Jesus Unshackled #3

Governor Sanford’s mistress declared, “I can’t redirect my feelings and I am very happy with mine towards you.”

As I mentioned in #2, we can all relate to that statement. Again,  the apostle Paul was quick to point out that when he wanted to do right evil was close at hand, indicating furthermore that sin had taken up residence in his flesh, his body parts. We have to take Paul seriously if we’re ever going to escape slavery to our feelings. If we can’t redirect our feelings then we, as Paul confessed, are wretched men. Of course Paul pointed immediately to the solution–Jesus.

Jesus knew the power of feelings within the self. He battled his own feelings in the wilderness and in Gethsemane. He met a woman at a well who’d been the slave and victim of her own feelings. She was thirsty and the force of the conversation clearly suggests they weren’t talking about mere water. She’d had five husbands and the man she was associated with at the time wasn’t her husband. We all crave relationships. When we’re rejected time and time again we become damaged goods. We weren’t created for rejection, we were created to blossom in a field fertilized by grace–acceptance and gift. Jesus offered her water of the sort that would quench her thirst forever. The water Jesus offered was the Spirit (see Jn 4 and 7.37-38). When we’re in Jesus and he’s in us we can be full and the shallow, yammering sort of feelings which tend to dictate our actions begin to lose their appeal.

And it’s the Spirit Paul points to in Ro. 8. When we move our lives over into Jesus’ reality he gives us the Spirit who helps us in our weakness and cuts loose the cords that keep us imprisoned to our feelings.

Feelings are good,  but as others have pointed out throughout time, they make good servants but poor masters. To say that we can’t resist them is to allow them to dictate our lives.

Jesus deals with feelings in words recorded in Mt. 5. It’s our desires that make us monsters and murderers. Anger, lust, the will to power, the thirst for revenge, hatred for enemies, the prideful use of religion in order to get status, anxiety . . . it’s all there, and Jesus tells us it has to cease being part of our character if we are going to live well-off, or blessed lives.

Few lies are as deadly to our souls as the lie that we can’t redirect our feelings. If we can’t redirect our feelings then we have to act on impulse. The will is both impulsive and rational. Kids act on impulse. Watch them in Toys-R-Us. They want what ever happens to be in front of them at the time. But we grow up and learn to control our desires within the broader scope of what’s rational. A dog in heat acts on impulse. Are we no higher than the dogs? Are feelings such as anger, sexual lusts, the will to power, revenge, jealousy, selfish ambition—are all of these completely irresistible? To live as a blind slave to such feelings is, as Paul put it, to be dead in our trespasses and sins.

But being rational isn’t enough is it?. That’s the rub. Highly intelligent people, thoroughly rational folks have behaved in the most bizarre manner when the will is taken out of the CEO’s chair and replaced by feeling. The S.C. governor is just the latest example. And the rest of us have experienced the power of our own feelings at various points throughout our lives. We’ve all felt like we couldn’t resist our feelings with the rational mind, whether it was the desire for a slice of pie, more possessions, anger, revenge, sexual lusts, anxiety, or religious pride.

Jesus doesn’t tell us to bone-up on logic so that we can rationally deal with our desires. He offers us water–the Spirit. It’s only when we begin to yearn for God’s Spirit to come to the assistance of our own spirit that we begin to taste the freedom known only to transformed, recreated humans. Even then a battle will ensue within us. As Paul put it, the Spirit wages war against the flesh (Gal. 5). But as time goes on our own spirit gets back on the throne and begins to manage the feelings. I’ll not suggest we ever really control our feelings entirely, but we can manage them. We can learn to discipline the self so that feelings don’t determine action. And we do this under the mysterious direction of the Holy Spirit.

Who is well-off? Who is a blessed person? Not the indulgent, impulsive, feeling-directed typical person of the 21st century. There’s a reason why there’s so much loneliness in our culture, so much unhappiness, so many prescriptions for anti-depressants, so many outrageous attempts to simply “feel” alive. To pursue feelings as if they are an end in themselves is to live a life with a crushed soul. We are never satisfied on the basis of feelings. We will forever thirst and never find enough water. Real life begins when we are reflective enough to consider what it really means to be a human, to be a created being with a spirit—personal power designed to live in the spectacular grace of God, being known and cherished by Him, and coming to know and cherish Him through the perfect expression of Himself, the Man, Jesus. And we are really blessed if we find ourselves in communities of recreated humans who stop the rejection, the attacks, and the withdrawals that define so much of human interaction.

An unshackled Jesus confronts us on the sidewalk, in our homes, at work, at play, and in church. He has absolutely no desire to make religious people who sing sweetly but live sourly. He didn’t establish a religion to be manipulated by men and utilized by slaves as an artificial sweetener to make us feel good for a few moments each week. The striking thing about Jesus that allows him to tower over me, and anyone else like me, is that he could resist his feelings without being reduced to a Spock-like figure. He felt the whole gamut of feelings without becoming the slave to them nor did he become a cynic, an Aristotle, or a Buddha. He was a man, a real man who in one long walk to a place called The Skull resisted his feelings—no anger, no verbal manipulation to get him out of a tough spot, no revenge heaped on those who were brutalizing his innocent body, no curses spewed upon his enemies; and in those moments he showed us the power of his teaching. His words were never simply academic, they were meant to be trusted for real life because the naturalized behaviors put on us by the sin structures of world lead only to death. He followed his own teaching, finding power to resist his feelings on a bloody cross, and by dying to self (selfish desire) showed us what a God really looks like as scandelous as the whole thing seems.

And we were made just a little lower than the Gods. In jesus we can really be well-off. But we have to suffer with him (see Ro. 8.17f). And the suffering Paul has in mind in that context has to do directly with this discussion. We must reflect on the self, see the parts that need their own crucifixion, trust Jesus as our guide, and allow his Spirit to put to death the deeds of the body. We, therefore, will all taste something within ourselves of the epic battle between good and evil. And it will not be easy. It will not be religious. It will not be soft and perfumed like our worship services. It will look more like the road to Calvary. That’s why Jesus invites us to pick up our cross and follow him. At the end there will be a death that will  mark the beginning of life.