This is going to be a very long post. It will also be somewhat controversial. It discusses the importance of feelings in apprehending the truth of God. Let me start by saying that feelings can guide you toward things you need to deal with in a way that intellect alone cannot.
Let me explain. If anything, you see or interact with triggers you or causes you extreme discomfort, that is your feelings trying to tell you that you have something you need to deal with. Those feelings don’t come to you for no reason. This is where I tie logic together with our feelings. It doesn’t give us the answer but alerts us to something we need to investigate.
What Should We Do?
So, what should we do? I would argue that we should pray to the Holy Spirit to guide us. We must ask Him to give us wisdom and discernment. We will be able to, with God’s help, deal with what those feelings have exposed. Jesus promised us that the Holy Spirit would guide us into all truth (John 16:13). So if we, with an open, submissive heart, ask the Holy Spirit to show us the truth of something, He will. Jesus told us that if we ask God for something, He will give us the good things we ask for (Matt 7:9–11).
The Epistle of James adds, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.” (James 1:5) This is what God has told us to do. Why? Feelings expose our belief system to something we need to deal with. They bypass the intellectual filters we construct to protect us from certain things. They allow God and the Holy Spirit to take us where they want us to go.
Let me illustrate. If you think about the fruits of the Spirit, they are all rooted in feelings. You may exercise these fruits by acts of your will. However, it is your feelings that bring their expression to the forefront of your life. For example, you may know you have to forgive someone. By an act of will, you may seek to forgive them of everything they’ve done to you. Why? Because you know that it is necessary because of the feelings they engender in you. Their presence, or even the mere memory of them, triggers things in you. Feelings can expose things the intellect avoids.
Our Feelings
Our feelings show us that we need to dig down and pull up the roots, not just the flowering weeds that are so easily seen by our intellect. Dealing with our feelings is a lot harder because we have to break apart, dig deep, and expose things that may be painful or sinful, things we’ve been avoiding dealing with solely with our intellect. Our intellect often allows us to sweep things under the rug, sidestep, or pretend they are not important. Feelings keep nagging at us to examine further, deeper.
Think about what Luke says in Acts 17:27-28, “…that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’”
God knows everything about you. There is no place that you can go or anything that you can hide from Him. This passage reminds us that, as His children, merely knowing intellectually that this is true is not enough. We need to experience what a child feels when a parent is loving, and the sense of safety and security that this knowledge brings to our lives. Our eternal parent, who enabled us to be born again, is YAHWEH. He is our Father, who, through the actions of his Son and Holy Spirit, has given us the assurances we need to know.
Sometimes, to grow in something, you have to try to feel your way into what it is. That is because it is not until you touch what you’re searching for that you will feel it, which is a different kind of knowing. It is different than mere intellectual understanding. When you encounter something in your life that evokes strong negative emotions, you have identified a problem that needs addressing. This is where the temptation to push it aside becomes particularly strong. Sometimes, an external force that is part of the problem resists exposure.
Closeness to the Holy Spirit
You can tell someone’s proximity to the Holy Spirit and their willingness to confront the issues in their life by what they’re not afraid of. Fear, at least this particular kind of fear we’re addressing, is not of God or the Holy Spirit. When the Bible speaks of the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom, it refers to a deep respect, overwhelming honor, and related meanings. This is not the kind of fear that the enemies of God engender. That fear is the fear of what might happen, of a possible loss or lack. It is not a deep respect for what God will make happen as you submit your life to Him.
Baal’s (Satan’s) strategy is to corrupt your faith in God, shifting it to faith in yourself or some other external resource besides God. His strategy is to sever you from your true roots and keep you captive in his falsehoods and lies.
As an aside, if you live in America, Baal is in your bloodline because this country was founded on self-reliance, not reliance on God. Our polity gives lip service to the rights that God has given us… “We are endowed by our creator with…” Those rights may be given, but we do not admit they are sustained by Him. We say they are sustained by our own actions. The lie is that it is up to us to maintain these rights by our self-reliance, not by trusting Him and acting according to His leading. We tell ourselves, “We’ve got this.”
I will continue this in Dealing with the Altar of Baal (Part Two).
