From episode: Inner Healing - Connecting with Father God
Emotions are so important. One time I was in worship and God said to me and I heard him really, and I wasn't expecting anything like this and I wasn't feeling very emotional or anything. I was just really enjoying worship and I had my hands in the air and I was actually dancing. Because it was a church that was just so good at that, oh goodness, I love that place so much. And I heard the Lord say, "I can handle your emotions." I mean, just out of nowhere, unprompted. And I thought, wow, what does that mean? And it took me years to unpack how important emotions were to God. One thing that I know is that in his rescue of us, he's not just rescuing us spiritually for the by and by. Our spirits are made perfect the minute we give our life to Jesus. We come into that connection to our perfect spirit. We come into this understanding of this eternal reality that we're connected to. How beautiful is all that?! And there's this thing that I just didn't expect in the life in Christ. And that was that I might have, that I had two massive holes in my life. It wasn't just a God -shaped hole as so often is talked about. But I think it's Townsend, Dr. Townsend, John Townsend that says, it's not just a God -shaped hole, there's a people -shaped hole as well. In his book, People Fuel, he says that. And that's so true. And I don't know why, but for some reason, yes, we can share our emotions with God, and that's definitely a place where I started sharing emotions. But when we start to share our emotions with people, that hole starts to fill up. Because you have to get to a place of intimacy with people in order to be able to open up vulnerably to them and with your emotions. And some of us, we just don't have any patience for all that, you know. And I've met you, I envy you, it's just not me. I had such a hard time opening up to others emotionally because I have to develop trust. I'm very much the Joseph in this story where I have to spend three days, or three chapters torturing you almost before I'm ready to be comfortable to express my emotions. But God, the Father, is the one that helps teach us about emotions. And then when we're able to do that with people, that's when things just start to get very real in our lives, and we start to feel really whole. It doesn't mean that we're constantly going on about all the painful experiences in our life. But see, when we suppress our emotions, we tend to suppress all of them. So, just because we don't show people our emotional rages, if we're just pushing all of that down, then sometimes it's really hard to feel the joy in our lives. It's hard to connect with people's peace and to share our peace with others.