Winston Smith – Feeling Bad about Feeling Bad? (#CCEF16 Main Session 1)

Our negative emotions are designed to deepen our relationship with Christ and to each other.

Winston Smith opened the 2016 CCEF conference by focusing our attention on so called “negative” emotions.  Consider anger, sadness, grief, anxiety, or stress. Winston asked us if we ever felt bad about feeling bad. “Do you ever feel bad about feeling bad? Do you get angry at yourself for getting angry? Do you feel shame for feeling bad?”  Our attitudes toward our emotions impact how we experience them.

Winston explained that Christians often consider “negative” emotions as evidence of spiritual failure, as if we have lost sight of the gospel. But we shouldn’t think this way. “Our negative emotions are designed to deepen our relationship with Christ and to each other.”

Winston took us to the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in John 11. Jesus’ emotions in the story reveal his divinity, not just his humanity. Understanding that narrative as an expression of his divinity, not just his humanity, gives us an important glimpse of ourselves because we are created in God’s image. Negative emotions are part of the way we reflect the glory and image of God, being mirrors of God’s heart.

From the beginning of the story, God’s purposes are there. Jesus tarries four days, so that Lazarus may die, so that his glory may be revealed in raising him from the dead. We know that there is going to be a happy ending. Within minutes there is going to be intense joy and celebration.

And yet when Jesus saw Mary weeping, and the Jews weeping, He was “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.” He experiences an emotional storm, not just sadness. Jesus knows the ending of the story, and yet Jesus weeps and grieves and is in anguish. His tears are not a weakening of resolve, not a crack in his faith, not a moment of doubt. “Jesus has come face to face with the ugliness of sin and death. He can see it on his friend’s faces and hear it in their own cries and he can see it in their tears.” The reality of the brokenness of the world is facing Him face to face. Jesus is emotional. He weeps.

How would we counsel Jesus in his grief? Would we be tempted to see his emotional anguish as weakness? But praise the Lord that we have a God that is not only intellectually there, but emotionally there as well.

In one sense, as Christians, knowing God’s will and being aware of His purposes and glory actually intensifies our grief. It intensifies our sorrow because the ugliness and wrongness of sin becomes even uglier. We know this is not the way it was meant to be.

Praise the Lord that He is engaged in our plight. The God who is revealed in Lazarus’s story is the same God who warns Israel of her sins and warns her to repent. This is the same God who laments Jerusalem’s destruction in Jeremiah and Lamentations. “God loves us and hates sin. He hates it’s effect on creation and our lives.”

It is the nature of love to be fully engaged in the welfare of the other. God is love. And Jesus is Immanuel, love with us. And that love with us is going to be emotionally engaged with our welfare.

The thought of God having emotions can be unsettling for us. We often experience strong emotion as a bad thing. We can be pushed around and led by our emotions. “Our emotions can take us places and bid us to do things we know we shouldn’t do… But God is never pushed or led by his emotions.” God is not ruled by his emotions. “God’s emotions, whether anger, sorrow, or joy are perfect expressions of his holy character and his loving purposes.” We don’t need to defend God by denying his emotions. Rather, we should understand that they are different from us in expressions of his character and perfect love.

The more we share in God’s image, the more we have clarity about sin and the experience of the curse, and the more we will experience more intensely the wrongness of the wrong.

As we grow in Christ, we should expect, anticipate, and understand that the Christian life is a calling to feel “negative” emotions. Like God himself, we are to be moved by the state of brokenness and sin. This is what love and the gospel is about.  God enters into our pain. Praise the Lord who took action, entering into our world, because of his great love.

<< The rest of the conference will speak about how to engage our emotions, and connect with God in our emotions.  View the other CCEF16 main session summaries here. >>