God Shares His Emotions with Us

Jesus wept

John 11:35

To know God is to experience God. The meaning of the word ‘know’ involves a vulnerable engagement with God in such a way that we experience Him, feel Him, are touched by Him and we are different because of it.

We are not minds who have the optional capacity to feel. We are actually beings that were made to feel who have the added capacity to think. Love requires a vulnerability to life that can only truly be understood at a feeling level.

Our educational model is so limiting that we say, ‘I think, therefore I am’. We are alive because we can think. Yes, our mind is a wonderful thing and we must use it, but it is only fully alive and functioning when it is helping us explain the treasures of the heart, which are, in essence, emotional.

When you read the history of God at work among humanity, you see great emotions as He shares His life with us. As you read the gospels, you see Jesus, the expression of God, fully present in His emotions. God gives us His word in story form so that we might clearly see the emotions of all the characters through the story. For story’s, if anything, are the containers in which the emotional life (values) of people is shared and understood.

The reason we are uncomfortable with emotions is because they make us feel out of control. We will not dig deep enough to get to the values beneath the feelings and hold those values up to the light of God. In that revelation, that He is worthy, only then does everything fall into place and make sense to us.

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