Renewing Our Feelings

Sermon Text:
1 John 4:7-21

Excerpt
Feelings are essential to life. God made us to feel and to feel deeply. Jesus is a person of deep feeling. He was “fightin’ mad” when He cleared the Temple, He openly wept at the tomb of His close friend Lazarus, and in His anxiety, He sweat drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Feelings, per se, are not the problem. There are at least two challenges with regard to feelings. One challenge is not to be ruled by our feelings. The other challenge is to learn to cultivate the feelings that ought to characterize us as followers of Jesus.

This may be a new idea for some of us: that we can and must learn to cultivate specific feelings. But this is a hopeful discovery particularly for those of us who struggle with negative or destructive feelings. With God’s help, we can replace destructive feelings with the good feelings that flow from our relationships with Jesus.

In the transforming of our feelings, we must realize feelings cannot be changed by a direct act of the will.

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