Thayer Thursday – the Emotional Elephant
Chris Thayer is the Director of Discipleship at Good Shepherd Church in Charlotte, NC where he oversees adult life groups and Biblical education. On Thursdays I share his weekly “Thayer’s Thoughts” for small group leaders, which are based on the previous Sunday’s sermon. Click HERE to watch or listen to the accompanying sermon.
Emotion.
It’s a word that, for me at least, conjures intellectual objection. If I could be like Spock on Start Trek and rid myself of all emotion, particularly in my faith, I could understand exactly what it is that God wants me to do; I could live and think in a manner according to the core message of the Gospel without the pesky problems of emotion.
At one point in my life emotion had turned into the elephant in the room. I ignored him for fear of being lost in a sea of the post-modern[1] way of living life without the security that comes from cold, calculated thinking. Then (through a situation that would take too long to recount here) the elephant stepped on my chest, and I had no way of ignoring him anymore.
Modernity[2] brought us cold, calculated logic. I, along with much of the Western church, swallowed this philosophy’s hook. Unfortunately, this has caused us to forget what it means to be human, to remember that we are not only intellectual beings, but also emotional beings as well. Many removed God (and ourselves) from the realm of emotion, and the hole it has left in our hearts is groaning to be filled again.
God did not just give us a mind; he gave us a heart as well.
My challenge, and the challenge of our generation, is to understand Yahweh on not only on an intellectual level, but also on an emotional level. My prayer is that we can learn how to appropriately do this as members of the body of Christ and as communicators of the Gospel to a hurting generation.
This, as you heard this Sunday, is why we experience the truth of the Gospel at Good Shepherd not just on an intellectual level – but also through experiences that evoke an emotional response. We don’t just hear a sermon…
…we see it communicated in the atmosphere of the room
…we feel it communicated in the rhythm of the songs we sing
…we engage our emotions as we sing scripture and they become our prayers.
The Gospel is not relegated to the mind alone, nor is it relegated to the heart alone. It is a message that engages both our minds and our hearts; our intellect and our emotions.
One of my favorite thinkers, Ravi Zacharias has a quote I have said often (and still strongly believe): “What I know in my heart must make sense in my mind.” I’d like to say that the opposite is also true. “What I know in my mind, must make sense in my heart.” To ignore the opposite is to live only half of the way God created us, to become machines rather than truly human.
Chris Thayer
[1] Post-Modernity, at the risk of oversimplification, is a philosophical term used to refer to a system of belief in which truth becomes relative and emotion takes the throne that the mind held in Modernity.
[2] Modernity (again at the risk of oversimplification) is a philosophical term used to refer to a system of belief which places an enormous amount of weight in humankind’s ability to reason and think – to the extreme of needing nothing to understand reality outside of our own mind’s capacity.
Categories: Blog, Ministry, Thayer Thursday