KILLING THE GIANT OF EMOTIONAL REASONING
You take your emotions as evidence for the truth. Your logic: “I feel like a failure, therefore I am a failure.”
But this kind of reasoning is misleading because your feelings reflect your thoughts and beliefs. If your thoughts and beliefs are distorted—which is quite often the case—then your emotions have no validity. You think, therefore you feel as you think. Examples of emotional reasoning could be, “I feel overwhelmed and hopeless therefore my problems must be impossible to solve; I feel inadequate, therefore I must be a worthless person. I’m not in the mood to do anything; therefore I might as well just lie in bed.”
Emotional reasoning plays a role in nearly all depressions. Because things “FEEL” so negative to you, you assume they truly are—that how you feel is reality when in actuality it is not! It doesn’t occur to you to challenge the validity of the perceptions that create your feelings. But that is exactly what we are doing and will do in this message!
One usual side effect of emotional reasoning is procrastination. You avoid cleaning up your garage because you tell yourself, “I FEEL so lousy when I think about that messy garage that needs to be cleaned up. Getting it clean will be impossible.” But a few weeks later you finally give yourself a little push and do it. It turns out to be a good thing and not so tough after all. You were fooling yourself all along because you are in the habit of letting your negative feelings guide the way that you act! Call it having a passive mind.
So then the question is this: how do we overcome being imprisoned by our feelings? How do we kill the giant of emotional reasoning?
II Corinthians 5:7 says, “For we walk by faith and not by sight.”
We could say it this way: We live by faith in God and in His Word and not by how we feel.
As Romans 1:17 declares, “the just (the righteous; those who have been born again and belong to God) shall live by faith.”
For example, the Word of God teaches us to forgive all those who have wronged us. It doesn’t say, forgive others if you FEEL like it. I can tell you, by experience, that 99.9% of the time you don’t FEEL forgiveness toward someone when they have really hurt or wronged you!
You forgive them by faith because you know that this is what the Word of God tells you to do. This is God’s heart for you and them. Therefore you obey God’s Word not because you FEEL like it but because you love and trust God and His Word. You know that it is the right thing to do and that in the long run you will reap the benefits of acting on God’s Word.
Allow me to use an event in Abraham’s life to illustrate what it means to act in faith and not on how you may feel at the moment. When God told Abraham to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice, Abraham acted in faith on what God told him to do and not on how he surely must have felt as a loving father to Isaac!
Hebrews 11 is the faith chapter in the Bible. It is a list of those who acted not on how they may have felt, but in faith on what God said.
That’s one reason why I think that what David did in killing Goliath is so important. While others were paralyzed with fear because of how big and bad Goliath was—they felt that facing him would mean certain death—David was not controlled by fear or by how he may have felt. Instead, he faced the giant with faith in God, and he killed him!
So too must we challenge our thoughts and feelings of emotional reasoning by our faith in God and in His Word, the Bible.
If you will MOVE in faith and trust God and His Word, you will discover that the giant of emotional reasoning will most definitely go down! Replace emotional reasoning with faith in what God has said. God’s Word is truth. It is inerrant and infallible. Trust it completely!
Believe God’s Word—the Divine reality which is greater than what we can see or not see—and not your feelings which can change with the wind!
Dear ones, if you would experience the fullness of God’s Jubilee year of 5776, then you must make the choice to stop living by how you feel. “Freedom from what binds and restoration of what is mine” will become a reality when we make the choice to stop allowing our feelings to control us!
Pick up a stone and put it into the sling and hurl it at the giant of emotional reasoning by making the determination to walk in faith in the Word of God regardless of how you feel. If you will walk in faith in God’s Word, your feelings will eventually follow.
Make the choice to renew your mind by and with the Word of God!
You take your emotions as evidence for the truth. Your logic: “I feel like a failure, therefore I am a failure.”
But this kind of reasoning is misleading because your feelings reflect your thoughts and beliefs. If your thoughts and beliefs are distorted—which is quite often the case—then your emotions have no validity. You think, therefore you feel as you think. Examples of emotional reasoning could be, “I feel overwhelmed and hopeless therefore my problems must be impossible to solve; I feel inadequate, therefore I must be a worthless person. I’m not in the mood to do anything; therefore I might as well just lie in bed.”
Emotional reasoning plays a role in nearly all depressions. Because things “FEEL” so negative to you, you assume they truly are—that how you feel is reality when in actuality it is not! It doesn’t occur to you to challenge the validity of the perceptions that create your feelings. But that is exactly what we are doing and will do in this message!
One usual side effect of emotional reasoning is procrastination. You avoid cleaning up your garage because you tell yourself, “I FEEL so lousy when I think about that messy garage that needs to be cleaned up. Getting it clean will be impossible.” But a few weeks later you finally give yourself a little push and do it. It turns out to be a good thing and not so tough after all. You were fooling yourself all along because you are in the habit of letting your negative feelings guide the way that you act! Call it having a passive mind.
So then the question is this: how do we overcome being imprisoned by our feelings? How do we kill the giant of emotional reasoning?
II Corinthians 5:7 says, “For we walk by faith and not by sight.”
We could say it this way: We live by faith in God and in His Word and not by how we feel.
As Romans 1:17 declares, “the just (the righteous; those who have been born again and belong to God) shall live by faith.”
For example, the Word of God teaches us to forgive all those who have wronged us. It doesn’t say, forgive others if you FEEL like it. I can tell you, by experience, that 99.9% of the time you don’t FEEL forgiveness toward someone when they have really hurt or wronged you!
You forgive them by faith because you know that this is what the Word of God tells you to do. This is God’s heart for you and them. Therefore you obey God’s Word not because you FEEL like it but because you love and trust God and His Word. You know that it is the right thing to do and that in the long run you will reap the benefits of acting on God’s Word.
Allow me to use an event in Abraham’s life to illustrate what it means to act in faith and not on how you may feel at the moment. When God told Abraham to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice, Abraham acted in faith on what God told him to do and not on how he surely must have felt as a loving father to Isaac!
Hebrews 11 is the faith chapter in the Bible. It is a list of those who acted not on how they may have felt, but in faith on what God said.
That’s one reason why I think that what David did in killing Goliath is so important. While others were paralyzed with fear because of how big and bad Goliath was—they felt that facing him would mean certain death—David was not controlled by fear or by how he may have felt. Instead, he faced the giant with faith in God, and he killed him!
So too must we challenge our thoughts and feelings of emotional reasoning by our faith in God and in His Word, the Bible.
If you will MOVE in faith and trust God and His Word, you will discover that the giant of emotional reasoning will most definitely go down! Replace emotional reasoning with faith in what God has said. God’s Word is truth. It is inerrant and infallible. Trust it completely!
Believe God’s Word—the Divine reality which is greater than what we can see or not see—and not your feelings which can change with the wind!
Dear ones, if you would experience the fullness of God’s Jubilee year of 5776, then you must make the choice to stop living by how you feel. “Freedom from what binds and restoration of what is mine” will become a reality when we make the choice to stop allowing our feelings to control us!
Pick up a stone and put it into the sling and hurl it at the giant of emotional reasoning by making the determination to walk in faith in the Word of God regardless of how you feel. If you will walk in faith in God’s Word, your feelings will eventually follow.
Make the choice to renew your mind by and with the Word of God!
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