Chris' Christian Blog

Emotions and Reactions

"Emotions and Reactions" 

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Today's Christian blog entry is by Sister Ray. Here it is:

I was thinking today about how we, as Christians, deal with emotions. In my experience, it’s not the emotion itself that is bad – God gave us emotions for a reason. What can be negative is how we deal with those emotions.

Take anger for instance. Even Jesus got angry when he threw the money changers out of the temple. However, the key here is that he took care of the problem by using that to teach the people. He let his anger go. When we deal with a problem constructively, our anger will tend to subside. However, there are bad ways in which to deal with our anger. Cussing, fighting, anything that hurts other people – that’s bad. But what if we took our anger to God first, like Jesus did, and let God lead the way we deal with the situation? It can turn into a lesson. It can show Jesus in us, rather than give others a bad impression of Christians.

But even good emotions can have bad reactions. Let’s take the idea of a wedding. It’s a happy occasion – but what happens if someone celebrates a little too much and winds up drunk? Or what if someone says something that they don’t mean as offensive and someone takes offense to it? If not handled in a constructive way, it can mean the difference between the best day of someone’s life and the worst day of their life.

Every one of us can agree that, at times, emotions can be intense and difficult to control. However, if we let God lead us by taking our emotions to Him first before we react, we will never be led wrong.

And one of the most important lessons we can learn in all of this is that there is so much power in our words – the Bible says that the power of life and death rest in the tongue. So no matter what our emotion, we must be careful to choose our words.

Next time, I will go into a deeper discussion of the power of the tongue. But for now, let’s take some time to think about how we react to our emotions – and make an effort to take our emotions to God before we react and do something we’ll regret later.