How To Have Healthy Emotions

Erickson said:

The Christian who desires to be spiritually healthy will give attention to such matters as diet, rest, and exercise. Any attempt to deal with people’s spiritual condition apart from their physical condition and mental and emotional state will be only partially successful, as will any attempt to deal with human emotions apart from people’s relationship to God.

Depending on the level of damage, the healing process may take years. Even if your family and friends can’t fully understand the terror, the aloneness, the pain, and the abuse that you may have experienced, Jesus knows and understands. He wants you to know you are not alone, that He will be with you through the whole process of healing. There is hope for every person who turns to Jesus for healing. Which brings us to my 3rd point, Jesus wants you to be...

3. Delivered by Truth

Because our emotions are intricately linked to our thoughts, beliefs, and judgments, our spiritual and even physical health, it is important to be self-aware. I’m not talking about being self-absorbed but about having a healthy balance in life. If you want a healthy body, you have to eat healthy food and exercise. If you want healthy emotions, you need to feed your mind with truth and exercise your faith.

The point that Erickson is making here is that our emotions will only be truly healthy if we have a genuine relationship with God and His Word. This isn’t merely talking about going to church or Bible study and fellowshipping with people but is talking about having an authentic and intimate relationship with God.

Our minds control our will, our emotions, and direct every action of our lives. That is why it is so important to have the mind of Christ. His truth identifies where we need to be healed. There are people with chemical imbalances, cerebral impairment and mental deficiencies who don’t have control over their minds or emotions and may need psychiatric care and medicine to help them to control their thoughts and there is no shame in this. But even a person who suffers from these maladies can experience God’s love, be renewed in their minds, and delivered by truth.

Think about this:

Jesus lived for us, in our place, the perfect human life, with every emotion in close alignment with the heart of God. And here in the book of Proverbs we have his wisdom for our emotions—our squally emotions, our negative emotions, our dead emotions, our distorted emotions, our upset emotions, our excessive emotions. We need the emotional life of Christ, and he wants to give it to us.

Growth in sanctification brings deliverance to our emotions. When we change the way we think, we change the way we feel. The sanctification of our intellects not only involves growth in wisdom and knowledge. Sanctification means we intentionally identify every useless, godless, discouraging thought that comes into our minds and bring it into obedience to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). In other words, no matter what the thought is or where it came from, God has the final say. When we do this, we will find that our thoughts are more and more the thoughts that God himself imparts to us in his Word.