FEELINGS

Opinions and beliefs are meant to be evaluated in the light of truth. What did happen? What do you think and believe? How do you judge people or your situation? Finally, is what you think true and righteous, or false and sinful? Instead of posing these sorts of questions, “I feel that...” ducks conscious evaluation of my ideas and judgments. What I feel just is. True-for-me replaces truth. The Bible has devastating things to say about leaning on your own understanding, about being wise in your own eyes, about the way that seems right to a man, and about people who delight in airing their opinions (see Prov. 3:5; 3:7; 14:12; 18:2).

David Powlison

Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers, 2003, p. 213-214.

This use of feeling is also fuzzy and problematic. It loads implicit authority into our impulses, desires, intentions, choices, expectations, and fears. Far from being givens to obey, these are meant to be examined biblically. The words “I feel like” often obscure our responsibility for our desires. People act as if their “feel likes” were authoritative impulses! Deceptive desires determine choices.

David Powlison

Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers, 2003, p. 214.

The Bible teaches us that our “feel likes” are frequently desires of the flesh. Most of our “felt needs” are idolatrous desires. They are meant to be killed by the Spirit, not indulged. Such is the way of life, freedom, wisdom, and joy in Christ.

David Powlison

Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers, 2003, p. 214.

The ambiguous words “I feel” are commonly used in four distinct ways. The phrase speaks of experience, emotions, thoughts, or desires. Serious problems arise because the word is typically loaded with authority: “If I feel it, then it’s inherently true, right, and valid.” Clear biblical thinking pierces the fog of ambiguity and authority that wraps itself around “feelings.” As minds and hearts are renewed by the Spirit’s life-giving truth, everything about us is touched.

David Powlison

Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers, 2003, p. 216.

Believe God’s love and power more than you believe your own feelings and experiences. Your rock is Christ, and it is not the rock that ebbs and flows but the sea.

Samuel Rutherford

Where there is no “moral gravity” – that is, no force that draws us to the center – there is spiritual weightlessness. We float on feelings that will carry us where we never meant to go; we bubble with emotional experiences that we often take for spiritual ones; and we are puffed up with pride. Instead of seriousness, there is foolishness. Instead of gravity, flippancy. Sentimentality takes the place of theology. Our reference point will never serve to keep our feet on solid rock, for our reference point, until we answer God’s call, is merely ourselves. We cannot possibly tell which end is up. Paul calls them fools who “…measure themselves by themselves, to find in themselves their own standard of comparison!”

Elisabeth Elliot

Discipline – The Glad Surrender, Revell, 1982, p. 19-20.

It is Christ who is to be exalted, not our feelings. We will know Him by obedience, not by emotions. Our love will be shown by obedience, not by how good we feel about God at a given moment. “And love means following the commands of God.” “Do you love Me?” Jesus asked Peter. “Feed My lambs.” He was not asking, “How do you feel about Me?” for love is not a feeling. He was asking for action.

Elisabeth Elliot

Discipline – The Glad Surrender, Revell, 1982, p. 148.

[Many] falsely suppose that the feelings, which God has implanted in us as natural, proceed only from a defect. Accordingly the perfecting of believers does not depend on their casting off all feelings, but on their yielding to them and controlling them, only for proper reason.

John Calvin

Commentary on Acts 20:37.

Feelings must be engaged. They are meant to be involved… [Yet] our danger is to submit ourselves to our feelings and to allow them to dictate to us, to govern and to master us and to control the whole of our lives.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Spiritual Depression – Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 110, 112, Used by Permission from Elizabeth Catherwood (daughter).

I must never ask myself in the first instance: What do I feel about this? The first question is, Do I believe it? Do I accept it, has it gripped me?

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Spiritual Depression – Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 115, Used by Permission from Elizabeth Catherwood (daughter).

We must not concentrate overmuch upon our feelings. Do not spend too much time feeling your own pulse taking your own spiritual temperature, do not spend too much time analyzing your feelings. That is the high road to morbidity.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Spiritual Depression – Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 115, Used by Permission from Elizabeth Catherwood (daughter).

Faith, obviously, is not a mere matter of feeling. It cannot be, because one’s feelings in this kind of condition can be very changeable. A Christian is not meant to be dejected when everything goes wrong. He is told to “rejoice”. Feelings belong to happiness alone, rejoicing takes in something much bigger than feelings; and if faith were a matter of feelings only, then when things go wrong and feelings change, faith will go. But faith is not a matter of feelings only, faith takes up the whole man including his mind, his intellect and his understanding. It is response to truth.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Spiritual Depression – Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 142, Used by Permission from Elizabeth Catherwood (daughter).

There is great value to us of becoming more deeply emotional over the great issues of our faith. Our age is not deep enough in feelings. Biblical men are depicted as weeping copious tears, as sighing and groaning, as on occasion rejoicing with ecstasy. They were ravished by the very idea of God. They had a passion for Jesus Christ – His person, offices, names, titles, words and works. It is our shame to be so cold, unfeeling and unemotional in spite of all that God has done to us and for us in Christ.

Maurice Roberts

Are We Becoming Reformed Men? Issue 330, March 1991, p. 5, by permission Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA.

We should understand that the subjective depends on the objective. Right emotions depend on, and derive from, sound doctrine.

D.G. Heart
How Does Hell Glorify God? © 9Marks. Website: www.9Marks.org. Email: info@9marks.org. Toll Free: (888) 543-1030. Used by Permission.

You should not believe your conscience and your feelings more than the Word which the Lord who receives sinners preaches to you.

Martin Luther

“We think with our feelings,” Sinclair Ferguson has said. It’s true. We allow our feelings to guide our thinking and we shouldn’t. Emotions are a wonderful gift from God. And our relationship with God should bring to our lives strong godly affections. However, our emotions shouldn’t be vested with final authority. This should be reserved for God’s Word alone.

C.J. Mahaney

The Cross Centered Life, 2002, Sovereign Grace Ministries, p. 48. Used by permission of Multnomah Publishers, Inc. Excerpts may not be reproduced without prior written consent of Multnomah Publishers, Inc.

On a daily basis we’re faced with two simple choices. We can either listen to ourselves and our constantly changing feelings about our circumstances, or we can talk to ourselves about the unchanging truth of who God is and what He’s accomplished for us at the cross. Far too often we choose to passively listen to ourselves. We sit back and let our view of God and life be shaped by our constantly shifting feelings about our ever-changing circumstances.

C.J. Mahaney

The Cross Centered Life, 2002, Sovereign Grace Ministries, p. 47. Used by permission of Multnomah Publishers, Inc. Excerpts may not be reproduced without prior written consent of Multnomah Publishers, Inc.

There is nothing so deluding as feelings. Christians cannot live by feelings. Let me further tell you that these feelings are the work of Satan, for they are not right feelings. What right have you to set up your feelings against the Word of Christ.

C.H. Spurgeon

The human spirit contains our minds and our emotions. Our emotions should never be allowed to rule over our minds. We see too much of that today in what I would label “mindless Christianity.” That eventually leads to hazy theology and ultimately into mysticism.

Curtis C. Thomas

Practical Wisdom for Pastors, Crossway Books, 2001, p. 66.

I declare I know of no state of soul more dangerous than to imagine we are born again and sanctified by the Holy Ghost, because we have picked up a few religious feelings.

J.C. Ryle

We must never forget that good feelings alone in religion are not the grace of God. We may know the truth intellectually. We may often feel pierced in conscience. We may have religious affections awakened within us, have many anxieties about our souls, and shed many tears. But all this is not conversion. It is not the genuine, saving work of the Holy Spirit.

J.C. Ryle
Commentary, Matthew 19.

Measure not God’s love and favour by your own feeling. The sun shines as clearly in the darkest day as it does in the brightest. The difference is not in the sun, but in some clouds which hinder the manifestation of the light thereof.

Richard Sibbes

A Puritan Golden Treasury, compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 89.

In an authentic spiritual experience, emotion, feelings, and the senses often become intense, transcending the normal. These may include strong feelings of remorse over sin, a mighty sense of trust that surpasses the pain of a traumatic situation, an overpowering peace in the midst of trouble, the overwhelming sense of joy related to confidence and hope in God, intense sorrow over the lost, the exhilarating praise in understanding the glory of God, or a heightened zeal for ministry. Spiritual experience by definition is an internal awareness that involves strong emotion in response to the truth of God’s Word, amplified by the Holy Spirit and applied by Him to us personally.

John MacArthur

Charismatic Chaos, Zondervan, 1992, p. 26.

You are certainly not to order your life according to your feelings. A conscience fixed on feelings becomes unreliable. If you are subject to depression and melancholy, you of all people should not allow your conscience to be informed by your feelings. Despondent feelings will provoke unnecessary doubts and fears in the soul when not kept in check by a well-advised conscience. The conscience must be persuaded by God’s Word, not by your feelings.

John MacArthur

Feelings are a poor foundation for marriage, but they can be a wonderful, glorious by-product.

John MacArthur

Matthew 16-23, Moody, 1988, p. 174.

Sight is not faith, and hearing is not faith, neither is feeling faith; but believing when we neither see, hear, nor feel is faith; and everywhere the Bible tells us our salvation is to be by faith. Therefore we must believe before we feel, and often against our feelings, if we would honor God by our faith.

Hannah Whitall Smith

We must stress that the basis for our faith is neither experience nor emotion but the truth as God has given it in verbalized, prepositional form in the Scripture and which we first of all apprehend with our minds.

Francis Schaeffer

The New Super-Spirituality, IVP, 1972, p. 24.

We must not allow our emotions to hold sway over our minds. Rather, we must seek to let the truth of God rule our minds. Our emotions must become subservient to the truth.

Jerry Bridges

As we feel the calamities of war more than the pleasures of peace, and diseases more than the quietness of health, and the hardness of poverty more than the commodities of abundance; even so we ought not to marvel if we feel the stingings and pricks of sin a great deal more than the consolations of the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

Daniel Cawdray

A Puritan Golden Treasury, compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 89.

Throughout the history of the church, emotions were always viewed with suspicion because they could vacillate so wildly. Now they are praised. Too often they are the standards by which we make judgments.

Edward T. Welch

When People are Big and God is Small, P&R Publishing, 1997, p. 84. Used by Permission.

Feelings have become the inarticulate mutterings of the divine soul: To be morally upright is to do whatever your heart inspires you to do. When following inner impulses, this assumption declares we can do no wrong.

Edward T. Welch

When People are Big and God is Small, P&R Publishing, 1997, p. 81. Used by Permission.

When feelings become more important than faith, people will become more important, and God will become less important.

Edward T. Welch

When People are Big and God is Small, P&R Publishing, 1997, p. 84. Used by Permission.

Suppose you have been outside in extremely cold temperatures, only then to enter the home of a friend who offers you a glass of brandy. A few minutes after drinking it, you become conscious of a feeling of warmth and attribute it to the alcohol. The fact is, the alcohol will actually make you colder. It has for the moment caused your blood vessels to dilate giving you the impression that your body is producing heat. In point of fact, it is losing heat. You may feel you are warming up, but in reality you are cooling down. Your feelings have led you astray. An observer knowledgeable about the effects of alcohol could tell you what was really happening. But if you are relying on your feelings you would reject his conclusions. So, too, in the spiritual realm, feelings can often deceive us as to the true state of affairs. We must have an external reference point or standard of objective truth by which feelings may be evaluated and judged… All subjective states of mind and emotion must be brought under the searchlight of the objective principles of God's written Word.

Sam Storms
Dangers of Intimacy, November 8, 2006, www.enjoyinggodministries.com. Used by Permission.

Tragically, though, many have become so enamored by their intimacy with God that they interpret their subjective states of mind and emotion as infallible indicators of truth. Worse still, some have concluded that because of the depths of intimacy they experience with God that objective revelation is no longer essential; it can be discarded in favor of immediacy of communion and communication with God.

Sam Storms
Dangers of Intimacy, November 8, 2006, www.enjoyinggodministries.com. Used by Permission.

Resolved, whenever my feelings begin to appear in the least out of order, when I am conscious of the least uneasiness within, or the least irregularity without, I will then subject myself to the strictest examination. July 4, and 13, 1723.

Jonathan Edwards

Resolution Number 60.