Hi ~

It’s a super common teaching: Your feelings will lie to you.

And you’re supposed to combat your feelings with FACTS and REASON.

But all that isn’t in the Bible at all. Nope, not there.

You may have been taught that your emotions will lead you astray, away from God and down Satan’s path, so you shouldn’t believe them.

That really never made sense to me (even in the days before I understood trauma), because feelings are just expressing feelings, right? They’re not making a statement of truth or falsehood.

But wait a minute, Rebecca (I hear you say).

I feel like God doesn’t love me. That’s a lie, right? And I should combat it with facts, right?

Yes, for sure lies should be combatted with truth.

But that wasn’t an expression of your feelings.

The expression of your feelings would be, for example, “I feel shame when I think about God looking at me.”

And that leads you to conclude that God doesn’t love you.

Shame is the feeling here. One of the Six Big Negative Emotions that I address in Untwisting Scriptures #3.

Ah! Instead of immediately rebuking yourself for believing a lie (“God doesn’t love me”) you can perhaps gingerly look at or touch that powerful feeling of shame.

Why is it there? Where did it come from?

Perhaps you’ve been taught that your feelings should be the “caboose” in your life and your “faith” should be the train engine.

This means your “truth statements” are supposed to be the engine. That is, your decisions in your intellect.

This didn’t make a lot of sense to me either, because I thought that if you actually believe something to be true, then it would feel true without effort.

For example, I actually believe that when I look out the window, what I see accurately represents the scene I will experience when I walk outside. That feels true without effort.

But there’s often a disconnect between the intellect and the experience. In order to live the kind of Christian life God talks about in the New Testament, those two have to come into alignment.

There is more.

And I’ll talk about it tomorrow.

With you in wanting to understand our emotions,

Rebecca

Untwisting Scriptures at heresthejoy.com

See my Untwisting Scriptures series

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