Follow your heart.
Or should you?
In many ways, “follow your heart” is the motto of the world we live in. Our culture has wholeheartedly embraced the idea that we must “follow our hearts” in order to be “true to ourselves.” Trust your gut, lead with your heart, and so many other cliches tell us to trust what we feel and follow it to the end. You see this everywhere, from movies to marketing campaigns to kids t-shirts at Target.
And yet in the Christian sub-culture, we’ve largely been taught the opposite: to ignore how we feel, keep our head down, and continue about the business of doing what God has asked of us. It’s true- our hearts can mislead us, and certainly aren’t to be trusted as the guiding compass we must follow.
After all, the Bible says the heart is deceitful and desperately sick.
Thus says the LORD: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the LORD…” The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9
However, when we ignore our heart along with the feelings and emotions it allows us, we can miss the heart of the Gospel.
The heart of the Gospel is a Father longing to be in relationship with His children. It is a story of great compassion. The separation between us and the Father has been bridged by His Son Jesus through His death on the cross and resurrection from the grave. His death purchased our pardon and restored to us our freedom! God’s heart was so moved to be with us that He gave all He had to restore our close relationship with the Him. That’s the Gospel! We are now forgiven and can be in relationship with God!
So if the Gospel is about relationship with God…. and having emotions in relationships is good…. why do we so often keep our emotions from him?
I remember being in college and experiencing for the first time being really disappointed with God. The Lord had allowed me to be in this beautiful dating relationship for a time; it was something so sweet He had given me. But then He asked me to give it back to Him and end the relationship, so I did. It was excruciating. For weeks I wrestled with the ache, wondering why the Lord would ask me to do something so painful. It wasn’t until a friend’s encouragement gave me the permission I needed to be honest. She said, “It’s okay that you’re angry with Him. You can tell Him that.”
And all of a sudden, the floodgates opened. My whole life I’d thought anger wasn’t an emotion I was allowed to have with God. I’m supposed to keep my distance when I have these crazy human emotions that are disapproved of and beneath Him. His ways are higher than my ways, that I knew for sure. But what I hadn’t learned yet was that He is tender and gentle and allows me, in all His grace, to bring Him my ache and my frustrations. Even my anger.
I propose that our emotions, our hearts, play a vital part in having relationship with God. It’s important to recognize that relationship with us is what God longs for, not merely our obedience.
To further our relationship with God, we can be honest with Him about what our hearts feel, because there is a vast difference between denying our flesh and suppressing our emotions. What we must keep at the forefront, however, is that even though our feelings are real they may not be true.
My feelings are real, but they may not be true.
The pain of my heartbreak was very real. The disappointment with God’s decision and direction was very real. The fear that my life would not unfold how I had pictured was real.
I felt abandonded. I felt like I was being punished. Those feelings were real, but they weren’t true.
But all of those emotions have to surrender to the knowledge that God is good. By remembering that not every feeling is true, we can keep ourselves from being deceived by our emotions.
By remembering that not every feeling is true, we can keep ourselves from being deceived by our emotions.
The Bible says this in 2 Corinthians 10:5:
We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.
My feelings of being abandoned and punished were lofty opinions that were against the knowledge of God, and as a child of God I get to destroy those thoughts and take them captive. I brought Him those emotions and fears, and allowed Him to remind me of what was true: His goodness.
No, we certainly cannot rely on our emotions as truth due to their shifting and fragile nature, however, we can bring them to the Lord as a part of our humanity. In bringing those emotions to the Lord, so many things became possible. First, He was able to empathize with my weakness.
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin.
Hebrews 4:15
We serve a God who knows what the human experience is like, and I believe He uses that as a way to connect with us. He’s felt this flesh and known this unspeakable ache inside. Bringing it to the Lord also allowed Him walk me to the next step, to show me what to do with those emotions. I’m a firm believer that difficult emotions go somewhere. When we choose to stuff them down, that doesn’t mean they go away; it means they will come out at a later time, often in much uglier ways. Acknowledging those emotions and letting myself feel the feelings allows them have their place in my human experience. That’s where the growth of life happens.
The friction created by my raw human experience colliding against the knowledge of Heaven is where spiritual granite is formed. Rock solid foundations are laid as we allow Jesus to walk us through our stony emotions step by step closer to heaven.
The friction created by my raw human experience colliding against the knowledge of Heaven is where spiritual granite is formed.
When things are painful in my life now, I often pray, “Lord, let me not waste this. Show me how You can use this pain to bring me closer to Your heart.”
God works deep miracles when I bring Him my pain and disappointment. He offers us the opportunity to rediscover the Truth in our relationship: the Gospel Truth that God is for us and that He is good.
Have you found this to be true in your walk with God? Have you ever watched Him take your negative emotions and turn them to riches of relationship? Tell me how in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.