Kaleo San Diego Church

(Musical Intro. by the Beatles: "I've got a Feeling")

Isn't that a great way to introduce a sermon? That was the Beatles, to introduce our message on Jesus and emotions with "I've got a feeling."

Well, as we've been looking at Jesus in this series, we've been blessed to see what a life characterized by love looks like. John Lennon said, "all you need is love," right? But what does that mean, and what does a life completely driven by love really look like? Albert Einstein has this great quote:

"I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene... No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."
-Albert Einstein, Interview from the Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929

Isn't that a great quote? And from an unbeliever at that! This is the effect Jesus has on people.

Well one of the things we're actually uncovering about Jesus, and about which I'll be speaking to you today, is what a life colored with deep, and often intense and unashamed emotion really looks like. For love may be more than emotion, but can you imagine love without it?
And though we may not often think about it, these emotions actually turn out to be a vital part of the good news which is the Gospel. We see Jesus loving God His Father-as the great commandment calls us all-with all His heart (which in the ancient world included your intellect, emotions, and will), and all His soul, and all His strength-and doing it all in our place. Which is really good news, isn't it, because we just don't love as we should! I Cor. 13, the great love chapter-as wonderful as it is-is not the gospel, but actually a nasty piece of law! And if you don't think so, I challenge you to go out and try to do I Cor. 13 this week. Try to be completely patient, and kind, and keep no records of wrongs. And you'll see this is exactly why we need more than a great example; we need a great Savior! (I Cor. 13 is actually quite beautiful, until you try to do it.)

But I think our theme today, which is often neglected in portraits of Jesus, is a crucial subject for us for two reasons. And here they are:

1. We are saved, in part, by Jesus' authentic humanity, as he lived in response to His Father's will, fulfilling perfectly the two great commandments on our behalf, (loving God & others), which includes expressing His emotions perfectly from His heart.
2. And then second, the Gospel is not just about saving us for heaven, but also intends to make us authentically human (which is to say, better lovers of God & others), so that we look like Jesus in our emotions as well.

Now this is a huge theme (and I apologize at the start if we don't cover everything you want to hear on emotions in one sermon-but take heart, you'll catch many more as David and others preach through this series). But if we just take a quick flyover of Scripture we see how love is never disconnected from emotion in Jesus:

The Emotionally Healthy Jesus & You

• Because He loved, Jesus was "full of joy through the Holy Spirit" that His salvation was revealed to little children (Luke 10:21).

• Because He loved, Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved, weeping for Lazarus ("See how he loved him"-his friend had died); and also over the city of Jerusalem (like a "mother hen" longing for her chicks Jn. 11:33; Lk. 19:41).

• Because He loved, Jesus showed astonishment that a Roman centurion understood and believed Him more than the Jews did (Matt. 8:10).

• Because He loved, Jesus showed great compassion for widows, lepers, and blind men (Matt. 20:34; Mk.1:41; Lk. 7:13).

• Because He loved, Jesus was sorrowful, and troubled: "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death" (Matt.26:7-38) as He prepared to love us on the cross.

• Because He loved, Jesus had an emotional longing to be with the twelve apostles (Lk. 22:15).

• Because He loved, Jesus was consumed with zeal for welcoming worship in His Father's house (Jn. 2:13-17 )

• Because He loved, Jesus cried out in emotional agony with a broken heart from the cross to His Father, "Why have you forsaken me?" Because He was willing to love us, He endured the excruciating feeling of abandonment, as perfect harmony had been severed.

• And yet because He loved, Jesus rose with great satisfaction (Isa. 53:11 "After his suffering...He will see the light of life and be satisfied") rising to cook fish at a beach party with His friends! And the list goes on...

The Gospel that saves us, you see, is run through with emotions! Does that encourage you this morning-that your Savior would validate emotions like this? Well to the degree we embrace this for ourselves, this church will indeed be a healthy "hospital for sinners," as Jesus intended.

But let's pause for a moment and ask, how do we think about emotions? Far from just random chemical reactions, one biblical idea is that emotions are physical, bodily experiences that are intimately connected to what our hearts treasure or despise. In this sense, they serve as sign-posts or windows to our hearts, and what is important to us. Let me give you an example. When I was about seven years old, I was digging around in the backyard and I was sure I found gold...ever have that experience? And so I took this rock to my Dad, only to find out to my great disappointment that it was fool's gold. And so, you can imagine how I felt (like a fool). One minute I had the treasure of Solomon in my hand, the next my hopes were dashed and my emotions took a huge drop.

Emotions then are the very language of the soul, gifts from God that reveal how we interpret and experience life. Just read the Psalms, and you'll see a whole catalogue of emotions, expressed through nearly every Psalm. (Try sitting down with a highlighter sometime and just mark all the emotions as you skim the Psalms. Your Bible will be full of yellow.) How often do we see David saying things like, "I cried to the Lord and He heard me, and set me free from all my fears" (Ps. 34:6)? Or, "He answers me in my distress," or, "fills our hearts with joy"?

Emotions, then, help tell your story, and can lead us to ask further questions: Do you feel God has abandoned you? Do you feel like a failure? What do your anxiety and the fact that you bite your nails down to tiny stubs reveal? Have people become bigger than God to you? Are you struggling with what Proverbs calls "the fear of man?"

And then also the state of our bodies plays a role too, doesn't it, for we are whole persons, not just souls. When you are tired, you simply don't function as well; you feel groggy and you need sleep (that might be some of you this morning). When you are in pain you may need medication. When you are hungry (as some of you are now), you get hypoglycemic and you need to eat. And many of you, if pressed, might even admit that the state of your sanctification on a given day is intimately tied to how much caffeine you've had-which is why a teacher I knew was advocating for a "Starbucks Study Bible!" And he was also a doctor!

Remember Scrooge, realizing that he could be influenced by what he ate the night before? When Marley's ghost asks him why he doubts his senses, he replies, "You could be a bit of British beef, or an underdone potato!"

Well if emotions are a vital part of the Gospel-the Gospel of what Jesus does for us in love-I want to pause at this point and ask a serious question about Jesus: Have we, perhaps in our attempts to give Jesus the seriousness and weightiness He deserves and to show how devout He is, presented a one-dimensional portrait of His humanity? In other words, does He always walk around looking like this?

(We'll be singing "Man of Sorrows" later, and yes He was that, but does Scripture paint of picture of Jesus as always having a headache?) Or did Jesus express joy and perhaps even laugh?

The Gospels tell us that one of the reasons the Pharisees were so bothered by Jesus is because He knew how to party! In Matt. 11 Jesus answered criticism about His partying saying, "I feast and drink and you say he's a glutton and a drunkard, and hangs out with the worst kind of sinners! Yet wisdom is proved right by her actions." And the Pharisees were expressing what we feel sometimes when someone seems to be enjoying life too much: "Surely sin is right around the corner!" Well, tell that to Jesus, right? The testimony of Scripture is that people loved to hang out with Jesus, because if anything He appeared to be having too much fun! (You don't get called a glutton for nothing, right?!)

Or take the wedding feast, the occasion of Jesus' first miracle, when he transformed 180 gallons of water to wine (180 gallons! Which means his first miracle was really bar-tending, right?) And this was after the wedding guests had already been drinking! How many of us would've been tempted to say, "Wait Jesus, do you really want to make more wine? The people are already tipsy; if anything, you should be bringing out the crappy wine now!" And yet what does Jesus do? To save the host great embarrassment for running out of wine, but also because he wanted to love the people, he goes right ahead and parties hard! And the best merlot flowed freely. (I'm pretty sure it was merlot!)

And Jesus' teaching is also laced with humor isn't it? He describes all of us with logs sticking out of our eyes! Or how about camels who try to fit through the eye of a needle? (The "eye of the needle" was reported to be a tiny gate in Jerusalem that a camel could never fit through-even if he was greased up! But even if Jesus meant a sewing needle, the point is still humorous. What is impossible with men is only possible by the work of God.)
Or do you think the One who inspired Solomon to write, "There is a time to mourn and a time to laugh," would not heed his own wisdom? There was plenty to laugh around him, right? Just think of the silly Pharisees walking around so seriously with scripture boxes on their foreheads and somber faces, always fasting?

What about the impetuous Peter, whom He called "the Rock" when he was really a coward, or the two hotheads James & John whom He poked fun at, calling them "sons of thunder." Those are ironic, if not funny nicknames.

Or just think of creation around us. John 1 says that by Jesus all things were created... including crazy monkeys who blow kisses at you at the zoo, giraffes with necks ten feet long, and kangaroos with little baby carriers built into their fronts? That's funny stuff! Speaking of animals, we once owned a cockatiel who learned tae-kwon-do moves by watching our kids-no kidding! The kids would be working out, and all of the sudden he'd start making the grunt sounds and lifting his little leg up on the side of the cage. Jesus made that cockatiel!

What is the message for us in all this? The message is good news of great joy, as the angels sang, for if any of this was up to you, salvation would be a heavy, heavy burden. But what if you didn't have to work for it? What if salvation really was like the surprise Christmas gift you never expected?

Say you were a real jerk in the days leading up to Christmas (which a lot of people become because Christmas freaks a lot of people out-they have to visit their relatives after all)-and still your little child walks up to you with her big Cindy Lou-hoo eyes and says, "Here Daddy, this is for you," as she hands you a gift. You'd feel like, "Wow, I've been such a jerk, I don't deserve this at all!" And you'd just want to cry. But by Christmas dinner you find yourself playing and laughing with your kid because you just realized something about yourself-that love and grace are undeserved, and it's not about the good you do, but what's been done for you-while you were a jerk. (That's my paraphrase of Romans 3!)

So Jesus sets us truly free to laugh, and so my question is, have you missed this joy in Jesus and never really learned to laugh freely, because you're so uptight about your performance? We need to learn to laugh at ourselves, taking God seriously and not ourselves. His joy is a vital emotion!

Speaking of learning to laugh, I have to show you this:

As I was preparing for this message I came across the "First church of Spock," a real church near Lynchburg, VA. (I believe this may be where Jerry Falwell attended as a boy.) But this is a real "church" and they preach Vulcan ideology. Now if you remember the old Star Trek show, Spock was the character who came from a race that was purely logical, devoid of any real emotion-like some Christians want to be.

But the thing that really caught my attention about the article (besides the nifty church logo) was reading that back in the 80's they actually went through a church split. It seems some members just couldn't live a life devoid of emotion, arguing that Spock was after all half-human, but the stricter half of the church said, "We must remain faithful and strive to be emotionless." Well apparently after a very heated exchange, the half-human group had to part company... because apparently having an emotionless savior was quite unsatisfying, as you might imagine! Well all I can say is thank God our Jesus isn't like Spock!

But this does raise the question, how did the Christian church get here to this place of short-changing Jesus, who is the creator of joy and all emotions?

Well a little quick history here: In part because God is so different from the pagan deities of old, early defenders of Christianity began to speak of the absolute divine impassability of God, which is another way of saying that our God-who is the One True God-does not have shameful passions like the pagan gods of mythology.

Remember the Odyssey, and how Odysseus just gets tossed around in his little boat by the whim of the gods? Or take the great Zeus, who was said to have engaged in the rape of the beautiful Leda by becoming a swan. (It just really makes you want to worship a guy who models sex with animals right?)

Well this idea of impassability (literally, to be unaffected by passions) was picked up by a number of the historic confessions and unfortunately interpreted by many to mean that God has no emotions at all. And so for many, Jesus became some kind of unemotional ascetic-a kind of Spock-walking around the countryside in robotic fashion.

This suspicion of emotions carries over into the modern day as well. Have you seen this? This is the Campus Crusade booklet of the fact-faith-feeling train:

Fact! Faith! Feeling!"

And here's how it goes: First you need the facts about Christ, which is the engine pulling everything. This is followed by the response of faith, or the coal car-which is the fuel that makes it the facts go-and bringing up the rear is the feelings in the caboose.

The booklet goes on to say, "the train will run with or without the caboose. And of course it would be futile to attempt to pull the train by the caboose."

Now thank God for Campus Crusade right; they've done a lot of wonderful things in spreading the Gospel. And in this picture we have to admit that at least Campus Crusade acknowledges feelings, and that there is some truth in this, right? The Gospel message is based on facts that are "completely outside of us," as Luther said, and the promises of God are just that-promises that God has made to us, and they don't ultimately depend on what you do or how you are feeling on a given Tuesday morning.

And this is a great comfort, because I might wake up one day with low blood sugar, or a bad cold, or a bank balance in the negative, and it simply doesn't feel that "God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life!"

Your feelings can become a dark cloud that want to blot out the sun, and yet the truth is that the sun is still there-which is a very comforting thought when it comes to God's nearness and love, right?

And to be fair, if Campus Crusade is saying that sweaty palms and tears in one's eyes do not make a conversion to Christ, that is true. But think about it...try to imagine a true conversion without a sense of great gratitude, or joy, or desire, or growing hatred of the dead works you used to try to find life in. Should you just stick them in the caboose, pull the disconnection pin, and say they don't really matter, and that they have nothing to say to us? The great preacher Martin Lloyd Jones would respond this way: "Can a man look into hell without emotion? ... Conversely, can a man really contemplate the love of God in Christ Jesus and feel no emotion? The Gospel of Jesus Christ takes up the whole man, and if it doesn't it's not the Gospel!"

Well this brings us back to the point we noted earlier, which is that emotions are gifts from God, not optional things (as if we could disconnect from them), but are sign-posts or windows revealing how we are transacting with God. And because Jesus loves the whole of us, He will not miss transforming a vital part of how we are made.

Well our final point is to ask, how does this happen? How does the Gospel impact our emotions? Let's get very practical. Notice the following picture:

Humans, Like Icebergs,
Have Many Deep Layers
Below the Surface

Those of you who are recovering Presbyterians will identify with this (the "frozen chosen"), right?

It's been said that the Titanic sank because it collided with a piece of the 90% of an iceberg that was submerged beneath the ocean's surface. And we know that because James Cameron told us, right? (All those computer re-enactments?) But do you see the dilemma this poses for us? If our God is about transforming our hearts now (which He is-we're not just saved for heaven but are being saved and transformed in the here and now), how can you address something if you are refusing to look at it-if you refuse to follow the God-given signposts that help you look down beneath the surface to the heart, which is where Jesus says the real action of our lives is going on?

Let's be honest, aren't most of us quite comfortable with just that 10% above the surface that we let everybody see? But here's the thing. In just trying look good (like Titanic), we badly damage and even risk shipwrecking our lives because we fail to deal with the heart, which Scripture says is the "wellspring of life." This is why it's so good that we are learning to tell honest Gospel stories to each other in our church! We need to be learning to share our hearts with each other.

Now let's take another emotion the church has also been squeamish about: anger and hurt feelings. Don't we love the passages when Jesus is telling off the Pharisees with great descriptions like, "you brood of poisonous snakes, you blind guides?" (Which, again, would be kind of a funny description if it weren't so tragic!) And perhaps we love those sections because we want to say, "Give it to ‘em Jesus! That's right, get those jacked-up religious people!" When Jesus "goes Rambo" and walks into the temple, overturning tables and scattering the money-changers, it's kind of cool isn't it? And you've probably heard why He did it. Again it was love, because people were getting ripped off and others were excluded from the worship of God.

Now there's something very significant going on in that anger, isn't there? If you step back and try to figure out what's going on, on the surface it looks like Jesus just loses it and blows His cool! But in fact what you're getting is a window into His soul-a window into the heart of love. And do you know what Scripture is revealing that His anger means, then? It's showing us that God's anger-directed at fixing a broken world-is actually the hope of the universe. Have you ever thought about that? Some people say, "I could never worship a God who gets angry!" But imagine a parent, watching her child being bullied and beaten up right in front of her eyes. You wouldn't want her not to care would you? If she just stood by passively, you'd say there's something terribly wrong with that mother! And you'd be right!

And so you just don't exclude people in front of Jesus and get away with it either! His anger expresses how much He loves and wants to come to the rescue of broken people. It's a vital part of love.

And yet what if it's us? This is when it gets tricky, right? What do we do with our own feelings when we're truly hurt by someone-which can often lead to anger? Well the easy band-aid answer we hear is "forgive and forget," right? But the truth about anger and hurt is that the closer someone is to you, the more they mean to you, the more it hurts. I mean, which hurts more: when you get hurt by a total stranger, or by someone you love dearly, with whom you've enjoyed close intimacy? This is why the abuse of a parent or close relative is so hard to get over. It's a deep wound, and it often takes a lot of patient care, compassion, and identification with the sufferings of Christ. Just read Isaiah 53 to see how Jesus identifies, for He was bruised and wounded for our sakes. But who bruised Him? Scripture says it was the Father's will to crush Him-and He did that for you! But you'll never really plumb the depths of hurt, or identify with Jesus, or even be able to validate someone else's hurt (which is so important) if you just say, "You're not allowed to get angry. Shut it off, it's so unspiritual!"

And yet we also have to say that there is a great lie attached when hurt morphs into bitterness and anger, (which it so easily can), and that is when we begin to believe that "someone else has made me bitter, or angry." Aren't we so quick to believe that? "My boss makes me so angry," or, "my children," or, "my spouse," or, "the counter person at CVS," or whoever. And it seems so right, because they are broken too, right?

Perhaps you've heard the illustration that Amy Carmichael has used about two glasses of water, one filled with pure, sweet water and the other with bitter. Each glass gets bumped, and water comes out of each. Her question is, "Was it the bump that made the water in the bitter glass turn bitter? Or the sweet to turn sweet?" And here answer is no, the bump didn't do anything to change the water; it just revealed what was already in the glasses. And so you see when we say, "So-and-so made me so bitter," or, "made me so angry," or, "they are the reason I feel sorry for myself," we forget that really the bump, (and maybe it was even a big bump), only revealed what was already in the heart. James says the same thing when he asks one of the most penetrating questions in the Bible: "What causes fights and quarrels among you?" James' answer is unexpected: "Don't they come from the desires that battle within you?"

This is why it is so important that we don't just shut off our emotions, but learn to ask ourselves, "Why am I angry?" "What is it I really want?" "Do I desire justice here?" "Do I want to even the score, make them pay?" "Do I just want acknowledgement, validation, approval?" And you see, you can pretend to shut it off, but you haven't really dealt with the heart of the matter if you haven't gone deep into your own heart, which is where the source of the anger really is. The other person who "bumped you" only provided the occasion for it to be revealed. This is part of what our feelings are trying to tell us, if we will explore them.

Listen, I know these are hard words, and if you are here today and that's you, let me say how painful it is to be hurt by a loved one. I cannot feel that for you, but I can sympathize, and I can encourage you to search your heart while I point you to the One who knows your pain, who gets angry about injustice and the things that hurt people, but who was Himself hurt, wounded, and ultimately abandoned for you. And He wishes to even use your pain in a similar way to transform this broken world.

Well, I'll give one final illustration of what it means to search out our hearts through our emotions, (this one a bit on the lighter side) and then we'll bring up Ian to share with you.
Say you're driving in your car on your way to work, you've got an important meeting, and you find yourself stuck dead in traffic. The dashboard thermometer which gauges the temperature inside the car begins to rise. You begin white-knuckling the wheel, gritting your teeth, and soon you're shouting a few unmentionable adjectives (after all, you're by yourself, right?) Woops, you forgot that "God is my co-pilot" bumper-sticker! You think, "Maybe I have time to go out and peel it off." But frustration mounts and you begin to curse the radio announcer, the transportation authorities, even the Governor. "Why didn't they make these roads wider?" You worry about your engine, thinking, "What if my car overheats?" You begin to place blame... "What jerk caused this back-up?" "Doesn't everyone here know that I have a schedule to keep?" But you shut the thoughts off again, and look for a CD to distract you.

On top of this (and this proves that our anger is not forced by our circumstances), you look across to the driver beside you and she seems to be quite happy about the traffic, putting on her make-up in the mirror and fixing her hair. But what you don't know is that she's secretly grateful for the traffic because she's missing a serious meeting on conflict resolution that she didn't want to go to today anyway, so she's feeling pretty good!

So now you're instantly seized with guilt because you've heard somewhere that anger is like murder, and you could sure murder someone right now. So you shut off the feelings and distract yourself with talk radio...but the radio announcer breaks in to tell you there's absolutely no hope, you're going to be stuck for a few hours at least.

Now take the same traffic jam, same driver, except now you're willing to explore your emotions. "Why am I so angry after all?" "What do I think I need that is so important?" "What is ruling my heart and making me want to play Moses, imagining myself holding out my staff so that the cars part before me?" (Sort of like what Jim Carrey does with his soup in Bruce Almighty). Is it that I really want to play God?

And as we begin to see the idols of our heart revealed-because we've courageously looked through the window of our feelings-we can also now begin to hear the "music of the Gospel," melting our hard hearts once again and reminding us that Jesus, by taking all the wrath of God on the cross in our place, has already made us sons and daughters, forgiven and loved. And we don't have to play God or seek for man's approval because we have the best and only approval we really need-the Father's love, because of what Jesus has done.

And so now we can actually begin to worship in that traffic jam, which is why we're here in the first place, and we find that the traffic has now become an opportunity to slow down and remember who God is. And lo and behold, we actually make the road and the world a safer place to be, as the Gospel transforms us in the small moments of life. That's how the Gospel and our feelings work together.

Now I want to end with a brief glimpse at Jesus' compassion-about which there is hardly any debate at all-with Jesus as portrayed very humanly in "The Visual Bible," a verse-by-verse portrayal of the book of Matthew. My wife discovered this on television one Christmas when she was in the hospital having a miscarriage, and it was a great encouragement for us to see an image of a warm, smiling Jesus, as well as to identify with the Father, who also lost a son-for us. It's the scene when Jesus heals the leper, and as you watch I want you to think about ourselves as the lepers, with our sinful hearts that Jesus has come to heal. And then I want to ask my brother Ian to come up and share a Gospel story with you of how God is at work in his heart to transform his emotions.

1. Thoughts adapted from the teaching of Ed Welch, counselor with CCEF.

2. Idea taken from CCEF counselor and doctor Mike Emlet, from a message on ministering to someone with chronic pain.

3. Picture and some ideas in this section borrowed from “The Emotionally Healthy Church,” by Peter Scazzero.

4. Illustration used by David Powlison, and also Paul Tripp in a message entitled “How to be Good and Angry,” from Paul Tripp Ministries

5. Ibid.

 

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