Question: My Husband Has No Emotions. Are Emotions Soulish?
My husband has no time for his emotions, my emotions and he has told my son he was done with his “emotionalism.” He is so emotionally unavailable, our family is wrecked!!!
Answer: Let's Explore What Emotions Are. Emotions Are Spiritual!
Emotions Defined: Emotions are the response of your heart to the pictures you hold in your mind.
I was taught emotions were part of my soul, and were unreliable and soulish. Therefore, I cut them off since I was trying hard to be spiritual. The result was that I became a mechanical, analytical robot. No passion, no joy, no excitement. Just - there. It almost crushed my marriage as I could not cherish Patti, since cherishing is an emotion! Yikes! However, God showed me the error of my ways.
When I began hearing God's voice, I discovered God's love was very tender and passionate. I saw a vision of Jesus holding my head against His chest and caressing my hair. Wow! No man had ever done that in my life. He spoke and said, “Mark, tenderness is OK. Emotions are OK.” And with that He broke my false belief that emotions were to be cast aside. He said, “Mark, I want to restore emotions to your life.” I want you to do three things to restore emotions:
- Read through the Gospels and see how Jesus, moved by compassion, healed. See that it is OK for you to have emotions, and it is OK for these emotions to even lead you in ministry.
- Read through the Psalms and see how David processed His emotions with God. See that he had them, he expressed them (both joy and depression), and it is fine for you to do that.
- Notice how tenderly I love you in your journaling, and love others that way.
So I did all the above three things, and my view of emotions was totally reversed. For starters, the Bible mentions emotions within one’s spirit. God sent Ezekiel “embittered in the rage of his spirit” (Ezek. 3:14). Wow! Rage in one’s spirit. So there you go. We can and do have emotions in our spirits. Amazing! Completely contrary to what I had learned.
So What Is the Value of Celebrating Emotions and Restoring Them Back Into Your Life?
- You can feel again! You can have happy emotions, joy, laughter, happiness, and, of course, this also opens the door for sorrow, grief and pain.
- You can experience God’s emotions in your spirit and then radiate them out through your soul (Gal. 5:22-23 - Love, joy, peace are emotions and are fruits of the SPIRIT.)
- You can now excel as a communicator, since you now speak with passion!
- All your interpersonal relationships will improve as people feel your warmth and love!
- You become more whole, using more of the faculties which God has created within you.
If you need to repent for your own ungodly beliefs concerning emotions, then do so. If you have purposed to cut off emotions, repent of that inner vow, and state your intention to ask God to restore emotions to your life. Perhaps re-read the Psalms and see how David expressed his emotions.
How Can I Guide My Emotions?
So now that emotions are allowed out of the box, you find that they can be all over the place, and that is uncomfortable. One of the wonderful things God showed me was how to guide my emotional responses. Since emotions are essentially by-products of pictures, if I want to change the emotions I am feeling, I can change the picture I am looking at internally. For example, if my spouse is late arriving home, I can picture an automobile accident, and feel the emotion of fear, or I can ask God for His picture, and He can show me a picture in my mind of His angels surrounding the vehicle, keeping it safe, and He can speak, “All is well, they will be home soon.” That picture produces peace and faith.
So God is in the continual business of “replacing pictures in the art gallery of my mind, removing pictures that do not have Jesus in them and replacing them with pictures that do have Jesus in them.” The result is a wonderful lifestyle of peace, power and serenity.
Additional Resources: Emotional Wholeness Through Hearing God's Voice:
Learn How to Do Two-way Journaling - “4 Keys to Hearing God’s Voice”
Apply Two-way Journaling to Restoring Emotions - “Counseled by God”
Understand How Your Heart/spirit Operates - “How to Walk by the Spirit”
Related Blogs:
Vibrant Health
Comments
Rev. Maurice Fuller
by Mark Virkler
COMMENT ON “EMOTIONS” BLOG
You were absolutely right to re-assess your early teaching on the soul and its connection with the emotions. This teaching is wrong on several other critical points as well. Paramount among these is the basic assumption that the soul is a separate part of a tripartite humanity (i.e., body, soul and spirit). This idea has become an accepted part of Christian theology (or anthropology). But, is it biblical? Actually, it isn’t.
“Soul”, in scripture, is the translation of the Hebrew nephesh and the Greek psuke. The Hebrew term defines the Greek term since it was first. Nephesh has the consistant meaning of, not a mere inner part of man, but the whole person. In its very first occurrence in the Bible, Genesis 2:7, this meaning is established. “ And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground (body) and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (spirit) and man became a living soul (nephesh).” The body, animated by the spirit of life, became a soul, a whole person. This meaning of the whole person, among countless examples, is found in Gen. 46:26 where those of Israel who went down into Egypt with Jacob are called “souls”, “All the persons, nephesh (KJV, “souls”) who went with Jacob to Egypt, who came from his body, besides Jacob’s son’s wives were sixty-six person’s (nephesh) in all.” Now, obviously, there were not 66 shadowy vapors who went down to Egypt while their bodies and spirits stayed behind in Israel! Sixty-six completely whole persons made the journey to Egypt.
The Greek word for “soul”, psuke, becomes the New Testament equivalent of the Old Testament nephesh with the identical meaning, “the whole person”. So, where did the idea come from that “soul” is an inner part of man in which the emotions reside? Are you ready for it? From pagan Greek religion ! Psuke, in the history of the Greek language, had the same meaning as nephesh originally, but at some point Greek religion gave it the meaning of an inner part of man. The pagan Greeks, without divine revelation, knew nothing about God’s Spirit animating man at creation and giving him life (and the capability of emotions) called that life “soul”. And somebody leafing through a Greek lexicon found that meaning for “soul” and it stuck. Nobody thought to see what nephesh meant in the Hebrew Old Testament. It is also just possible that some Christians who would rather that Christianity be very sedate and rational – and very quiet- were looking for ancient proof of it but got their proof from a very dubious source!
Emotions, then, can be from God, since God speaks into the spirit He gave us. They can also be from ourselves (our own spirit) or from Satan. Every Christian is given divine discernment to distinguish one from the other. We do not reject the genuine because there is the false.
Emotional Restoration
by Anonymous
Your blog today was about Restoring Emotions and I have been praying for directions from God on this matter, thank you. I enjoy Mark Virkler's step-by-step teachings on spiritual matters as I too am very "left-brained". I do flow in spiritual gifts, dreams, journaling and I pray in tongues. And through all these methods of hearing God's voice I have been told by Him that my physical healing will manifest as my "inner healing" gets fixed. I have become emotionally numb over time as I've developed a fortress of protection against negative feelings. I rarely cry or get upset but then I lack joy and love too. If I want to be physically healed, God tells me I must become emotionally healed. Emotions are apparently involved as a gateway of sorts and the numbness of emotions must be a hindrance to manifesting physical healing. So! Thank you for these step-by-step directions on repairing emotions!
Lynne Suszek
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