Blog with Matthew

In the Newletter

I was sent a copy of Pastor Eric Johnson's church newsletter at on FEEL and thought I would share it.  Thanks Eric!  How can I empower a better understanding of God's plan for your emotions at your fellowship?

Hello Friends,

Quick quiz:  What is the missing word in each song?

It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I ____ Fine) – R.E.M.
Man! I ____ Like a Woman! – Shania Twain
I ____ Good  – James Brown
Can you ____ it? – The Jacksons

Probably like you, I’ve read many Christian-authored books over the years.  The latest one that I’ve been reading has been the most spiritually impacting book I’ve read in recent years.  It’s simply called FEEL (which is the answer to the quiz).  It’s by Matthew Elliot (my new Facebook friend!).

I grew up in eastern Kentucky, so I’m "Appalachian-American" by birth. I grew up where you did three things with feelings: hide, repress and/or ignore them.  Want to cry?  Hold it in.  Want to scream?  Don’t.  Want to share something you’re struggling with? Better not. 

Through reading this book, the Lord drove it home to me that I’ve always viewed emotions/feelings as a liability, and never an asset.

How many times have you heard . . .?
"Your feelings cannot be trusted."
"Emotions can cloud your thinking."
"God cares about what you believe, not what you feel."

I’ve grown up hearing these statements, from believers, non-believers, and even Christendom.  However, these statements are myths.  Even though we’ve repeatedly heard them, they are unbiblical and untrue.

Many Christians simply aren’t experiencing abundant life.  There can be a heavy focus on doing our duty and living by reason (like our favorite Vulcan Spock!).   When what we know trumps how we feel, it can leave us feeling stolid, dull or like we are suffocating spiritually. Our Heavenly Father wants our passion restored so we can live the life that Jesus came to give us.

In the book, Matthew Elliott takes a deep and powerful look at what our culture and many churches have taught about controlling and ignoring our emotions. He contends that some of the great thinkers of the modern era got it all wrong, and that the Bible teaches that God intends for us to live in and through our emotions. Emotions are good things that God created us to feel.

FEEL has really helped me personally understand my emotions. It’s also equipped me to nurture healthy feelings and reject destructive ones. It’s been refreshing and convicting in so many ways.

A few of the author’s conclusions, which may make you do a double take, are:   1. Emotions were given by God to drive us to our best.  2. Emotions are among the most logical and dependable things in our lives.  3. The true health of our spiritual lives is measured by how we feel.

God gives us permission to feel, to express.  Our spiritual lives don’t have to be dull or uninspiring.

So with that, I want to invite you to walk with the Lord through becoming more emotionally whole and expressive.  God wants you to soar. He wants a "you" more full of vitality and spirit than you can imagine.  It will be an amazing journey, and as we know, the journey is the destination.

Can you feel it?

Pastor Eric

Emotion and Their Physical Responses

A FEEL reader writes:

Thank you very much for the book, Feel. It is a terrific help to me in my journey to personal freedom in Christ.

One issue I was looking to understand better is how emotions are tagged to physical responses. You wrote how that's why the Church and rationalists suppress emotions. I have observed how certain emotions relate to physical responses both good and bad and the opposite is true too. I think it conditions us to gratify or repress certain emotions or seek to gratify or repress certain physical responses.

Don

Great Questions Don, here are some thoughts.

This is something we all wrestle with, what feelings in our bodies are tied to our emotions, and what feelings are just because we are bodies are reacting to something directly?  On a basic level, emotions are not necessarily linked to a particular feeling in our body. In early psychology, William James and others, wanted to find a permanent link for every emotion to a particular sensation so they could study emotions by looking at how the body felt.  But nobody could do that successfully.  In fact, researchers were so unsuccessful that they had to move on – there is no sure way to measure or quantify an emotion by how your body is feeling. 

If we look at philosophy, we also find very strong arguments for the fact that emotions are only necessarily linked to our thoughts, values and judgments and require no corresponding feeling in our body.  They are independent from bodily sensation.  For more on this, you need to read the early sections of Faithful Feelings.

That is good to know, because it means we need to be careful in figuring out one to one correlations with what we are feeling emotionally and what our body feels physically.  Our body relates to our emotions, but it relates to all manner of other things as well, so the signals it is giving us can be based on a combination of all kinds of things. 

On a  practical level, our emotions very often find expression in our bodies.  How our bodies feel can be used as one indicator of the intensity and nature of an emotion we are experiencing.  We can cry in sorrow or we can cry for joy  or we can cry because we just hit our thumb with a hammer – a person on the outside may interpret our tears as sorrow when in fact they are for happiness.  Only us, who know why we are crying, can correctly interpret the tears.  But even we need to be careful.  Are we crying over “spilled milk” (something minor) because it is really that upsetting, or is it because our bodies are stressed and exhausted?  Each situation requires its own unique analysis.  As we mature, we get better and better at figuring these things out quickly and correctly.

We need to recognize that we are complex, that we are so integrated that each part of us is so deeply interrelated – the rational, the physical, the emotional – that they are all always reacting to each other.  Sometimes, it is easy to tell how our emotions are affecting us physically.  Other times we need to do a little digging, even getting some help to unravel our feelings and emotions and learn how to be more mature emotionally and spiritually.  I believe that as we do that, we can undo some of the unhelpful links our mind has created between our bodies and our emotions – like we get sick to our stomach building toward an ulcer when we increase in anxiety -  while learning healthy emotional expressions in our body.  We need to learn to face hard emotions as emotions, not allowing them to destroy and harm our bodies as they have to leak out somewhere.  We can also learn healthy physical expressions for our love, joy as we let them out to bless our families and friends in laughter, hugs, or other forms of expression and affection.

Fear and Salvation

Brian recently wrote to us at Faithful Feelings about his fear and anxiety.  Here are some of his struggles in his own words, followed by our thoughts:

Dear Faithful Feelings,

I am working through your book primarily because of a struggle that has cropped up in my life in the last three years.  You can definitely lump me in with one of those long-time Christians who seems to have boatloads of head knowledge, but is seemingly incapable of getting much of what I know to sink in much below my neck.  I have the list of excuses, I came from an abusive, broken home where positive emotion was rarely, if ever, displayed, but where manipulation, anger, silence, and stoicism ruled the day.  I went through the typical cycles of alcohol and drug abuse and still struggle with pornography - a problem that started with my introduction to it at the age of 8, though thankfully I finally seem to be getting some victory over it after 30 years.

Oddly, my problem, and question, really doesn't have anything to do with my emptiness and lack of emotion, I understand that much of that comes from a detachment I developed in order to not have to deal with the pain that was a constant part of my experience growing up.

What is truly bothering me, and it really hit me hard while reading Chapter 7, was my feelings of FEAR toward God.  Why does this bother me?  Well, that's easy.  If my emotions are to be trusted and listened to, and if they are "true" then my feelings of unworthiness are true, even though my rational mind tries to reject them.  You have a quote by Jonathan Edwards that talks about maintaining a lack of "religious affection" that leads to "spiritual death" and eventually "eternal death".

Since this is what I fear, and these emotions are true and to be trusted, I don't know what to do.  There are times when I can see a cross and feel a great fear of judgment and hopelessness, when instead I should feel hope and joy at the grace that cross represents.  Instead, I want to cower in a corner and think about something else.

In this, I desperately feel like I want to believe my head, that I'm saved, covered by grace, and worthy, and Disbelieve my emotions, that I'm worthless, that I've blown it too many times, that I've hardened my heart and that I'm abandoned.

In many ways, your book has helped me a lot with what is, in my case, the more "benign" problem of simply feeling emotionally distant and disconnected.  On the other hand, this latter issue seems to lead me to feel even more emotions of condemnation and hopelessness because I need to "believe" what I feel.

Have you ever encountered this, and do you have any insight for me?

Brian

Here is our response:

Dear Brian,

I am so blessed to hear from you and I am so blessed by your honesty.  We all have deep struggles in a broken and sinful world.  For the first parts of your struggle, I believe that God can be faithful in opening your heart to feel again.  Start opening doors to everyday emotions, and ask God earnestly for more, that you need and want more love, more joy, more hope, more of Him.  Please write me again when you have finished the book – perhaps the next chapters will help in this regard.

For the paragraphs about fear, praise God, this is an easy answer.  As John writes to us:    ”I have written this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know you have eternal life.”  My point in FEEL, which I hope you will see clearly, as your read on, is that emotions tell you the truth about YOU, your beliefs, your values, your thoughts – not that they always tell you the truth.  Many times they can tell you the truth about others or the world and we need to listen, but other times they are only speaking the truth about your beliefs and thinking.  I too battle feelings of anxiety and questioning of God’s promises and sometimes I am afraid.  And we all may be there sometimes until we are with Him. 

As John also tells us, we all remain sinners and whoever says he is without sin is a liar and deceives themselves.  You ARE covered by the grace and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He promises that even when we are faithless he remains faithful because he cannot deny himself.  It is tough, and a process, but you must work the head knowledge down into your heart.  Memorize promises that say how God really feels about you, call a friend in a down moment, talk to a pastor after church, find a good counselor, shoot me an email – do whatever it takes to begin to change those deeply held beliefs that inform the fear.  God has called you, God has found you, God has loved you with an everlasting love if you have believed on the Lord Jesus and accepted his sacrifice for your sins.   Come against the lies that our enemy tells, and work the truth into the fabric of your life.  As your faith and trust grows, as God’s truth is not just known but believed then your emotions will change.  This is a hard thing because it is not about what we say we believe but rather about what we actually believe deep down.  It may take some wrestling with God to get there, some brutal honesty about your hurt and anger and fear.  God is big enough to take it all and love you anyway as his precious child.  Nothing you can say to him will surprise Him, He already knows.  Let it all out and feel His loving embrace of comfort and acceptance.  He will come to heal you as you trust in Him- I believe.

Bless you Brian, and God be close to you.  With love and prayers.

FEEL and Love Languages

I received this comment from a Feel reader and liked it so I thought I would share it with you.

I’m reading Matthew’s book and enjoying it. I’m also reading “Boundaries for Teens”. It talks about feeling remorse versus guilt. I definitely fall into the guilt category thanks to my Irish Catholic upbringing. They mastered the art of guilt. Anyway, it got me to thinking about feelings.  Then I thought about “The Five Love Languages”. The purpose is to speak love to your husband, kids, whomever in their love language so that they can feel your love for them.

I think she is right, without love being an emotion, there could be no love languages!

Emotions and Feelings

Mike asks a great question this week: “When I reached the 7th blog in your book I was shocked to read the part that says that emotions and feelings are different. When I read through the chapter I see your point and I agree that they differ but there are some things in which I cannot pin point the whether they are feelings or emotions, I am really confused when it comes to this matter. Things like love, I know that love has a feeling and it has an emotion. There are times where we feel loved and when it is really love and I can’t really see when they differ. Things like laughter, is laughter the emotion or simply the feeling we get from being joyful?”

Wow, that is a lot to think about, Mike.  My major point is that emotions are about our thoughts, our minds, our thinking process.  They are not based or centered in our body or nerves as many early psychologists taught.  See Faithful Feelings for a review of the history of this.  If emotions were based in our body, we could never know the difference between being sick because of the flu and being sick out of being nervous – for example.  The attachment to thinking is what makes the nervous emotional.

We could also look at it like the classic question, “What came first, the chicken or the egg.”  We affirm, the thinking – conscious or unconscious - came first.  Anything else is logically impossible – again see Faithful Feelings.  Feelings, in a strict sense, is what we feel in our bodies and these come after the emotion, are caused by the emotion.  So we laugh at something because we THINK it is funny, we feel butterflies because we THINK something or someone is lovable.  Emotions produce physical feelings in out bodies much of the time – sometimes they do not but most of the time they do.  Yes, sometimes you need to think, “hmm, do I have this stomach thing because of that extra piece of cheesecake or because I am about the propose to my girl?”  If we think about it a bit and give it some time, usually we can figure that out without too much trouble.

Hope that helps Mike, keep pondering these things so you can become emotional mature!

Listen in Your Area!

I had a great time at the Moody Radio Network recording for Prime Time America for airing next week.  Greg Wheatley and I laughed,  cried (not really),  renewed connections and talked about mutual friends (notably Dr. Kent Hughes from the church where I was raised and ordained - and yes Pastor Hughes you still need to read FEEL!).  We did five segments, one for each day.  They will air around 4:45, before the 5:00 news CST. 

1) An overview of how we often think of emotion in our churches and an honest look at emotional maturity

2) Some thoughts on how emotions was viewed by different people in church history, and why we have often been confused about them

3) Emotion in the Bible, most notably the honesty and authenticity of the Psalms

4) How do you handle harmful emotions - getting to the why

5) Emotions in our relationships - how we handle our emotions and express them well or badly will either tear down or build up other people

If this has peaked your interest, find a station near you here or listen online.  By the way, what a voice Greg Wheatley has. Wouldn't it be great to be able to sound like that?  Will we get a better version of our own voice in heaven - having just published Heaven for Africa, I will have to ask Randy Alcorn. 

I can tell you one funny thing.  When we were talking about different personality types and Greg asked if Laura and I were opposites.  I said "Yes, we kinda are."  He said, "And I know who is the talkative outgoing one, that's you right."  Laura and I just cracked up and I replied, "No, I just love talking about this stuff."  Having seen my very emotive enthusiasm in the interview, Greg mistook this reserved, controlled, guy for the outgoing loud one.  Well, I guess by God's grace we can get out of our shell and go for it.  Especially if we really LOVE what we are talking about and can't wait to share the message.  So pray with me that many people listening next week, like me, will gain a new passion to express themselves and live the kind of vibrant life that God intended.

FEEL hits newstands!

We were very happy to see FEEL reviewed in the February 28 issue of World Magazine.  I have enjoyed reading WORLD over the years and getting a Christian perspective on news, views and issues - especially when they cover Africa.  Many of my friends are loyal readers.  World Magazine Online

Faith Proved by Facts or Feelings

I received this question from a FEEL reader and it was timely as I have been thinking about this very thing the last weeks.

I'm curious what implications this has for evangelism which seems to be mostly about apologetics and intellectual reasons for God and Jesus. My husband has not been walking with God for the past few years which is awfully sad to me. Well-meaning people keep giving him books that defend Christianity intellectually. I'm about through with this!  I have felt for a long time that the struggle is for his heart and emotions, which seems to confound other people. I have a sinking feeling that people would rather give him a book than engage him emotionally.  I read your book because of this statement, "The true health of our spiritual lives is measured by how we feel."  I know you meant this for Christians following Christ, but I suspect that emotional health is key for someone who is considering accepting Christ's unconditional love.

What a great question!  First off, let me say that there is a place for facts and proofs - more power to those defending a faith that is true and a God that is truth.  Hard searching for truth will lead people to God.  That said, God's proof is also written on our hearts - has God changed us?  Can people see that in our faces and love for others?  Do we feel it?

If emotions, show us truth, if they are all tied up with what we know and believe we can say all the words to prove God and Jesus but those people are looking to see if these things are true for us, do WE really believe what we say?  Do you love me?  It would be a good exercise to systematize these things in the Bible but some things that come to mind for me include the commands not to divorce an unbeliever, but to live in a way that brings them to God.  The strongest testimonies and proofs for God are written upon our hearts and people know that instinctively.  That is what brings them over the edge - "You will know them by their love."

While we are giving arguments those around us are asking, "do YOU really believe it, do you feel it?"  Emotions show the truth, and to listen to the proofs, people need to see that you believe it in a way that it naturally overflows in real emotions toward God and others.

So how you FEEL about God and others?  Does it line up with the truths you give lip-service to?  For me, all to often it does not and that is when we need to do some business with God to get feeling right.  When people and churches get feelings and proofs together, on the same page, that is when we see people drawn to Jesus.

Visit Central Peninsula Church

I had a great time speaking and interacting with members of Central Peninsula Church last week.  if you are in the San Francisco area I highly recommend you check it out.  You will find a great group of people who are serious about following Jesus!  Loved all your great questions guys - hope the answers were helpful.

A special thanks to Justin Buzzard of the Buzzard Blog for inviting me and caring about the message of FEEL.  It was a great opportunity to really think about how to get this message down to :40 in a compelling way.  I so enjoyed getting to know Justin and his heart for people.  May God bless all that you are doing in that great - and should I say - WARM city (from waking up to 0 degrees today).  And everybody should check out Justin's wise and thought provoking words on the web!

Welcome FEEL to the UK and Europe

 We are very pleased to announce the publication of FEEL from Monarch for the UK, Europe and the Commonwealth.  I have been very excited to see their enthusiasm and believe this to be a great match. 

Check out their edition here.

Now about that cover - we like it.  But we have lots of opinions on what this squishy feely thing might be.  Opinions have included, sea sponge, seed pod, squishy toy, and Asian fruit.  The point is, don't you just want to touch it and feel what it is like?

So we are asking God to use this edition to touch lives and encourage people across the world!  And thanking God for such a strong partner across the pond. 

From the forward to the Monarch edition: "I am very pleased that this edition for the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Commonwealth is being published by friends.  After working with us and blessing our work in Africa over the last years, it feels good that Monarch is publishing Feel.  Thanks to Tony Collins for believing that the message is something the church really needs to hear.  I have spent a number of years living and working in the UK, first in Eastborne as a boy when my dad worked at Kingsway, then in London as assistant to George Verwer, and finally in Aberdeen during graduate studies.  I have so many wonderful memories from those years and learned much at each place, your island has been my second home.  Laura and I are thrilled that Feel, the work birthed at Aberdeen, has found a proper British home with Monarch! "