Even if we feel guilty, God is greater than our feelings, and he knows everything. –1 John 3:20
A person’s ability to love unconditionally is severed when they are very young. A child is born with the need to be loved & accepted because God wove that need deep within their spiritual DNA. Before going on, it’s really important to recognize the difference between wants and needs. Wants are wishes or desires for a thing, however intense. Needs are something that must be satisfied for life to be sustained. We can live with unmet wants; we die with unmet needs.
The problem is that when we show up on planet earth, we do not know God who alone can fill us with the unique love our spirits crave. Even still, we have this great necessity gnawing deep within us, yet we don’t quite know what it is. Since we don’t have God as a resource, we end up targeting humans by default in an attempt to fill our empty “love tanks” and to feel accepted, significant and secured. Our victims begin as mom, dad, siblings, etc. Meanwhile, God’s archenemy Satan tries to block us from discovering God’s love. He leads certain moms or dads to focus on themselves instead of on their kids, so the kids grow up feeling neglected and unloved.
This self-focus and neglect manifests both overtly and covertly. Overtly, some examples might include:
Your dad spent his weekends on hobbies at the expense of the family.
You were called names, bullied, or degraded with critical words.
A parent told you they wished you were never born or “If it weren’t for you _______________.”
Physical aggression, abuse or sexual abuse
Your parents lied to you.
Your parents compared you to a sibling or other child.
Covertly, some examples may include:
Parents who don’t spend time with kids, affirm or encourage kids, workaholic, tv-aholic, etc.
A parent who neglects to say, “I love you.”
A parent who you sense is unapproachable.
Parents yelling, threatening or screaming instead of teaching, discipling etc.
Parents who favor boys over girls, or vice versa
Parents who make kids do things because of laziness.
Parents who gave a child alcohol or drugs
Excessive teasing
Our souls are comprised of a rational mind, emotions and a will to choose. Our emotions react predictably to whatever is going on in our mind. Your mind is like a glass of water and your emotions a glass of oil. Drop a nickel into the water, and it sinks straight to the bottom. Drop a nickel in the oil, and it sinks much slower. Thoughts in our mind are black and white and move freely as through water. Emotions colorize thoughts and cause them to “stick.”
Set your mind on a rabid pit-bulldog charging toward you while out for a walk, and (on a 1-10 scale) your mind will think, “I’m in great danger, and that’s a ten!” Your emotions will get involved, instantly shooting up to parallel your mind, and you will feel terrified at level ten! But then you notice a thick chain yanks the dog back down to a tree he is tied to. You immediately think, “I’m safe!”, and your mind zooms down to one as you stand there for a staring contest with the dog. However, even though your emotions will slowly start down, it may take a couple of hours to sink all the way to one. Thirty minutes later, when your emotions are still fearful at level seven, you stumble upon a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike! Both your mind and emotions zoom back up to ten, but whereas your mind had to travel ten points, your emotions only had to travel three points to arrive at ten because they started on a seven.
Now, imagine a child during her developmental years, living in a home where dad is a pit-bulldog and mom is a rattlesnake (See Rejection examples on page 1). This up and down process occurs many times per day until the child’s emotions begin to lose their ability to use the entire ten-point scale. The emotions get trapped up near the top of the scale. So the child begins to meet life with only a few points on her emotional scale. Her emotions are trapped.
Due to our fallen human nature, a baby is born totally self-centered. As a result, a small child is continually learning about herself from what others say and don’t say, and from what others do and don’t do, especially concerning those most significant in her life. If mom or dad does not express affection and approval, the child doesn’t learn that such things are difficult or impossible for her parents. She learns, “I’m unlovable. I’m not sure where I stand. I’m not good enough.” If mom and dad express the child’s continual need for improvement and reform because of extremely high expectations, the child does not learn that her parents may be feeling anxious, uncertain and insecure. She learns, “I need to try harder and do better.” She learns, “My task=my identity. If I fail at what I do, I’m a failure.” She learns a standard of performance as the pathway to acceptance. She may further conclude there is one and only one “right way.” Because of the pain such an environment solicits, her emotions stay near the top of the “ten-point” scale. She FEELS unlovable, rejected, insignificant, incompetent, insufficient, incapable, etc. And out of her own ignorance, Satan (through the power of sin dwelling in the members of her body) leads her to BELIEVE what she is feeling and experiencing is the TRUTH. She “thinks with her emotions” by drawing conclusions from her life experiences—the consequence being her emotions get trapped. This Satanic assault goes something like this:
I FEEL...unloved, unacceptable & unwanted.
Because I FEEL this way, I BELIEVE... I am unloved, unacceptable & unwanted.
Because I BELIEVE my feelings are true, I ACT...as if I am unloved, unacceptable & unwanted.
Because I FEEL, BELIEVE and ACT this way... saying, “I AM unloved, unacceptable and unwanted”, I send this message to others and make it circumstantially real in my experience. I live what I believe. It goes like this:
#1. EVENT > #2. EMOTION > #3. FACT/TRUTH > #4. ACTION > #4. IMPACTS REALITY
Over the course of time, and by adulthood, although these folks want love and acceptance, they don’t know what to do with it when they get it. It makes them very uncomfortable. So many of them build their lives around how to live in a loveless world. This may be what happened to one or both of your parents. Maybe they could handle rejection better than they could handle love. They wish they were different, but they see themselves as hopeless.
Now the problem is always more complicated than the solution, possibly why they say, “The devil is in the details.” The beginning of the answer to healing damaged emotions lies in understanding the term “Appropriation.” Appropriation means “drawing on something that’s already yours.” Think of a checking account. It’s your money in the bank, so you write a check when you want to purchase something. Spiritually, the first thing is to receive Jesus Christ as your personal Savior in light of your personal sins. Now you have, objectively, a new resource for daily life and for healing damaged emotions. You’re “saved” and are now in Christ and Christ is in you. You’ve opened a checking account, and there’s “money in the bank” so to speak. You have been blessed (past tense, once for all) with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph 1:3). But many misunderstand initial salvation as being the end while it’s really the beginning. Salvation is a crisis whereby you enter a process of “being saved.” Your spirit is saved one time, but now your soul (incl. emotions) is being saved. Before Christ, you had to look to your parents, family and peers to find out who you are—to discover how loved, accepted and secure you are. But now, since the day you entered into Christ, all your need for love, acceptance and identity became yours once and for all time. The daily transformation and healing happen as you appropriate these facts. Appropriation needs a situation. Unless revelation has a situation, it will remain but information without significant transformation.
To appropriate something for our daily walk in Christ, we face two essentials: (#1) To see what we possess in Christ. Eph. 1:17-18 “photizo” [illumination] and (#2) To be aware of our need for it. Upon these two variables rests the ability to appropriate, to reach out in steadfast faith and receive what already belongs to us in our Lord Jesus Christ (e.g., Eph 1-3; Eph. 4:1 ff.). These two realities of “seeing and needing” (Mt 5:3) brings us from childish meandering into a responsible, specific walk of faith. They take us from the “help me” attitude to that of “thank you” ...from begging to appropriation.
In Christ you lack nothing (Ps 23:1 KJV; Col 2:10). You possess all the spiritual love and acceptance you will ever need. For His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness (2 Peter 1:1-3). And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. (Ro. 5:5) To the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved (Eph. 1:6). You are eternally secure and potentially unshakable. This hope (certainty) we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and reliable and one which enters within the veil, where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us (Heb 6:19-20). Who will separate us from the love of Christ?...For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Ro 8:35-39)
So, God’s wish is that we have a meaningful, daily experience of His love, acceptance, valuation and security of us. How does He do it? To experience unconditional acceptance with God, He leads us to situations that threaten rejection before men. To experience eternal security in Christ, you must enter situations that threaten your security in the earth. To experience His valuation of you, you may have to be stripped of worth in your relations with others. You may have to be humiliated. These are examples, but the principle is this: For trapped emotions to be renewed, your trapped mind must be renewed. The way to impact feelings is to identify the faulty belief attached to the feeling and allow God to replace it with His scriptural TRUTH. But remember, your mind must have a situation in which to exercise these new ways of thinking. Under the influence of the world, the order was: Event, Feeling, Truth/Fact, Belief, Action. God’s order is: Event, Truth/Fact, Belief, Action, Feeling
I FEEL...unloved.
But I know it is a FACT...that I am loved by God who sent His Son to die for me (John 3:16)
Because of this FACT and my BELIEF in its TRUTH...I renounce the faulty BELIEF and ask God to replace it with His TRUTH.
I can then ACT as if it is true for me; and since my beliefs and thoughts control how I will respond to feelings, I will keep my thoughts upon God’s truth and will recognize that my feelings are not facts and, therefore, I don’t have to treat them as if they were. By understanding this idea and having a firm knowledge of “Who I Am In Christ,” a person can stop being controlled by feelings. Others might respond to you differently as well.
#1. EVENT > #2. GOD’S TRUTH > #3. FAITH/BELIEF > #4. ACTION > #5. EMOTION
“For we walk by faith, and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). Our reality is not based upon the five senses but upon scriptural truth.