Developing Emotional Depth

Well, welcome everybody.

So good to see you all here.

Everybody uh watching in the overflow, watching online.

So great to have the family together today.

And uh I'm going to get right into God's word because I don't want to run out of time.

All right.

So let's uh go ahead and pray and open our hearts to the Lord.

God, we come to you in Jesus' name.

We thank you, Lord, for the opportunity to be here today, to have minds that can think and process and perceive.

Lord, I pray that you would um speak to us today, God.

I know this uh word that you've laid on my heart is something that can improve our lives, it can improve our relationships.

It's something that is essential, Lord, ultimately for us uh living the purpose you've called us to.

So I pray, Lord, that you would help us in the right way to be challenged and provoked to a positive change without being demoralized or discouraged and getting caught up in that.

Uh, Lord, I pray you would speak to us as a collective, as a as a church family, as a community, but also as individuals.

And we praise you and thank you in advance.

In Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.

Amen.

Well, here in the month of March, we're gonna start a new series of messages, and we're calling it the struggle is real.

The struggle is real.

We're gonna talk about struggle, and uh we're gonna look both at uh Jesus' struggle, especially as he's headed to the cross.

And then also uh we're gonna be looking at an Old Testament character by the name of Job and looking at these stories in parallel and finding some things that will help us to get better as we struggle through our life situations.

Uh if you're hearing a sermon or a message on struggle, often you would hear some sort of soundbite that would be like, hey, struggle makes you stronger.

And uh that that can be true, but it's not necessarily true.

It's not a foregone conclusion that struggle is just going to result in strength.

Uh struggle can lead to you being stuck.

Struggle can lead you to become cynical.

Uh struggle could could lead you uh to become demoralized or to quit.

Struggle could lead you to hopelessness.

Struggle isn't necessarily guaranteed to lead to strength, although it does take struggle to get to strength.

It's really how do we handle the struggle?

How do we do this the right way?

And so that's what we're gonna look at over this next month.

Um I'm gonna start in a verse, uh Matthew 26, verse 38, and this is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, shortly before he goes to the cross.

Matthew 26:38

If you think about this uh context, it's like the calm before the storm.

Jesus is about to get arrested, he's about to be put on trial, ultimately, he's about to be executed.

And right before that, he has this quiet moment in the garden with a few of his closest friends.

And here's what he says in Matthew 26, 38.

He told them, My soul, my soul being my mind, my will, and my emotions, my feelings are that I'm crushed with grief to the point of death.

Stay here and keep watch with me.

Okay, we often think of Jesus as this, you know, robotic divine character, you know, who just kind of walked around walking on water and turning water into wine and you know, making five loaves and two fish and all this huge meal and banquet and um, you know, all of this.

Jesus was not a robot, Jesus was a human being.

And here we actually see him making a powerful statement.

He's like, my soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.

Like he's at the place that he, that some of us have been in, if not all of us, to where you're like, you know what, my feelings are so big right now, it feels like my body can't take it.

It feels like I'm hitting my emotional pain threshold.

I don't know what to do.

And he reaches out to his friends and is like, I need help.

Jesus asking for help.

Um, you'll notice when you read the Bible, there's not a lot of emotions in the Bible.

For example, it's not often mentioned, like emotional things aren't often mentioned.

It's it's fairly seldom.

And the reason is not because emotions aren't real or that emotions aren't important, but if you think about the way that we make content now versus then, okay, it's we can put out bulk content.

Like so your thumbs, some of y'all got the fastest thumbs in the West.

I mean, you can just blah blah blah messages, right?

We got emojis, we got pictures and videos worth thousands of words, okay.

You you got your fingers, you can type 80 words a minute.

So uh we've got these fast ways of doing it.

If you go to the more archaic texts, you know, you're dealing with things like stone, okay?

Uh even in the New Testament, you're dealing with, they're writing on papyrus, and often they would use a scribe.

And so you're you're really the way they made it, you there was not a lot of superfluous content.

There wasn't things mentioned or put in there that didn't need to be in there.

And so that's why emotions usually aren't talked about.

But when they are talked about, it's a big stinking deal.

It's something you're really supposed to pay attention to.

The author wants you to know this is a big part of the point.

This is why in John 11, the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11, 35, Jesus.

I'll see you all know a verse.

Some people are very proud.

Yeah, I've memorized the Bible, I've committed it to memory, whether Jesus wept.

Okay.

Um it's just two words, right?

It's the shortest verse in the Bible, but it is packed with power because it's mentioning, it's talking about Jesus' emotion.

In fact, if you look at the surrounding verses, it says people were stunned at how torn up Jesus was at the death of Lazarus and the grieving of his family, Jesus wept.

And so it's not a throwaway verse, it's a big deal.

So when you come up to Matthew 26, 38, and Jesus is saying, My soul is crushed with grief that I feel like I'm going to die.

You know how stress, stress will kill you.

Stress will cause your organs to shut down.

Anxiety will rob you of sleep.

You can't even sleep at night, cause insomnia.

So the the internal storm, okay, can become a huge problem.

And Jesus is in that place.

My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.

Um, we're gonna look at emotional depth and how do we work our way through struggle and the feelings associated with it.

I'm gonna go to the book of Job.

Job is an Old Testament book.

It's gonna be up on the screen if you don't have your Bible.

Job, okay, a little context.

Job, the book of Job is many biblical historians believe it's the oldest book in the Bible.

It's a little bit ambiguous in terms of who wrote it and when they wrote it.

A lot of people give credit to Moses, but we don't know exactly who wrote it.

But many of the biblical authors think that it predates Genesis in terms of when it was written.

It's a very, very old story.

But if you look at it, it's one of the most relevant books in the Bible, especially as it relates to going through, working your way through pain and struggle and emotion.

And Job is introduced as his character in chapter 1, verse 1.

It says he was blameless.

Job was a super good guy.

He was a man of complete integrity.

He feared, honored, respected, uh, obeyed the Lord.

He stayed away from evil.

And then in verse 2, it says he had seven sons and three daughters, ten kids.

He owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five thousand oxen, five hundred female donkeys, and he had many servants.

In fact, he was the richest person in the entire area.

So he's uh a successful, wealthy guy.

And and throughout the course of Job chapter one, in a very short period of time, things go from really good to really bad, and he loses everything in an instant.

And he loses his business, he loses his home, but most devastatingly, he loses all ten of his children.

And so in verse 20, he he starts to work through his grief.

And in verse 20 it says, Job stood up and tore his robe in grief, and he shaved his head, which was a sign of grief, and he fell to the ground and worshiped.

Verse 21.

He said, I came naked from my mother's womb.

I will be naked when I leave.

The Lord gave me what I had, the Lord has taken it away.

Praise the name of the Lord.

Okay, what we're gonna see, 42 chapters, and we're gonna take a magic carpet ride here.

I'm gonna go fast cliff notes through 42 chapters of Job.

But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take his story and overlay the five stages of grief.

Because actually, you will find, you will see very clearly the five stages of grief in Job's story.

In fact, we see it here, right?

Job finds out that he's lost his ten children.

Like whatever about the house, whatever about the business, that's fine.

His ten kids are gone.

And he he says this ver, you know, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, but blessed, blessed be the name of the Lord.

And I think it's a misunderstood verse because I think a lot of times people go, Well, you know, Job was a what a good guy, you know, and man, when you've lost everything, that's what you're supposed to do.

You're just supposed to go, well, you know, shucks.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.

And in fact, we wrote a song about it.

It's like he gives and takes away.

Oh, he gives and takes.

Some of you don't recognize it because um you don't recognize the key.

It's like my heart will choose to say, Oh, blessed be your name.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

I used to sing it all the time, be like, Blessed be your name.

He gives and takes away.

Job's going, he gives and takes away.

He lost 10 kids.

Job was in shock.

Job was in denial.

Read all 42 chapters.

He's about to go a long way from, well, he gives and takes away.

He's about to be in the next chapter, he's gonna curse the day he was born.

I I wish, I wish I had never been born.

He said, I curse the night I was conceived.

I curse the day that they put me in my mother's lap.

He's about to hit the valley of despair, but in the moment, right, that's how our brains work, denial.

Your brain works like that because it's not meant to handle that much devastation all at one time.

So you go into this numb, like, oh, I don't even know what happened.

Time slows down, you're in a time warp, and sometimes it lasts for a very long period of time, depending on how big a devastation.

Lost all his kids.

He doesn't know what to do.

He starts to go through the grieving process, but his brain's not even able to handle it yet.

And so we see the first stage of grief is denial.

The second is anger.

Pretty quickly he plummets into anger, and this is this is very common.

People going through pain, going through loss, at some point you start blaming.

You blame yourself, you blame other people, uh, you you hit a low place.

In fact, that's how oftentimes damage happens to relationships.

Because in that in that anger, we start lashing out and we say things we can't unsay, and and and often, you know, relationships fall apart with those that are still still alive.

Um, his wife, Job's wife in Job 2.9, she says to him, Are you still trying to maintain your integrity?

Are you still trying to be a good guy?

Are you still trying to honor God?

She says, Curse God and die.

His wife is in such agony, in such pain.

She lost her 10 kids.

She's not only angry at God, she's angry at Job for not being more angry at God.

And what you see is in her bitterness and her pain, she's unable to support him.

And so what happens?

We see what's interesting is you see a contrast between how she deals with anger and how he deals with anger because she uses her words and says the most passionate word she can come up with.

Job, it says, when his friends, he had three friends that showed up to support him, and they said he was unrecognizable.

We don't even recognize him.

This pain, this anger has so seized him, he doesn't even look like the same guy.

And when his friends got there, they sat in silence for seven days.

A solid week of no words.

Because people handle anger differently.

Some people use their words, some people go complete silent.

But he dealt with anger, he hit a low place, and he curses the day he was born.

The the third is bargaining.

Bargaining.

You start praying prayers like, I'll I'll never do this if you'll just do that.

You you might bargain with people around you or uh, you know, make these, try to make deals with God.

Uh Job's friend Eliphaz in ver uh chapter 5, verse 8, he says to Job, here's the advice.

He says, If I were you, I would go to God and present my case to him.

I would go present my case to him.

You try to play every card that you have in the bargaining stage, and we see that in Job's story.

Verse, or sorry, the fourth stage is depression.

Um, a sad reflection often overtakes a person.

And sometimes uh people that are trying to support a friend through this, they don't exactly know what to do, and they'll say, hey, it's time to move on, it's time to go.

But often people uh are walking through this stage of grief where uh you're finally coming to true grips with the magnitude of your loss.

And you might tend to isolate yourself on purpose.

Um, you might kind of get lost in memories and really dwell on the things that you're never gonna get back.

Look at look at this language and how Job articulates his depression in Job 6, 2 and 3.

He said, if my misery could be weighed and my troubles could be put on scales, they would outweigh all the sands of the sea.

Some of you know that feeling.

Verse 8 and 9, he said, Oh, that I might have my request, that God would grant my desire.

I wish he would crush me.

I wish he would reach out his hand and kill me.

He's having suicidal thoughts.

Verse 11, but I don't have the strength to endure.

I have nothing to live for.

He's in that spot where he's calculating everything he lost in the past and going, There's nothing in the future that I can imagine that would any way offset what I've lost.

He said, Do I have a strength of a stone?

Is my body made of bronze?

No, I'm utterly helpless without any chance of success.

And so from chapter six into the late uh 30s chapters of uh, you know, for about 30 chapters, he is talking with his friends, he's getting some good advice and some bad advice, he's crying out to God with his conclusions, he's begging for help, he's doing all this, he's working his way through his struggle.

And all through, you see him bargaining, you see him depressed, you see him angry, but he never stops moving.

He never stops moving.

And he gets all the way to chapter 42, the last chapter, and he comes to the fifth stage, which is acceptance.

It says in verse 3, he this is what he says to God.

He said, I was talking about things I knew nothing about, things too wonderful for me.

He's looking back over his 42 chapters and he's saying, Everything from, well, the Lord gives and takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord, everything from that to, he goes, things I yelled out in depression, things I yelled out in anger, things that I bargained for.

He goes, all of it, he goes, I was confused, I was disoriented, I was working my way through it.

And he said, In that time, I said things I didn't know about, things too great for me, verse four.

He said, You said, Listen, and I will speak, I will have some qu I have some questions for you, and you must answer them.

Look at this, verse five.

He said, I had only heard about you before, but now I've seen you with my own eyes.

And I take back everything I said.

In other words, because I didn't stop at denial and I didn't get stuck in my anger, and because I didn't get stuck in my bargaining or depression, I worked my way through and I came to a place of emotional depth.

I came to a place in my relationship with God, in my maturation process that I only knew how to talk about before, but now I've personally experienced because I've walked through it and worked my way through it.

And friend, this is what I was saying from the beginning of this.

Struggle all by itself won't make you strong.

It's going to be working your way through struggle, working your way through your feelings, working your way through a process that ultimately gets you to a place of acceptance, which is a place of maturity, it is a place of depth, it is a place of wisdom and strength, but you've got to walk all the way through the process to get there.

Um, you know, I'm talking about Job here, and when you talk about Job, it's the probably the most dramatic story of grief.

Okay, losing everything, and and and you know, 10 kids and your whole business, and you've got nothing.

Okay, and so we any of us, if we were Job's friend, we would tend to say, hey man, this guy of anybody, this you know, this person has a right, you know, to grieve.

They have a right to walk through this.

But here's the reality: even if your struggle isn't this dramatic, we deal with a version of this that may not last 42 chapters, but it's still a process to walk through in different losses.

It doesn't have to be your 10 kids died, it doesn't have to be your best friend died, it could be my best friend and I aren't friends anymore.

It can be something like the end of a season.

It can be something like a breakup.

You're like, well, I don't really get to, I mean, I shouldn't make a big deal because it was only four months.

We were only together for six months.

Well, I'm not saying you should go to the valley of despair and loathe the day you were born because you broke up with some of six months, but you might have some anger.

You might have some bargaining, you might have some depression, uh, some denial.

There may be some of that.

And and and it may be a uh uh, you know, a shrunk down timeline, and it may not be as intense, but it's still something that you work through to get to a place where you're not like pushing these emotions down into a volcanic place.

Okay, it might be things like career change, or maybe it's grieving the loss of a dream or a vision, something you saw in your mind's eye that's just not gonna happen, it died.

Uh, it might be sending your kid off to college, like you're excited about their future, but it's like, man, this is like I'm feeling some depression, I'm feeling some anger, I'm I'm feeling something.

It might be marrying your child off, it might be empty nest, it might be retirement.

Like, in a sense, yeah, man, this is what we've been working for.

We're excited about this, but there's a grief around that season's never coming back.

It might be the end of your childbearing years or grieving your youth.

These types of things are real struggles and things that we work through, and often we don't give ourselves permission to do so.

I've I've told this story before, but it just fits so well with what I'm talking about.

Some of you guys know a little bit of the story of our family, and the the guy on the scooter with uh Isaiah Shakespeare is my son, Hudson.

And so both of our sons have autism.

I didn't see it coming, we didn't see it coming, I never really thought about it.

I mean, I knew it was a possibility, but it was nothing I thought anything about.

We totally caught us off guard.

And in that process, when Hudson was diagnosed with autism, we had a family in the church, the Harshaw family, and they have a son at the time was in his 20s on the autism spectrum, and so I just sort of gravitated to them, and and Gene, as the husband of the family, became like a mentor to me.

And I was just always asking him questions, trying to learn.

They did a great job, uh, Gwen and Gene with their son Zane.

And I thought, you know, I want to I want to just learn everything I can.

He's uniquely positioned to help me.

And so one day I remember he said to me, He goes, Hey Greg, first thing you gotta do, you need to grieve.

I was like, what?

He said, you need to grieve the son you thought you were gonna have so that you can accept him.

Acceptance.

So you can accept him for who he is.

He said, when you found out you were having a son, you had a you had a certain idea of what a father-son relationship was gonna be and how you guys were gonna bond and how you were gonna interact.

And he goes, that was a dream, and and that's gone.

He said, You gotta grieve.

And I was it threw me off because I thought, why would I grieve for a son who's still alive?

He's like, no, it's a dream, you gotta grieve it.

And what was interesting is I kind of in some ways had a hard time doing that because I thought, well, who am I to get to grieve?

Because people really did lose their kid.

And some people did, they lost their kid in an accident or they lost their kid to a disease, or they lost somebody, they actually lost somebody.

They get to grieve.

I don't get to grieve because I still have my son in a sense.

I felt I needed to buck up and be like, no, everything's cool.

But man, if that man hadn't taught told me that, I would have been, I wouldn't be the man I am today.

Because I'll tell you, everything here from bargaining to anger to depression, all of it was part of my reality, and I still at times feel a flare up of these things, but because he sent me in a direction to actually work through my struggle and my grief in this way, I know how to keep moving forward and not get stuck.

Think about there are certain things in your life if you start to look at That are maybe the grief thing, this roadmap here is helpful.

Like, think about maybe you were in a family and you guys moved around all the time.

Right?

So you're always getting pulled out of school into another school.

You're getting leave this city, this school, whatever.

And if you're around my age, you know, there was no social media, there was no texting.

You left the you left, you were gone.

You didn't see.

You had to grieve.

I mean, these friends are dead.

I don't ever get to see them again.

We're moving to another state.

I'm moving to another house.

I got moved around a lot.

So what do you do?

First time you do, you're probably bargaining and trying to get out.

You're ticked off.

You're moving me to this other place.

And then they do it again, and you have no control, you have no power.

They just, you're up and gone.

You you have no, you have no, you don't get to speak into it.

And so here now you've done it like five, six times.

What do you do?

Am I going to grieve every time?

No.

You know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to not go deep with anybody.

I go to this new place, I'm not going to get any real deep friendships.

So you get really good at either shallow friendships or being a loner.

I'm going to be a loner.

And the whole time I'm afraid to plug into a deep relationship because I'm just going to get yanked out.

Now you're 20, 30, 40, 50 years old, and you now have some choice in your life, but you have been trained, so to speak, to keep everything on the surface.

So you're great at shallow relationships.

But you don't know how to do intimacy.

You don't know how to do depth because you've got some pain in there.

Have I worked?

I got to work through a process.

And you go, well, I shouldn't get to do that.

Only Job gets to do that.

He lost 10 kids.

No, you get to do that because you dealt with your own struggle and your own sense of loss.

You got to work your way through so you don't get stuck in it.

I'm going to give you a path out, but before I do, I just want to work on you a little bit more as to why you might be tempted to blow me off right now.

A lot of people, there are reasons why we don't want to mess with emotions.

There's a few reasons or a few objections in the room as to why to just keep them tucked away.

The first is emotions are confusing.

It's not like you can measure it or whatever, so it doesn't feel productive.

You can't put a smart goal on it.

It's like going to the doctor and they're like, on a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in?

Like, I'm going to give me a pill pain.

I mean, give it to me now.

You know what I'm saying?

What am I going to say?

A four, I'm like a four, a six, I don't know, seven.

You could be sitting next to the same person.

We might be in the same amount of pain.

They say four, and I say eight.

I don't know.

I don't know.

It's hard to put a number on it.

And emotions are that way.

It's kind of like, I don't know, man.

This stuff is vague.

I don't know what to do.

I'm going to put my head on something I can calculate.

And so emotion, emotions are confusing.

Um, another reason I think people tend to avoid them is because I'm afraid of what I might find.

You start digging into your feelings, often what's in it, if I go five Ys into a feeling, why do I feel that?

Why do I feel that?

Why do I feel that?

I might get down to a core fear, something.

I'm terrified, and I kind of am afraid I might find the truth.

And the the truth might devastate me more than just keeping it tucked away.

And so often people are afraid to find that truth.

Um, the the third is uh reason people avoid emotions is because maybe the culture or subculture you grew up in didn't give you permission to get into feelings or whatever.

I'm gonna talk to the men a minute.

For men in general, okay, our self-view, our identity is tied to our masculinity.

And so, based on what your family or the subculture around you told you was permissible for a man and what being a man really was and how that tied in with feelings, you might have a really hard time going into something like that because men don't do that.

Men don't show emotion.

In fact, part of how you show your power is you control your emotions, you control so you don't ever let anybody see what you're feeling.

And so what you're taught this is the this is the deception.

You weren't taught to control your emotion, you were can you were taught to control your poker face.

So the emotions are taking you for a ride, and you might think, well, hey, I'm not very emotional.

You're the only one that believes that lie.

The only person you're fooling is you.

Because people can feel it, man.

We feel like you're about to snap.

We feel like you're about to break.

We can see it coming out sideways.

I see the smoke coming out of your ears.

I see you're on the verge of a bad decision.

I see that you can't plug in and connect to anybody.

I see that you run and hide every time someone sheds a tear.

I see that you're uncomfortable in your own skin.

And so, but but you think that by by hardening up the outside that somehow you have emotional control.

That is not true.

You're going for a ride.

And you have this internal turmoil, and there is there is no shortage of case studies of people who thought that they had refined their poker face only to have internal turmoil and emotions that are still there.

Guess what you still have?

Depression.

Guess what you still have?

Anger.

Guess what you still have?

Internal confusion, because I didn't learn how to work my way through it.

I'm gonna show you in a minute how do we get better control emotionally, but it's not by acting like I don't have emotions and suppressing or pushing them away or ignoring.

Okay, but again, the subculture of your of your family taught you what to do with those things.

Uh I'll give you two more real quick.

Um, this is why I don't like dealing with emotions, is because it makes me feel weak.

Okay?

I'm on the, if you're going to personality typologies, I'm in the personality type that doesn't like weakness.

I don't like to look weak, I don't like to feel weak.

Things that make me feel weak, I don't like.

I want to go somewhere else, I want to do something else, I want to go find something that makes me feel strong.

And so often emotions make me feel weak, and so I avoid them, but what it's it's I'm creating a greater liability by not being willing to go there.

There's a certain type of courage to go when you hate weakness, to go into something that makes you feel weak because you know it's ultimately going to bring good.

The fifth thing is uh reason why I think people avoid emotions is because they don't want to get stuck in them.

It's like quicksand.

If I stay out here, I'm good.

If I step into that feeling, it might suck me in and I can't get out.

Okay, those are legitimate concerns.

How are we going to offset that and get to a better place and ultimately get to like Job, where we develop emotional depth?

Here's the path out.

First is the first thing you have to do is you have to experience, you have to experience the emotion.

You have to experience it, you have to allow yourself to feel it.

Let's go back to what we said from the beginning.

By the time Jesus got to Matthew 26, 38, he said, My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.

We have evidence that he had already felt these feelings before and went in and understood them a bit in John 11.

He wept, he he experienced grief, he supported other people in their grief, and he was at a point he needed support it.

So you've got to allow yourself to experience them.

As you experience them, though, I want to be very clear.

When you think about the relationship between your heart and your head, often people, the reason you emotions are like quicksand and they can suck you in, you can't get out, is because people go in with their heart and they leave their head outside the quicksand.

Bring your head with you when you're going through with your heart.

In other words, experience it, but second, study.

Study.

Study your feelings.

Why am I feeling this way?

Why am I so afraid?

Study, study, research, think about it, learn.

If you study, eventually you'll get to a place where you understand.

Understand.

Okay?

You can't control anything you don't understand.

So that's why the the fallacy or the foolish belief that by putting up a wall or putting up a stoic face and neglecting going in and feeling what feeling it and understanding it makes me in control.

No, it's ignorant.

You've pushed it over here and you're going for a ride.

Anything, if I gave you a piece of technology and you didn't understand it, you couldn't control it.

If I gave you a weapon and you didn't understand it, you couldn't control it.

If I gave you a piece of equipment, if I handed you a chainsaw and you did not understand it, you couldn't control it, and the chainsaw would be more of a danger to you in your ignorance than if you knew how to control it.

The weapon could keep you safe or it could kill.

And your ability to control the weapon is I know what all the buttons do.

I know how to control it.

If I'm ignorant of it, it's more likely to hurt me.

Think about a car.

A car can get you from point A to point B and make your life a lot better.

But if I don't know how to, if I don't understand it, okay, and I can't understand something I don't experience.

I gotta experience it, I've got to study it, I've got to understand it, and if I understand the car, then I can control the car.

And by the way, if the car starts making noises I don't understand, what do I do?

I take it to somebody who knows more than I do.

Only a fool hears clanging and banging, and the car's doing weird stuff, and they go, you know, I'm sure it'll be fine.

Men don't go to mechanics and ask for help.

Then that manly man's gonna be in a ditch on the side of the road calling triple A, how manly are you now?

And friend, there is no shortage of case studies of people who try to do that with their emotion.

They feel clanging and banging, this thing's this car is missing, it's doing crazy stuff, and they thought, I don't want to say anything, I'm not gonna do it, I'm gonna push it down, I'm gonna act like everything's fine.

And what was happening is ultimately it created a humongous, massive breakdown.

So, so how do I understand as I study?

Well, how do I understand my emotions?

Dude, you gotta study them.

What do you do?

How do you learn anything?

You read, you listen, you go to the mechanic, somebody that knows more than you, and get some, be able to put some language on a feeling, somebody who's crystallized these concepts, you've got to commit yourself to this, otherwise you're getting taken for a ride.

And if I get to a place where now I've experienced it, I've studied it, I've understood it, I've gleaned the wisdom of the mechanics, I've gone to driver's ed and I learned how to control this thing.

Now I get to a place where I can operate and be in control of my emotions.

Now, when I say control, when I say control emotions, we've already talked about what is that.

Some people think that means I don't have any emotions.

Or that I'm stoic.

That's not what I'm meaning.

I'm redefining what it means to control.

Control isn't that I have no emotions, it's I'm able to move through them.

Like Job, I'm able to move through them.

You're still gonna have times like Jesus, he said, My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.

I feel out of control.

I feel like my body can't take it.

And what did he do with that feeling?

Jesus asked for help.

Jesus went to his friends and said, I know you can't solve it, but will you stay awake with me?

And I'll give you this last thing.

Actually, I'm gonna give you two more things in a minute and six seconds, to the best of my ability.

This is here's this is where, this right here is where this right here is where the message is.

Because some of you, your relationship to your emotions has been this.

You've observed people who experience their emotions, but they don't study and understand and control them.

And so you're trying to be the antithesis of that because you have somebody in your family who experienced their emotions and all of their glory, and they controlled your whole family by their untamed emotions.

And it drove you insane and it made your life very difficult.

And you said, you know what, I'm I'm gonna live off a vision of what not to be.

I'm gonna not be that.

And so you've tried to swing the pendulum the other way.

And some of you grew up around people that thought they were controlling their emotions, but the reality is that they hadn't experienced them and they didn't understand them.

All they did was stonewall and stoic, and so they didn't support you.

And here's what I'm gonna tell you the reward for going through the Job Jesus process of walking all the way through your emotions and coming to understanding is not, when I say control, I don't mean you can wield them and pull them out when you want them and throw them away when you don't.

It's still sometimes they are huge emotions, but I understand them so I can work my way through, which means I have a sense of internal peace.

Instead of you trying to fake it till you make it, and and internally the storm inside of you is raging.

You live in a greater place of internal peace, but the second is you're able to support other people because you have language for it.

Even if you haven't walked through exactly what they've walked through, you know the feeling that they have.

You've gone in and experienced it, you put some language on it, you understand it, and now you have something to offer.

And so what you don't want to do is either think of misdefine control as just being stoic and never showing emotion, or think of experience as just, I am all heart and no head.

We go into the experience.

This right here is where the revelation is.

This is where God will use us in each other's lives.

This is where the Holy Spirit can bring illumination.

This is where God can use education, this is where God can use content of people that have gone through similar things that you have and brought language to it to help you define it so I can understand it, so I can work my way through it.

Last verse, 2 Corinthians 1, 3 through 4 says, Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion, the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.

One of the things that brings us together is our experiences and our emotions.

Even if you haven't walked the exact journey I've had, you have felt what I have felt, and I have felt what you felt.

And so if we'll go in and experience it, every time we go into an emotion and and we we walk all the way through to understanding and we can articulate, I have another tool in my belt to bring me internal peace and to be able to help you walk through yours as well.

And that's where I'm gonna leave it for today.

Next week we're gonna get back into this.

We're gonna talk about how do you support somebody.

How do you support somebody who's walking through a struggle?

And if it's appropriate, I would encourage you.

Uh, maybe there's someone who's supporting you or you're supporting someone else.

Maybe invite them to come with you next week because I'm gonna give you some tools and I'm gonna tee up a really good conversation that you guys can have.

Give you some language to work through together, okay, as you're you're supporting through the struggle.

Okay, let's pray together.

Lord, we come to you in Jesus' name.

We thank you, God, that you use even painful things like what we see in one of the oldest stories in the Bible.

Lord, Job's life.

Although most of us don't have a story quite that dramatic, we understand the feeling of loss, the feeling of anger, the feeling of bargaining and depression and denial.

And yet, Lord, if we'll walk all the way through that, at the other end, when we get to a place of acceptance, we are deeper.

And in many ways, we come to a place of greater peace, and we're also a vessel that can be used to help others walking through what they walk through.

So help us, Lord, to develop emotional depth.

And we thank you, Lord, that you are an ever-present help in that time of need.

We thank you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.

I'm gonna invite you to stand on your feet, and our prayer team is gonna come down.

If for any reason today uh you'd like somebody to pray with you, feel free to step down, come down and receive ministry.

Same in our overflow, we have a team to serve you as well.

And if you're watching online, uh we have a team for you.

Just let us know.

Love you guys.

God bless you.

We'll see you next week.