“We need not resign ourselves to stifling or living for emotions. Instead, because Christ restores our emotions, they can work the way God always intended, in harmony with our other faculties. To become emotionally balanced we must guard against these two main errors.”

The Gospel Restores Our Emotions

Emotions have been disrupted by sin, and so we stifle our feelings or seek emotional highs. But sin does not have the final say. The good news is: through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God erases the guilt of our rebellious emotions, empowers us to resist the temptation to sinful emotions, and enables us to express godly emotions (2 Cor. 5:17). By his grace, we can now receive strength and wisdom to deal with our messed up feelings, and Christ has promised to one day give us a glorified body that functions perfectly with our emotions (Phil. 3:21).

Jesus didn’t save us piecemeal or a la carte. He did not redeem our minds and wills only to leave our emotions to rot on the vine of our humanity. All of our faculties were equally corrupted by sin, but all of them are being equally restored, and Christ makes peace between our minds, wills, and emotions.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones exclaimed:

What a gospel! What a glorious message! It can satisfy man’s mind completely, it can move his heart entirely, and it can lead to wholehearted obedience in the realm of the will. That is the gospel. Christ has died that we might be complete men, not merely that parts of us may be saved; not that we might be lop-sided Christians, but that there may be a balanced finality about us. ¹

We need not resign ourselves to stifling or living for emotions. Instead, because Christ restores our emotions, they can work the way God always intended, in harmony with our other faculties. To become emotionally balanced we must guard against these two main errors.

Read More