Dealing With Our Feelings - Renovation of the Heart

Welcome to Trinity Sermons. Here at Trinity Church,

Streetsville, we want to share messages that inspire you in your faith journey as we learn

together to love Jesus, live like Jesus, and lead others to Jesus. This is episode 4 of our sermon

series, Renovation of the Heart. Today we have guest preacher Luke Limo with us. He is a student

from Wycliffe College and today he will be preaching about dealing with our feelings.

Certainly a talk that you don't want to miss. But before we begin, please make sure to take a minute

to follow our podcast so you can stay up to date on all of our future episodes. We hope you enjoy

the sermon today and God bless. A reading from Mark chapter 7 beginning at verse 1.

Mark 7 · chapter mention

The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around

Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with their hands that were defiled, that is unwashed.

The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing,

holding to the tradition of the elders. So the Pharisees and the teachers of the law ask Jesus,

why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their

food with defiled hands? He replied. Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites.

As it is written, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain. Their teachings are merely human rules. You have let go of the commands of

God and are holding onto human traditions. Again, Jesus called the crowd to him and said,

listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them

by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them. If anyone has ears

to hear, let them hear. After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him

about this parable. Are you so dull? He asked. Don't you see that nothing that enters a person

from the outside can defile them for it doesn't go into their heart, but into their stomach and

then out of the body. In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. He went on. What comes

out of a person is what defiles them. For it is within, out of a person's heart that evil thoughts

come. Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander,

arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and defiles that person. The word of the

Lord.

I want to say good morning to you all. It's a pleasure to be here and to talk about feelings.

How are you feeling today? Maybe yesterday was Canada Day, right? So happy Canada Day. Maybe

you're feeling proud about Canada. Maybe not so much. Feelings are something, aren't they?

Libby was just sharing from her heart, you know, all of the anxiety and the excitement and the

stress of doing a renovation of a house, of an actual house. That's, I think, our experience of

feelings. Feelings are powerful that way. And, you know, you can feel happy, you can feel sad,

you can feel hope, despair. You can feel all of that at once. Feelings are something else.

When Rob told me I would be talking about feeling, I thought, how do I feel about that?

Yeah. And it's not just emotional feeling, right? There's even physical feeling, too.

I mean, a favourite feeling of mine of the physical sort, and that's sarcasm, is when I'm

eating and all of a sudden you feel that urge to sneeze. You can't control it. And you want to

sneeze and you're eating. It's terrible. Feelings are an integral part of our lives.

There's no way we can live without feelings. And, frankly, would you like to live without feelings?

Psychopaths, notoriously, it's not that they don't have any feelings. They do have some feelings,

actually. But most of the normal feelings that normal sort of regular people have,

non-psychopaths, anyways, they don't have. Would you like to live like that? Nobody would like

to live like that. Feelings are important. In the book that I think some of you might be reading,

called Renovation of the Heart, that Rob has been recommending for this series,

Dallas Willard opens the chapter about feelings with this sentence.

Feelings are a primary blessing and a primary problem for human life. Why would he say something

like that? Why are feelings a... Could feelings be a problem? I'm sure I'm not the only one, right?

So many times, I think, you must have had that experience. You know what you want to do.

You know what you need to do, but you feel like doing something else. You feel otherwise. You feel

tired. I don't know. Or you feel like watching TV or another episode of The Chosen instead of

whatever it is that you need to do. It's like there's this battle going on sometimes between

what you think and what you feel. Well, let me give you a very personal example, actually.

Last year, October 7th, my dad, who lived in Brazil, passed away. I received the news. I was here

starting a very busy semester at Wycliffe College when I received the news. And it was somewhat

unexpected. He was sick, but he was getting better. You get your hopes up. You know how that goes.

Feelings, right? And let me tell you, I remember that very well. It was a Friday afternoon. That

Friday, when I heard, of course, I was sad. I cried in the shower as I took a shower later. And

the Saturday, I was also sad. Feeling sad, but it wasn't until Sunday morning, just as I was having

breakfast before church and Priscilla hadn't even woken up yet. I was by myself. Why would I do that?

I opened YouTube. My dad was a musician, actually. And so for some reason, I felt like watching one

of his very last videos, music videos. And boy, it hit me hard. It was this flood of emotions

coming, like it felt like a flood of emotions coming crashing down on me. I couldn't stop crying.

I felt like a kid. I felt like I was back to being a child. The feelings were so overwhelming,

the feeling of grief. And I was supposed to help in church. And I just thought, how am I going to

do that? It's not going to happen. Feelings are that strong. Let me give you another example,

actually, still on the same note. I love comedy. I've always loved a good old sitcom

and something Priscilla and I like to watch. But guess what? Oh, yeah, I need to tell you this.

Whenever my mom recommends me something to watch on TV, and it's usually, oh, this is amazing.

This is an amazing movie. It's usually a drama. I know. And my joke, I'm not going to lie,

my joke, I used to joke, well, why would I want to watch some more drama? There's enough drama in

real life. Thank you very much. I want to pass on that. But guess what? After my dad passed away,

I just couldn't watch even the somewhat upbeat show that we were watching anymore. We had to

stop. And I was drawn to drama, to watching drama. Feelings are that powerful. They can control you

in ways that you and I are almost helpless to actually try to control them. And guess what?

It's true. We are very helpless in trying to control our feelings. I actually minored in

psychology in my VA, a Redeemer. And so I'm going to throw you some psychology right now.

But I think it's helpful. When I thought about, you know, talking about feelings, I said, no,

I really thought back to this. There's this very famous, very influential, he's been named among

the 25 most influential psychologists of our time called Jonathan Haidt. And the metaphor that he

uses for the brain, which, of course, from a psychological point of view, feelings, everything

happens in the brain, right? So the metaphor that he uses for the brain is that of a writer

and the elephant. Yes, that one right there. Lest I misquote him, let me read him for you how he

himself describes this. The writer is our conscious reasoning, the stream of words and images of which

we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99% of mental processes, the ones that occur

outside of awareness, but that actually govern most of our behavior. And he goes on, I developed

this metaphor in the happiness hypothesis, which is a book he wrote, very famous one, where I

described how the writer and the elephant work together, sometimes poorly, and this is very

important, as we stumble, listen to this, as we stumble through life in search of meaning and

connection. If you want the technical terms from psychology, the writer represents what we call

controlled processes, and the elephant has to do with what we call automatic processes. The writer

represents conscious reasoning and thinking. The elephant is where the realm of emotions,

affections, and feelings and intuition lives. So let's take a closer look. How do they work

together? Well, do they work together? You know, you can try to pull the elephant and

it's not going to work because guess what? The elephant is very, very heavy. Yeah, you're just

going to be there. It's not moving. It's a struggle. Yeah, it doesn't matter how much you

tell or try. Your feelings are that powerful. That's what this metaphor, I get from this metaphor

anyways. Height actually suggests that the writer's job is to serve the elephant. And this is very

key. What the psychology actually indicates is not so much that you think and then you feel, that

you think about something in a certain way and then you feel about that thing in a certain way.

That's not how it works. You usually already feel about something a certain way and then you reason

about it in service of how you feel about it. Let me give you an example. Politics. That's the reason

why it's almost useless to try to get into an argument with a politician or I mean in politics,

in politicians as well. Because those commitments are made really deep down, most of the time

anyways, not at the rational level, but at the emotional level. You already feel a certain way

about that party or that candidate and therefore you reason about him or her or the party in order

to support how you feel about it. And that's unconscious. You don't even realize it. It's

how it happens in our minds all the time. And something I find very fascinating about this is

that this is the psychology today. This is psychologists and guess what? Saint Augustine

over 1500 years ago was saying something very similar to that already. He had this idea,

Augustine's thought is very complex, but in a nutshell, he had this idea of the will as the

center of something that actually determines your whole being, your will and not reason,

not actually reason, not your thinking. It's at the level of the heart. In our passage,

now you might be thinking, what does that have to do with this passage of ours? In our passage,

the Pharisees criticized Jesus because they see his disciples eating without washing their hands.

Let me just tell you something. That had nothing to do with hygiene. They were not washing. That

was not the case. They had no idea about bacteria and germs and all these things that today we know

about. That's not what is at work here. The reason they were criticizing Jesus' disciples for not

washing their hands is because they washed their hands in order to be clean religiously,

ceremonially. It had to do with being accepted before God, with being holy, actually. They

thought that washing their hands made them holy. They see Jesus' disciples not washing their hands

and they say, ha, why are they doing that? What kind of a rabbi would Jesus be if he couldn't even

get his disciples to wash their hands? Not because of hygiene, because of what I just said.

But I just love how Jesus completely turns the tables here. You have to bear in mind that the

Pharisees are the holiest of holy people that would have existed in that day. You would see them and

you go, oh, those are Pharisees. They're really holy. And you would feel inferior and you would

feel those are the Pharisees. And these are the people to whom Jesus was sent. And they were

the Pharisees. And these are the people to whom Jesus says these words. Isaiah was right when he

prophesied about you, hypocrites. As it is written, these people honor me with their lips, but their

hearts are far from me. Jesus goes on and he warns them that nothing outside a person can defile them

by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them. The disciples,

of course, are as low to understand as we are. So they ask a question and Jesus asks to clarify.

And then Jesus says, oh, are you so dull? Don't you see that nothing that enters a person,

food, for example, can defile them? For it doesn't go into their heart. It's what comes out of the

heart. What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person's

heart that evil thoughts come. And my theological mind here, it's also connected to the psychology

that I know. And I was just sharing with you, right? It's amazing to me the precision of Jesus

diagnosis. Like we just established, your feelings actually come first and then you reason. And Jesus

is saying it's from the heart that come even evil thoughts. Now, I want to make something very clear

before we continue. Please don't come away from the sermon with the impression that I'm advocating

a reductionist view that everything is sin and so I'm associating feelings with sin. That's not my

intention at all. Feelings are a blessing. Feelings are what makes you human. But I am focusing

on the brokenness of feelings. You know, that disconnect that we are talking about, right?

Between what you think and what you actually feel. Or sometimes there's a disconnect even

between what you want and what you want to want. That's how messed up we are. I think in some ways

this is part of the human condition that Jesus is addressing here. Jesus is telling them that

there is a fundamental problem with us. It's not about food, it's not about... it's at the level of

the heart. It's a renovation of the heart that we need and that only he can address.

I love this passage because the Pharisees were so full of themselves and they thought they had it

all together but Jesus just turns the table on them and he just levels the playing field.

Everyone is in the same condition before God. We really are that broken. And our feelings, I think,

when I thought about it for this sermon, I thought, you know, it's that condition. It's

the rider and the elephant. How can you change your feelings if you have feelings that you would

like to have changed? Jesus just says the problem, folks, is way deeper than you think.

And feelings have this funny way of taking over. All of a sudden they could be ruling your life.

You could be just living out of your feelings and that might and might not work, actually.

Let me throw you just another quote from

Jonathan Haidt, which I think is very helpful, actually. He says... he's talking about human

nature. This is very interesting. It's at the introduction of the book that I read and

he's talking about... he's reflecting on human nature and bear in mind, Jonathan Haidt is a

secular social psychologist, not religious, he's an atheist. He says, when talking about human

nature, we are indeed selfish hypocrites, so skilled at putting on a show that we fool even

ourselves. And he was talking about it in the context of doing good deeds. And what he's saying

is we do them, but we don't feel like doing them. We just do them to show up, like to show that...

to appear good, right? And that was certainly the case with the Pharisees in our passage,

but I wonder, is that the final verdict? Is that the final word on our human condition

that we really are this messed up? And you know the ending... I didn't put that in the slide,

but you know the ending of this verse, it's out of the human heart that all these evil things come.

And is that the end? Is that the final verdict? Of course not. You know you're here because you

believe it isn't. But it is our human condition. And you know, last week, Rob,

he quoted from a passage where the Apostle Paul is wrestling precisely with this, the human condition,

that thing about, I think about this and I actually want to do this, but I even can't.

And then he says, oh yes, sorry, for it is from within, from the heart, that thoughts, evil thoughts

come. But I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a

prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man that I am. Who will rescue me from

this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Let me just make something very clear. When you see body there, please don't think about our

physical bodies. I mean, we don't need, we need to do away with this dualistic mentality of spirit

versus body. That's not what the Apostle Paul meant. I mean, most theologians today would agree

that what Paul meant by body subject to death is precisely this inherited human condition that we

all share. The brokenness that we all share. And there's something I really like about this verse is

in the Greek at the end there is much more direct and succinct than the NIV makes us sound like.

When the Apostle Paul is thinking about this and I wish I did that and but I feel another way,

he says, he exclaims, what a wretched man I am. And then he asks, who will rescue me from this body

that is subject to death? And in the Greek, his answer is just thanks to God through Jesus Christ.

Thanks to God, it is through Jesus Christ that I am rescued.

And we are very soon going to celebrate the communion. And you know, another way to refer

to communion that is often used is the word Eucharist. It sounds fancy, but the word just

means thanksgiving. When we're celebrating communion, we are actually giving thanks to God

for Jesus Christ. Because he is the Savior. He is this one who sees the inner thoughts of our hearts,

the feelings that we all have, the feelings that you don't want to have. And he sees it all.

And he's the one who can fix them. He's the one who can actually fix them. There's something

I shared with you, psychology. And psychology can be helpful. I thought it would be helpful to

actually if you're aware that that's how our brains work, you know, oh, this is why I feel this way.

And this is why it's so difficult. But psychology will only go so far, right?

It's like, to use the analogy of a fixer-upper, I think psychology or any human effort for that

matter is like painting a wall that has structural damage. It's not going to do anything. The house

will eventually fall. We need someone who sees right through us, like Jesus saw right through

the Pharisees, who sees our hearts, who can actually fix our hearts. And that is Jesus.

Because Jesus is not only God, but he's also human. So he understands us.

He himself experienced what we experience, the brokenness that we experience without sin.

The author of Hebrews had a lot to say about this.

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who

has been tempted in every way, just as we are. Yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God strong

of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Now, something came to my mind as I was preparing the sermon. And that was an interesting...

I mean, I think it's an... you know, imagine if Jesus were here physically,

and we could actually approach him physically and ask him to help us.

We could actually approach him physically and ask him,

Lord, I mean, I would have all my own questions. Lord, look at me. I have all these feelings that

I can't control. And you know, and it came to him and asked him, how can I reframe my feelings?

Which is the theme of this sermon. How can I reframe my feelings? I have a feeling

that Jesus' answer would be, seek first God's kingdom and God's righteousness,

and all these things will be given to you as well.

I... it's very interesting. If you were to look at Jesus' sermons and teachings in the Gospels,

he was a very practical guy. There's a lot of theology. We need theology. I mean,

Rob mentioned Dr. Stratus. I was in his class. I love theology. There's a lot of theology

outside of the Gospels, I would say, because you're thinking about what Jesus did and

what he has done for us, the death and resurrection of Christ. But while Jesus himself

was here in the Gospels, the Gospels are just very, very practical. And you can see

that. And Jesus' own teaching is very practical. He was a praxis-oriented guy. If he saw a blind

man by the side of the road, he would go right there and heal him. And his sermons were

delivered to the people that the religious leaders of the day would have ignored. They

didn't care much about them. He just seemed to like going to the marginalized for some reason.

So, if we want to know what the Kingdom of God is like, that Jesus talked so much about...

Oh, yeah, that's what I'm... Sorry, I forgot to say. If you were to look at the Gospels

and to try to think of, especially the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and you try

to think of what's the most common theme, probably one of the top answers would have to be something

to do with the Kingdom of God. Jesus talks about it all the time. And if we want to know what the

Kingdom of God is, it's just this. The Kingdom of God, which is what Jesus brings to earth,

is hope for a very broken world. It's a place where the least is the greatest and the last are the

first. The Kingdom of God is feeding the hungry, ministering to the hopeless, fighting for justice

for those who don't have a voice. And you may think that this is a detour from a sermon about

feelings, but I really think that if Jesus were here physically and we could actually ask him,

Rabbi, what about our feelings? I have all these bad feelings. I wish I were a better person.

Can you transform me? And of course he will transform you. That's his job. But I think he

would smile. He would look at you with a smile on his face and he would say, seek first God's Kingdom,

and all these things will be added to you. And trust that the rest will be taken care of.

There's something about getting our hands dirty with the work of God's Kingdom, even when you

don't feel like it, and that just ends up shaping you as you go, as you walk with King Jesus.

You may feel inadequate and unworthy, but don't listen to your feelings there. Just do it.

I'm sure there's many people in this congregation who will tell you that sometimes the change,

the transformation of the heart happens as you are involved in ministry, whatever that is,

as you get involved working in the Kingdom, whether it's volunteering here at Trinity or

a local food bank or a shelter. Jesus' invitation to you and me is to join him in restoring the

whole world. And the reframing of our feelings happens in that process. Some people experience

that conversion experience that you change, like water to wine all of a sudden. The vast majority of

us, it's a long process. Day by day, you screw up, you come back, you repent, and Jesus is there.

I just love how Paul the apostle describes the Kingdom of God in this verse.

For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking. And forget about that part.

It's a complicated story, but the Kingdom of God is about righteousness, which can also be

translated as justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Just imagine a world,

imagine a world where justice, righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit are what rule.

This is what God wants for us. I mean, imagine what our feelings would be like in that world.

But we don't have to wait for it. I mean, yes, we do. It's both end in theology. The Kingdom of God

is at hand, but at the same time, we wait for the final fulfillment. We're living between.

And Jesus restores us as we go. To close, I thought I wanted to share with you, and even if we

just read it together, because this passage is so powerful, it always moved me so much. We're

talking about feelings. This is one of the passages that I love to read. It's a passage that I

love to read. It's one of the passages that moves me the most, because it's Jesus' own feelings.

Jesus Christ is the one who sees through you, who sees your needs, your most, your,

your, you know, unfulfilled needs, the feelings that you have that nobody else knows about Jesus does.

And guess what? He himself had a moment, and there I say this. I don't know if I'm saying heresy here,

Justin, but Jesus himself had his own struggle with feelings.

The passage that we're about to read, which is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, is right

before he is betrayed. It's right before the crucifixion. And this is the most, this is Jesus

Christ, the perfect human being, the bravest of, of all the brave people that have ever lived.

Jesus Christ, at the very last moment, has this conversation with the Father, and we get a look

into how he was feeling. They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples,

sit here while I pray. And he took Peter, James, and John along with him, and he began to be deeply

distressed and troubled. Let's look at the feelings there. The Greek is, is really strong.

My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, he said to them. Have you ever felt like

that? Nobody, none of us will ever feel like this. Stay here and keep watch. Going a little

farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible, that hour might pass from him. Abba

Father, he said, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but

what you will. This is Jesus Christ, the perfect, the only perfect human being who has ever lived,

who never sinned. At the very last moment, he came to this very hour. There's another passage where

he actually says this in John, well, what would I say to the Father? Deliver me from this hour,

because I came for this hour. I came to earth to die on the cross. And here we look at Jesus' own

heart and that struggle that you and I have, Jesus also faced. The thing is, we, you and I,

more often than not, don't succeed. Jesus did. He did go to the cross. And the rest is history.

The world was changed. This is our Savior. He is the high priest, which means the one who intercedes

between you and me with God, who is also human. He sees our pain. He sees our sorrow. He sees our hurt.

And he's right there to heal us from all of that. In my grief, after my dad passed, it was really

difficult. There were times when I couldn't really do anything else. It just, I needed an extension

as Justin well knows. And the help stalking about it, you want to talk about your feelings. Don't

suppress them or ignore them, because they will explode eventually. You want to talk about them

with someone you trust. But my experience was that it actually drew me closer to God.

Don't let your feelings govern your life. I mean, as we saw, that is the psychological model for

thoughts and feelings. But I think there is a better way with Christ. He can bring peace and

harmony to our very broken souls. Thanks be to God.

in Mississauga, Ontario. Thanks for listening.