As A Christian, Do My Emotions Matter? | Theocast

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If you've been listening to Theocast for long at all, you maybe have heard us say something like, don't trust your feelings when it comes to assurance with God or peace with God.

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And as you're learning more about the Reformed faith or the confessional faith, maybe you have concluded that, okay, well, maybe emotions and feelings are just bad.

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Maybe I just need to push them to the side. And you're wondering, because you live life every day and you feel a lot of things, do my feelings as a

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Christian, do they matter? Do my emotions matter? Do they matter to God? Do they matter to my pastor?

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Do they matter to other people in my local church? What do I do with my emotional life?

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So John and I are gonna have a conversation about all that stuff today. And we are going to ultimately take this to the heart of confessionalism is a preoccupation with God and Jesus being for us.

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And so we process ourselves, our lives, our experiences and our emotions through the objective, revealed presence of God with us, for us, and to save us.

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We hope that this is a helpful, encouraging conversation to many. Stay tuned. If you're new to Theocast, you may not have heard of this word.

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It's called pietism. You ever felt like the Christian life is a heavy burden versus rest and joy, that you wake up worrying about how well you're gonna perform instead of thinking about what

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Christ has done for you? It's dread versus joy, really. That's pietism. Pietism causes

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Christians to look in on themselves and find their hope, not in what Christ has done, but what they're doing.

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And we have a little book for you. It's free. We want you to download it. And we're gonna explain the difference between pietism and what we call confessionalism.

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Reform theology, really. How it is that we walk by faith, seeing the joy of Christ, and when

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Jesus says, come to me and I will give you rest, what does that look like? You can download it on our website.

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Just go to theocast .org. It is a good day to be with you because we get to talk about Jesus today.

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And this is Theocast, and this is what we like to do. We like to talk about our Christ because he brings us rest.

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So if you're weary, you're exhausted, or if you are excited in Christ, this is still the podcast for you because you will be restored and renewed about conversations about your faith.

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And the goal of this particular podcast and episode is to pull the clutter off the gospel and to then help us to rethink about the spiritual nature of the kingdom and us and Christ.

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And what does it mean to seek Christ's kingdom of God? It's all good conversations. Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

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I'm John Moffitt, I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Justin, this is our second episode today.

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So we are fired up and ready to go. We got some tea and coffee and all kinds of good stuff in us.

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So yeah, good times. Nah, not too important. And we're also running a little bit behind schedule. But we are, so I need to speed this up.

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So two important conversations to be had. One, if you aren't joining us for our Law Gospel Conference, why not?

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Because you didn't know about it. Now, now you know about it. That's right. Come join us, April, what is it? April 11th and 12th.

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April 11th and 12th. And it's gonna be in Asheville. There's only like 200 tickets available.

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So not even that, those are sold by now. But 200 seats available. It's a smaller conference.

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Justin and I are excited about that. We're gonna have two amazing guests with us. We're gonna be having none other than Ken Jones and Chad Byrd.

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And these men know the law and the gospel. And so it's gonna be great lectures and panels and times of fellowship and food and drinks.

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It's gonna be great. Justin, if you can't come to the conference, another great place to come to find encouragement and to learn and resources is our community,

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Theocast Community. There is a free section you can come and join, but if you'd like to help support us and have access to all kinds of material, education material, classes that you and I have taught on reform theology, covenant theology, law, gospel distinction, all those classes we've taught, all available in our community.

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And you can have it right on your phone. So as you drive around or as you do dishes or workout, whatever, you can right there on your phone.

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So try to make it accessible to you. Mm -hmm. Word. This is a little bit of a conversation from last week.

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So if you didn't hear last week, maybe go back and listen to that. But today, Justin, this is one that really resonates with you and I.

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You, I would not describe either one of us as emotionless beings. So talk to us, my friend.

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This is an important one to you. You're passionate about this. And so I'm excited to hear you talk about this today.

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Yeah, I'm a person who lives in my emotions. And people that know me well may not know that about me.

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I try to tell as many people as I can and my, who are close friends or even people in our church that get to know me.

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You're a feeler, baby. I am a feeler and I live in my emotions. And, you know, sometimes that's misunderstood because I have a big, pretty big public persona.

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I have an intensity to me. Sometimes, even in the way that I speak or lead, the church, different things, where I think sometimes people are surprised to know how much

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I do live in my emotions and how much of a feeler I am, how affected I am. Announcement here,

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Justin is a big baby. For those of you who don't know. Oh my gosh. So yeah, this conversation does matter to me.

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It is related in some regards you already said to our conversation last week where we tried to say some things about unhealthy deconstruction.

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Because you and I have deconstructed from things that are distortions of the truth, like pietism, revivalism, legalism, et cetera.

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Many of our listeners are deconstructing from those things as well. And to deconstruct from things that are bad is a good thing because there's a healthy way to do that where we assess them in light of what is true, what

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God reveals in his word, what Christians have always believed. And it's like, all right, well, is this sound or not? And if it's not,

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I wanna head in a better direction. That's a good thing to do. I don't wanna be like that anymore.

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I don't wanna think like that anymore. I wanna think in a better way. I wanna live in a better way. And off we go into reformed confessional

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Christianity or whatever. So in our world,

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John, of confessionalism, whether you're reformed or Lutheran doesn't matter.

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You're a confessional Protestant. There are some in our stream that are perhaps overly concerned with being sound doctrinally.

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And I say that, it's like, I don't know if you can be too concerned about being sound doctrinally, but there are some people that I think attach so much of their confessional identity to being right that sometimes people can draw the conclusion that all that matters is truth and sound doctrine.

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Or let me frame it a different way. We have done episodes in the past, John, for example, one called

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More Than a Feeling. We have tried to expose some of the errors of revivalism or some of the ways that the evangelical church has operated that is grounded very much in sentimentality or in my own personal, subjective, emotional response and experience of God and how it subjectivizes religion in a way that robs me of peace and assurance and hope.

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We've tried to expose all of that. So then sometimes people will push back or they'll ask genuinely, well, do my feelings matter?

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Do my emotions then just not matter if I can't trust my feelings and I can't trust my emotions because they vacillate all the time?

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Well, maybe I just need to sideline them all together. And that's what faithfulness looks like.

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That's what health looks like, that I just concern myself with what's true and I learn sound doctrine and I just push emotions and feelings to the side.

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Is that what you guys are telling me to do? To which we would say, no, not at all. Part of what prompted this conversation for me is just some things

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I've been thinking about lately. I was listening to Carl Truman speak on effectively confessional and creedal

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Christianity, which you and I would say we are both. We affirm the ancient creeds of the church and we are confessional, not only in that we subscribe to confessions, but just everything that a confessional posture means.

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I'm sure we'll get into some of that today. And so Truman makes the observation or just makes the point.

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He says, I'm an undergraduate professor. I teach college students and he teaches church history and he teaches the history of orthodoxy and he teaches creeds and confessions and all these things as a piece of all that.

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And so he said, I regularly get the question, well, do my feelings matter? Does my experience matter?

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Because we're always talking in corporate terms. We're kind of pushing back against that kind of enlightenment principle of the

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I, I, I, I. We're kind of pushing back against the humanistic notions of self.

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So does my experience matter? Do my feelings matter? Truman says, I get this question all the time.

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And he said, actually, Christianity has always been a part of my life. It's always been very concerned with the individual. And Christianity has always been very concerned with our emotions.

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Our emotions do matter. Our feelings do matter very much. And what we do with them matters very much. So that's really what

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I want us to talk about today is all right, we're all emotional creatures. And the question is just how much you live in your emotions or how much you avoid them, right?

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I mean, that's really it. And all right, given that we're emotional beings, given that we all have feelings, we all feel some type of way about a lot of things in any given day.

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Now, how aware of our feelings we are is another conversation, but we're all emotional creatures. So what do we do with our emotional lives?

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Does God care about it? Does the confessional faith care about it? Does reformed Christianity care about it?

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Does my local church give a rip about it? And do my pastors care about it? Well, our answer today is yeah, we do.

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And we should talk about these things. And what's the best way to process myself, my experience, my emotions, my feelings?

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That's right. I talked a long time. No, you're good. Now, this is a really important conversation,

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Justin, because when you do not process them, they can become like, like you've ever had a riff with your spouse or another person where you don't ever process like the problem, like, and it just kind of builds and it compresses and it becomes more and more of a problem.

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And to the point where it can explode on you. Like, it's just really bad. So people are told to kind of suppress their experience, suppress these emotional, like all this stuff that's going on.

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I mean, I've got teenage girls and, you know, there are times I have to literally sit them down and process their emotions with them because it's overwhelming their body.

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And if I just walked over there and said, you need to stop feeling that. This is not true.

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This is not reality or whatever. You're experienced, you know, I don't care what you feel. You need to change.

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Well, all you're doing is telling her to learn. You are giving her an improper perspective of life as if emotions are bad, good or bad, right?

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Emotions, good or bad or bad. And even, you know, I do this with my boys and my girls. I know you do too with your sons and your daughters.

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You help them process their emotions. And when you say to a child or another adult in the church, I don't care how you feel, you need to do

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X. Like, I think we can give each other the benefit of the doubt and understand what we mean there. It's just not a good way to talk though, because what that implicitly communicates is, yeah,

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I don't care about your emotional life. I don't care about your experience. All I care about is that you do the right thing.

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That's right. Yeah, no matter how you feel, you're gonna do the right thing. And we're not making excuses here and we'll get to that in a moment, but I'll give you an example you and I were talking about for a moment.

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The difference between hopeful and hopelessness, right? So when someone is hopeful, it does affect your emotions.

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Like you have a sense of calm and peace. Even hopefulness creates within someone in emotional anticipation where there's a positive, there's a positive outcome coming your way.

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Hopelessness leads to depression, anxiety, anger. And stress.

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So it's healthy at times, Justin, to even look and listen to your emotions, right?

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It's as crazy as this sounds. It's like, why am I feeling distraught?

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What you're talking about is emotional self -awareness, which is a mature thing. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

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Like why am, or should I? Should I be distraught at this moment and I'm not?

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Well, you know what the Bible calls that? Hardheartedness. That's also a problem, right? I've met hardhearted

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Christians where I'm like, dude, there ain't nothing phasing you, and that's actually not good. And like your lack of feeling is not a good thing.

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You know how like John Newton will say that I'm cold and lifeless. In private,

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I'm cold and lifeless. And he's saying that as a bad thing, you know? Anyway. Yeah, at the same time, you know, the mistake has been made, and this is the part that you and I have been so like against where we create false emotions, right?

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Like you're trying to create these, what I would call godly affections through use of smoke and mirrors.

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Yeah, you're gonna conjure it up through fleshly means like smoke and mirrors and music or whatever.

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And because you're longing for that, because there is an ecstasy that happens within the body.

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It produces certain kinds of chemicals, and those chemicals feel good to us. You know, it's anytime like I'm near my wife or we have affectionate conversations,

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I can feel the chemicals in my body, and I like the way it makes me feel. I mean, it's a wonderful feeling. We're trying to conjure that up by means of external where we actually are gonna argue in this particular podcast that we think confessionalism is a tool for our affections to guide us towards,

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I think, better affections, to liberate our affections, to actually cause us to be emotional, as a matter of fact, right?

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There is this, like, to love someone requires, actually, there to be emotions involved, right?

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Justin, if I were to just look at you and be like, you're a wonderful person, I'm so thankful for who you are, you have blessed my life so much.

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You're like, wow, I don't know if you quite believe that or not, I think you're just saying it, right?

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So I think how we express ourselves, you and I say this all the time, and I'll throw this back over to you. Sometimes it's not the truth that you say, it's how you say the truth.

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So there's so much of our experience as a believer that we don't wanna suppress our emotions.

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At times, we need to be looking, we need to allow them to help. I think they could be channels to look at our heart, whether it's good, and I just really am feeling the joy of the

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Lord today. Or it could be channels to say, man, maybe I've let sin come into my heart. It's a good way to reflect on what's going on with me.

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Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, emotional self -awareness, emotional maturity are good things.

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You know, I think where I wanna - That might be a good title for the episode, emotional self -awareness. Are we emotionally self -aware?

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You know, in speaking to anybody out there that you're wrestling with your experience of life or your emotional life, and you've been made to feel in the church in the past, maybe that those things don't matter to your pastors or to fellow church members, or maybe even to God.

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We're here to say otherwise. And the question really then becomes, all right, well, what do I do?

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How do I process these things in a healthy way? And I do think that confessionalism, as John just said,

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I think is super helpful, and here's the reason why. We've said other things about confessionalism, and in the interest of keeping this podcast to a reasonable length,

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I'm not gonna say all of the things that I think it means or John thinks it means to be confessional.

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But for the purpose of today, the reason that the confessional faith is valuable for this conversation is because the confessions and confessionalism is preoccupied with God.

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Credal Christianity is preoccupied with God. And John Calvin, in the very beginning of his

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Institutes of the Christian Religion, will say that if we're ever gonna know ourselves rightly, it will be because we have beheld the face of God.

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And then coming down from seeing Him, like with the eyes of our hearts, we then assess ourselves.

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We will only know ourselves in light of God. And so to be preoccupied with God is a really good thing for a church.

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It's a really good thing for a Christian. It's a really good thing for an association of churches. It's like we are unapologetically preoccupied with God and preoccupied with Jesus Christ for us, and then we're gonna process all of life, including our emotions, through that.

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And so the way I would maybe illustrate it, biblically, is Psalm 73. It's one of my favorites. I trust it's near and dear to many people.

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Asaph is the writer of that psalm. He is close to King David. He's a worship leader in Israel, effectively, is his post.

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And he writes in a way that makes a lot of churchgoing folk very nervous because we don't know what to do with it, because he starts out by saying, surely

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God is good to Israel. Truly He is. But there was a time when I wasn't sure that He, in fact, is good, and I had almost given it all away.

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Like when I looked around at my life and circumstances and the lives and circumstances of other people, I was about to punt this thing and be done with it.

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I had almost slipped. And he goes on and writes about how the wicked around him prosper and how their lives are so filled with opulence that their eyeballs are fat and they don't give a rip about God, they don't give a rip about holiness, but yet they are just blessed.

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And as far as he is concerned, he's like, I have lived a life of effectively self -denial and I've pursued righteousness and it's gotten me absolutely nothing.

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All I know is suffering. And what makes it worse is because of my job, I can't even talk out loud about this because I would harm other people in the congregation of Israel.

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And so that's kind of how he starts. Very emotional. I mean, very much that he's expressing his feelings, his emotions, his experience.

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And then he says this, what is it that does the trick for him? He doesn't change it.

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He doesn't just somehow do a 180. He goes to the sanctuary.

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Then I went to the sanctuary of God. Well, what is the sanctuary in that context, in the old covenant?

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It is the place of the presence of God, the objective revealed presence of God in the sanctuary.

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That's where Asaph goes. And that is what changes everything. The objective revealed presence of God with him, the mercy seat, the atonement cover, like the law, the showbread, the incense, all the things pertaining to the tabernacle and the presence of God and what all those things represent, that is what effectively changed

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Asaph's perspective. And then he sees the end of the wicked. And then he says that he sees his own foolishness.

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He repents, right? And he says, my heart and my flesh may fail, but the

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Lord is my strength and my portion forever. And then he even says this man who effectively was cursing

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God in his experience and in his emotional feelings is now saying the nearness of God is my good.

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Well, God did that for him. And God does that for us. And so the reason that confessionalism is so good for our emotional lives is that when our heart and flesh is failing and when we feel some type of way about things, we're grieved, we're hurting, we're angry, we're frustrated,

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I'm just discouraged by myself and by the ways that I continue to want this and feel that.

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I don't like any of it. I'm discontent with my life, whatever. Whenever we're feeling all of those things, what is it that we process those emotions and those experiences through?

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It's that objectively, outside of me, not having anything to do with how I'm feeling or doing, outside of me,

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God is, and he loves me. I know he loves me because he sent Christ for me. And here is who

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Jesus is. He is the one who seeks and saves the lost. He is gentle and lowly in heart. He is compassionate and merciful toward those who know they need him.

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And I know I need him. He is the forgiveness of my sins. He is my righteousness. He is my hope for eternal life.

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And he says, he'll never lose me. I can rest. And now I'm gonna process my life through that lens and through that filter.

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And I'm gonna come to him over and over and over and over again, when

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I am in the throes of the ups and the downs of my life.

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And to me, that's in part what it means to be a confessional Christian is

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I'm not looking in, I'm looking out. And then in looking out to Christ, it changes everything in terms of how

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I process myself and my life, my emotions, my experiences. Hey guys, real quick, some of you are listening to this and it's encouraging to you, but you have questions.

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So where do you go? How do you interact with other people who have the same questions and share resources? We have started something called the

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Theocast Community. And we're excited because not only is it a place for you to connect with other like -minded believers, all of our resources there, past podcasts, education materials, articles, all of it's there.

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You can share it and ask questions. You can go check it out. The link is in the description below. No, I think that's so good because at times our emotions can absolutely imprison us.

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And we can be so controlled by them. I'm an emotional eater when I'm happy. I don't need to eat, but when

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I'm sad, I like eat all the time, you know. Each feeling, John, each feeling. My wife will watch me walk in the kitchen.

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She goes, hey, you okay? And I'm like, leave me alone. That's funny, that's funny.

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I need to be alone with my food for a moment. No, Justin, this is so healthy because people, there can be in the reformed world like this dead orthodoxy where -

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It's a pitfall. The real mature people have no emotional experiences up or down. Calvin's blood pressure never rose or went, it's just like, that's what

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I do appreciate about him. Which I actually, in reading him, I don't think is true. But no, no. And Luther, man, you talk about an emotional wreck.

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That's why you love the guy. It's like he felt everything. But this is even true, like Paul -

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I'd love to have a beer with Luther. That's right. Like Paul even uses this type of language. You know, like Philippians 1 .7,

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it is right for me to feel this way about you. He was feeling comforted and excited because of what was going on in the church of Philippi.

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But then he would write to the church of Corinth and he was like, dude, whoa. Like, I need to come preach to you guys the gospel because this is not positive.

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And even when he's in prison, he's describing an emotional state that he's in.

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He's like, can you please send somebody to me because I'm discouraged. Like, I need to be uplifted.

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And discouragement is in an emotional experience, right? To be discouraged is to look at circumstances and situations and feel the negative pressure.

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And this is how God, like to rejoice when it says, rejoice in the Lord always. And again,

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I say rejoice, it's calling for not a fake shout for, you know, because we think rejoice, like no matter what,

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Justin, no matter how you're feeling, you're going to rejoice the Lord. Again, I say rejoice. That's right. No matter what.

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And Paul, what I think is fascinating is Paul says, now listen, I can find a reason to rejoice.

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And the reason I'm finding it. Yeah, he says rejoice in the Lord always. Right, he says, but the reason, and it goes back to what you're saying, it's our thoughts about God and confessionalism because confessionalism properly positions the truth of God to our heart.

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This is Christ for you, right? This is his hope for you. This is the joy for you.

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And so when you look at it in the midst of my tears, I can experience then joy and it can bring me through my sorrows.

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This is why you and I think James and Peter say, hey, trials are a good thing because what a trial does is it knocks away that which we can tend to emotionally attach ourselves to.

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You know, what does Romans say? It's like, you know, the whole world is groaning, including our bodies.

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Why? Because it's under a curse. And a trial comes in and he says, hey, don't emotionally get attached to that which is corruption.

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So what are we going to emotionally, because it's not like don't have emotions. That's not true. Joy, happiness, love, affect, like all of that is part of the

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Christian life. What it's saying is attach your emotions to that which is steady and firm.

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And effectively attach yourself to God. Right, so we're encouraging emotion.

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Just let their emotions be informed and controlled and protected by the

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King who never changes. And I would argue, you know, there's a place too for, you know, healthy, deep, thick relationships with other believers too.

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So we're not saying God only, you know, nobody would, I feared, I don't think anybody would draw that conclusion.

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It's impossible to have a relationship with God and not have a relationship with others. It's demanded. Right. It's commanded.

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Yeah, and when I was listening to you talk and I've got many things that,

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I mean, I could say, but I'll go this direction. Sure.

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The reason that this episode dovetails nicely with what we said last week, I think I trust is already clear because we're talking about various things pertaining to our emotional lives.

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But there is an obsession with the self in our day. And I know this has been true for a long time where, you know, humanism and, you know, we'll call things narcissism and I am preeminent, you know, in the world.

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And we're saying in this podcast that your experience matters, your emotions, your feelings do matter.

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It's not that you don't matter, but what I hope we're giving people, what I would mean to give people is rather than falling into the traps that the world falls into all the time, that Christians are not immune to where I become the focus all the time.

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And even how I'm feeling becomes the focus in a way that's unhealthy. This is a better way where I can be emotionally aware.

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I can be emotionally self -aware and here's how I'm doing it. But I am always processing my emotional life and I'm processing myself.

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Like self is not the point, but I am processing myself through the lens of God and his love for me and through the lens of Christ for me and the faithfulness of God and how he has demonstrated that time and time and time again and I'm processing all this through the hope to which

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I've been called, you know, and the riches of God's glorious inheritance in the saints and the greatness of the power of God that's at work in me.

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And so I hope what we're doing is threading a needle here where we are avoiding the two ditches.

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One is all you think about is yourself because that's very worldly. And many

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Christians sound very worldly in the ways that they talk about their lives and experiences and their emotions and even the way they'll talk about trauma and pain and all of that, they sound like the world.

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Whereas the other error would be to dismiss emotions altogether and say what you feel doesn't matter, all that matters is the truth and don't talk about trauma, don't talk about pain, don't care how you feel.

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Both of those are really bad. But then what we're hoping to convey today is that there's a middle way that is actually really, really good.

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It honors God, it's healthy and safe for us where we can talk about the experience of living life in this world under the sun.

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And we can then see all of that through the objective revealed presence of God with us and for us.

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It's a better way forward. You know, Justin, as you're saying this, I was thinking about last week's episode when we talked about deconstructing and at times when people come into the

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Reformed faith and they've been in such a wishy -washy marsh of theology that it's just like drowns you in your emotions and you don't even know how to deal with it.

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You find some solace in the sovereignty of God and the definitiveness of covenant theology.

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Sure. And there can be an overreaction for sure.

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And I understand the overreaction because, dude, right now, our world, our emotions is law.

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Like how you feel, I'll just say some of these things. Yeah, say it. I'm trying to say this because I know there are children who listen to this, but how you feel about intimacy, like whatever your emotions are conjuring, which are -

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Or your desires are or whatever. Right. So like, this is how I feel. You can't tell me I feel something different.

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And I'm like, listen, I know how you feel. Like if you feel affections towards the same gender that are supposed to not be there,

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I understand that is a real emotion and that is a real affection and you really are having them.

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But it's also being informed by your sinful desires and the world around you.

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And this is kind of what we're talking about. It's like, I'm not telling you to stop feeling because sometimes, Justin, it's like, you need to stop feeling.

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It's like, no, we need to inform our affections so that we have the proper, so you're just telling me to stop feeling.

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And that's where I think some of this comes in. It's like, even in this heterosexual versus homosexual conversations, it's like, no, no, no,

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I'm not actually telling you to stop having feelings or emotions in certain ways. But it's like, our emotions need to be informed by truth so that we think and feel properly.

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That's the liber - Almost like there's a, well, Jesus talks about this in the last week, that the truth of Christ liberates us to have proper emotions.

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So our feelings and affections are driven by the affections of God, his love for us.

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Instead of our emotions, Justin, I know for a fact that often my emotions are driven by my sinful desires and they start controlling me.

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And so like when he says, walk by the spirit and you will not fill the rest of the flesh. So if we're walking by the truth of Jesus, then our emotional expressions will be informed by that.

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And we want to embrace those. These are good, right? It's truth and emotion in hand in hand. But if we're being driven by the flesh, which the world is, then our emotions are going to all kind of be whacked out and they're going to be, tend to be narcissistic and selfish in nature.

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I think that, maybe I'm thinking about things while you were talking there again, and maybe a way

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I would illustrate this, because I agree with you. The things that we're advocating on this show today will be very helpful to Christians over the course of a lifetime.

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And so when you're thinking about even your emotional life, I think that the wrong conclusion that some

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Christians have drawn, even in the reformed world, or the impression that some pastors and teachers have given them, is that God is just kind of low -key, angry with them all the time over their emotions.

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Like God is just kind of almost scoffing at you from the heavens because you're such an emotional mess.

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And because your emotions are so just jacked up and you don't feel the way you should,

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God is just, He is just not happy with you. And He's kind of frustrated by you and really just kind of wishes you would figure this out.

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And well, all right, if that's the way that I've been made to think, that God really is displeased with my emotional life and the way that my emotions and my feelings function, well, the last thing in the world that I'm ever going to want to do in the throes of those things is go to God with them.

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And so as we continue to try to help us all see God as this loving, merciful, gracious, compassionate

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Father, as we hold Jesus out as the good shepherd who loves

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His sheep and laid His life down for them and came to seek and save us, and He's gentle and lowly and all the things

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I said earlier, as we hold Christ out in those ways to us all, and we begin to better see

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God this way with the eyes of our hearts, and we learn that we're known by Him and loved by Him and we're safe in His presence, that we, okay,

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I can go to Him with these things. And I can now, I can talk to God about it.

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I can pray to Him about it. And He already knows how I feel anyway, but I can say that,

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Lord, You see, You know, here's how I'm feeling. I don't feel this way. You know, I just, I need Your help.

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I need Your grace. And I can talk with other believers about this stuff and talk about the ways that I'm feeling that may or may not be good.

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And I can be reminded by them, by a voice outside of me. Sometimes we need the voice of a brother or sister to say, hey, here's who the

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Lord is for you. Here's how He loves you. Here's how good He is to you. Here's how faithful. He knows you.

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You're His son now. You're His daughter now. You can trust Him. And it's okay, you know, and the

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Lord's gonna continue to work in and through you by His Spirit. And that's the kind of thing that will bear a ton of fruit over the course of years and decades.

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I think that we become more emotionally mature and healthy even as Christians by feeling safe with the

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Lord and by knowing that He loves us and by feeling this sense of like, oh, okay, it's good that I go to God with this rather than thinking that God wants nothing to do with me and God wants nothing to do with my feelings or my experiences or my emotions.

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He just wants me to figure it out and get it right and be holy. Okay, you know, anyway, just some thoughts there.

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Maybe things I've experienced and I know others have too. So maybe some of that's helpful. Yeah, no, and hopefully this has been encouraging for people.

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We believe this phrase, all of Christ for all of life. We would include this, this, your experience of Christ here.

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We don't think that Christ has ever called us or the Bible has ever called us to be robotic in nature, that He not only redeems our sinful flesh, but He redeems our experiences and our emotions and the way in which we think and feel about Him.

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It's not like emotions came into existence at the fall. I don't believe that.

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I think that God wants us to have these experiences because now the one thing that's great and the promise is

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Justin, is that the hope that we have is that the part of our emotions that we hate the most,

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Christ says, I will wipe those away. Like that experience will be gone. Yeah.

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And that is a wonderful thing. And that's part of the gospel, right? That's part of the goodness of the gospel that it restores all things in that.

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I would say the majority of my experience in this life is negative.

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Yeah. To be honest with you. Or at a minimum, there is always something that is very heavy, dark and negative hanging over even the good.

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I mean, I think we can say that. Yeah. And that's why it is so beautiful, like you said, that mourning nor crying nor pain will exist anymore.

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Yeah. I mean, sometimes Justin, I get around people and I'm like, you don't live in the same world I do. Or you're just pretending like the world is different.

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But I can't think of a day where I wake up and I don't deal, I don't groan. I don't deal with the frustration of a world that is one, it has a curse.

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Two, I feel my death day coming. And number three, the enemy is always hounding me down.

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I just always feel that. And in many ways, it helps me stay focused on the hope of Christ, right?

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And it reminds you that, yeah, the hope of Christ, it reminds you that you've not yet been brought into the heavenly country, you know, where we're gonna dwell with God forever.

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But at the end of the day, to sigh and just say, man, this is rough, this is tough. And it's why we say, come

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Lord Jesus. Yeah. You know, Ecclesiastes has always been one of my favorite books in the Bible. And that probably says more about me than it does

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Ecclesiastes. And so I love it because of its honesty, you know, and because of the way

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Solomon writes. And there's a reason I love Psalm 73 and Job and other things, Psalm 77, 88.

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But you know, that book is great because Solomon's writing about the life under the sun, what you just said about how effectively like, okay, here is how things are.

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And things are often not just what they seem to be. And when things are not just, there is a lot of bad and mourning and suffering.

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I mean, we live in a world where we bury our children and only an insane person would look around and say that everything's okay.

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And that everything is as it should be. And so that is gonna produce a very substantial, weighty, emotional life for people who have eyes to see it.

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You know, it's like, man, like you said, I wake up every day like groaning. Yeah. So what do we do with it?

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We go to the sanctuary. We go to the objective, revealed presence of God for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

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And we cast ourselves into the arms of Jesus over and over and over again. And we're reminded, I pray, every time we gather on the

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Lord's day, that's what we get, that's what we come to receive. It's like, man, I just, I need to be fed this.

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I need to be told this again. And then I need to live life with people in a church where we're gonna remind one another of this on a daily basis.

39:08

Yeah, anyway, good things. Yeah, well, hopefully this is encouraging to you and uplifting and kind of a new, you know, thinking about the new year, this episode comes out second week into the new year where, you know, there is some optimism and there's some hope, but there's also thinking about the last year of like, man,

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I really, like last year did not go. And Johnston and I've already said this, man, 24 is rough.

39:32

Oh my gosh. It's a rough year. Yeah, I feel like you're reliving 2020 in some ways, but. Yep. Yeah, our, you know, our hope for this podcast going forward and what it's always been, but we always just want to keep clarifying the gospel, the hope of Christ.

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You know, we don't, we never wanted to posture ourselves as a deconstruction podcast only.

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We want to pull down the Gospels, the wrong views of the law and the gospel.

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We want to rebuild our lives around the wonder of Christ. So hopefully today was one of those. It is higher than we are.

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Yeah, that's right. So hopefully, you know, this is a verse I'll end with. This is why

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I think Paul says, hey, weep with those who weep and rejoice those who rejoice. Those are real emotions you're going to have.

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You're going to have both sometimes at the same moment. You know, I can remember that one of my first,

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I'll give you one story. I can remember when my first child was born. This would have been about two years after my dad's death.

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And there was this rejoicing of like, oh my word, what a wonder to be a dad.

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And like, she's so beautiful. And then there was a sadness of like, man,

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I wish my dad was here to see this, you know? And I think that that's the experience.

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And it's healthy and it's good to remember that you can have these experiences and emotions and always inform them, right?

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Because we do, I keep saying the last thing, I'm a good Baptist, so. I can't have as many - You gotta have multiple conclusions.

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You are a preacher. Yeah, but you know, Paul says we do mourn differently. We do mourn, but we do mourn.

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Yeah, we do mourn. So, all right. Well, thank you for listening. And if you would like to be a part of a community that thinks and is discovering how to live this way, a lot of pastors are in there, a lot of people in there.

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So join the Theocastle community. That's it, Justin. And thanks for listening.

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We'll talk to you soon. Hey, everyone, before you go, Justin and I first wanted to say thank you. And if this has been encouraging to you in any way, please feel free to share it.

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But we also need your support. And it's when you give that it really helps us financially reach more people.

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So the next time you consider giving to a ministry, we hope that you would pray about Theocastle and partner with us as we share the gospel around the world.