Resilience and the Power of Emotions

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You're listening to the Pursue God Truth Podcast, the official channel for faith and life topics at PursueGod.org. Join us every week as we explore new topics from a biblical perspective.

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Hey church, today we start a brand new series called Resilient. We're going to talk about how to harness your difficult emotions to build your faith. In this five week series, we're going to talk about anger and shame and fear and grief. All of these are emotions that for some people

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have led them away from faith in God. You experience difficult emotions and it causes you to want to bail on your faith because you feel like maybe God has abandoned you. But to be resilient as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus, to be resilient is instead of allowing those emotions to push you away from God, to be resilient is allowing those emotions to draw you closer to God, to build your faith rather than to destroy your faith.

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This is a great series to go through with your family. So parents, if you have junior highers or high schoolers, man, this would be a great series to go through with them. Or maybe whether you're a small group at church or even one-on-one in a mentoring relationship, you can find this full five-week series at pursuagod.org forward slash resilient. And if you've never used, you know, any of these podcasts based discipleship series before, it's really simple. Here's how it works.

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You listen to the podcast ahead of time before you come together with your family or your small group or your mentor. You listen to it ahead of time so that by the time you come together for the conversation, it's just that everyone's prepped and ready to have a meaningful, powerful life changing conversation. So in this first lesson, we're just sort of going to give an introduction to resilience and the power of emotions. See, a lot of people think that emotions are bad.

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They think that emotions are sinful. A lot of people, a lot of men in particular think that emotions are weak, that they're things to be stuffed. I'll admit it as a man, even in my own life, I think I'm a guy who stuffed my emotions for the longest time. Now luckily I married someone who has a master's in counseling psychology and my wife has helped me over the years in more than 25 years of marriage.

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to understand my emotions, to embrace my emotions, to process my emotions instead of to vilify them. Because here's the truth, and this is what I want you to understand here as we get started in this series where we're gonna be processing our emotions. The truth is that emotions aren't sinful or weak. Let me say that again. Emotions aren't sinful, emotions aren't weak. In fact, they were created by God.

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And listen to this, even God experiences emotions. Let me give you just a few examples right from scripture, right from the Bible. Think about anger. Exodus 32, it says this, the Lord said, I have seen how stubborn and rebellious these people are. Now leave me alone so my fierce anger can blaze against them and I will destroy them. Here's an example of God as a father.

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He's talking, of course, about the Israelites. If you've read the Old Testament at all, you would understand that it's a story of the Israelites just failing God over and over and over. Any parents out there can recognize this pattern because we see it. Everyone's sinful. Our own kids are sinful. The Israelites, God's children, were sinful in the Old Testament. It was like this constant struggle, this constant battle that so many parents...

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can totally relate to if you've ever gotten angry before as a mom or a dad, then you understand what God is experiencing here in Exodus 32. Now, remember, Jesus is also God and Jesus flipped over the tables. Think about that. We'll talk about this more next week, but Jesus, in his anger, now it was righteous anger, but in his righteous anger, he goes to the temple and he flips over the tables and he

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gets upset with the people for turning the temple into a place to make money. The point is that God experienced the emotion of anger. Jesus Himself experienced the emotion of anger and therefore, emotions aren't sinful by nature. Because if God experienced anger, if Jesus, while He walked the earth, experienced anger and Jesus is perfect.

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Jesus is sinless, then the experience of an emotion as difficult as anger—a lot of times we think of anger as a bad emotion—but even the emotion of anger isn't inherently sinful or wrong. Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have experienced it. Now, next week when we talk a little bit more about harnessing the emotion of anger, we're going to get into the fact that for most of us, the anger we experience isn't righteous.

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like it was for Jesus. So we'll get into all of that next week. But for today, suffice it to say that this emotion isn't always sinful. Or consider the emotion of grief, and we're going to talk about this in week five of our series. Genesis 6 says, the Lord was sorry that He had ever made people and put them on the earth. It broke His heart. Some of you might be listening to this podcast today and you've experienced

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grief in the last year, maybe a loss in the family, maybe the loss of a job, whatever, for whatever reason, grief is a normal experience for human beings. And this is something that's really encouraging to me because this verse, and this is just one of many verses, but this verse tells us that even God experiences grief. So grief, it turns out, isn't...

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inherently evil or bad or wrong, God himself even experienced grief. And in fact, think about Jesus, Mark chapter 3. It says he looked around at the people and he experienced two emotions in Mark 3. He looked around at them angrily, number one, and number two, he was deeply saddened by their hard hearts. Now, the context for this is that it was a Sabbath day and the religious leaders

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were judgmental, they didn't understand the heart of God for people. And so, they were more concerned about the rules, the laws. They didn't think that you should work on the Sabbath to include doing a miracle. So basically, they were testing Jesus and they didn't want Jesus to perform a miracle on the Sabbath. So that's why Jesus experienced two emotions. Number one, he was angry at them, and this was righteous anger. He was angry that they so misunderstood the heart of God.

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He was angry that they would manipulate religion to hurt people rather than to help people. They were more interested in the letter of the law than the spirit of the law, so it made him angry. But the passage says that he was also deeply saddened. Now I imagine that at first he was sad because this poor guy had a deformed hand and he really wanted to help him. But actually Mark 3 verse 5 says that he was saddened by their hard hearts.

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So even for the Pharisees and teachers of the law, the people who were misunderstanding religion and misunderstanding God, even for them, Jesus was not just angry at them, but he was actually sad for them because they were missing out. Isn't that interesting that Jesus was saddened by the hard hearts of the Pharisees? Jesus was truly experiencing grief mixed with anger.

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because they were missing the point. And that wasn't just harmful for the people who needed healing, it was also harmful to their souls. Anyway, the rest of that story, by the way, is that right away he said to the man, after experiencing these emotions, he said to the man, hold out your hand, and the man held out his hand and it was restored. So isn't it interesting that Jesus' emotions, that he allowed those emotions, he experienced those emotions, he didn't stuff them, he experienced them.

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But then he did something about those emotions, and he ended up healing a guy. And that's a great picture of what we're gonna be doing in this series, is we're experiencing our emotions, we're understanding our emotions, we're not stuffing them, we're not denying them, we're not trying to battle them, but we're experiencing our emotions, and then we're harnessing them for something good. This is exactly what Jesus did with his emotions.

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So we've looked at anger, we've looked at grief. Let's just look at one more emotion real quick today, and that emotion is joy. Zephaniah in the Old Testament, Zephaniah chapter three, it says there, "'For the Lord your God is living among you. "'He's a mighty warrior. "'He will take delight in you with gladness. "'With His love, He will calm all your fears. "'He will rejoice over you with joyful songs.'" You know, some people think of God as a curmudgeon. They think of God

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as a spiteful, vengeful, mean, nasty authority figure. But I love that there are places in Scripture that paint a different picture. Well, first of all, God is love, we know that. But then we're even seeing that He has joy, that He's saying to His people, I delight over you, I love you, I want to fill you with joy, I have joy when I think about you. We all have people in our lives that...

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We love to see, right? I mean, think of it, maybe get in your mind the person that truly brings you joy when you think about hanging out with them or when you see them for the first time in a long time. Right? I have people like that in my life, people that just truly bring me joy. My wife is one of those people, my kids, several other people I can think of that really bring me joy. Now think about that for you. Now think about that for God. God says that His people bring Him joy.

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Jesus Himself in John 15 said this to His disciples, His closest followers. He said, I've told you these things so that you may be filled with My joy. What does that mean? Jesus had joy. Jesus wanted to fill His disciples with joy. In fact, He says at the end of that verse, He says, yes, your joy will overflow. So look.

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Joy is an emotion that we should experience, that God experiences, Jesus Himself experienced. Jesus had joy. Jesus wanted to transfer that joy to His disciples. In fact, think of the very first miracle of Jesus. You know what it was? It was to turn water into wine. Why did He do that? He turned water into wine because wine represents joy. His first miracle was performed at a wedding party.

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Contrast that with Moses's first miracle. Moses's first miracle was to turn water into blood. Remember that he went to Pharaoh. He said let my people go He turns the Nile River into blood basically and what does blood represent? It represents judgment So Moses's first miracle was a miracle about judgment Jesus's first miracle was a miracle about joy

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And that's because Jesus wants us to experience joy. He came to bring us joy. Now that's just one emotion, but I think it's a great emotion for us to think about for a second here because emotions aren't bad. Emotions, this is the point, emotions are at least neutral, right? They were created by God, God experiences them. They're not sinful, they're not weak. Now we can use our emotions in sinful ways.

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Or we can harness those emotions and use them for good, which is what Jesus did every single time. So that means anger can motivate us to be world changers. The next time you feel anger, think about it. Maybe you should process what that's really about, what's at the root of that, because maybe there's an injustice that God wants you to be involved with addressing.

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I mean, William Wilberforce, this was a guy in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. He had this righteous anger against inhumanity in the transatlantic slave trade. And so what did he do? He harnessed that anger to abolish slavery in England. Or someone a little bit less well known, Sophie Scholl, she was a leader of something called the White Rose Resistance Group in Nazi Germany.

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She recognized the atrocities of the Nazi regime. And she, along with her brother and some of the other members of this group, distributed leaflets. They denounced the crimes of the Nazis. And they were even eventually executed for their resistance. But you see what happened is they had an anger because they recognized the injustice, a righteous anger, and they were willing to step out and do something about it.

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In a couple of weeks, we'll talk about the emotion of fear. Now, originally, initially, when you think about fear or anxiety, you think of it as a bad thing and it can be bad for many people. Anxiety is absolutely crippling. So we'll talk about that in week three of this series, but you know that we can actually use fear. We can harness fear to awaken us to a deeper spiritual reality. So fear doesn't have to be all bad.

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Again, if we process it, if we think about it, if we sit with it, if we dissect it instead of stuffing it, if we put it on the table and dissect it, then it actually can wake us up. Or in week number four, we're going to be talking about shame. Now, shame is one of those emotions that seems like it's all bad, right? But actually, if we think for a moment about why we're experiencing guilt and shame, which again, the enemy loves to use. The enemy loves to...

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recruit shame, it's one of the greatest emotions that the enemy recruits to lead us away from God. We feel shame, we experience shame, and so we bail on God because we can't handle it. We can't handle the shame, so we just go all in on our godless lifestyle. But instead, we could allow shame to be a pointer to us, to God. Shame then can actually lead us into an experience of grace. And we'll be talking about that in week four of the series.

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And again, grief is one of those emotions that everyone will eventually experience. Maybe some of you are experiencing that emotion right now. And even grief can be used by God to open us up to the ultimate comforter. That loss that you've experienced, even that emotion can be redeemed by God. Even that emotion can be harnessed by God. We'll be talking about all of this in the weeks ahead.

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But for now, I want to make sure to talk about this concept of the heart that we read about in Scripture. And here's what I think all of us need to keep in mind as we process through the idea of resilience and dealing with our emotions. Here it is. Our hearts determine the course of our lives, and that includes our mind, our will, and our emotions.

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especially in the Old Testament. In fact, we have a whole series, we talk about this, a lesson on heart in Hebrew and what the word heart actually means. So we'll put a link to that down below in the show notes. But every time we see that word, it's talking about the whole package. It's talking about the whole inner person. It's not just talking about your emotions, like how we use the word today, but emotions is included in it. It's talking about

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everything, that it's all connected, that the way you think, the way you reason, your mind, your will, your intentions, and your emotions, that all of these things are built to work together. And here's what Scripture says about your heart, Proverbs 4.23. It's kind of like our theme verse for this whole series. Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life. So that's saying that your mind

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Your will and your emotions will lead you either toward God or away from God. I want to say that again. Your mind, your will, and your emotions, that's what the heart means. Your mind, your will, and your emotions will either lead you toward God or they will lead you away from God. That means we need to guard our hearts. We need to protect our hearts.

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We need to pay attention to our hearts. We need to learn about our hearts. We need to learn about this connection between mind, will, and emotions. Kind of an emphasis in this series on the emotions that we need to sit with our thoughts and we need to sit with our emotions. We need to put them again, put them on the table. Don't stuff your emotions, which is what a lot of men do. Don't stuff your emotions, but put those emotions on the table, on the operating table. That's how I like to think of it. Put your emotions on the

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Operating table and dissect your emotions and really try to understand what is going on there. Why am I feeling this way? Use your mind to evaluate your emotions. Why am I feeling this way? Why do I feel shame? Why do I feel fear? Why do I feel grief? What's behind all this? Why am I so angry all the time? You know our culture says to follow our hearts

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But the Bible says to guard our hearts. Don't just follow your hearts and kind of blindly let your emotions and even your thoughts sort of carry you wherever those thoughts and emotions carry you. No, instead you should guard your heart and you should really submit it to God and to His ways, and that's what we're going to be talking about in this series. So guard your heart above all else.

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for it determines the course of your life. We're going to be talking about how to do that throughout this series. Now, one last thing here before we finish this introductory lesson, I think it's important for us to define the word resilient. Now, if you look it up online, the Oxford definition for resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties. So resilience is all about bouncing back.

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Resilience is about being an emotionally healthy person and not letting a setback totally derail you. But here's a definition that I want to use throughout this series. It's a little bit more of a biblical, faith-based definition of resilience. Here's our definition. Resilience is harnessing difficult emotions to build your faith. I'll say it again. Resilience is harnessing difficult emotions to build your faith.

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Now remember, Satan, the enemy, wants to manipulate your emotions, to destroy your faith. Satan wants to recruit your emotions, emotions like anger and fear and shame and grief. He wants to take those emotions and he wants to use those emotions to get you to bail on God. He wants you to be overwhelmed by your difficult emotions.

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recruit those emotions to get you to say, I'm out of here, God isn't real or I'm angry at God or whatever. And maybe you can think of people in your life, I can think of many people in my life who've experienced emotions like these, anger, fear, shame, grief, and instead of those emotions leading them to God, those emotions led those people away from God. So in other words, the enemy won. Those people weren't resilient.

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Those people weren't able to work through those difficult emotions so that at the end of that experience of those emotions, at the end of that, they actually had stronger faith in God rather than a weaker faith in God or no faith at all. I remember years ago I had a health scare in my life. The doctors thought I had cancer. It was really scary. The kids were little. Tracy and I were experiencing this new kind of fear and anxiety that we'd never experienced before.

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And as we went through that experience, it was about three or four weeks where we thought, honestly, the doctors had given me a death sentence. They said I didn't have long to live. It turns out it was a misdiagnosis, but we went through the whole experience as if it was real. And I remember through that time, I remember that that experience of fear, like existential dread that I had, that I might die, that I might meet my maker. I remember, thank God, that that experience of fear and anxiety led me

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to God. It led Tracy and I to God, to a deeper embrace of God, a deeper dependence on God for our future, for my health, for our kids, for our lives. But I also have a friend who experienced a very similar thing, a cancer diagnosis, and she bailed on God. She got bitter at God, she got mad

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pointed with God, so the fear and anxiety in her life brought on by a disease like cancer actually led her to bail on her faith, to turn on God, and to walk away from her Christian community. And it's really sad because she ended up passing away. She ended up losing the battle to cancer. And my fear is ultimately she didn't just lose the battle in a temporal sense.

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but spiritually she was lost. That's devastating. Some Christians have this misunderstanding about life and the experience of Christianity. They think that God wants to give them health and wealth and that everything, when you become a Christian, everything becomes perfect and you don't experience the difficulties that non-Christians experience, but that is not at all what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that we will experience trials

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The Bible teaches that there will be difficulties in this life, and the attendant emotions then will be part of the Christian life, just like they're part of the non-Christian life. So the question is, what will we as followers of God do with those difficult emotions? If we're resilient, we'll harness those emotions, and at the other side of that trial or difficulty, whatever that thing that is really triggering those emotions.

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at the other side of it, we'll have more trust in God. We will have built our faith rather than allowing the enemy to use those difficult emotions to destroy our faith. That's what we'll be talking about throughout this entire series. And that's why I encourage you to get with your spouse, to get with your family. Parents, sit down with your kids and help them process this because parents, you're the pastors at home.

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Maybe small groups can go through this and I'm sure that any given small group is going to have an experience of all different emotions while they go through this series. Maybe one-on-one with a mentor, you can go through this, but I really encourage you to share this series with a friend. Don't just listen to these podcasts on your own, but I hope you'll process it with other people because we need other people to process our emotions. Now one more thing about this series before we're done for today, this is not just

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some sort of like self-help series that you could pick up at Barnes and Noble. This isn't like a, just a secular series where we're, we're talking about emotions and, and we're talking about it just sort of in these worldly terms. Now this series really is going to be a pointer every week to the only one who can truly help us because the bad news of the Bible and the Bible doesn't just

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share the good news with us. It also shares the bad news with us because the Bible is going to speak truth to us. And here's the bad news that we read about in the Bible. It's that our hearts, remember what our hearts are? It's our inner selves. Our hearts are fundamentally broken. Now, I just said that emotions aren't bad. They're not. They're neutral. They're made by God. God even experiences them. But the truth is that by nature, our hearts are broken. Our inner selves

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What that means is that our mind, our will, and our emotions are powerless. Our mind, our will, and our emotions by default lead us to sin. The prophet Jeremiah said it like this in chapter 17 verse 9, the human heart is the most deceitful of all things and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?

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It is so easy for us to be self-deceived. It is so easy for us to play the victim when we are processing our emotions. We're going to be talking about this. We're going to be talking about why that is and how to overcome that. But the truth is that our hearts are broken by nature. Our hearts are desperately wicked by nature. By nature, our thoughts and our emotions will lead us away from God, not toward God, because we're broken.

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because we're sinful. Every single one of us is, no exceptions. But here's the good news, the good news of the Bible. So the bad news is that our hearts are broken, but the good news is that God wants to give us new hearts. Ezekiel 36 26, God gives us this promise. He says, I will give you a new heart. I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.

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This is a promise that we see all throughout the Old Testament, and it gets fulfilled in the New Testament after Jesus dies and raises from the dead. This is the good news of the Gospel. This is the good news of the Bible. Here it is. That when we trust in the finished work of Jesus on the cross, when we recognize that we're broken, and then we look to the cross and we recognize that Jesus took the shame and the sin and the pain that we put on Him, that He took that to the cross for us.

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The Bible says that when we trust in Him for salvation, something happens on the inside of us. That He gives us a new heart, He puts a new spirit in us, He takes out our stony, stubborn hearts, He gives us tender, responsive hearts so that we can be resilient. So that when we experience anger and fear and shame and grief, it doesn't have to be the end.

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of the story for us in terms of our journey with God. But instead, instead we can allow those experiences, we can allow those emotions to actually lead us into a deeper understanding, a deeper faith, a deeper trust in the God who can truly help us, the God who can make us resilient.