The Role Of Emotions



Emotions are a legitimate and essential part of our human make-up. However, they should be regarded as serving a similar function to the senses. Our senses give us information about our environment and situations. That information is then processed by the brain so that we can take whatever action is appropriate and logical. Of course, our senses provide their information in various ways, so that our sense of smell gives different, though often complementary, information to, say, our eyes. Likewise, our emotions provide information, albeit of different kinds.

The Effects Of Dominant Emotions

Emotions are there to serve our needs. Yet we often allow them to become our masters instead of remaining our servants. When this happens our behaviour, and even our decisions, are dictated by what we feel rather than by what we know and understand.

For example, someone we know and love treats us in an unkind and apparently unwarranted fashion, and our reaction may then be to distance ourselves from them, or not speak to them, or refuse to ask them to participate in some

event to which we would normally invite them, or even to criticise them to others. However, a more loving attitude, combined with a little reflection and less pride, might indicate that their action was out of character and may have been due to some stress or pressure from events in which they were involved, or even to some (albeit temporary) illness or indisposition, all of which we are perhaps unaware.

Yet we have allowed our emotions to dictate our actions; they have ceased to be servants and we have elevated them to the position of master over us. This has cost us considerable freedom. Any retaliation, or indulged feelings of self pity, will be unsatisfying compensations for what we have lost.

We are then being dominated by our emotions. We have become people of emotion rather than the people of love which Jesus requires of us, and for which the Father has generously made available his grace, to assist us in become more deeply associated with him.

Every time we allow our emotions to dictate to us, they are elevated into the position of mastery over us. This is not what God wants and it is not the purpose for which God gave us emotions. Except that they provide us with information, emotions do not matter in God. All that matters for the Christian is what God has said, what God has promised. God does not lie. Whatever God has said, is saying, will say, is truth. God is Truth and what is true is fact. Emotions and feeling do not come into this in any way.

The Function Of Emotions

Emotions often do exert mastery over us. They can do this by telling us that we have been hurt. But whether this is of any consequence or not is actually outside the proper sphere of emotions. When we are hurt in this way, it is not the function of the emotions to determine what action should follow as a consequence.

Their function is to inform, not to determine our actions. As Christians, and as spiritual people, our actions have to be determined through the mental processes which it is the brain's function to carry out, properly regulated by our spirituality. These processes are informed processes, not emotional reactions to what may be no more than random stimuli: things that we cannot control or determine and which might not have occurred had we been in a different place at the time.

Once we understand clearly the roles and functions of the emotional side of our nature we are in a much stronger position to progress our growth in God through Jesus, whose life was a continual example of how to control and use emotions.

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