Introduction — How Do You Feel about How You Feel?
How you respond to your emotions, even how you feel about how you feel, matters a great deal to your relationship with God and with the people in your life. Your emotions can deeply enrich those relationships, or they can drive wedges into them.
The starting point is simple. Emotions are an essential way you bear God’s image. God expresses emotions, and he designed you to express them too. In the Gospels you see Jesus’s compassion for people who are hurting, his anger at callous religious leaders, and his groans as he grieves over unbelief and death. And as you live in relationship with him, he starts to give you a heart like his, one that hates what he hates and loves what he loves.
Chapter 1 — Sometimes It’s Good to Feel Bad
Jesus stands with Mary at the fresh grave of her brother Lazarus, his close friend, and he breaks down in tears. Now think about this. In about five minutes, he’s going to raise Lazarus from the dead. So why would he weep right before he fixes the whole problem?
Because he’s perfect. He cries because that’s what love does when it meets loss. He won’t refuse to share the pain of the people he loves. Not even for ten minutes. Not even when he knows their sorrow is about to turn into astonished joy.
You need unpleasant emotions because you live in a fallen world. God made you to respond to things as they actually are. It would be wrong not to grieve when someone you love dies, or not to be upset when your kids lie or hurt each other. Even Job, who lost everything in a single day and still worshiped God, tore his robe and fell to the ground when he heard his children had died. You were made to see the world the way God sees it, and to be bothered by what bothers him.
A day is coming when no one will feel sorrow or fear again, because there will be nothing left to feel them about. Until then, only those who open their hearts to the pain in God’s world will be able to enter into his joy as well.
Chapter 2 — What Exactly Are Emotions?
Do emotions start in the mind or in the body? The wisest answer is “probably both.” But perhaps the most important thing the Bible says about your emotions is this: they express what you value, or love. Jesus’s tears at the grave showed what was in his heart.
That’s why sharing emotions draws people together. Think about the people you feel closest to. You’ve probably shared some of your deepest feelings with them, or gone through something intense together. Sharing in someone’s experience is part of what love is. As Paul puts it in Romans 12, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” Jesus did exactly that when he mourned with Lazarus’s sisters.
Emotions also give you energy to act. If you’ve ever wrestled with anger, you know the surge. Your heart pounds, you get hot, and suddenly you have to do something. That’s why people show anger physically, from shutting a drawer a little too hard to punching a wall.
And at the deepest level, your emotions are an expression of worship. You’re called to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. So you can’t cut your life into pieces and call just one piece worship. Your love for God should shape all your other loves.
Chapter 3 — Emotions Don’t Come in Single File
Your emotions never come in single file. Most of the time, you’re feeling several things at once, and some of them conflict. That’s normal, and the reason is simple: you love lots of things. If what you love shapes what you feel, you’ll always be reacting to different parts of your world in different ways at the same time.
Jesus felt this too. In Matthew 23, he gives the Pharisees his longest, most sledgehammer-like rebuke. Then his heart overflows with compassion for the very people he just scolded: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
Mixed emotions are the right response to a mixed world. In this life, the glories of God’s handiwork always get the muck of sin spattered on them. You’ll never fully understand every stream that runs from your heart into your feelings, and you don’t need to. Bring what you do understand to God, and trust him with the corners only he can see.
Chapter 4 — Emotions Happen in Your Body
Other than God himself, two things shape your emotions from the day you’re born until the day you die: your body and your community. Start with your body.
Your emotions happen in your skin, your brain, and your blood. Someone can speak into a phone a thousand miles away and make the hair on your neck stand up. A photograph can make your heart pound. Your body is the messenger of your soul. So common sense applies. Exercise, enough sleep, and a full but not stuffed belly all make it easier for your emotions to line up with God’s.
Try this. For about fifteen seconds, relax your shoulders, tilt your head slowly back, and take a few deep breaths. Did you find tension in your neck or chest? Were you aware of it two minutes ago? Most of the time, this back-and-forth between body and soul goes unnoticed. Yet every moment you spend tensed up quietly tells your body that life is stressful, and a body that keeps hearing that only gets tenser.
Chapter 5 — You Relate to Others When You Feel with Them
Now your community. Paul writes, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” Relating to people the way God wants means being fully engaged in what they’re going through. So when a usually loud friend goes quiet, slow down and ask what’s going on.
That’s also why holding your own emotions back is a problem. No matter how much you love someone, a lack of emotional expression communicates a lack of love. Imagine your spouse handing you a dozen roses and saying they love you, but in a flat, mechanical voice with a look of total boredom. You’d wonder if they meant it. The roses would say love, but the tone would say apathy.
Emotions aren’t the center of love, but they’re a critical way to express it. The goal isn’t the right phrasing. It’s honesty about what’s on your heart and real interest in what excites or discourages the people you love.
Chapter 6 — Why Can’t I Control My Emotions?
Psalm 42 opens with the famous line about a soul that thirsts for God “as a deer pants for flowing streams.” Fewer people know the writer spends the rest of the psalm wrestling with his feelings. Twice he asks, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” He reminds himself of God’s goodness and urges himself to hope. And his feelings stay stuck anyway.
That doesn’t mean he’s fighting poorly. It means he’s human. When your emotions are big, something big usually has to change before they do. That’s why a living relationship with a good and sovereign God matters so much. The goal isn’t a trick for changing your feelings directly. It’s joining God in the slow work of changing your heart.
Chapter 7 — Two Pitfalls
Here the book turns from understanding emotions to engaging them, starting with two ways to go wrong. The first is making feelings the center of everything. Just as cookies make a terrible center for your diet, emotions make a terrible center for your life. The second is the opposite: holding your feelings at arm’s length. Even in a culture that worships emotion, the hottest way to manage feelings right now is mindfulness, which sits on that stoic side. The Bible offers something richer than either.
Chapter 8 — Engage: A Better Option
The Bible’s way is to engage your emotions. When an emotion shows up on your radar, you look at it, see what you find, and then, not before, decide how to respond. It works in four steps: identify, examine, evaluate, and act.
First, identify what you feel. If that’s hard, ask someone you trust, “What emotions do you see in me most often?” Second, examine it. Ask, “Why am I feeling this? What am I reacting to? How is this making me want to act?”
Here’s how that plays out. Say you’re a husband, and you realize you’re angry because your wife broke the lawn mower. You didn’t say anything, but you’ve been short with her since, and quiet at dinner. One thought keeps looping: “She knows I always get to the lawn on Saturday. Why couldn’t she just leave it alone?”
What can you learn? Your anger is making you pull back. You value efficiency and comfort, which makes you one of about 7 billion people who like things to go smoothly. But the looping thoughts also show that right now you care more about your own inconvenience than about her good intentions. She was trying to make your life better.
That’s the third step: sort out which parts of the feeling are good and which are bad. Then you’re ready to act. Feed the loves and actions that are good, and starve the ones that are bad. So the husband should apologize for being short and thank his wife for trying to take care of something for him. There may even be room for a gentle request that she check with him about the lawn equipment next time.
Chapter 9 — Engaging Emotions Means Engaging God
Engaging your emotions always leads you to God. Psalm 62 puts it simply: “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him.”
Picture your mixed feelings as different colors of paint sloshing around in one bucket. Pouring out your heart just means naming the colors you feel most strongly and tipping the whole mix into God’s hands, one sentence at a time. That’s what the Psalms do over and over. And Peter gives the reason you can: cast your anxieties on him, “because he cares for you.”
Jesus prayed his emotions too. In Gethsemane he says, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” Look at what he does next. He doesn’t pour another glass of wine to take the edge off. He doesn’t step back to find his calm. He tells his friends honestly about the dread he feels and asks them to pray. Then he falls on his knees and pours out his heart to his Father. If Jesus brought his desperate sorrow to God, how could you not bring your own mixed feelings?
So why is it so hard? The reasons all come back to one thing: you don’t fully trust him. But you will trust something. You’ll take your emotions somewhere. Most often, going to God simply never occurs to you. He seems irrelevant, or you think you need to get your act together first. But reading your Bible and not yelling at your kids aren’t the end goal of life. Loving God and walking with him is.
So talk with him through the day, with every blip on your emotional radar. Author Paul Miller once said that anxiety is wasted prayer. He didn’t mean worry is a sin. He meant that when you run on the hamster wheel of anxious thoughts, you miss the reason God gave you the ability to feel anxious. Your anxieties are meant to lead you straight to him. Every time.
Chapter 10 — Engaging Relationships
Engaging your emotions changes how you handle conflict. When you’re hurt, it’s easy to launch accusations, which only brings a counterattack. When anger pushes to the front of the line, it crowds out compassion and patience. So slow down enough to remember that you actually care about the other person.
Then start with your own vulnerability. Picture a couple, Roger and Jean, who fell into an icy silence as they left the house. If Roger led with vulnerability, he could 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 went quiet. I’m sorry. I want to be close to you. Can we talk about it?”
That’s hard. It feels safer to hold back and blame. But it takes two to keep a war going. When you lead with vulnerability, you step back from the battle and put the relationship ahead of being right. Being first to lay down your weapons is scary, and that’s exactly what makes it powerful. It signals that it’s safe for the other person to do the same. Could they attack anyway? Yes. But it reflects the grace God showed you in Jesus, who didn’t have to walk around in your world, but did.
Watch more than your words, too. Tone and facial expressions can cause more misunderstanding than words do. So skip the eye rolls, heavy sighs, and folded arms. Sit down, relax your face, and turn toward the other person. The moments you’ll look back on as turning points will likely be the times you walked into a hard conflict leading with vulnerability and empathy.
Chapter 11 — On Nourishing Healthy Emotions
Next come six ordinary practices that help your emotions grow healthy. They aren’t tools for changing your feelings. They’re habits that grow your love for what God loves and, over time, shape your feelings to look more like Jesus’s.
Read your Bible. Scripture soaks your mind in hopes, promises, comforts, and warnings. It lifts you onto your tiptoes to watch God care for a young Moabite widow, a shepherd boy who kills a giant, and a murderer who becomes a missionary. Most of all, when you read God’s words, you meet God himself. One simple way to respond is to write down what you’d say back to him.
Go outside. Ten minutes of sun on your face won’t transform your mood most days. But it reminds you that you live on a bigger stage than your messy house or your office walls. One of the authors walks six minutes to a stone wall in the woods behind the office, stands for a minute to watch the sunlight on the forest floor, then walks six minutes back through the pines. That short walk is a reminder that God gives abundant life, and a reminder to drop the shoulders and breathe.
Cultivate good negative emotions. The only book of the Bible named after an emotion isn’t called Joys. It’s Lamentations. There are ways you should feel bad more often than you do, letting godly grief and guilt do their work instead of crushing them. The main way is to lament: to name a loss honestly before God. It’s the most common kind of psalm. In Psalm 13, the writer asks “How long?” again and again, and he ends with hope in a rescue that hasn’t come yet.
Build altars. In the Old Testament, an altar marked something that needed to be remembered. Like a souvenir, it compresses a story into a single glance. Your altar can be an object or a regular practice that reminds you of God’s goodness. It’s no accident that Christ gave bread and wine, things you can smell, touch, see, and taste, to remind you again and again that he’s with you.
Cling to corporate worship. In God’s house, surrounded by his family, you remember you’re not alone. And singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength.
Watch for God on the move. Ask anyone what the Lord is doing in their life. Stories of grace in others will help lead you home.
Chapter 12 — On Starving Unhealthy Emotions
Emotions would be easier if they were like an old western, where the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black. But you can’t label anger bad and happiness good. You have to listen to what each emotion is saying, sort the true from the false, and respond wisely. So instead of rejecting any one emotion, here are four messages to say no to in every emotion.
“I am my emotions.” People who feel overwhelmed often feel their emotions are who they really are. But you’re more than what you feel. In Psalm 142, David doesn’t just cry. He cries to God. That’s a world of difference. One cry is self-talk that can leave you alone. The other connects you to Someone who cares, even when your feelings say he isn’t there.
“I need to act right now.” God is “slow to anger.” The same caution goes for joy. A manic high can push you into promises you can’t keep and purchases you can’t afford. That’s why one old evening prayer asks God to “shield the joyous” right alongside the sick and the suffering.
“I shouldn’t be feeling this.” Think of emotions as a sixth sense. You can read the date on the milk carton, but you won’t know if the milk has soured until you smell it. Your senses check each other. Listening to your emotions doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It means interpreting them. One of the authors often feels anxious before preaching, and that anxiety becomes a nudge to prepare more.
“This is all or nothing.” As a mixed person living with mixed people in a mixed world, you’ll often feel mixed emotions.
Saying no to these four lies is one way to obey Jesus’s words “Let not your hearts be troubled” without growing ashamed of your feelings. Don’t let your heart be troubled, and at the same time, cry out to the Lord the way David does. Do both.
Chapter 13 — Engaging Fear
The last part of the book walks through the hardest emotions, starting with fear. Fear has a simple message: something you value is under threat. Because fear is so common, your fears are probably the single best map of what you actually value. Where fear flourishes, there your heart will be also.
Fear pushes you to extremes with people. You either pull away or cling to them like driftwood in a shipwreck. But God built you to need each other, so you’ll usually do better with your fears when you share them with a trusted friend.
Bringing order to your world is good, whether you’re an executive organizing deals or a three-year-old organizing dolls. But you’ll never be completely safe, fully in control, or 100 percent sure what’s coming. You were never meant to be. Danger and uncertainty point you not to a strategy but to a Person, the One whose certain character is your only real safety.
To identify fear, notice your body: short breath, a racing heart, tight muscles. The simplest sign is the question “What if?” What if we don’t have enough money? What if nobody likes my project? What-ifs pull every possible doom out of the future and write God out of the picture.
To examine it, ask what you’re doing about it. Do you escape into alcohol, social media, or overwork? Do you run circles in your head? Or do you turn to prayer? Then ask, “Why would I care if this happened?” Your answer shows your treasures. To evaluate it, ask how likely the feared thing really is. Fear is a notorious exaggerator and false prophet of doom.
Then act. First, turn to Scripture. First Peter 5:7 says to throw your anxiety into God’s hands, because he cares for you. He cares in both senses. He feels for you, and he looks out for you. These aren’t abstract truths. They’re real words from a real God who will keep every promise.
Next, care for your body. Slow, deep breaths preach safety in Christ to a body shaking with dread. Someone once joked that exercise is the most underused anti-anxiety medicine. And learn to rest. Many anxious people build endless moats of activity to keep fear away. If that’s you, slowing down is faith. When you stop checking email at night, you place what you care about in God’s hands. If you procrastinate instead, the move is the opposite. For you, faith means leaning into the work and trusting God with how it turns out.
Finally, go after anywhere you’re self-medicating. It’s amazing what you learn when you take away a crutch. But no change will last unless the love of your heart changes too.
Chapter 14 — Engaging Anger
Anger says, “That is wrong.” It’s the moral emotion. When you’re angry, your heart is crying out that something you love is being treated unjustly. And like every emotion, anger flows from love. The Bible presents God as the angriest character in Scripture, precisely because he’s also the most loving. Remember where the book began: Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s grave over what death does to his Father’s creation. The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s apathy.
At its best, anger is protective love for what God loves. At its worst, it’s self-interest issuing an ultimatum: “Obey my will or suffer my wrath.” And even when there’s plenty to be angry about, anger shouldn’t rule your life. No one can live next to a bonfire that never goes out without getting burned.
Identifying anger is tricky, because angry people almost never know they’re angry. When you feel deeply right, it’s very hard to say, “Maybe I’m the problem.” That’s why Jesus says to take the log out of your own eye first. And watch your words. People say, “I’m not angry, I’m just frustrated.” Don’t be fooled. Frustration is anger that hasn’t fully bloomed yet.
To examine it, ask, “Why am I angry?” Just finishing the sentence “I’m angry because” can take some of the heat out. To evaluate it, ask whether you’re upset about what God is upset about. Even if you are, be careful. You’re in the greatest danger when you’re right, because being right about someone else’s sin so easily blinds you to your own. Notice, too, that Jesus is in agony but not angry when he’s nailed to the cross. Yet he’s furious when he flips the tables of the money changers cheating people in his Father’s house.
To act well, start by slowing down. You’ll almost never go wrong by pausing when you’re angry. Count to ten. Take a breath. Talk later, after you cool off. It also helps to simply say, “I’m angry.” Naming it instead of spraying it at everyone helps you respond to your anger rather than in it.
Remember what God does with his anger. He poured out his wrath on Christ, once and only once, so the people he was angry with could be restored. True love attacks evil hard, but the attack is always a rescue mission.
In the end, the best answer to anger is humility. Humility says, “It seems to me,” instead of “You always.” It asks real questions and listens, while self-righteous anger grabs the microphone and rants. And even when the fault is all on the other side, humility remembers its own log and offers grace, because Jesus has shown you grace beyond compare.
Chapter 15 — Engaging Grief
When you’re grieving, some of your feelings may surprise you, like anxiety, anger, or even relief. After his wife died, C. S. Lewis was surprised by what he called “the laziness of grief.” He wrote, “I loathe the slightest effort.” You’ve probably heard of the five stages of grief. But try not to think of grief as fixed steps. Think of all those feelings as swirling paints on one canvas titled “Grief.”
Remember losing a tooth as a kid? For a day or two you kept poking your tongue into the gap. Then one day it wasn’t interesting anymore. You’d explored it, accepted it, and moved on. Real losses are far more complicated, but that’s the basic way you engage grief. You name what was there, press into the hole it left, and share it with people who love you. Ask a grieving friend, “Tell me who this person was. What do you miss most?”
David’s life shows grief in many forms: the grief of guilt, the grief of a child’s death, and the grief of betrayal. In Psalm 55 he writes, “It is not an enemy who taunts me—then I could bear it… But it is you… my companion, my familiar friend.” Whatever you lose, the Bible is full of words to help you name it.
Paul told the Thessalonians not to “grieve as others do who have no hope.” Your hope is this: Jesus was raised from the dead. That means he has conquered every loss and will one day heal and restore it.
If you’re caring for someone who grieves, be a companion, not a fixer. Remind them they’re allowed to feel one way today and another way tomorrow. You might say, “You’re probably feeling all kinds of things you weren’t expecting,” and then be quiet and let them answer.
Chapter 16 — Engaging Guilt and Shame
Guilt says, “I’ve done something wrong.” Shame says, “Something is wrong with me, and other people can see it.” Both can help you see when you’ve sinned. And if someone has mistreated you, shame rightly signals that what they did was wrong, the way a sharp pain in your side warns you about your appendix.
Sometimes it’s hard to hear the good in guilt and shame, so you try to quiet them. You avoid people. You reach for things that make you feel better. But hiding is sin’s oldest reflex. After Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, they hide, and when God calls them out, Adam points at Eve.
But God doesn’t just want to remove your guilt. He wants to restore you as his beloved child. Jesus tells of a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find the one that wandered off. When he finds it, he isn’t angry. He carries it home on his shoulders and calls his friends to celebrate.
So take one hugely important step. Talk about your guilt and shame with someone you trust. Don’t listen to the voice that tells you to hide. Brought into the light, guilt and shame lead to growth. Kept in the dark, they fester.
Chapter 17 — A Museum of Tears
Isaiah 65 describes the day God makes all things new. Children won’t be in danger. Families will be together forever, without rebellion or tragedy. Danger, death, and pain will vanish for good.
When he returns, God will wipe away every tear. But Psalm 56 also says he keeps your tears in a bottle, because he loves you. Somehow heaven will be a place where your sorrows are both completely comforted and remembered forever. That’s the idea behind the chapter’s title, “A Museum of Tears.”
In some way you’ll never fully grasp in this life, every emotion will one day resolve into joy. A God who chose to bear scars is a God you can trust with your wounds. Every joy now is a small taste of what’s coming, and every tear is a prelude to complete comfort.
Appendix — Does God Really Feel?
It matters both that God has emotions and that his emotions are different from yours. First, be clear: God does understand, and he does care. Hebrews says Jesus is a high priest who is able “to sympathize with our weaknesses,” because he “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet was without sin.”
But God isn’t swept around by feelings the way you are, and that matters, because his unchanging character is what makes him faithful and able to save you. As pastor Kevin DeYoung puts it, 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.”
So when you’re suffering, does God care? Of course he does, and he wants you to know he understands. The Father sympathizes with you and sends Christ into your life. The Son feels with you through his human nature. And the Holy Spirit, living in you, feels with you from within.