22 Swordplay

Let’s rip off the Band-Aid, shall we? Ouch!Giving our emotions control of our lives can be dangerous.

I can feel your eyes narrowing and your head shaking through the page, but hear me out. We live in a society that’s in love with the idea of “following your heart.” I’m pretty sure movies don’t get to be classified as a romance if that line isn’t in there somewhere. The sympathetic best friend or parent who tells the heartsick protagonist to “follow their heart” with furrowed brow and a gentle smile does pop up often enough for most of us to be able to name at least half a dozen titles if we stopped to think about it.

It makes sense that this would be so common because we all know from experience that emotions have the potential to be beautiful, wonderful, euphoric glasses that paint our world in rosy hues.

But even though those rosy hues can sometimes lead us to make less than excellent decisions, that’s not to say emotions are bad. They have a purpose, and they often enrich our lives. They can operate as indicators that we need to get out of a situation or environment,^[1] and they allow us to more fully experience and learn about others, especially God Himself. How else could we get to know the God who is Love? It’s also not a mistake that we can see the word motion after the e- because our emotions serve as powerful internal motivators that get us to do what needs to be done.^[2]

But there’s a problem. Just like with everything else in this world, sin has messed things up.

A Lesson from Preschool

The year before I began A bit of a jump, I know, but there aren’t nearly as many differences as one might think.teaching high school, I taught preschool. I was placed in a three-year-old room because my boss and I quickly realized I needed my crying children to be able to tell me what hurts.

My class was full of fifteen amazing little personalities, blooming and growing a little more every day. There was Lucas with the most infectious and encouraging happiness I’ve ever seen in a little one. There was Allen who was as klutzy as I am, but with a much better attitude about it. And there was Kenny who had such a big heart for helping others that I don’t know how it fit in such a little body.

I was the assistant teacher in the room, which meant my duties involved monitoring the kids when the head teacher was busy, decorating the classroom door, designing and crafting the T-shirts the children made for special occasions, and spending the afternoons watching the whole class by myself. Yes, you read that right—I had fifteen three-year-olds all to myself for the entire afternoon every weekday. If nothing else, I was never bored.

One afternoon, we were inside and the children were playing in centers when I heard the inevitable wail that accompanies a preschool game gone wrong. It was Lucas, his sunshine smile replaced with a look of pain and confusion, a small carpet burn glowing red on his palm. I called the office to have a happy hand—a latex glove filled with ice—sent to our room and asked Lucas what happened.

After a few moments of tears and hiccups, I was able to figure out that Kenny had pushed him down. Looking over at the block station, I saw Kenny curled up in the corner with his head down. His eyes were wide as though looking for an imminent attack, and when sweet Ashley went to ask if he was okay, he answered with a frightened squeal, which sent her scurrying away.

The reason Kenny had pushed Lucas down, I found out after a little more investigating, was that Lucas, in his excitement about being in the block station with his friend, had gotten a little rough, and Kenny thought he was going to hurt him. In reality, Lucas was just a little extra hyper that afternoon, but Kenny’s fear got the best of him and altered his perception of what was happening until he felt like he needed to defend himself.

That’s the problem with our emotions and feelings—if we aren’t careful, they can alter our perception of reality, which puts us at risk of doing something we’ll regret. This is why we aren’t supposed to give our emotions reign over our lives according to the Bible.

You know, like Eve deciding to taste the wrong piece of fruit because the idea of being like God felt appealing.Just in case you skimmed over that last sentence and missed it, here it is again: the Bible tells us to be in control of our emotions, rather than letting our emotions control us, because when they’re in charge, the enemy can manipulate our perception, and this often leads to devastating choices.

Faith Is About Choices, Not Feelings

Pop quiz! I get to do that because I’m an English teacher.Which word is most closely related to faith—choice or feelings? Okay, I might have given that one away with the title of this section, but it’s true, and I think it’s very important to realize that faith is a choice. Yes, we can feel like we’re filled with faith in a given situation and we can feel close to God, which makes us feel as though our faith is strong, but it’s when all those mountaintop feelings are gone–when life gets tough–that our faith is tested. And in those moments, we have to choose to keep following God, even if it doesn’t feel like He’s there.

Time for question number 2: For example, do we continue to trust God in a difficult time, or will we follow God’s guidance when He tells us He wants us to move to a third-world country to be a missionary? When we make important decisions about our faith, does God expect us to base our decisions on our emotions or logic?

I’m not going to argue here that there’s no room for factoring in emotions when making decisions about our faith. Yes, God can speak to our hearts to guide us in the way He’d have us go. What I will argue, however, is that most of us are probably looking at that word logic a little sideways and maybe scratching our heads a bit. God wants us to be logical in our faith? Yes, He does.

We’ve been called to a logical and intentional decision-based faith. If you aren’t quite convinced, consider the fact that it’s a decision, not a feeling, that ushers us into God’s marvelous light. Luke 9:23In Scripture, we’re even told we’re to “take up [our] cross” and follow after Christ daily. This isn’t referring to a feeling. It’s a commitment, an intentional and daily decision to keep going in a chosen direction.

This idea may not give you all those warm fuzzies, but if we look closely, it’s such a beautiful truth: the faith through which we’re saved is grounded in our decisions, not in how close to God we feel at any particular time. The sensation of being far away from God, and the pain and fear that can come from it, gets no say in our eternal destination because we’ve made, and are making, the decision to follow Christ.

In the age of emotionally charged contemporary worship and a “follow your heart” movie mentality, the idea of a logical approach to faith may sound strange, but believe it or not, it’s biblical.

We’re warned many times in the Bible to control our hearts, rather than being ruled by them. The reason for this? Our hearts are vulnerable. Anyone who’s been betrayed by someone they trusted or experienced a bad breakup or been hurt in any of a thousand other ways already knows how true this is, but it’s not just true in our relationships with people. Our hearts are also vulnerable when it comes to being deceived and led astray spiritually.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at Deuteronomy 11:16: “Beware that your hearts are not easily deceived, and that you do not turn away and serve other gods, and worship them.” A few hundred years later in Proverbs 4:23, we receive another warning concerning the heart: “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.”

In both of these verses, the initial command to take care or watch over your heart comes from words that mean to watch, guard, and protect something. In fact, the word used in Deuteronomy is the same word used in Genesis to describe how the angel with the flaming sword guarded the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve were driven out.^[3]

Our orders from our Commander constitute an intentional act that requires sustained vigilance. You can bet the angel in Genesis never let his guard down, even for a moment, until he was relieved of duty. And neither should we. We can’t let our guard down when it comes to our hearts, or our emotions could be used by the enemy to divert our attention away from our relationship with Christ and truth.

The Venerable Mr. Lewis and the Proof of Surgery

I love how C. S. Lewis discusses this idea in Mere Christianity. As he often does in his apologetic writing, Like eating a bit of orange or sailing a ship.^[4]he finds the most practical, commonplace scenario and turns it into a magnificently straightforward illustration of deep theological principles as if it were the most natural comparison in the world.

The scenario Lewis sculpts into an illustration of the relationship between our minds and our hearts is surgery. Most of us would agree that our knowledge and reason inform us that we’ll not feel pain during surgery. We know that we’ll be given anesthesia by an exceptionally well-educated professional who’s had countless hours of practice doing this very thing and that the surgeon won’t get started on us until the anesthesia has had its full effect.

This doesn’t, however, prevent us from being nervous or even afraid when we lie down on the gurney and are wheeled to the operating room.

How silly of us, right? We know one thing to be true and yet we act on something completely different. Lewis explains the conflict like this: “It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.”^[5]

Sometimes it really can be a full-fledged battle we have to fight against ourselves. Our emotions are that powerful. They can sway us away from acting on the things we know in our minds to be true. And that’s exactly why our enemy often targets our hearts. He knows how easy it can be to let our minds wave the white flag and submit to the direction of our hearts.

Lewis doesn’t focus on the enemy’s oh-so-generous contribution to this struggle, but he does give us some advice about how to fight this battle when he writes, “That is why Faith [holding firm to reason] is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off,’ you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.”^[6]

We can’t let our hearts have the reins because, in the brilliant vocabulary of Mr. Lewis, we’d just be “a creature dithering to and fro.” That sounds far too familiar for comfort. So much of our culture is built around following the ideas that sound and feel good at the time rather than thinking things through and taking a firm stance.

So how do we avoid succumbing to the temptation of “following our hearts”? We train. We intentionally build skills and habits that will fortify our minds so we can effectively guard our hearts against the attacks of the enemy.

Not the Hallmark Happy Ending You Were Expecting

At this point, you might be ready to believe we need to pay attention and guard our hearts against the enemy’s deception, but that doesn’t mean we can’t follow our hearts in our relationships and life decisions, right? In the words of the great meerkat, Timon: wrong!^[7] The Bible doesn’t stop at just telling us to always keep an eye on our hearts. In Proverbs 23:19, we are also told to “be wise, and direct your heart in the way.”

Translation: Don’t follow your heart. Lead it.

Interestingly enough, the same word that’s translated here as direct is translated elsewhere as to be happy or to be blessed.^[8] It seems a bit ironic. How can telling our hearts, “No, not that way,” make us happier? Especially when we know how much it can hurt to deny ourselves the things we want so deeply. It would seem like having everything our hearts desire would make us happy, but that’s not what we see from Scripture.

Talk about the worst Hallmark movie ever. The attractive, successful businesswoman goes to a small town to facilitate the takeover of a reluctant family business and begins to fall for the young handsome owner. But she decides emotionally cheating on her equally successful but self-centered fiancé is wrong. She also realizes how wrong it would be to underhandedly take over the family business, which forms a pillar of the small close-knit community, so she returns to tell her boss she’s resigning from her position and break things off with her fiancé. The end. Happily ever after?

It may not be a plot that would win an Oscar, but it’s how we’re called to live because the enemy loves to take our well-intentioned hearts and put them through an emotional rollercoaster that will leave them not knowing which way is up, which way is down, which way is right, which way is wrong. But I have good news! God has given us a tool to help make sure our hearts stay on track, a compass we can use to make sure the devil’s schemes don’t send us dizzily darting in the wrong direction—He gave us a mind.

Until now, we’ve been looking at Old Testament verses that refer to the heart. In the Old Testament, the word translated as heart referred to the entirety of a person’s inner self—personality, thoughts, and emotions all included.^[9] When we get to the New Testament, something changes. When the possibility of a relationship with Jesus becomes an option for us, we come across a new concept in the form of the word nous. Nous refers to the mind as the center of logic and reason in a way that’s separate from the heart, and it plays a vital role in living out our faith.^[10]

Paul gives us a good picture of what happens when we choose to pursue a logical faith—using our mind to guide our hearts—by choosing to follow Scripture even when it’s difficult: Romans 12:2“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

There are two options. Either we begin to look like the world on the outside, taking on its shape, or we turn to the Father and are “transformed by the renewal of our [nous]”. The transformation doesn’t start with our hearts and our emotions. It starts with our minds, the centers of logic and reasoning, and our minds guide our hearts toward “that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

The Tough Part

I was thrown one of the biggest curveballs and blessings of my career in education when I found out a couple of weeks before The entirety of my experience with these two subjects was one Intro to Psych class in college that was taught by a foreign graduate student with a heavy accent I couldn’t understand.the start of the 2020-2021 school year that I’d be teaching psychology and sociology. Just so we’re clear, I’m an English teacher. I also have a history and social studies certification on my license because I was a history minor in college, but I. Am. An. English. Teacher. English nerd through and through.

I spent the entire year cramming for the next day’s lesson and hoping my kids couldn’t tell how unsure I was They were particularly good at asking those questions that first year. when they would ask an in-depth question. They’d ask about how certain concepts apply to our everyday lives and how different types of psychologists would view other concepts. I’m talking about the kinds of questions every teacher lives for—the kind that stems from a deep curiosity and desire to know more.

And of all those wonderful, deep, somewhat nerve-wracking conversations, the one I remember the most is the conversation about s’mores.

It was easily the most entertaining conversation of the year. I don’t remember how that conversation started—probably a student impatient for lunch was craving a snack—but all I had to do to comprehensively demolish all constructive educational process was tell my students that the word “s’mores” has an apostrophe because it’s a contraction of the words some and more.

The conversation that resulted was so hilarious it has blotted out the entire rest of the day in my memory. Probably not.I have no idea what I was teaching, or whether or not I even made it to the end of the lesson, but I was suddenly faced with a room full of teenagers who couldn’t match what they now knew in their heads to be true with what they had always believed—that it was just a weird word with a tasty meaning.

The room echoed with “No way” and “I can’t believe it” and the sound of palms slapping on foreheads as they saw the connection between the contraction and its source. I’d rocked their world with this revelation.

This is a rather silly example, but it reveals something important—acknowledging the truth is difficult when we’re having trouble getting our hearts to believe in the reality of that truth.

See? I don’t hate emotions after all.Our hearts often provide the passion and motivation to act on what we know is true,^[11] so it can be a challenge to act on a truth our hearts aren’t ready to accept. This is why listening to our hearts can be dangerous.

I’ve struggled with depression for years. Most of the time when I’m struggling with depression, I’m listening to the lies about who the enemy says I am, and while I know in my head who God says I am, I can’t feel it in my heart. I head-believe, but I don’t heart-believe. Just like the father in Mark 9 who “cried out and said, ‘I do believe; help my unbelief’” when Jesus critiqued his faith.

It’s in these times—when the heart just won’t get on board with what the head knows is true—that it’s most important for us to be ready to fight back, even if it doesn’t feel like it’s doing any good at the time. Remember, the skills we’ll practice using in this book aren’t a quick fix for our struggles, especially mental health struggles.

I don’t pretend there aren’t days when I can remind myself of who I am in Christ all day long and still struggle with depression or feelings of loneliness and being a burden. It happens. The struggle is real and runs too deep to be cured immediately. Or even on this side of eternity. But these skills will allow us to be more effective when we find ourselves pitched in an emotional battle against the enemy as long as we make the conscious decision to practice them.

Notes