What to Do When Your Feelings Don’t Line Up with God’s Word

Following Our Feelings We live in a culture that tells us to follow our feelings. We hear things like Follow your heart or Do what makes you happy. We’re told to Live your truth, and that means that truth is defined by what you feel and what you think is true. There are some good impulses there that we want to pay attention to. We don’t want to stuff and ignore our feelings, but there can be a big difference between cultivating a healthy emotional life and letting our feelings begin to run our lives. And so, as believers, we want to be careful to keep in mind what the Scripture says about our hearts—that they are deceitful above all things and desperately sick. And so when we realize that our hearts (our feelings, in other words) can deceive us, we need to be a little bit skeptical of them. And so instead of just following them blindly and doing whatever our feelings would lead us to do, we want to line them up with Scripture and ask, Okay, I feel this, but what does God’s word say about that? And if we find that there’s a difference between what our feelings are saying and what the Scriptures say, then we have to submit our feelings to the word of God. Turn Your Eyes Winfree Brisl...