Emotions Can Lie

I often battle listening to my emotions vs. listening to God’s truth, so this excerpt from Joel Engle’s book, The Exchange:  Tired of Living the Christian Life On Your Own?  really encouraged me.  I hope it does you, too.

EMOTIONS CAN LIE

Eugene Peterson wrote, “My feelings…tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God.  My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel.  Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors.  ‘As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about his people.’  The image that announces his dependable, unchanging, safe, secure existence of God’s people comes from geology, not psychology.”

Think about it:  our security has nothing whatsoever to do with how we feel.  Peterson says that just as the mountains are not going away, so the Lord’s surrounding of His people is not going to change.  Ever.  If you lived in Denver, you wouldn’t wake up every morning wondering if the mountins were still standing.  You would be certifiably insane if you first had to “feel in your heart” that the mountains were still there before being convinced they were there.  So just as surely as the mountians remain around Jerusalem, so remains the faithfulness and love of God.

You don’t have to think about it anymore.  It’s settled.  You can stop doubting God and begin to rely on the immovable bedrock certainty of His Word.  Christ has won the fight over your eternity; the only battle still raging is the one going in your head.