Monday, October 17, 2005
Taming Emotions
Broken Messenger is writing about to role of emotions and emotional response in our faith walk. Brad offers several passages to point out that emotions play an important role, that we are not purely intellectual creatures.
The problem, I believe is that we know how to train our intellects, but we do not really know how to tame our emotions. As we are fallen and must have our minds transformed, so too are our emotions fallen and they too must be tranformed.
Yet, because we feel we do not control our emotions, we tend to treat them as something "other" than ourselves, and therefore not really of our spiritual journey.
Firstly, I do think we can control our emotions to some extent, but much as we can never truly tame our minds absence the action of the Holy Spirit, our emotional responses must also be transformed not by our control, but indeed by the Holy Spirit.
Do you pray about your emotions? I don't mean just tell God about them, I mean really and truly ask him to change them. "God next time someone cuts me off in traffic, please restrain my anger." Try it -- you'll be amazed at the results.
The problem, I believe is that we know how to train our intellects, but we do not really know how to tame our emotions. As we are fallen and must have our minds transformed, so too are our emotions fallen and they too must be tranformed.
Yet, because we feel we do not control our emotions, we tend to treat them as something "other" than ourselves, and therefore not really of our spiritual journey.
Firstly, I do think we can control our emotions to some extent, but much as we can never truly tame our minds absence the action of the Holy Spirit, our emotional responses must also be transformed not by our control, but indeed by the Holy Spirit.
Do you pray about your emotions? I don't mean just tell God about them, I mean really and truly ask him to change them. "God next time someone cuts me off in traffic, please restrain my anger." Try it -- you'll be amazed at the results.
