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All three of these ladies have self-diagnosed themselves as struggling with their emotions. They have convinced themselves that they have emotional problems. All three of them are most definitely struggling with something, but none of them have emotional problems in the way they think they do. Their emotions are working fine—just as God designed them to work. Their emotions are working well enough to signal that something is amiss in their lives. This ability to perceive what is happening in and around you is a mercy from the Lord.
The real issue for these ladies is not primarily about their emotions but about their thought life and thinking habits. Emotions cannot be damaged or abused. Unfortunately, our psychologized culture has made many crucial inroads regarding the way many Christians think about emotions. For example, abusing emotions could be analogous to abusing smoke. If I tried to harm smoke, I suppose I could wield a ball bat and take a swing at some smoke. According to secular theorists, I would be a smoke abuser.
Smoke abuse, like emotional abuse, is impossible. If you buy into the term emotional abuse, you’ll have to look outside the Bible for help, which will be futile. But, if you want to stop unwanted emotional fluctuations in your life, you will need to discern the real source of those up and down emotions, which is always in a person’s thought patterns. This worldview regarding Mable, Marge, and Mildred is life-changing: it addresses their thoughts and stabilizes their emotions.
Let’s pretend you were casually walking across a busy intersection downtown. Then, out of nowhere, a speeding car whizzes by you, going 55 MPH. Your eyes widen, your heart races, and you quickly jump back in horror. From an emotional perspective, you’re a mess. What triggered your emotions? It was your racing thoughts that amplified in a nanosecond and went in five different directions at once. As for your emotions? They were working as God intended. Your emotions were responding to how you were thinking at that intersection.
How about this: you just received a phone call saying you won a brand-new digital tablet. Now, you’re the celebrating one rather than the terrified tourist in the prior illustration. You shriek and bolt upstairs to let your spouse know the good news. You are ecstatic. Again, your emotions are working well and are consistent with your celebratory thoughts. Perhaps you received another phone call that was not as pleasant. Someone just informed you that a family member passed away in the early morning hours. You end the call and sit sadly on the edge of your bed, reflecting. In all three of these case studies, your emotions are reacting to your thoughts, which is normal because emotions are always normal, and so are yours.
Of course, there are times when your emotions are not helpful and need to change. The process for doing this begins by tracing the emotion back to your thought life. It is in your thoughts where your emotions originate. Here is another illustration: suppose you held a rock about the size of your fist above your head. You release the rock. It falls to the ground. You would not suggest that you had a gravity problem. Gravity does what gravity always does. Gravity is being itself, which is also the nature of emotions: they do what they are supposed to do. It’s a psychological law: thinking produces comparable and proportional emotions.
Some thoughts can lead to unpleasant emotions. In such cases, the person must begin to change their thinking to have better emotional responses. A happy person is merry in his heart. A habitually angry person has a bitter heart. We are true to ourselves: what we show on the outside is what we are on the inside (Luke 6:43-45; Proverbs 23:7). If you want to change your emotional outside self, you must first adjust your thinking on the inside. For example, here is a list of bad emotions (or reactions) that point to an unbiblical thought life.
Pouting: The pouting person is using a manipulating emotion to show that he is not getting his way. When you see a person pouting, you should immediately know what he is thinking. Anger and manipulation are working in his thought life. If this is a child, it would be easy to respond to him wrongly by giving him the thing that he is manipulating you to give him. The better response to the pouter is to identify what is going on in his mind. More than likely, his thoughts are not biblical. He has a worship disorder that tempts him to cave to his selfish desires rather than esteem others more significantly than himself (Philippians 2:3). You will need to call him to repentance. If you don’t, you could validate this type of behavior, which would motivate him to employ it regularly to satisfy all of his selfish thoughts.
Conviction: This kind of emotional manifestation is from a person who is feeling terrible about what he has done. He needs explicit biblical intervention. Several things could be going on in their mind. If it is an unbiblical conviction—he is not guilty of anything—he must remove it because it is not from God. There are many Christians who are weighed down by self-imposed forms of guilty regret for things that have happened in their past, whether it was because of them or because of someone else. It is common for parents to rear their children improperly because of lingering guilt that remains in their lives. They parent their children from a position of fear because they feel they have displeased God in some way.
Maybe they had an unbiblical divorce, or the marriage dissolution was not primarily their fault. Rather than living in the freedom of God’s forgiveness, they over-compensate and spoil their child by giving him whatever he wants. This tactic is the parent’s way of paying for what they did to the child because of the divorce. You might hear them say, “I’ve asked God to forgive me many times for what I did.” The practicalization of the gospel is not real to them. They can’t believe God will forgive them by merely asking. God’s grace is sufficient, no matter what they did. But because of their poor theology, they feel a sense of conviction that is a product of their thinking rather than from the Spirit of God.
Anger: The angry person typically is manipulative. Most of the time, he uses his angry emotions to regain control of his world. If you fall prey to his emotion, you will respond precisely how he wants you to respond—in fear—and give in to his manipulations. But suppose the situation permits you to confront him because you know you are not in harm’s way. In that case, you may be able to help him understand the corrupted thinking that motivates him to manipulate others emotionally.
You want to speak into his thought life. I realize that in many of these types of situations, which primarily involve women, this redemptive option is not an option. Typically, the wife needs to contact her pastor or other spiritual authority for help. The angry man is playing god. Rather than placing his trust in the Lord to bring about a specific desire, he chooses to circumvent God’s way for his sinful purposes. He can—and might—use any means necessary to justify his position while blaming you for what is wrong. Anger is a form of insanity: it’s not in line with a biblical mind. It is also a manifestation of insecurity or what the Bible calls fear of man (Proverbs 29:25).
Despair: This is the emotion of the hopeless. According to the discouraged person’s thinking, they have lost all hope, and what you are observing by their sad emotional response are forms of despair, grief, worry, or depression. Typically, the despairing person didn’t fall into the ditch of despair without a long trail leading to it. It is usually the accumulative effect of many years of poor thinking that has gone unchecked. It is hard to discern this kind of thinking because a person who allows their thoughts to run along these lines for years is not usually forthcoming about what they have been thinking about due to embarrassment.
You may not be aware of how they have been processing things until full-fledged despair has overtaken them. When helping a person like this, you must remember that you will need to be patient but firm with them (1 Thessalonians 5:14). Don’t let their emotional despair override your care. You may be tempted to coddle the discouraged person when what they need is compassionate, faith-filled, and courageous grace.
Jealousy: This attitude is another form of anger. The jealous thinker is upset about something they are not receiving. They have a coveting thought life, and what you observe on the emotional outside is a jealous attitude of the mind. This struggler does not need your coddling; they need you to bring them back to the cross of Christ. How can the jealous thinking coveter continue in his coveting while responding to the cross? His thoughts need a crucial recalibrated gospel reorientation.
Fear: This emotional attitude of the heart is the most common emotion of them all. “Do not fear” is the oft-repeated command or appeal in the Bible. Our entire Adamic makeup stands upon the fear/unbelief dynamic that can run wild in our minds. We are born fearful, and we express our fears emotionally. No person can escape this emotion altogether. While at times it can serve us well, as in the case of the terrified tourist, it can also be our worst enemy. The fear-based person needs the gospel just like all of the other people that I have described in this shortlist of dangerous emotions. And what does fear say about our thinking? It means we are not trusting God.
“Do not fear, trust me.”
These five words can transform you. All of God’s servants have yielded to fearful temptations, but God is greater than all of our shortcomings. If God is for you, then who can be against you (Romans 8:31)? When you are struggling with doubt and fear, merely utter these simple but potent five words. I realize it will take more work than a mantra, but minimally, it is a good start. Go ahead and say them now: “Do not fear, trust me.” You must know that God is entirely trustworthy no matter what you may be going through at any given moment. Repeat this truth often. Let it transform your mind and massage your soul: Do not fear; trust God!
When caring for your friends, don’t become confused by what you observe behaviorally. Let what you see be clues that take you deeper into their hearts—to their minds. Start with their emotions and move inward to what they are thinking. Once you get into their thought life, ask God to give you the discernment to truly understand what they are thinking and how their thoughts are affecting them. Solving wrong thinking in one meeting would be rare. Often, this type of work takes several meetings, many people, and different contexts to practically speak into a person’s life who has had their thinking shaped in unbiblical ways for years. Paul’s exhortation in 1 Thessalonians has been meaningful to me as I think about people who need long-term biblical care:
And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all (1 Thessalonians 5:14).
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).
