Emotions Can Enable Us

As I research and study both bib­li­cal and non-bib­li­cal sources, I pray for wis­dom as I search out and write about the truth about our human “emo­tions.”  While I am not a psy­chol­o­gist or psy­chi­a­trist I do have a dri­ve to under­stand how God has design us, so nat­u­ral­ly I want to know how emo­tions work in my life. I am not in search of rules, but of truth in God’s design for man.  Not as an end all solu­tion, but to open our minds to the pos­si­bil­i­ties inher­ent in learn­ing of God’s plan for mankind’s use of his emo­tions; feel­ings both good and bad and how to cope.

The sub­ject of emo­tions and its many ques­tions have been debat­ed for thou­sands of years; and still is a pri­ma­ry dis­cus­sion among edu­ca­tors and psy­chol­o­gists every­where.  But I ask, who of them are bring­ing God into the dis­cus­sions?  And why do we have and expe­ri­ence emo­tions?  How do we con­trol our emo­tions?  In this age of gross miss infor­ma­tion and per­verse cul­tures, explor­ing these ques­tions is more impor­tant than ever.

As I have writ­ten before, God had a plan for man when he cre­at­ed man and women with mind, will, and emo­tions.  And He clev­er­ly, by my under­stand­ing, includ­ed in man’s design a unique pow­er to con­trol the emo­tions.  The pow­er of choice and will gives man such pow­er.  As my research expand­ed I was remind­ed of the vast impli­ca­tions to mankind of “emo­tions” and how his choic­es to react to them actu­al­ly affects his life.  The effects can be dra­mat­ic and pro­found, but often not desir­able.

An over sim­pli­fi­ca­tion per­haps, but I see emo­tions are to humans what a gyro­scope and com­pass are to a fly­ing air­craft.  While the com­pass has been around for many years before, in the ear­ly days of air­craft devel­op­ment the gyro­scope was invent­ed to show a pilot when his air­craft was upright.  So togeth­er they helped keep the pilot upright and on course.   Sci­ence has evolved the mechan­i­cal gyro­scopes to less mechan­i­cal and more dig­i­tal and involved com­put­er con­trols to help man fly air­craft or oth­er aer­i­al projects.  Emo­tions help us know when our life is upright and head­ing in the right direc­tion.  Emo­tions con­nect with our brain [mankind’s com­put­er] to react to the emo­tion.  Will our emo­tion­al reac­tions be for good or bad?

A Gen­er­ous Gift

A gen­er­ous gift from our Cre­ator; emo­tions are feel­ings that affect our lives.  I believe our emo­tions are intend­ed for our good but sad­ly there are bad times when emo­tions often work against us. As I wrote pre­vi­ous­ly:  There is com­mon belief that man is body, soul, and spir­it; and with­in the soul our mind, will, and emo­tions flour­ish.  Emo­tions are a crit­i­cal part of human behav­ior, just as God Planned.  The mind holds a pow­er and dom­i­nance over our flesh­ly body.  The mind is pro­found­ly pow­er­ful and sure, yet com­plex for man to under­stand. Man’s soul holds a spe­cial con­nec­tion with the spir­it of man.  I have come to believe the soul, “man’s being,” that is con­nect­ed to the “spir­it” of man will reflect out­ward­ly the inner emo­tions of man:  And thus cre­ate our per­son­al­i­ty which is as some­one once said, “…an out­er expres­sion of an inner atti­tude.”  Then when we find Christ we are born of the Spir­it thus empow­er­ing us [our soul through our spir­it] to com­mu­ni­cate with God on a spir­i­tu­al lev­el, and com­mu­ni­cate with man from the heart [the spir­it of man]. The intri­cate­ly crit­i­cal work­ings of a man’s life, his being, his per­son­al­i­ty, is direct­ed by not only his mind and will, but under the influ­ence of his emo­tions.  Emo­tions reflect a peace­ful spir­it or a not so peace­ful spir­it.  James Allen spoke of self con­trol and emo­tions when he said, “Self-con­trol is strength. Right thought is mas­tery. Calm­ness is pow­er. Say unto your heart, “Peace, be still!” and, “Calm­ness of mind is one of the beau­ti­ful jew­els of wis­dom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self-con­trol. Its pres­ence is an indi­ca­tion of ripened expe­ri­ence, and of a more than ordi­nary knowl­edge of the laws and oper­a­tions of thought.”

When we use our intel­lect and our will in favor of self con­trol, and can learn how to NOT allow WRONG emo­tion­al reac­tions into our lives; how not to be con­trolled by pride and van­i­ty we are sure to come out on the right course.  But sad­ly, in today’s social and media worlds, we see all too often impul­sive emo­tion­al reac­tions trig­gered by hate and prej­u­dices.   I is both sad and alarm­ing when you real­ize these out­bursts come from the heart of the per­sons involved.

We must learn to dis­tin­guish intu­itive feel­ings [emo­tions] from our rea­son­ing intel­lec­tu­al knowl­edge.  After con­sid­er­able research includ­ing sev­er­al dic­tio­nary reviews, prayers, and deep thought, here is how I define emo­tions.  Emo­tions:  A feel­ing result­ing from an instinc­tive state of mind for humans derived from the cir­cum­stances of the moment at hand that emanate from that feel­ing and sen­sa­tion that come about for a per­son from his or her cir­cum­stances of the moment.  I did not find any real dif­fer­ences in the few dic­tio­nar­ies I reviewed on emo­tions; I did find they lacked in sub­stance of what real­ly defines “emo­tions.”  Dur­ing my life, hav­ing had emo­tion­al out­bursts with bad tone of voice expe­ri­ences, many of which I would not be proud to repeat, I learned that many times the emo­tion­al event was trig­gered by an impul­sive action. Wrong impul­sive­ness comes from the heart the same as right does.  But, thank God, I would even­tu­al­ly learn we can choose to change our hearts, and so main­tain self con­trol over the emo­tions effects on our lives.

Since it is wide­ly accept­ed by Chris­tians and non-Chris­tians alike, that we are born with emo­tions; then the real ques­tion must be, how do we learn to con­trol our emo­tions and not allow wrong emo­tion­al reac­tions into our lives?  Emo­tions do exert cer­tain pow­er over the mind; so we want to avoid the bind­ing and blind­ing effects some emo­tions can have on our lives.  Aware­ness of emo­tion­al affects, and how they can work for us or against us in our lives, can have real life chang­ing affects when we make the right choic­es.  It has been said fear trig­gers a fight or flight response.  When this hap­pens to us, self con­trol [the will] can help us hold our ground [not pan­ic] and turn the emo­tion to our ben­e­fit.  We have will pow­er [self con­trol] so we can choose to use it for our ben­e­fit.  God instilled emo­tions into man to help him find his way; they can keep us on course.  He cre­at­ed man with mind, will, emo­tions.  Our will gives us the pow­er to choose.   I ask you, What are choos­ing to do with your emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence?

As I got more into the study of emo­tions to learn more of God’s plan, I found it help­ful to list words of my think­ing that were results of my emo­tions. Words sig­ni­fy­ing emo­tions and words that trig­ger emo­tions can appear in dif­fer­ent forms such as hap­py and hap­pi­ness.  I put togeth­er a list of emo­tion­al sig­ni­fy­ing words [not con­clu­sive] shown below.  I should note:  There are more words one can add to this list of emo­tion­al feel­ings should you desire.  I then searched the KJV and the NIV Bible for the word emo­tion which I did not find.  Then I searched for each word on the list.  As I list­ed each word I did “feel” an emo­tion; then I dis­cov­ered dif­fer­ent emo­tion­al sig­ni­fy­ing words appeared a dif­fer­ent num­ber of times.  For exam­ple notice in the list below the words “love and faith” com­pared to the word ‘admire.”  Oh, then it occurred to me; the more the word appears the more impor­tance God placed on that emo­tion.  Remem­ber what God said of char­i­ty: [love]: “1 Corinthi­ans 13:13

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the great­est of these is love.

*NOTE:  Love was list­ed 686 times.  Wow, what a les­son!

The words list­ed sig­ni­fy an emo­tion; the num­ber in brack­ets [ ], indi­cates how many times the emo­tion appears in NIV of the Bible.  I chose to list from the NIV ver­sion of the Bible.  There is no par­tic­u­lar mean­ing or sig­nif­i­cance to the sequence of the list I have put togeth­er below, though I did alpha­bet­ize it for con­ve­nience.  While this is not a study in ety­mol­o­gy it is indica­tive of “feel­ings” result­ing from a par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stance or events at a par­tic­u­lar moment of life.  As you read the word you can feel an emo­tion.

• Admire [1]
• Adore [1]
• Amaze [54]
• Anger [268]
• Anx­i­ety [7]
• Appalling [26]
• Awe [53]
• Calm­ness [1]
• Con­fu­sion [19]
• Con­tempt [43]
• Crav­ing [7]
• Dis­gust [5]
• Enjoy [61]
• Envy [20]
• Excite­ment [1]
• Faith [458]
• Fear [336]
• Grat­i­tude [5]
• Guilt [189]
• Hap­py [26]
• Hate[127]
• Hor­ror 24
• Joy [242]
• Love*[686]
• Pride [63]
• Rage [35]
• Relief [19]
• Sad [39]
• Sat­is­fac­tion [4]
• Sur­prise [14]
• Sym­pa­thy [6]
• Tri­umph [34]
• Trust [170]

Exam­ples o­f words that sig­ni­fy emo­tions; awe­some insights into God’s Design for man.

 I see our emo­tions as our life’s gyro­scope and com­pass in God’s design to keep our lives upright and on course.  I see us as being able to con­trol our emo­tions dur­ing our life jour­ney.