Season: 9 Episode: 140
Listen to episode 138 in Spanish:
Summary:
Emotions can get the best of us and in a culture where emotion and desire leads the way, we aren’t told Is the church creating emotionalism junkies? Shanda shares the three ways to spot an emotionalism junkie and why emotions aren’t a guide to reality but a response to it. There is a way to get the emotionalism junkie to come off the high and get rooted in truth.
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Are you an emotionalism junkie?
An emotionalism junkie:
Seeks an emotional response.
Which leads to an emotional high.
Which results in a crash because emotions cannot be sustained.
Take a look at the next two statements. Which one describes how to know God?
- To feel God is to know God
- To know God eliminates the need to feel Him
In a culture that nurtures and affirms ones feelings when it comes to issues like:
Gender
Love
Life
Race
We’ve concluded that to know anything at all is to feel it. This litmus test of using emotions to determine truth has crept into the church, therefore, creating emotionalism junkies.
We’re going to talk about 3 ways to identify emotionalism junkies:
1. Emotions are a guide to reality.
2. Emotions are the way to love God with all of your heart.
3. Emotionalism junkies seek an emotional high but end up crashing because emotions cannot be sustained.
I was raised in a charismatic church where emotions were the outcome of a typical Sunday morning. An emotional response was the evidence that God moved. In fact, if there were tongues, a word from the Lord, crying at the altar, or any sort of emotional evidence, we would say, “The Spirit moved today.”
It gave me goosebumps. It reassured me that God was present and still at work in His people.
I always left church emotionality charged. I loved the excitement and rush of a worship service that left me drained from tears and exhausted from lifting my arms for hours, or at least until someone said it was 12:00 – time for lunch!
That was the high I chased as a young evangelical who wanted to experience God. I measured the success of my relationship with Him and the fruitfulness of the service on whether or not the pastor’s sermon touched me. I walked away disappointed if God didn’t speak to me. If the pastor’s message wasn’t passionate and filled with emotion, did he even hear from God?
Did the worship move me to tears?
Did I get to cry out all of my woes from the week?
Was I able to lay every burden at the altar and make sure God heard me so He would fix my problems before I left?
Because if I didn’t, I questioned whether or not God loved me, if He still moved, and in extreme cases of emotional dryness .. I questioned His existence.
I was an emotionalism junkie.
And what I’ve described is what many in the church chase and why the church might be creating emotionalism junkies.
An emotionalism junkie uses feelings to guide reality instead of as a response to reality.
The emotionalists motto is – to feel it is to know it. But that means truth is determined by emotional experience rather than objective truth and evidence. This is called subjective truth, culturally identified as my truth and your truth.
The problem is, many in the church mimic the emotional addiction nurtured by culture.
For example, the culture says gender is what you feel it is, making gender subjective and changing. It doesn’t matter that gender is a biologically determined fact. If you feel you’re a man trapped in a woman’s body, who can tell you otherwise?
That’s your truth.
The culture says love is love, meaning whatever you feel sexual desire for or attraction to is permissible. We use the word love for anything we enjoy .. from people, to pets, or the pancakes we ate for breakfast.
The culture condones murdering babies in the womb by justifying it with words that prompt an emotional response –
women will die if we don’t allow them to abort their babies
my body – my choice
women’s reproductive rights
The scientific fact that human life begins at conception doesn’t matter in these emotionally charged debates.
But, emotions are an unstable way to determine truth.
Emotions are subjective and unpredictable and cannot be used as a guide to reality for that reason. Truth cannot be determined by what you feel because emotions constantly change.
So why does the church nurture an emotional response to determine God’s existence and presence in the life of believers?
This cultural belief that feelings guide reality has translated to the church because many believe to feel God is to know Him. We go to church looking for an emotional response to a song or sermon, waiting to get goosebumps, cry, shout, or respond in a way that confirms God’s existence.
But since emotions don’t determine reality, God’s existence is not dependent on whether or not you feel Him.
2. Emotionalism junkies emphasize emotions as the way to love God with all of your heart.
But is that what Scripture means? Jesus said the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind (Matt 22:370.
While emotionalists emphasize loving God with all of their hearts, they often forget to love Him with all of their minds. Christianity is an intellectual faith that commands us to love God with all of our minds for a few reasons;
- Intimacy with God follows knowledge of God. Proverbs 1:9 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” The Bible emphasizes knowing God as the first step toward loving Him.
2. You can’t love what you don’t know. Jesus said true worshipers worship Him in Spirit and in truth – meaning there is a difference between knowing about God and knowing God. Jen Wilkin summed it up by saying, “The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.”
The appearance of emotionalism brings the appearance of intimacy with God – but at the first sign of a well gone dry (no tears and no emotional response), the church wonders if God exists and does He care?
The misunderstanding here is that loving God with all of your heart means an emotional experience.
But is that true?
The Bible tells us what loving God with all of our hearts and minds looks like and it’s not one or the other … it’s in conjunction to each other. For example:
Jesus said, “He who loves Me, keeps My commandments.” (John 14:21). You have to know the commandments in order to keep them. The mind and the heart are both represented in our love for God.
1 John 4:16 says, “We have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” Here again, we see that the heart follows the head … belief takes place in the heart (Rom 10:9), but it follows knowledge.
3. Finally, the emotionalism junkie seeks an emotional high, but ends up crashing since the high cannot be sustained.
More in the church today are after the high of emotionalism when it comes to Christianity, and constantly look for the experience in order to prove intimacy with the Creator.
You look for the evidence in several ways: tears, goosebumps, a rush of courage or excitement.
Sometimes you don’t even have to be the one to shed a tear. Did someone else get excited or cry? Because if they did, that shows God is revealing Himself through the experience of someone else, which proves to you that He still works by revealing Himself through emotional encounters.
Jesus quoted Isaiah 29:13 when He said, “These people worship me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”
The appearance of emotionalism brings the appearance of intimacy.
Just as the people of God worshiped with their words and expressions, God knew their hearts were too far away. There was no connection between the emotion and the heart. And that’s another problem. There should be a connection between the head and the heart. When that happens, true emotion will follow.
We have to be careful with emotionalism. It becomes a high that we seek and eventually it becomes the litmus test for whether or not we’re “close” to God. It becomes the barometer of a “healthy church” where God moves and the Spirit abides.
When we base our entire experience and relationship with God on the idea that we must feel His presence and see evidence of tears, we will be disappointed when the storm blurs our view of Him. Because trials do that. The feeling of pain, stress and difficulties often override the feeling of God’s presence because in reality, His presence is not a feeling at all.
An emotionalism junkie is tossed like the waves of the sea because the crash from an emotional high is real. Truth and knowledge of God anchors you when you go through difficult and confusing times because truth doesn’t change.
So what can emotionalism junkies do to get off the high?
First, know that your emotions can be a result of your relationship with God, not an indicator that you have one. Emotions aren’t even an indicator that God exists. Emotions change but truth doesn’t. If your relationship with God is not based on knowing Him, when you don’t feel God you will be shaken.
Truth is objective, meaning it applies to all people, at all times, in all places. Since the opposite of true is false, that means God exists whether you feel Him or not. Truth is the anchor that keeps your emotions from sweeping you away when what you feel overpowers what you know.
Second, know that emotionalism has nothing to do with loving God with all of your heart, soul, and mind.
Christianity is an intellectual faith and that means being prepared to give an answer for the hope that is within you (1 Pet 3:15). We are called to be disciples and disciple others. That means knowing the faith we claim to be part of. Learning is not a passive activity. Discipline yourself to study the word and you will create a discipline that leads to loving God with all of your mind. Get used to expository preaching and be able to recognize sound teaching regardless of the emotion or passion conveyed by the messenger.
3. Finally, know that emotions can and must be disciplined. While God did give humans emotions, they are affected by the fall.
Emotions are not a guide to reality but a response to it. Here are 3 ways to discipline your emotions from a biblical perspective:
- James 1:19-20 says to be slow to speak, quick to listen and slow to anger. Verse 20 tells us why: the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.
Although emotions are given by God and anger is not a sin, it is not the first place to land.
To be slow to speak and quick to listen means you are able to keep what you know in front of what you feel – leading with reason and logic over emotion.
2. This takes self-control which is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23). Emotional discipline is a sign of spiritual maturity. Without the working of the Spirit producing the fruit of self-control, you will be subject to your emotions instead of your emotions being subject to you.
3. Finally, transform your mind. Romans 12:2-3 says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Discernment, testing, and proving are not based on emotions but knowledge, and it starts in the mind. Therefore, we must allow God to transform our minds since what enters the heart flows from what is filtered through the mind.
In conclusion, emotionalism junkies must understand that to feel God is not to know Him, but to know Him eliminates the need to feel Him. In a culture that nurtures and validates feelings over facts, the church must do a better job in helping the emotionalism junkie come down from the high and help anchor them in God’s truth.
Spanish Show Notes
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