wedges into them.
Emotions are an essential way you bear God’s image. God expresses emotions, and he designed you to express emotions too.
In the Gospels you witness Jesus’s compassion for suffering and heartache, his anger as he speaks to callous religious leaders, and his groans as he grieves over unbelief and death. As you live in relationship with him, he actually begins to work in you, giving you a heart increasingly like his own—hating what he hates and loving what he loves.
Standing with Mary, the sister of his close friend Lazarus, and staring at a fresh grave, Jesus is stabbed by grief and breaks down in tears (John 11:32–36). As God, Jesus controls the entire universe and can change anything at any time—in fact, he is about to raise Lazarus from the dead in roughly five minutes. Why would he weep when he’s about to fix the problem? Because he’s 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. Jesus is the only perfect human being who has ever lived, and that is why he does not refuse to share the pain of those he loves—not even for ten minutes, not even when he knows their sorrow is about to turn to astonished exultation.
The basic reason you need negative, unpleasant emotions is that you live in a fallen world. God made you to respond to things as they actually are. You should be distressed by what is distressing, horrified by violence and abuse, deeply concerned about injury to someone you love, and angry at arrogant injustices.
To not feel grief when someone you love dies, to not feel discouraged when you fall into the same pattern of sin yet again, to not be upset when your children lie or hurt each other—all of that would be wrong. Even Job, the man who lost everything in a day and still worshiped God, “arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground” when he heard about the death of his children and the ravaging of his vast wealth (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, to respond as he responds, to hate what he hates, and to be bothered by what brings him displeasure.
It doesn’t stop with anger and grief. God is frequently “jealous” for the affection, loyalty, and worship of his people. In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus trembles and sweats blood from some combination of dread, anguish, and loneliness.
A day is coming when you will never again feel sorrow or anger or fear or disgust, because there will be nothing at which to be sorrowful or angry or afraid or disgusted. Until that day, however, it is only by entering into both the joys and the pains of God’s love for his children that you can live in honest, wise relationship with the One who made you. 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.
Understanding what “causes” emotions is a critical step in learning to deal with them. The wisest answer to the question Do emotions originate in the mind or the body? is “probably both.” Sometimes the body will seem to be the initiator or even to have the upper hand; at other times your beliefs and interpretations will seem to be the most powerful factors. Understanding how to identify what factors are most in play and how to respond to them requires wisdom and practice.
Perhaps one of the most important things the Bible tells you about your emotions is that they are an expression of what you value or love.
There is a very real sense in which sharing emotions with each other strengthens relationships. Take a mental inventory of the people you feel closest to. It’s likely you’ve had experiences with them in which you’ve shared some of your deepest thoughts and feelings, or at least both experienced strong emotions together. There’s a very good reason for that. Sharing in the experiences of others is fundamental to the very nature of love. Paul writes in Romans 12:9, “Let love be genuine,” and then follows with a list of ways genuine love is expressed, including verse 15: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” In other words, one of the ways sincere love is shared is by emotionally entering into the experience of others—just as Jesus’s willingness to enter into the grief of Lazarus’s sisters was an expression of his love for them.
Emotions also serve a third purpose: they give you the physical energy and motivation to act. If you’ve ever wrestled with anger, you’ve probably noticed it can actually feel like a surge of energy—your heart pounds, your temperature rises, adrenaline rushes through your veins, and suddenly you feel you’ve got to do something. That’s why people so often show anger with physical action, from shutting a drawer a little harder than needed all the way to breaking plates and punching walls. It feels like energy inside demanding to be released.
Your emotions are an expression of worship. The first great commandment says to love God with all that you are—heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second extends it: your love of God must be reflected in the way you treat others. You can’t segment your life into pieces and call one of those pieces worship. Your love for God should shape all your other loves and commitments.
Your emotions never come in single file. Life isn’t that simple. The vast majority of the time, you are awash with different, even conflicting emotions. Confusion about what you are feeling and why is very normal. The reason is straightforward: you love lots of things. If what you love and care about shapes what you feel, then the fact that you love many things means you are always simultaneously responding to different pieces of the world around you in different ways.
Consider Matthew 23, where Jesus lays into the Pharisees and teachers of the law for their hypocrisy and hard hearts with his most extended, sledgehammer-like rebuke. But then, after thirty-some verses of intense critique, he gives voice to one of the most poignant laments in all of Scripture, his heart overflowing with compassion for the very people he has just chastised: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! 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).
Mixed emotions are the right response to a mixed world. Life in this world means the delightful glories of God’s handiwork always get the muck of sin and suffering spattered on them.
You will never exhaustively understand all the streams from your heart into your emotions—and you don’t need to. All you need to do is bring whatever you do manage to understand to God and entrust him with all the hidden corners of your heart, loves, and feelings that you can’t see into but he knows perfectly.
Two influences on your emotions especially stand out for the constancy of their presence from the day you are born until the day you die: your body and your community. Your emotions don’t happen in the abstract—they happen in your body. Responding with emotion to something literally causes a physical reaction in your skin, your brain, and your blood. 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. That you can change the flow of another person’s blood and brain chemistry by using mere syllables is a testimony to how profoundly God has made you a creature of meaning, a being whose life and loves matter. Your body is the messenger of your soul, and it cries aloud over and over again that you care deeply about the purpose, outcome, and experiences of your life.
Take fifteen seconds and do three things: consciously relax your shoulders, tilt your head slowly backward as far as you comfortably can, and take several deep breaths. Did you find tension in your back, shoulders, neck, or chest? Were you even aware of it before? For the vast majority of us, the back-and-forth between body and soul is happening in the background, and 99 percent of the time we don’t notice it. Yet every moment spent unconsciously tensed subtly reinforces to your body that life is stressful—and the natural result is a deepening cycle of becoming just that much tenser.
As common sense suggests, regular exercise, sufficient sleep, being warm or cool enough, and having a full (but not stuffed) belly—along with a hundred other physiological experiences—make it easier for your emotions to line up with God’s. Your body is the vehicle through which the passion of your soul flows. No matter how much you come to understand about the biology of your brain, you will still always need to wrestle with your emotions as expressions of what you love.
Paul writes, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor. 12:26). The observation is simple but profound: to relate to one another the way God intends means to be fully engaged in the experiences of the other. When you notice emotion or a surprising change in someone—a usually boisterous friend who is reserved and distant, a sibling who seems flustered—slow down and ask questions about what’s going on. Or, if questions don’t seem appropriate or welcome, stop and put yourself in the other person’s shoes and imagine what might make you feel that way.
Not sharing emotions in a relationship is a problem. No matter how deeply you love and are connected to someone, a lack of emotional expression and connection communicates a lack of love, which can have a subtle corrosive effect over time.
The biblical goal of emotional connection is not that you follow a specific formula or phrasing; the goal is honest vulnerability about what is truly on your heart, and sincere interest in and empathy for the matters that excite or discourage your loved ones. Imagine a spouse who professes wholehearted love and hands you a dozen roses or a new watch, but does it all in a mechanical voice and with a look of total disinterest. You would probably wonder if it was really meant. The actions and words would communicate love, but the tone and lack of emotional expression would communicate apathy or manipulation. Emotions are not at the center of what love is, but they are a critical way of expressing it and connecting to others.
While emotional connection is not the only way you connect, this sharing of hearts and values and communicating a depth of care for others will be part of your delight for the rest of your life—even in heaven. All the images we have of heaven are of people sharing the joy of delighting in the King on his throne, singing together, expressing their collective passion for all he has done and who he is.
The author of Psalm 42 provides one of the clearest examples of this struggle. He famously writes that his soul “thirsts for God” like a “deer pants for flowing streams” (vv. 1–2). What is less well known is that he spends the rest of the psalm wrestling with his emotions, twice asking, Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? (vv. 5, 11). Even as he fights to remember the good things God has done and urges himself to hope in the Lord, his feelings seem to stay stuck, doggedly resisting his efforts to change them. This lack of immediate change, however, doesn’t mean the battle is pointless or that he’s fighting poorly. It simply means he is human, and the world around him must change at a significant level for his significant emotions to change.
A vital, active relationship with a good and sovereign God matters a great deal to your emotional life. Tips for working directly on your emotions for the purpose of changing them are not enough. What matters is participating with God in a process of ongoing heart change—body, mind, and spirit.
Just as cookies are a terrible nutritional center for your diet, emotions make a terrible central priority for your life. One pitfall is treating emotions as everything—the dominant cultural narrative that leaves people with no easy way to guard against the flood of feelings they experience. Part of the popularity of mindfulness derives from the way it effectively pushes back against this narrative. While Scripture offers something richer than mindfulness practices, it is worth noting that even in this emotion-worshiping culture, the hottest strategy for emotional self-regulation currently sits on the stoic side of the spectrum. Both extremes—emotionalism and stoicism—miss the mark.
The Bible’s model of engaging emotions means something very simple: when an emotion comes on your radar, you look at it, see what you find, and then—not before—decide how to respond. Engaging doesn’t judge your emotions ahead of time as either good or bad. You move closer and explore, preparing yourself to deal with whatever you uncover.
Scripture’s first step in engaging emotions is simply to identify your feelings. If you struggle to notice what you feel, turn to someone you trust and ask, “What emotions do you see in me most often? What do they look like when I show them?”
The second step is to examine your emotions by asking questions like: Why am I feeling this? What am I reacting to? Why is this hitting me so hard? Why isn’t this affecting me the way it usually does? How is this emotion making me want to behave?
Consider this example: suppose you identify that you are feeling angry because your spouse broke the lawn mower. You didn’t say anything, but you’ve been curt ever since and weren’t very talkative at dinner. Inside you keep thinking, Why couldn’t she just leave it alone? When you examine this, several things surface. First, your anger is leading you to pull back—talking less, less warmly than normal. Second, this emotion is straining the relationship. Third, you value efficiency and comfort; losing time or money on fixing the mower pulls resources away from other things. Your anger is identifying this setback as a bad thing that should not have happened. But the frustrated thoughts running on a loop suggest that right now you care more about the inconvenience to you than the good intentions your spouse showed in trying to make your life better—you’re more concerned with the outcome than with her motives.
The third step is to act. When you know what you are feeling, have named it as best you can, and have discerned which aspects are good and which are bad, you are finally ready to respond. Proper responses fall into two fundamental categories: on the one hand, embrace and nurture the loves of your heart and behaviors that are good; on the other, resist and even starve loves and actions that are bad.
All the internal self-awareness in the world doesn’t help if it doesn’t lead to change in relationship and action. In the lawn-mower example, the next steps would include: apologize for being short, reassure your spouse that it’s going to be okay, thank her for trying to take care of something for you, and perhaps gently request that she get your input on lawn equipment in the future.
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” simply 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. It doesn’t occur to most of us most of the time that prayer can and should include simply talking to God about what is on our hearts. Yet this is exactly what we observe over and over in the Psalms. Countless verses echo the words of Psalm 71:3: Be to me a rock of refuge, to which I may continually come.
Scripture is full of similar promises. Peter speaks of “casting all your anxieties on him” (1 Peter 5:7) and gives the simplest of reasons: “he cares for you.”
If Jesus’s loves were perfect, then his emotions were perfect too—so it might seem like he shouldn’t have needed to pray them. Yet pray them he did. The most vivid example is the garden of Gethsemane. When Jesus says, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38), what does he do? He doesn’t take the edge off. He doesn’t stand apart from his emotions to seek the calmness of his wise mind. He doesn’t start reciting his favorite Bible verses to stay focused on the next task. Instead, he does two simple, relational things: he speaks honestly to his friends about the dread and ache he feels, and then, having asked their help in prayer, he falls on his knees and pours out his heart to his Father, just as Psalm 62 urges.
The earnest tears of Gethsemane are the signature proof that your emotions, no matter how dark, are to be a door braced open between your innermost heart and your Father’s throne room. If Jesus brought his desperate sorrow and urgent desire for a way out to his Father, how can you not also bring your muddled loves and mixed feelings?
Once you see Jesus engaging God in his emotions in the garden, you begin to see it everywhere. He engages God even in the unimaginable separation on the cross, using the words of Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He turns to his Father in Luke 10:21 and expresses joy that God brings the weak and lowly into the kingdom. Jesus actually needed to pray. He needed to bring his heart to his Father, to pour out his concerns—for himself, for those he loved, and for his mission—into the only ears that truly understand all, the only hands that can truly help.
If one of the core purposes of our emotions is to drive us to pour our hearts out to God, and if even Jesus needed to do so, why is walking through that open door toward God so hard? The reasons are all variations on one central theme: you don’t fully trust him. But you will trust something—you will take your emotions to someone. The only reason you ever fail to dash toward the Lord with your emotions is that you aren’t completely convinced it is worth it. The most common reason is that it never occurs to you to take them to God. He seems irrelevant, or you assume you ought to get your act together before going to him. Many of us, even those who read the Bible every morning, act as if our formal devotional time is the only slice of the day when we should or could interact with God.
Why is it such a big deal? Because reading your Bible, doing honest business, and keeping your cool as a parent are not the end goal of human life. Loving the Lord and walking with him is: “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).
Christian author Paul Miller once quipped that anxiety is wasted prayer. Not that any experience of concern is sinful—but that doing anything with your fears other than taking them to God, especially chasing thoughts on the hamster wheel of anxiety, short-circuits the very purpose for which God gave you the capacity to feel anxious. Your anxieties are meant to lead you straight to him. Every time.
Taking your emotions to God is as simple as talking to him throughout the day, turning to him with every blip on the emotional radar, every stronger eddy in the current of your feelings.
You tend to make assumptions and launch accusations at the other person, which only leads to defensiveness and counterattack. Anger doesn’t have to work that way, but when you let it push its way to the front of the line, it tends to displace all the other emotions that help you connect initially—compassion, concern, and patience. Rather than leading with anger, slow down enough to connect with your genuine concern for the other person.
When working through emotions with another person, begin with your own vulnerability. Vulnerability extends an olive branch of charity instead of leading with accusations. For example, rather than attacking, you might say: “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 and got quiet. I’m sorry. I don’t want icy silence between us. 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 for each person to take ownership of his or her own part in the conflict. It takes two to keep a war going—when you lead with vulnerability, you are retreating from the battle by acting in humility, putting the good of restored relationship ahead of your own comfort or being “right.” Being the first to lay down your weapons and express a real desire to understand and be understood can be scary. 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. Might the person take that signal as a sign of weakness and choose to attack? Yes, but it embodies the grace that God has shown us in Jesus, and that is powerful.
God didn’t need to walk around in our world, but he did anyway. The best kind of love wants to walk around in the other’s world, to truly draw near even at the level of the heart. Part of vulnerability is saying in effect, “Let me get in your space so that I can truly understand you in love.” You’ve got to credibly understand and articulately express the other person’s voice so that he or she knows that you know.
After both people acknowledge their sins, repent, and ask forgiveness, love requires them to look ahead. How can they make this less likely to happen again? No matter what they decide, there are no guarantees. In the moment, when emotions are running high, they may well have very similar responses, and the cycle will repeat. It will take courage not only to seek the Lord’s help and imagine different choices but also to believe that both people will follow through.
Most communication in any conversation has more to do with how something is said than with the words themselves. Tone and facial expressions may be greater sources of misunderstanding and conflict than words. Watch out for eye rolling, heavy sighs, folded arms, and turning your body away. When trying to connect, keep an open heart and an open posture—sit down to talk, relax your face, face the other person, and even lean slightly toward him or her.
Your best relational moments—the ones you will look back upon with fondness as turning points and bonding moments—will be the times when you entered difficult emotional conflict by leading with vulnerability and empathy, following through with charity and patience, and letting them all frame the legitimate concerns anger may need to express.
This chapter lays out six accessible practices that will incubate and nourish godly health and maturity in your emotions across the entire emotional spectrum. These are not tools for directly changing your emotions. Rather, they are ways to harness wise, normal, spiritual practices that will grow your love for what God loves and gradually mold your feelings to reflect the emotional life of your Lord.
How do the words of Scripture alter your perspective for the better? In a thousand ways. They make you think about the trials and faith of the biblical characters, the similarity of your heart to theirs, and God’s faithfulness to them. God’s words soak your mind in explicit hopes, promises, comforts, reassurances, commands, reminders, and warnings. They call your attention to who God is, who you are, and how the world works. They engage your emotions directly through humor, lament, dry sarcasm, impassioned entreaty, and euphoric exaltation. They boost you up onto your mental tiptoes to peer through a window in history at God’s tender care for a young Moabite woman and her widowed mother-in-law, a youngest son anointed to kill a giant and become a king, a self-righteous murderer knocked on his back who becomes a missionary. Words grab your attention and slip into your subconscious as they sing, preach, teach, and narrate.
The Bible impacts your emotions most fundamentally because when you encounter God’s words, you encounter God himself. To read the living Word of God is to relate to him. In Scripture, God both shares his heart and calls you to respond from yours. One simple, practical way to respond to this relational aspect of Scripture is to write out your response to what you’re reading as if you were speaking directly to God.
Ten minutes facing into the breeze or feeling the sun on your face won’t radically alter your mood most days. However, as with reading the Bible, it’s hard to overstate the value of regularly reminding your body and soul that you live on a larger stage and in a larger story than your messy house or the four walls of your office.
One practical example: a six-minute walk each way to a stone wall in the woods, a minute to stand, breathe, and watch the sunlight on the forest floor, then six minutes back through pines and young maple saplings. This little stroll past growing plants and trees and singing birds pulls mind and senses into contact with God. It reminds you that he is the giver of abundant life and has plans for renewing this world. It also reminds you to relax your tensed shoulders and inhale deeply.
It’s telling that the sole example of a book of the Bible named after an emotion is not Joys but Lamentations. As counterintuitive and countercultural as it sounds, there are ways in which you should feel bad more often and more strongly than you do. This doesn’t mean seeking out melancholy moods for their own sake. It means pouring in time and effort to grow in godly guilt, grief, and dismay because, as earlier chapters have shown, far too often you short-circuit God’s good purposes for negative emotions—crushing them, denying them, or escaping from them rather than letting them do their good and healthy work of driving you to him.
A lament is an honest, impassioned expression of sorrow, frustration, or confusion. Lament names a loss or injustice and the impact it has had. It is no accident that lament is the most common kind of psalm. The psalmists knew how badly the world is broken and turned instinctively and earnestly to God.
Psalm 13 illustrates this well. The author asks the Lord “How long?” several times, poignantly expressing feeling forgotten, abandoned, lonely, sorrowful, defeated, humiliated, and in deep despair. He asks God to hear him and see him and, implicitly, to have mercy. While he ends with clear hope, it is hope in a rescue not yet realized. In the midst of anguish, the psalmist persistently pours out his heart to God. The psalms of lament take very seriously God’s promise that he cares for us.
Laments honor God in two ways. They stand with God and grieve the brokenness of the world as he does—God hates sin and suffering and will one day eradicate both. Laments yearn, ache, and call for the coming of that day, driving your soul to see the world as he does: a beautiful story in desperate need of the happy, heavenly ending that only he can bring.
Laments are not the only way to engage God faithfully in negative emotions. Guilt, for example, is a vital emotion to embrace. To experience in your gut that you have done wrong and that your only hope is to turn around and walk the opposite direction is of enormous value. While guilt can easily misfire and lead to wallowing and ugly self-condemnation, its purpose is to turn you to the One who offers forgiveness. Engaging godly doubt likewise means bringing God your questions about the gap between the way he reveals himself to be perfectly good and just, and the way he allows terrible evil to befall people he promised to protect.
An altar is an acknowledgment that something important has happened and needs to be remembered. It serves as a long-term memory aid for who God is and what he has done (e.g., Genesis 28:10–22; Joshua 22:10–34; 1 Samuel 7:12). An altar can be a physical object or any regular practice that reminds you of the value of the object of your worship.
Like souvenirs, altars communicate by compressing a story into a single glance, reminding you of the great worth of the object of your worship. You need altars to God—reminders of his goodness and refreshing tastes of his kind, personal care for you. Your attention is so easily distracted, your heart so quick to forget all he has done. It is no accident that Christ gave us bread and wine, elements you can smell, touch, see, and taste, to remind us over and over of his covenant. We consume them regularly until the day he comes back. You need to be told over and over by all five senses that your God is with you. Build altars in your life from whatever “stones” of God’s kindness and care are lying around. Such reminders can scale the walls of your distractions and lead formidable truths to capture your attention and heart.
Unlike the highly personalized and private altars just described, church services are public, obvious, and communal. Sunday worship moves your emotions because you are surrounded by other visitors to God’s house. In his house, surrounded by members of his family, you are tangibly reminded that you are not alone in this world. The music of corporate worship can be transformative—which is exactly what many of us need. As one writer puts it, “Singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength.”
Lastly, seek out and seize every opportunity to hear about God’s work in the lives of others. Paul explains that those who have received “comfort” from God are now equipped to comfort others with the comfort they have received (2 Cor. 1:4). Simply hearing how God has tenderly cared for others can be a great encouragement.
Observe your community group and reflect on where they’ve grown in connecting with and caring for each other. Ask your spouse why he or she seems in good spirits. Perhaps most basically, ask anyone what the Lord is doing in his or her life.
Emotions would be so much easier if they were like an old western—if you could know the good guys by their white hats and the bad guys by their black hats. It would be simpler to just say anger, anxiety, and depression are bad emotions, and happiness, contentment, and affection are good ones. But that’s not how emotions work. You can’t just put black hats on some feelings and white hats on others. You have to do the work of listening carefully to the messages your emotions communicate and discerning what parts are true or false, then responding wisely.
Since you can’t give a blanket rejection of any particular emotion, here are four messages you can say no to in every emotion.
When people feel most overwhelmed by their emotions, they feel as if their emotions represent who they are—their truest selves. But you are more than what you feel. No one can be reduced to what they feel. When emotions are intense, they can seem to take up all your interior space, partly because your body is physiologically working to maintain your emotional state, so emotions often don’t yield easily to thoughts and beliefs that may feel powerful at other times. But your emotions aren’t everything, important as they are.
Consider the difference between two ways of crying. One cry is self-talk that may well leave you continuing to feel alone and overwhelmed. The other—crying to God—creates connection to one who cares, reminding you that God is with you even when your emotions are telling you that he isn’t.
It is God’s very nature to be slow and deliberate. Scripture describes God as “slow to anger” (Psalm 145:8). The same caution applies to joy: a manic sense of feeling good can compel you to make promises you can’t fulfill and purchases you can’t afford. An ancient prayer asks the Lord to “shield the joyous,” placing joy in the category of sickness, weariness, and affliction—because joy can be as much of a blinder to God and reality as any other emotion.
Psalm 4:4 teaches: “Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent.” Paul draws on this in Ephesians 4:26: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” Anger is permitted; impulsive action is not.
It helps to think of emotions as a kind of sixth sense. The reason you have more than one sense is that each one—taste, smell, sight, hearing, feeling—serves as a check and balance on the others. You can read the expiration date on the milk carton with your eyes, but you won’t really know if the milk has soured until you smell it. Still not sure? Give it a taste. Your emotions shouldn’t operate independently either. When we say “listen to your emotions,” we don’t mean “agree with them”—we mean “interpret them.” Become emotionally literate. Bring them into contact with your other “senses” and what you know about yourself, God, and others when you aren’t emotionally charged.
Don’t just silence your own anxiety. For instance, if you feel anxious before speaking publicly, don’t put yourself down for it. That anxiety may be helping you recognize you can blow it if you’re not well prepared. Think, Maybe I should spend more time working on this—I don’t feel ready just yet. Your anxiety is helping you to be responsible and wise.
God created the world good, but it is fallen, along with everyone in it. Therefore, as a mixed person living in a mixed world with other mixed people, you may well respond to the complexities of the people and situations around you with complicated and mixed emotions. That is normal and appropriate.
Saying no to the four errors above is one way of obeying the command “Let not your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1) without developing an unhealthy shame over your emotional life. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and at the same time, cry out to the Lord as David does in Psalm 142. Do both. And God in Christ will carry you through an experience that may be impossible for you to understand in the moment.
Fear, whether mild uneasiness or abject terror, has a simple message: something you value is under threat. Something bad might happen to something you care about. The future holds potential for loss. 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.
Your fears not only tell you what you love; they also push you toward extremes in relationships. Fear urges you to either jump back from others or cling to them like driftwood in a shipwreck, depending on your perception of what will most likely make you feel safe. God does not expect or even want you to go it alone during life on this earth; he actually built you to need each other as well. He is enough, and yet he has chosen to use the fellowship you have with each other to encapsulate and reinforce his presence. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them,” Jesus said (Matt. 18:20). Thus, while there are exceptions to every rule, you will be better off in your fears when you vulnerably share them with a trusted friend.
Safety is great, until you cling so tightly to it that you are no longer willing to step out of your zone of perceived refuge even to love others or obey God. The Bible actually has an extremely high view of control, if by “control” you mean the right exercise of whatever strength and responsibility you have. Whether you are a business executive organizing deals or a three-year-old organizing dolls, bringing order and fruitfulness to your world is good. Paul spills a great deal of ink calling church leaders to direct and shape the growth of their congregations’ faith and community. The problem is not with self-protection or the desire to bring order and predictability. The caution is simply this: in this fractured life, you will never be completely safe, fully in control, or 100 percent certain of what is coming next. You were never meant to be. Dangers, dependence, and uncertainties are signposts that point you not to a strategy but to a Person: the One whose control and utterly certain character are your only real safety.
Your only path to real safety lies in trusting God by engaging him in your fears.
Physically, strong fear tends to cause shortness of breath, increased heart rate, clammy palms, tensed muscles, and racing thoughts. Nervous twitches in the face or constant fidgeting of hands or legs are not uncommon. Milder, more baseline fear might show up as digestive issues (ulcers and irritable bowel syndrome can both result from long-term anxiety), headaches, fatigue, and a whole host of other difficult-to-pin-down symptoms. Given enough time, fear can gnaw on pretty much any part of your body.
Perhaps the simplest telltale sign of fear in your life is a tendency to ask what if questions: What if we don’t have enough money? What if no one likes my project? What if I’m not ready? What ifs look to the future and import all the angst of possible dooms while writing the presence and help of God out of the picture.
Once you’ve identified some form of fear, it’s time to look at what is going on inside it. Your examination should hunt especially hard for two things: what you are caring about and what you are actively doing (or not doing) to deal with the fear.
In what contexts do I feel this fear? This asks what factors are pressing your fear’s buttons. Is there a particular location that makes you nervous every time you’re there? Certain seasons, events, or times of day can also produce anxiety. Still other fears swirl around people and activities—are there particular people in whose presence you immediately tense up?
What am I doing about my fear? What do you find yourself doing in response to the places, people, times, or activities that spark your fear? Do you self-medicate or escape with alcohol, social media, mindless smartphone games, daydreams, or overwork? Do you plunge deeper into the swirl of anxious thoughts, racing endlessly to solve problems in your head like a hamster on a wheel? Do you get irritable and critical of those around you? Do you turn honestly and desperately to prayer?
What am I valuing? The simplest form of this question is Why would I care if X happened? Listen to your fears. They are telling you something very important about the shape of your hopes, your dreams, and, most fundamentally, your worship. Examining your fear is a chance to put names on your treasures.
It is easiest to start by evaluating your reaction to your fear rather than the fear itself. Ask: Is my reaction to this fear godly and constructive, or am I acting in destructive and sinful ways?
The Bible offers a reorienting hope: no matter what the danger or what you are valuing, God can be trusted with your treasures, and every fear ought to drive you straight toward the Lord in prayer, obedience, and fellowship. A second, slightly harder evaluation question follows: How likely will the feared event come to pass? Fear is a notorious exaggerator and false prophet of doom.
What should you do about your fear? It depends—but several responses apply broadly.
Turn to Scripture. Psalm 27 speaks to your anxieties: even a literal host of heavily armed men trying to slash and stab you cannot overcome the “stronghold of your life” and his protection, in this life and the next. First Peter 5:7 is stunningly simple: hurl your fears straight into his hands, lay your fragile treasures in his lap, give him your anxiety—because he cares for you. He “cares” in both senses: he thinks about you, feels for you, has an interest in how you are doing, and he looks out for you, acts on your behalf, takes care of 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 promises that he will always see your obedience, and not even a cup of cold water given out of love for Christ can be wasted (Matthew 10:42). He invites you to come to him when you are exhausted and overwhelmed (Matthew 11:28–30). He forgives your sins (Exodus 34:6–7). These are not abstract truths to memorize (though memorizing them might be very wise). These are real words from a real God who really can and will do everything he promises—an unparalleled reason for hope in the face of fear.
Get your breathing under control. Anxiety writes its message on the slate of your body. Taking deep, measured, slow breaths and exhaling slowly is a common-sense way to preach the truth of safety in Christ to a body quivering with dread.
Exercise. Someone once quipped that “exercise is the most underused anti-anxiety medication.” Going for a run rarely makes your fears go away, but regular physical exertion can reduce anxiety’s ability to commandeer your body’s systems and convert them into a megaphone for a story of doom.
Learn to rest. Many anxious people struggle to rest. Busyness—be it work or play—can drown out the inner murmur that things aren’t going to be okay. For those who build endless moats of activities to keep fear at bay, rest can feel like putting down the drawbridge and welcoming the invader into the castle keep. It is hard to rest when everything inside you cries out that a successful career, a growing bank account, well-rounded children, or a satisfying schedule is the thing keeping you safe. Anxiety pushes many onto a treadmill that never slows down. If this is you, however, you can’t afford not to slow down. For you, slowing down is faith.
When you stop checking email in the evening, step down from a leadership role, or even take five minutes to breathe or go for a walk, you implicitly entrust yourself and the things you care about into God’s hands. By choosing to rest rather than throw yourself into the fray, you are literally, actively placing the battle and its outcome in God’s hands. This doesn’t mean self-indulgence or laziness is a virtue. It means that refusing to run endlessly and choosing to rest, even in the smallest ways, is a profound declaration that your hope is in God rather than yourself.
Press into procrastination. On the flip side, many anxious people struggle with procrastination, which is just as fear-driven as workaholism. The procrastinator fears the discomfort of doing the work, the uncertainty of the outcome, or both. When you find yourself instinctively punting the most important projects in order to rearrange the sock drawer or play one more game, your need is exactly the same as the anxious worker bee: to entrust yourself and your work to God. It’s just that the application is the opposite. For you, faith will be pressing into what you are responsible to do, entrusting the pain of the process (usually overblown in your mind anyway) and the eventual success or failure into his hands, where it has been from the beginning.
Go on the offensive against self-medication. Resist, cut back, give it up. It’s amazing what you learn about yourself when you get rid of a crutch you’ve been leaning on.
Actions always reveal your core beliefs and confidence. You always ultimately vote with your feet. You can choose to make any of these changes by simply saying, “Okay, I’ll try it.” But you won’t sustain any change in your life unless the love of your heart changes along with your actions.
Anger wants results fast. It is a fundamentally moral emotion—in fact, you could say it is the moral emotion. When you are angry, what is happening inside is this: your heart is observing the scene before you and crying out that something you love is being treated unjustly. Anger always passes judgment, and judgments—unlike a judgmental spirit—can be right as well as wrong.
Anger is right to say that some things are terribly wrong. Yet such anger, like all emotions, flows from love. This is why there is such a thing as good anger. The Bible actually presents God himself as the angriest character in all of Scripture—precisely because he is also the most loving. Many famous voices—C. S. Lewis, Mahatma Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, G. K. Chesterton—have proclaimed the inseparability of love and hate. The opposite of love is not hate but apathy.
Anger at its best communicates protective love for what God loves. Because it delights deeply in the relationships, people, structures of justice, beauties of creation, and material blessings that God has given, it targets anything that would divide us from God or one another and anything that would destroy what is right, lovely, and fruitful. At its worst, anger conveys unadulterated self-interest and issues an ultimatum: obey my law and my will or suffer my wrath. Sinful anger still seizes the moral high ground, but it is a high ground manufactured by your own sovereign preferences.
Thankfully, God’s great gift is the transforming work of his Spirit. He kindly changes your very heart so that you grow in love for him and for your neighbor in ways that allow love-driven anger to bear redemptive fruit. While there is indeed much to be angry about in our world, anger should not perpetually dominate your emotional landscape. No one can live near a bonfire that never goes out without getting burned.
Anger’s instinct is to punish and attack whatever or whomever it perceives as wrong—which is what makes angry people unpleasant to be around. To make matters worse, angry people almost never know they are angry people. This makes sense: anger says, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” When you feel deeply right, it is extremely difficult to step back and say, “Maybe I am the problem here.” Knowing this about us, Jesus gives one of his most famous instructions: take the log out of your own eye before you take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. People who are angry struggle greatly to perceive their own flaws.
Anger, more than any other emotion, demands to be satisfied with action. Physically, this usually looks like quickened breathing, flushed face, tensed muscles, perhaps even balled fists. When you are angry, your body feels tight. Long term, anger’s seeds sprout into nearly as many symptoms as spring from fear: hypertension, digestive issues, and high blood pressure, to name a few. Remember that all these experiences hold true for righteous anger as well, including potential long-term physical damage.
Do not draw a line in your mind between frustration and anger. People commonly say, “I’m not angry; I’m just frustrated”—or irritated, or annoyed. While common English usage reserves the word anger for more intense situations, do not be deceived: frustration, irritation, and annoyance are anger. They just haven’t fully blossomed yet, and they inevitably become anger that rightly bears the name if left unchecked.
The first question to ask is Why am I angry? Simply examining the source of your anger by saying “I’m angry because…” can itself defuse wrath. Another way of asking the same question is What wrong am I perceiving?—this helps you put words on the sense of injustice you feel. A further helpful question: What is the outcome of my anger? Is your world or the world of those you care about getting better as a result of your being angry, or is your wrath hurting you and others?
Are you upset about what God is upset about? If so, you still face a challenge: how will you seek redemptive justice and avoid the temptation to exact destructive vengeance?
You are in the greatest danger when you are right, because being right about someone else’s sin so easily blinds you to your own. Nothing makes it harder to take the log out of your own eye than being able to say, “But she shouldn’t have done that; it was wrong!” You must be exceedingly careful not to rush straight from evaluating something as wrong to unsheathing your sword.
Righteous anger—anger that aligns with God’s—is most common when the object of the anger is someone else, not yourself. Jesus, for example, is agonized but not angry when he himself is nailed to the cross, yet he is incensed when flipping over the tables of money changers who are exploiting his brothers and sisters and insulting his heavenly Father. This doesn’t mean anger at sin against oneself is wrong—God’s anger in both Testaments is aroused when his people betray him. The examples in Scripture, however, are weighted heavily toward righteous anger that focuses on the injustices others face. James 1:20 sums up the danger well: “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”
If you want to live out of righteous anger, you need to start by slowing down. 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). Or, as one pastor put it, you need to “wait out your racing thoughts and emotions until you can choose good, even for an enemy.” Count to ten in your head before you respond. Take a deep breath. Talk about the matter later, after you’ve cooled down. Slowing down means taking time to think before you act.
Another really basic yet surprisingly helpful response is to simply acknowledge that you are angry. To name anger rather than spray it at everyone around you is a great step of maturity and tends to help you respond to your anger rather than respond in your anger.
Remember, God’s anger is fiercer than yours or mine 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 and turn us to repent. God ultimately poured out his wrath on Christ, unleashing his fury without restraint one time and one time only, so that those with whom he is angry might be restored. True love attacks evil with vigor, and yet the attack is always a rescue mission.
The best thing you can do about anger in your life is to cultivate humility. Humility empowers the healthy anger that treats others as more important than yourself. It protects others while exposing and undercutting the unhealthy anger that enthrones you as judge from a moral high ground only you perceive. What does humility look like? It speaks honestly about what it knows and what it doesn’t: “It seems to me…” and “My concern is…” rather than “You always…” or “I can’t believe you would….” It asks real questions and listens to the answers, whereas self-righteous anger seizes the microphone and rants. Humility assumes that others might have good reasons for doing things that have bothered you. Even when the fault lies entirely on the other side, humility recognizes the log in one’s own eye and extends grace to offenders—which doesn’t mean erasing all consequences—because it knows that Jesus has shown us grace beyond compare.
When you’re grieving, you may feel many different emotions, some of which may surprise you—like anxiety, anger, or even relief. C. S. Lewis was surprised by what he called “the laziness of grief” after the death of his wife, writing, “I loathe the slightest effort.” You may have heard about different “stages” of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—based on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-known theory. But try not to think about grief as a series of fixed steps. Instead, think of these emotions and the many others you are experiencing as the swirling paints on a collage framed and entitled “Grief.”
Though God’s work in the midst of grief often includes times when you need to process alone, in general you seek the presence and comfort of others. When your losses remind you of the unique connection to the person or thing you loved, you can feel isolated and alone. As a result, you rightly yearn for the simple presence of others who represent relationship and love that hasn’t been lost, and the hope of recovery.
Think of grief like the experience you had as a child after losing a tooth: for a day or two you kept sticking your tongue into the socket where the tooth once was, fascinated by the hole where the tooth used to be. Eventually you explored it, accepted the new situation, and moved on. Significant losses are more complicated, but in a basic sort of way, that’s how you engage grief—identifying and absorbing the loss by exploring and naming the contours of what was there, emotionally pressing into the grooves and holes left behind, and sharing the experience with others who love you well.
Reconnection and healing happen when you are able to identify the loss and share it with people who care. Much of the time spent processing grief involves identifying and naming the losses by talking about and telling stories about those you 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?”
The grief of guilt. In Psalm 51, David pours out his grief before God and pleads for forgiveness: “Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities” (vv. 8–9). Grief may be an occasion for reflecting on your own failures or sin.
The grief of death. David fasted and “lay all night on the ground.” He couldn’t be persuaded to get up, and he wouldn’t eat until after the child had died (2 Samuel 12:15–23). Death will likely prove to be one of the most powerful experiences of grief you ever have. Expect to need a lot of help and companionship to find the words to express it.
The grief of betrayal. The psalmist cries, “For 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. We used to take sweet counsel together” (Psalm 55:12–14). Though it may feel like too much for words, God has spoken the unspeakable and invites you to use his words as you pour out your heart.
Grief of any kind. “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also” (Psalm 31:9–10). Grief can come in many shapes and forms, but when you examine it, don’t feel pressured to categorize it. Sometimes grief can just be grief. Whatever losses you experience, you will find the Bible full of words to help you examine and express them.
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’ve lost, no matter how severe the grief, you have hope. Jesus was raised from the dead and so conquered death. Think about the implications for your grief: it’s more than the promise of life after death or your own resurrection. It actually means that Jesus has conquered all losses and will ultimately heal and restore them.
It’s not wrong to want grieving people to feel better—that’s a sign of love. But a better approach is to view helping not as “making it better” but as being someone’s companion in the journey through grief to healing. Care for the grieving by reminding them that they’re allowed to feel one way one day and a different way the next, or even ten minutes later. You might say, “You’re probably feeling all kinds of things that you weren’t expecting.” Then be silent and let them respond. Be compassionate and patient with the bereaved, help them connect with God and others by inviting them to share their grief in their own time and in their own way.
Engaging grief wisely requires you to be flexible and make room for varied experiences, especially when different people are grieving the same thing at the same time but in very different ways. Know that God “gets” your grief. Every page of Scripture speaks to both the pain of grief and the hope you have in Christ. Above all, remember that Jesus has overcome every loss and gives you his power and love to find life even after the most terrible losses.
Guilt communicates, “I’ve done something wrong.” Shame communicates, “Something is wrong with me and others can see it.”
If you have sinned, both guilt and shame can help you see that you have. To be called “shameless” is not a good thing. If you have been mistreated and sinned against by others, shame rightly alerts you to the wrongness of their actions, just as a sharp pain in your abdomen alerts you to a rupturing appendix.
Biblically, your goals are always relational. Jesus taught that the whole of the law can be summarized in two commandments: love God and love neighbor (Matthew 22:34–40). Guilt, reflected in a healthy conscience, provides guardrails to help you know when you’re acting against God or neighbor. Guilt in itself doesn’t tell you that you are fundamentally unable to love; it tells you when you’ve failed to do so.
Sometimes it’s hard to hear the good intentions of guilt and shame, so you try to shut them up by dulling your conscience with denial and escapism—avoiding people you would normally enjoy, indulging in activities that produce more pleasant feelings. But this road is a lie. Simply suppressing the voices in these emotions is the road to death.
In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve choose to hide after sinning against God. When God calls them out, Adam points at Eve and exclaims, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). One of the basic reflexes of sin is to deflect guilt and shame onto another.
God doesn’t just want to remove your guilt; he wants intimate relationship with you. He is not just trying to fix a dent in his reputation that you’ve caused. His purpose is deeper: he wants to heal your identity by identifying with you, by becoming one with you. Restoration with God means being restored to your status as his beloved child.
Jesus illustrates this beautifully. When the Pharisees and teachers of the law mutter about Jesus mingling with the guilty and shamed, he tells his critics that God is like the shepherd who leaves the 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 and neighbors to rejoice with him: “I have found my sheep that was lost” (Luke 15:1–7).
With the hope of God graciously connecting you to himself, honoring you, forgiving you, restoring relationship, and claiming you utterly and eternally as his, there is one enormously important action step you can take as a response in faith: talk about your guilt and your shame with someone else 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. Both guilt and shame were meant to drive you to step more fully into the light, cling more closely to Christ, and associate yourself in word, deed, and identity with the One who has embraced you. Just as both guilt and shame lead to growth when exposed to light, both tend to fester in the dark.
Isaiah lists reasons why God’s final coming will make tears obsolete. Your beloved children will not be in danger (Isaiah 65:20). Everyone will live out a fullness of days—which the New Testament reveals means eternal life, not just dying at a ripe old age. There will be perfect blessing on your work and your leisure (vv. 21–22). Nothing will threaten your peace or happiness. Families will be together forever without rebellion, separation, or tragedy (v. 23). God will be in immediate contact with you and never distant (v. 24). Danger and death and pain and injury and evil will vanish forever (v. 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 your sorrows are both utterly and completely comforted and deeply and eternally remembered.
Somehow, in some way—the depths of which you will never sound in this life—every emotion will one day resolve into joy. A God who has chosen to bear scars is a God you can trust with your wounds, knowing that all joys now are a mere foretaste, and all tears now are a precious prelude to complete comfort.
It really matters both that God has emotions and that they are different from yours in important ways. God does understand, and he does care. Jesus provides the clearest understanding of both our emotions and God’s. In particular, Jesus’s role as High Priest demonstrates God’s commitment to relating with you 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, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:15–16).
The doctrine of impassibility matters because some important attributes of God are at stake. Whatever similarity exists between God’s emotions and yours ought not undermine God’s unchanging character (immutability), which undergirds his faithfulness and ability to save you.
If emotions are equated with the old sense of passions—uncontrolled impulses that sweep over a person—then God doesn’t have emotions. But if we are talking about affections, he does. God’s emotions are cognitive affections: most of what we call emotion in God is his evaluation of what is happening with his creation.
The core beauty of God’s impassibility is this: 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. God is energetically enthused and emotionally invested in creation by his own free and consistent choice, but his emotional life does not compromise his character or change his essence.
All Christian doctrine is at some point an expression of mystery. God is not just a different version of you; he is distinct from you as the Creator. Whether discussing the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation, or the problem of evil, everything rests on mystery at its bedrock. While what can be said about God can be said truly and accurately insofar as God has revealed himself, we must draw the line of mystery where God stops speaking.
When you’re suffering, does God care? Of course he does. Not only does he care; he cares that you know he understands. Because Jesus is your High Priest, he understands suffering existentially and physically through his human nature. Because of both Jesus’s purity and his human passion, God is uniquely qualified to empathize with you in Christ.
To keep a balanced view of God’s emotional life, always return to the Trinity as the picture of the divine emotional life. 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 imminently through his indwelling in you (Romans 8:26).