Feeling Saved: More than Mere Tingle and Mush, Emotions Play an Important Role in Firming up Our Faith

RICHARD FOWLERRichard Fowler is director of the Minirth-Meier Clinic of Longview, Texas.

When I was in graduate school I had the opportunity to share my faith with a classmate. As I relayed to my friend his need for personally accepting Christ as Savior and Lord, he asked, “Am I supposed to feel any different if I trust Christ?”

I promptly read to him the section in Campus Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws” booklet entitled “Do Not Depend on Feelings.” It reads, “The promise of God’s Word, not our feelings, is our authority.… We, as Christians, do not depend on feelings or emotions, but we place our faith (trust) in the trustworthiness of God and the promises of His Word.”

The booklet goes on to describe the analogy of the engine, the coal car, and the caboose. The engine is the fact of God and his Word; the coal car is our faith or trust; whereas the caboose is our feelings or emotions. The section concludes by saying that “the train will run with or without the caboose” and that “it would be futile to attempt to pull the train by the caboose.” At the time, I thought it summed everything up rather nicely.

Several years ago, however, I was challenged by a Christian psychologist to rethink this analogy. He felt the popular Christian premise that we should not listen to our emotions when making decisions assumes that emotions are merely psychological “highs” or irrational states of elation that elicit “tingly” and “mushy” feelings inside. My friend believed that most evangelicals do not understand how emotions work and thus downplay their importance. He was convinced that emotions, in fact, play a crucial part in our finding God. I decided to take him up on his challenge.

The Marriage Of Left And Right

An important angle to this long-debated issue fell into place as I began to research the functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Scientists have discovered that, generally speaking, the right side of the brain controls our emotions, our creativity, and our subjective thinking, while pattern and logical thinking are characteristic of the left side.

Since the right side of the brain controls intuition, artistic expression, and emotional reactions to situations, it also controls our sensitivity to people. Further, the right side of the brain seems to be very important in solidifying facts into our conscious memory. For example, I can recall exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard that President Kennedy was assassinated. The same is true for my memory of the space shuttle tragedy. However, there are many other important national and political events that cannot be so quickly and vividly drawn to mind. I remember every detail of the assassination and the crash because of the great emotional impact they carried for me. The right side of my brain functioned simultaneously with the left and indelibly etched all the data concerning these events.

It seems that the left and right sides of the brain, the cognitive and the emotional, work together to anchor an event securely in our minds.

Rediscovering Our Hearts

With scientific discovery in hand, I decided to look to the Scriptures to see what is said on the matter. I was surprised to find that my new insights were actually a few thousand years old. The idea that our will, intellect, and emotions do and should work together is embedded in the very common biblical concept of the heart.

The biblical words for heart connote “the thoughts or feelings of the mind.” Scripture sees the heart as what actually controls our will and intellect and integrates them with our emotions. In Jesus’ comments to the highly religious Pharisees, we see this usage borne out: “You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied against you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts [thoughts, actions, and emotions] are far from me’ ” (Matt. 15:7–8, NIV).

When you bake a cake, you first mix up all the ingredients. After the cake is cooled and ready to eat, there is no way to separate the ingredients again. The same is true with the heart: It brings together our will, intellect, and emotions; but once it uses these to bring about some action or decision, there is no way to go back and identify the separate ingredients. In a deep and mysterious way our heart represents our whole self. Solomon wrote, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life” (Prov. 4:23, NIV).

We can also see the importance of the heart in a negative example from Exodus 10. We are told that Pharaoh had a “hardened heart.” Though he saw what was happening, and could say, “I repent” with his will and reason, and though he could hear the groanings of his people (the use of all his faculties), Scripture says his heart would not change.

The apostle Paul also saw a need for an intellectual as well as an emotional affirmation in order to solidify our salvation experience when he stated, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved” (Rom. 10:9–10, NIV). In other words, our belief emerges from our hearts, where our intellect and our emotions work together.

The Heart Express

So how would I now answer my friend if he asked whether or not he should feel anything when he puts his trust in Christ? Piggybacking on the train illustration, I believe a more helpful picture can be drawn.

In our experience of faith, the engine could represent our will or intellect (instead of facts). The coal car can represent our emotions. Just as an engine does not move without fuel, so our intellect dries up and becomes lifeless without emotional support. And just as a coal car cannot pull a train by itself, likewise our emotions are directionless and lead us nowhere without the balance of our intellect. But when the heart brings these elements together, the wonder of combustion and movement occurs.

So what happened to the caboose? The caboose to this train is works (instead of emotions). We always want and expect to see the caboose on a train. It is a little disappointing to watch a train go by and not see the caboose. In the same way, we expect to see good works in the life of the believer. They belong there. While they can never pull us to heaven, their rightful place is following the engine and coal car.

So it is in our lives. When our will and intellect join hands with our emotions, the spark of faith is kindled and a glorious journey down the tracks of the Truth of God’s Word is begun. The unalterable destination is heaven.

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