Saturday, October 15, 2016

How God Meets and Grows Us Through Our Emotions

Why does my heart feel so bad? Why does my soul feel so bad? Oh the pain… enough of this! It’s okay. I can find comfort. I can find an escape
No. There’s an opportunity cost in denying our rawest emotions, or bypassing them through cynicism.
The opportunity we miss is a deeper, more intense connection with the Spirit of God. Intimacy through pain, treasure through adversity, blessed favour through weakness.
The point of the starkest emotions is that they break us down. Our emotions level us sufficiently, that in our surrender, in the loneliest depths of our being, God ministers His gentle, salubrious, gracious Presence into the nodules of our spirit, healing us spiritually in our soul. This healing requires the discretional capitulation of every defence to allow God comprehensive access to our vulnerability. It cannot work otherwise than by the access-all-areas gate pass of the purest trust of faith.
A deeper relationship with our relational God is secured through deeper connection via the truthful expression of our emotions. The lonelier we happen to be, the better.
Adversity is a vehicle to get us into the emotional state of ego’s renunciation.
This is, I’m sure, why God gave us David’s laments, Job’s travails, Lamentations, 2 Corinthians, and the like. We need to read something of God’s spiritual ministry when we’re at our lowest emotional ebb. True to life, without cause for escape, the great biblical characters had to cling to God. If we only had victory stories in the Bible we would be sorely ill-equipped to receive the Lord’s spiritual healing. But God shows us in His Word just exactly how the heroes of faith received spiritual encouragement — by being open to Him, emotionally.
How peculiar: God uses adversity to force us to trust Him in our emotional need which grows us spiritually.
May God truly bless you as you eagerly expect an encounter with Him when you’re crippled by adversity,
Steve Wickham.

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