TRANSCRIPT

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that’s a rather simplified process but you get the idea you guys just ignored the whole of our bumper video now you’re not gonna know what we’re talking about and it’s all your fault for chatting too much great to see you if you’re visiting my name’s alex I’m one of the pastors here and yeah well greg glad you and you chose to join us on this week where we get to talk about emotions and we’re going to be doing this for the next few weeks but before we get there that’s like the immediate sort of next few weeks but we’re going to talk for a second about like the the bigger macro picture which is this uh we’re in this season of what’s called the church calendar now if you’re new to church and you’re like you’re throwing a words like church calendar at me I have no clue what that means for a couple of thousand years now the church worldwide has thought about the way that we talk about this great story of Jesus as being like a calendar it begins in december with this moment of advent it’s this idea that God is present in the world through Jesus and then it continues through to this season we’re about to enter into called lent and lent is this thing that’s going to move us all the way through easter this moment of death and resurrection to this moment for us called pentecost the idea that we go from the fact that it’s God with us in the world it’s God for us dying for us coming back to life for us and then incredibly this moment God in us if you are a follower of Jesus the idea behind this is that God dwells in you that you are a spirit person now that doesn’t mean you have to do slightly weird or slightly unusual things it just means that somewhere God is working in you to shape you so this is the season we’re in right now and we begin this moment of lent and why is that important why do we need lent lent is the season of preparation it’s the season of building towards easter it’s this season of preparing for what’s coming why do you need that why do you need a season where really we focus a little bit on where God isn’t rather than where God is we focus on the fact there’s times in life that it seems like he’s not present there’s times where even for Jesus he looked up and it felt like his father wasn’t there in matthew chapter 26 we read Jesus went with his disciples to a place called gethsemane and he said to them sit here while I go over there and pray he took peter and the two sons of zebedee along with him and he began to be sorrowful and troubled then he said to them my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death stay here and keep watch with me even Jesus living on earth as God in human flesh had moments where he looked up to the sky and it felt like he was empty felt like it was stone felt like there was no way of getting through whatever was above his head even he had moments like that and every single one of us in this room have probably had and will certainly in the future have moments like that too lent protects you from your overly upbeat teaching pastor here because I am upbeat almost all of the time and it’s really irritating to lots of people in the first service of a staff people like yeah it is annoying I I was playing a game with aaron our worship pastor the other day and and I was in the moment I was serious and he looked across and he was like I don’t like game alex he’s like not normal usually you’re bouncing off walls like tigger or something and now you’re you’re like serious and you’re in the moment len provides a serious and in the moment moment for us that deeply needed because it is not constantly or good and easy and fun I grew up in a church tradition that implied that following Jesus was like a constant rocket ship up to the sky you should always be feeling good everything should always be fine and then I met reality and found that just wasn’t the case some of the time lent is the season of preparation this thing before the joy and the wonder of easter it’s the season where we reflect just like Jesus there are moments where it feels like God isn’t present so in this season of struggle this season of preparation this season where we talk a little bit about the dark rather than the light a little bit about the at least the sense of God’s absent even if he’s not really absent rather than his presence in this moment why why would we choose to talk about emotion and I think that’s a great question one that I’m still asking because a few weeks ago talking about emotions sounded like a really great idea and as we got closer and closer to it I looked at aaron and yvonne and some of the other stuff I’m like why are we doing this again no I genuinely want to know why are we doing this because talking about emotion is difficult there are huge challenges that go with that one of those challenges is I’m simply not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a counselor I did two credit hours of psychology when I was in seminary there’s lots of people in this room that do this for a living so there’s just the potential that I can make a fool of myself which is just good clean fun on a sunday morning for you guys but a little embarrassing for me what are the challenges beyond that of talking about emotion the challenges are these what are emotions what what they’re kind of nebulous right how many of them are there I was somewhat relieved to find in some of my research that there were only five core emotions now I was told that they get complex but there’s only five of them maybe this idea came from this very wonderful movie here we go all right this looks new

okay there is a dangerous smell people hold on what is that this is disgust she basically keeps riley from being poisoned physically and socially that is not brightly colored or she’s like a dinosaur hold on guys it’s broccoli

well I just saved our lives yeah you’re welcome riley if you don’t eat your dinner you’re not gonna get any dessert wait did he just say we couldn’t have dessert that’s anger he cares very deeply about things being fake so that’s how you want to play it old man no dessert oh sure we’ll eat our dinner

everybody

so this is the very wonderful inside out and in that there are five of these core emotions reflected there is joy there is sadness there is disgust there is fear and there is sadness and it just they they keep it pretty simple but what if there’s not five emotions one of the six basic types of emotions what if surprise is an emotion we need to talk about or what if according to somebody else the seven universal emotions that we can express or maybe there’s eight basic emotions and the purpose of each one is to do all of these different things or there could be 14 basic emotions or there could be 21 basic emotions or there could be 27 emotions that we need to talk about or you may have picked up an emotion wheel on a sheet of paper as you walked in that says there might be 72 different emotions and if you are saying there’s no way there’s that many emotions you’re probably a guy because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon or something like that there are all of these different emotions that we experience and how do you know what’s important to talk about and and how to talk about them maybe we’ve used language like this when we think about emotions maybe we’ve said that there are good and bad emotions but that may not be particularly helpful either maybe better language is that we talk about desirable and undesirable emotions the truth is when you look at that emotion wheel that you may have picked up when you think about the emotions you express a lot of them are undesirable emotions it’s how we try and put a finger exact on exactly how we’re feeling so if it’s difficult to talk about emotions if there’s a risk that I make something of a fool of myself talking about emotions why why talk about emotions well there’s a few fairly compelling reasons I think when we ask this question I would say emotions are present in our earliest stories as we go through this series we’re going to spend a lot of time in the book genesis which simply means beginnings and when you look at some of those stories that are right at the start of this book we call the bible there are emotions all over it just in the first few chapters these are some of the emotions you might pick up there is happiness this moment it says God created the world and it was good and there is this garden that two people live in and all seems to be well there’s this emotion of joy there’s this emotion of discontent where these two characters adam and eve believe that God is holding out on them that their lives could be better if they just had the one thing that they believed that they wanted this peace the shame there’s anger sadness disappointment disgust lust love despair envy fear betrayal anxiety all over just the first few chapters of genesis it’s emotion after emotion after emotion it seems like they’re rooted in our early stories there’s almost like this primordialness to them it seems like God created emotions as a gift even if we don’t always feel like they’re a gift emotions are in our poetry it’s in the poetry of the bible when you look at this book psalms which really is like israel this nation’s song book look at some of the emotions that come out of this psalm 126 a song of ascent it’s called restore our fortunes lord like streams in the negev those who sow with tears sadness will reap with songs of joy those who go out weeping carry seeing carrying seed to soul will return with songs of joy carrying sheaves with them in the midst of misfortune moving to good fortune there are different emotions that come up in the psalms and then how about this one psalm 137 verse 7 to 9 remember lord what the [ __ ] did on the day jerusalem fell tear it down they cried tear it down to its foundations daughter babylon doomed to destruction happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us happy is the one who seizes your infants and smashes them against the rocks what is this doing in a religious text what is this is this expressing how God feels no this is expressing how human beings feel this is a human being that is coming and saying God deep down in me there is a rage and an anger about what has happened I need to process that somewhere it seems like in our music our emotions come out whether it’s through poetry or something that we might listen to today think about beethoven’s sixth symphony and it’s the way it seems to soar above the clouds and then there’s other pieces of music that bring you down to that deep level of sadness maybe it’s a music that expresses a particular feeling maybe it’s the soundtrack of hamilton and how he expresses the american rage that a tiny island across the sea would control the price of tea or something like that there’s these ways that music gets to the heart of what we feel someone once said that the two musical types that are most alike in their ability to convey emotion are rap and country two musical types that are so unlike to hear and yet they both tell stories and share feelings and experiences for those of you that have never listened to eminem because you don’t like the language I understand not liking the language and yet the guy’s a storyteller almost like no other he shares compelling experiences and when you hear him you’re like wow you have felt deeply and now you’re sharing that with us the the the um writer siren kirkegaard said this what is a poet or in this case a musician or a songwriter an unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them it sounds like lovely music and people flock around the poet and say sing again soon that is may new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before for the cry would only frighten us but the music that is blissful seren kirkegaard said when a poet writes their ex they’re screaming their pain to us but the way they’re formed the way their lips are shaped it sounds beautiful may new misfortunes before you so we can experience the joy of hearing you sing again I would suggest almost every musician that you’ve heard that has moved you profoundly does this thing they have experienced deeply and are sharing that experience with you feelings emotions are written into our earliest stories they’re written into our poetry into our music but importantly they’re written into the life of Jesus when Jesus four biographers chose to put together the story of his life they often focused on emotions whether it’s just john in chapter 11 of his biography just simply saying in two words Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Jesus stood there and wept as each one of us will weep over the graves of people that we love Jesus showed different emotions 39 emotions one person counted in the life of Jesus and yet in the midst of that he demonstrates a full range of human emotions and expresses them in perfect love when you and I take a journey learning to process our emotions learning to work with them and learning to live in the world around us we are being formed in the way of Jesus Jesus who could show anger appropriately and not let it get out of control Jesus who could in a healthy way weep at the grave of a friend it seems like Jesus can take these different emotions that we wrestle with and he can process them well and when we learn to do that we are learning to be like him in the world around us we talk about emotions because we all have them this is true of you even if you have convinced your husband or wife that you don’t feel anything that silence is your spiritual language there is still emotions that you are processing and and the truth is sometimes we just don’t know how to say that as I was reading for this someone said that is an emotion because I just feel it all the time one guy said all of my emotions are just shared in one very inappropriate word set in lots of different ways that’s how I express emotion and another person said I’m so emotionally stunted the only thing only emotions I know are fear and anger we all experience emotions sometimes we just don’t know how to categorize them you can probably track back to some of the first emotions that you remember having if you grew up in the 80s this will resonate with you this is the first time I cried openly at a movie it’s this moment in the lion king where mufasa dies and you watch this great story as this character disappears and I remember the deep emotion of that story I was deeply upset maybe you remember the first time you had an attraction to someone uh in a romantic way my first kiss was after toy story weirdly I don’t know how that worked but it was like a now or never moment and after watching woody and buzz do their thing on screen apparently we just decided that was the moment you can probably track back to the the first times that you experienced particular types of emotion last week I shared with you how I have this story about how my parents they they kind of let me down in this particular way and I just felt this anger and rage at them I I used words like I’ll never forgive so upset was I that I thought I would remember it forever we think about all these different emotions you all have them even if you don’t know how to process them even if you don’t know how to put a label on them and yet many of us would admit to wrestling with our emotional health many of us walked in today with a smile on our face while also inside struggling deeply with some particular emotion some of us find ourselves in this moment deeply fearful about where the world is going and what it looks like for some of us were reading stories out of ukraine and saying I resonate or sympathize or or long in prayer for the people of ukraine but some of us have honest are just simply scared about what it might mean for us we remember drills hiding under tables during middle school because of the fear of nuclear war we think back to encounters in the cold war and think are we going that way again some of us are deeply fearful some of us are deeply sad and lonely some of us have narratives from our past and wonder if those narratives will continue indefinitely into our future will I always feel this way will I ever get the thing that I believe will lead me to happiness we walk in smiling but so many of us would say I am hurting deeply inside there are emotions I don’t know how to carry well and so often what happens those emotions when they become they get get up to pressure where do they go they land on the people that are closest to us they’re the people that feel the wrath of our emotions that we can’t process healthily laura and I have this joke about the way that we express patience she is infinitely patient with me and all of my just mean us she’s more impatient with the rest of the world whereas I have endless patience for the rest of the world and very little patience I’m sad to say for her she moves my charger and I’m like why would you why would you ruin my life what are you doing why why have you done this to me I am not great at showing patience and to the people that are closest to me while I’m wonderfully patient with all of you guys and your weirdness and all that kind of thing I can handle that I uh it just seems that when we wrestle with our emotional health it often attacks the people that are closest to us we talk about emotions because we all have them and yet so many of us would own to being emotionally unhealthy one of the values that we have at south on the wall is this it’s the value of wholeness and I’m just going to highlight a passage at the bottom this means we value being fully integrated people physical emotional mental spiritual relational vocational and financial offering all of ourselves to God and if you didn’t weren’t convinced already that we should talk about emotions here’s a line from the gottman institute john gottman does more sort of work with marriages than probably anyone in the country and what he says about the process of marriage and relationships is this emotionally intelligent husbands are key to a lasting marriage many of us as guys would say we struggle to know what we’re feeling and when we turn to the person closest to us or when they ask us what are you processing what are you feeling what kind of like I don’t I don’t know it’s not that we’re empty it’s not that we’re emotionally void it’s just that we don’t know exactly how to articulate it in one beautiful moment in the wonderful harry potter two of the characters are interacting each other and one of them female explains all of the things that someone is feeling and one of the guys looks and says nobody could feel all of those things they’d explode and she says no they can they’re just not male it’s just that we struggle to express that and becoming emotionally intelligent as guys is the key to future marriages to current marriages all of those different things are important for us as we walk in the way of Jesus one of the good outcomes of this series might be this it’s taking something as incredibly vague right now as this this this emotions wheel that talks about all of these different emotions and actually leading us on a journey where God enables us to reflect on some of the nuances of that perhaps you had a father or mother that were angry all the time that yelled and screamed and you don’t yell and scream so you’re able to say I’m not angry and yet you are it’s just it simply takes a different form your anger leads you not to yell but to withdraw there’s all of these different nuances to these different emotions that we get to unpack but maybe we haven’t answered one of the more important questions does God even care about this stuff does God care about your emotions because I was brought up to know that he didn’t I was told repeatedly either just overtly or covertly God doesn’t care about your emotions motions don’t matter is what I was told I think at different points both as a kid as a teenager and as an adult I was shown a picture that looked like this there are facts and you need to believe in those facts that is your faith and eventually your feelings they’ll follow they’ll they’ll come into line with that kind of thing and I grew up in a pentecostal environment that valued the idea of what we called repentance and this might horrify some of you but every week we would invite people to come down to the front of the church and so that they could pray and they could go through this process of repenting and I must have done that 200 times because I was deeply I had this deep sense of guilt and in this one final time as I stood down there just trying to understand how God felt about me and trying to process what was going on inside of me the pastor looked at me in a church of 2000 people and said you don’t need to be here go and sit down

it’s like wow this might be the only time that like this process someone got kicked out of it for being too good usually it’s like come whenever you want apparently not me apparently I wasn’t allowed down there in this case and people would say to me no there’s facts and you just need to believe that Jesus is and has done what he said he did and your feelings will follow but they didn’t I felt deeply guilty and nobody nobody helped me process that ever they just left me struggling in my guilt and my sense of unworthiness all of those different conundrums of emotions maybe one of the good processes that will lead us to is in there to enable you to highlight some of the ways that you feel and some of the ways that emotions get to you and maybe what happens is it doesn’t just happen in this space in actual fact regularly people come to me for counselling and quite often what they ask is do I have to pay you and what I say is no because I’m really bad at counseling I’m free because I’m not good at it and regularly what happens is I’ll say this I would love to meet with you once because I’ll meet with almost anybody once but there’s probably a process that will follow from that the process is that there might be a group for you to be part of there might be a class for you to attend or there might be someone who’s really good that you could spend time with regularly and you can unpack that with them somewhere there’s this journey of processing emotions uh figuring out how they affect us and nobody did that for me because I was told repeatedly your emotions don’t matter it’s fact then it’s faith and feelings they’re just lasting the train but maybe another struggle for us is this maybe we think emotions matter too much maybe that’s more of a modern idea we constantly have these different feelings different emotions different experiences and we believe they tell us the whole story that they give us all of the data we know that we need and and the truth is that um our emotions are also deceptive some wise person said that that they they are very useful but they make terrible masters you can’t let them rule everything about your life because there are things that we believe predicated on on untruths and and somewhere we need wise people that can help us unpack that I believe that emotions were not important at all some of us might believe that emotions are all that matter how does God feel about our emotions does he ever express sympathy ever express struggle with what we are feeling and to help us grasp that just a little bit I’d love us to look at an old story back in this book genesis this insignificant story in so many ways or certainly a story about an insignificant person her name is hagar she’s a slave woman to a person called sarai and a person called abram you may know them by their more famous names sarah and abraham as they will later become this couple sarah and abraham as I’ll just stick to because those are the names you know had borne no children in this culture this was incredibly difficult to process children were essential they were what kept the story going and for sarah at the age we believe now of at least 70 or 80 to have no children is a heartbreak it would mean she would be talked about by all of the rest of society in a place where there was no entertainment no particular culture you talked about your neighbors and maybe we still talk about our neighbors but in this time more so than ever and she would be known as the woman who couldn’t have a child and so she comes up with a plan she has an egyptian slave named hagar so she said to abraham abraham the lord has kept me from having children go sleep with my slave perhaps I can build a family through her the solution to the problem is hagar who has been taken from her own culture who has been landed in this family in a place that she doesn’t know doesn’t understand she will now become a wife she will have children she will keep the lineage going abraham agreed to what sarah said so after abraham had been living in canaan 10 years sarah took his wife sarah’s wife took her egyptian slave hagar and gave it to her husband to be his wife he slept with hagar and she conceived so on one hand the story seems like it’s going to fix or albeit in this slightly weird way there will now be a child who will be assumed to be abraham’s it will continue the lineage perhaps or will be well but of course feelings emotions are involved so it isn’t all well when she knew she was pregnant she began to despise her mistress then sarah said to abraham you are responsible for the wrong I am suffering I put my slave in your arms and now she knows she is pregnant she despises me may the lord judge between you and me in an interesting turn around sarah who came up with this whole plan now sister to abraham this is your fault you have done this this is like yours you got to fix it and if you don’t God is going to fix it for you some of you guys like I see this argument in my own life this is like maybe it’s different not exactly the same story but this is an interplay classically between couples perhaps what’s going to happen with this story how will it resolve abraham folds he gives up he says your slave is in your hands do with her whatever you think best then he sarah mistreated hagar so she fled from her as she flees away the angel of the lord which is a way that genesis will often talk about God speaking to someone at least in a fairly direct way found hagar near a spring in the desert it was the spring that is beside the road to sure and he said hagar slave of sarah where have you come from and where are you going I’m running away from my mistress sarah she answered what emotions do you see in this narrative it’s full of them right think about it from hagar’s perspective taken from a culture she knows she’s now part of another family she has no choice about who she marries she has no choice about any of this story it is simply forced upon her and now in this moment she becomes pregnant there is some joy there potentially maybe the story will resolve in a healthy way but no because of relationships because of how human beings work there is conflict again conflict now because hagar is pregnant and sarah isn’t and what does that mean for the story now juan despises the other and the way she’s treated drives out now alone again in a culture that she doesn’t know with no one to protect her she is essentially I would say a victim of this story she has had no choice and think about what her emotions might be as she flees into this wilderness with nobody around her and how does the God of the universe choose to show up in the story of this person who is the most insignificant in everything we know about this culture she is a nobody she is a bit part of the story there’s probably no good resolution for her then the angel of the lord told her go back to your mistress go back to at least somewhat of a safe place don’t stay here where there is no one to protect you go back to your mistress and submit to her the angel added I will increase your descendants so much they will be too numerous to count and then we see see hagar’s response to what she has experienced she gave this name to the lord who spoke to her you are the God who sees me for she said I have now seen the one who sees me that is why the well is called bia lahai it is still there between kadesh and beret you are the God who sees me the truth is nobody sees hagar nobody is interested in what is good for her she is a bit part of the story she is a victim of the story the only person who sees her in this story is the God who made the entire world somewhere in her moment of emotional trials some where in her moment of lost somewhere in her moment of victimhood she runs away and the only person that meets her is the God of the universe and she says this is the God who sees me it’s interesting language right and it’s language that in different ways I think we start to hear more and more in society regularly if I get to do some counseling with people after listening they’ll say thank you for seeing me or thank you for helping me be seen we hear people say things like I don’t feel seen in the environment that I mean we hear people express that emotional struggle for hagar in the moment she stops she says God has seen me in my distress in everything that I’ve been processing the God of the universe still values her a couple of chapters later the story twists again after going back and it seems like there’s peace for a while we’re told that sarah whose name has now officially been changed instead of just being changed by me said that she saw the son whom hagar the egyptian had warned abraham was mocking and she said to abraham get rid of that slave woman and her son for that woman’s son will never share in the inheritance of myosin isaac sarah has now had her own child and the concern now is what happens to the money where does it go I don’t want any of it going to this person that came out of this story that I now see as negative the matter distressed abraham because it concerned his son but God said to him do not be distressed about the boy and your slave woman listen to whatever sarah tells you because it is through isaac that your offspring will be reckoned I will make the son of the slave into a great nation also because he is your offering offspring somewhere God’s dealing with this story is I brought hagar back now she’s to be let go now she’s going to go and have our own story and ishmael will be a part of that story and so hagar leaves again with just a little bit of food and a skin of water and sent off once again into the desert of beersheba early the next morning abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to hagar he set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy she went on her way and wandered in the desert of beersheba when the water in the skin was gone she put the boy under one of the bushes then she went off and sat down about a bow shut away for she thought I cannot watch the boy die and as she sat there she began to sob this is a woman who again has had no choices in this story and is now under a tree sitting waiting simply for her son to die and for her to die simply crying simply subbing again the guard of the universe will step into her story unbelievably perhaps to the people that were hearing it for the first time God heard the boy crying and the angel of the lord called to hagar from heaven and said to her what is the matter hagar do not be afraid God has heard the boy crying as he lies there lift the boy up take him by the hand for I will make him into a great nation in the first narrative this God sees her in the second narrative this God hears her somewhere he is connected to all that this insignificant character is experiencing I wonder if we think at times that God’s interest is for the great people the significant people we began with a story about Jesus in gethsemane pouring out his emotion to his father when that makes sense to us of course Jesus on earth would receive that attention from his father up in heaven but what about people like you and I what about people that aren’t significant in the story hagar’s part in the story doesn’t matter she shall become a sort of a side element of the story she’ll be a tangent in the story not part of the central story and yet still it seems that the God of the universe is deeply compassionate towards her deeply interested in what she is experiencing and I would suggest deeply interested in what she is feeling and yet her story changes her perspective changes for her when she physically stops I wonder all of the emotions she processed as she fleed away from these people as she ran perhaps in tears experiencing all of these different emotions that we could never put a finger on especially again if we’re male somewhere she gets there and suddenly she stops and it’s in that moment that God meets her and I wonder what that just might teach us about where we need to pause in our own lives and where God might help us process all of the emotions we don’t know how to feel and don’t know how to express if I was to begin with one piece of advice for us as we begin the series and over the next few weeks we’ll take genesis narratives we’ll look at things like discontent shame at anger at fear and sadness and disgust all of these different big sort of primal emotions and will wrestle with how to process them but I wonder if the lesson that I wouldn’t begin with is this to find perspective practice the pause hagar finally stops finally pauses and that’s where she experiences God that’s where her narrative begins to change and I wonder if that isn’t something that we need to do so often when I think about the big stories in genesis so many of them they go negative when nobody stops nobody pauses when things get out of hand you think about the way that the cane and abel story will unfold it’s this story of anger where everybody’s reacting and nobody pauses so many of the stories they begin in that way and and I just wonder what would happen for us in our lives if in those moments where we’re like I just don’t know what to feel or what I’m feeling at all or how to describe it and you feel like it’s about to become a pressure cooker that hits everybody who’s close to you I wonder what would change if in those moments our first practice was to pause was to just wait and say that maybe in this moment the God of the universe may encounter me in the same way he encountered insignificant hagar maybe in those moments we get to practice the pause and when you pause pray we just finished the series on the lord’s prayer and I was intrigued by how the prayer finishes for those of you that are unfamiliar with it it runs through these different big elements our father who art in heaven may your name be hallowed your kingdom come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation and then it just stops yes there’s the part that we quite often say in services but most of the original texts would say we’re not sure that that was there probably wasn’t it just ends just in this big idea and it almost invites further conversation it almost invites us to to say what is it that you need to or to ask what is it that I now need to say to my father in heaven what are the other things that I need to tell him I love that that’s what it seems like Jesus practices in the garden of gethsemane in the garden of gethsemane it seems like this conversation where Jesus processes with his father everything that he is going through father if you are willing take this cup from me yet not my will but your will be done an angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him and being in anguish he prayed more earnestly and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground I would suggest that you and I we’re invited to share all our emotions with the God who sees you and hears you the beauty of those psalms we read those psalms that have that deep sense of rage God is not afraid of your anger God is not afraid of your grief not afraid of your sadness not afraid of your disgust not afraid of all of the things that you might be feeling it seems like when Jesus was at his lowest point as he was in this lenten journey that we’ve been talking about it seems like he can be with his father and he can express everything that is happening it’s that that gives him the strength to go through the journey that becomes so important for you and I the good news is is that even when our emotions explode even when they become damaging even like in genesis when they lead to all of these stories that are negative Jesus story will fix all of those things he will be the source of forgiveness for all of our brokenness and yet it seems like what he’s willing to do is is to help us process our emotions in a way that make us more like him too his good news is not just you can be forgiven his good news is also you can be different people you and I can be shaped in the same way he was Jesus is this person who expresses all of these different emotions and he does it in this incredibly healthy fully human way it seems like you and I are invited into that story too you are invited to share all your emotions with the God who sees you and the God who hears you even when you feel insignificant in the story to find perspective practice the pause and when you pause pray I’m gonna invite aaron and the team to come and lead us as we contemplate that a little more and I’m gonna invite you to pause now maybe you came in with a particular emotion maybe you came in just uncertain about everything that’s going on around you not knowing how to feel in any particular way or at least know what you are feeling in any particular way perhaps the idea of emotion talking about emotions for six weeks is terrifying to you perhaps there’s a sense of what will that unpack in me perhaps it’s very exciting that your husband or wife might listen to us talking about emotions for six weeks as well my prayer for us is this that there are some of us in this room that need God to comfort us because we’re deeply afflicted and in this room there’s some of us that are deeply comfortable and need God to afflict us and bring us out of that place of of over comfort let’s pray God as we begin would you open us up to become more emotionally healthy people we don’t have to make emotions everything but they are important

however we need to hear from you would you speak to us thank you that you made us you made us emotional beings

and you long to help us form more in the way of Jesus and deal with those emotions well as we begin this journey to the cross unto resurrection and into this moment of pentecost

thank you that you’ll shape us through that journey amen