You are visitor: In Scotland the time is:
Christian Network

For several years I have wanted to preach on healthy emotions. I think the Bible has something to say about it. But I think women in particular need to hear what the Bible says. It seems that there something about society that drives women to have a less than an ideal view of themselves.

First I want us to understand that emotions are good. Sometimes we need to feel anxious or shame or anger. These are appropriate emotions on the appropriate occasions. But sometimes our emotions can get out of control. When I was younger, I had a lot of trouble with anger, with my temper. I would fight at the drop of a hat. I did not care how big a guy was; I found a baseball bat was a great equalizer. I also had trouble with shyness and all that goes along with it. I can’t say that I am perfect in any area emotionally but I can tell you that God has taken me a long way from where I was. I am convinced that God can do it for anyone. If we believe that God sets us free from our sin, then we need to also believe that God can set us free from negative emotions that tend to hurt us and keep us from true happiness.

My observation of people leads me to believe that we live our lives on three levels: the level of the spirit, the level of the soul and the level of the body. This can be represented by a pyramid. The Spiritual level is the foundation of life. The middle level is the soul level. The soul level is our thought world where we argue with our self. The top level, the body level, represents our social world, our world of interaction with others. The top of the pyramid is like an iceberg. While the social world is what we see most, it is only a small part and the largest and most important parts lie below the surface.

Often, we put the most emphasis on the outer world, the world of the body, that aspect of our lives that deals with what we want others to think of us. We appear to each other in this fashion. We see what the person wants us to see. We play this social game. We want others to see how cool we are or well put together or how talented we are. Sometimes we want others to see how heroically we have suffered in life and how noble we are in our suffering. It is like makeup or clothes; the image we present to the world is designed to make people think this is who we are. It is probably the most false view of a person we can have.

But, our view of our selves can be just as false. It is the nature of sinful men and women to not get it right. We have either a too high or too low view of ourselves. Sometimes we think we are so good, smart, intelligent, wise, good looking, fortunate, hip, cool, and whatever adjective you might use.

Likewise we can have a very negative view of ourselves. We can think we are unworthy or helpless. We can think of ourselves as ugly and undesirable to others. We can see our selves as inadequate, worthless, hardly good for anything. I have a feeling that many women live with these kinds of negative attitudes. I have known a few haughty women in life but I have seen a whole lot more for whom life has taught them that they were of low value. They suffered from poor self-esteem and a very poor self-view. Sometimes absolutely beautiful women, women who seem to have everything, feel badly about themselves.

The question is, who are you really? The spiritual level is the place that most of us are afraid to go. We don’t want to look. Yet, this level affects what we think of ourselves and what we want others to think of us. It is in the spiritual realm where we interact with God and it is our relationship to God that affects all other areas of our lives.

I am convinced that most of our emotional troubles, excluding those organic diseases that involved biochemical disorders, are caused by our lack of relationship to Jesus on this spiritual level. How emotionally mature we are, determines how open we are to new experiences and to change. It determines our ability to show others mercy and grace and even our ability to love others and live in peace. And, our emotional maturity will determine whether or not we are able to confess our sins and accept and grant forgiveness or otherwise live life in anxiety and depression, anger, hostility and vulnerability.

You may be asking now what this has to do with the demon possessed man and I hope to tie them together. I don’t know too much about demon possession and I have never seen anyone demon possessed. I know that it occurs rarely in the Bible. I believe that it is possible to be demon possessed but I think it is rare even today. The Bible teaches that Christians cannot be demon possessed. Christians, your body is the temple of God, how can a demon live where the Holy Spirit lives? And finally, I don’t believe that anyone can be accidentally demon possessed. I believe it is a willful act. This man had dealt with evil so long that somewhere he accepted Satan as his lord.

I have to tell you, this man was no hypocrite. What he wanted you to see, what he thought of himself was exactly as what he was at the core of his being. He ran naked through the neighborhood. He howled and cried out like an animal. He wore the chains that others had tried to use to hold him down. He was stunningly evil and his sin had driven him completely crazy. His insanity was the result of his demon possession. They are not the same. And no, I am not saying that all mental illness is caused by demon possession.

If there was ever anyone who was beyond the pale of all hope, it was this man. But, Jesus came to the man. Upon meeting the man, Jesus recognized that he was possessed and began to command the spirits to leave him. When evil comes into the presence of God, it must flee. There is no compatibility between God and evil. The demons asked to flee into a herd of hogs. Jesus allowed them to and the man was free.

Suddenly, this hopeless man was in his right mind. He was clothed and was praising God. He wanted to follow Jesus but Jesus would not let him. "Go home to your people and show them what great thing the Lord has done." Go be a witness to his grace and mercy. If Jesus can cast out demons and heal this man’s mind, he can do wonders for our emotions.

We have to meet Jesus in that spiritual place, that place where we don’t like to go. We have to meet him in honesty because he really knows us. It is there, on a daily basis that we die to ourselves and become alive in Christ. And we do this over and over again until Jesus has reconfigured our emotions. Jesus was the most put together human that ever lived. He was perfect in every way, including his emotions. When we die to ourselves and become alive in Christ, we can begin to take on his emotional stability. It may not happen over night. But, wouldn’t you rather have Jesus direct your emotional development than the various elements that have caused you so much trouble?

We need to place our trust in Jesus and struggle with him daily turning over even our emotions to him. We need to stop paying attention to what we want others to think of us and even what we think of ourselves and concentrate on what God will make of us. This struck me as a very liberating idea last week as we looked at Paul in 1 Corinthians 4. Paul said that the Corinthians had no right to judge him. Then he said that he does not even judge himself. What a liberating idea! He had placed his confidence in Jesus. He was too busy pursuing after Jesus to waste time on what others judged him to be or what he judged himself to be. He said he belonged to Christ and no one has the right to judge the servant of another. He did not even have the right to judge himself.

The answer to emotional health is for us to daily live for Christ and to pursue him, to turn even our emotions over to him so that he can transform us. Jesus is Lord; he is master even of our emotions. So, there is no reason why we can’t trade our sorrows and our shame for the joy of the Lord. It is a matter of saying the yes of faith to the one who has redeemed us. Yes, Lord Yes. [The sermon ended with the choir singing Trading My Sorrows]