This morning, in prayer, I was seeking the Lord over an area of my life I need to work on. I can get irritable with people and will say things that while they aren’t wrong, I’m not saying them to the person to be helpful or loving. I’m saying it to the person because the person is irritating. I end up feeling bad because I know this isn’t the way God wants me to act.
I had tried to simply “walk in love” and let the behavior or comment go. I still feel annoyed with the person though, so I thought this was not the way God wants me to deal with the problem and was looking for other Godly ways to deal with it.
I was reading teachings on this and while reading one teacher’s blog about it the Lord showed me something in my spirit. What I realized is I had forgotten a few things.
1: We don’t walk by feelings, we walk by faith
2: We may not be able to control our feelings, but we can control our actions
3: We are called to deny our flesh (feelings) take up our cross and follow Jesus.
4: Crosses are for dying

1- We don’t walk by feelings, we walk by faith.

Our feelings are the expression of our flesh…and our flesh is the enemy of God.
 Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. Romans 8:7
So, if we are led by our feelings (emotions) we are not lead by the Holy Spirit. I know sometimes we get emotional about God and that’s a good thing, but it’s not leadership material since we can’t control our emotions. We’re commanded to exercise self-control. When we have self-control, we can determine to submit to God and his way of doing things. Our feelings and emotions often get in the way of our commitment to follow God…. like when we know we should be praying or reading our Bible, but we don’t feel like it right then. Disciplining the flesh is to shut down the contrary emotions and submit to God by faith.

Allowing feelings and emotions to confirm our faith or even to guide our behavior is a recipe for disaster. We can’t control our emotions… only how we respond to them. Examples of being led by emotions are when someone is so angry with a cheating spouse, so they follow their emotions, lose control and do the unthinkable. An example of some using emotions to confirm their faith is when you need to reach a certain emotional high in worship to feel like you are in the “spirit” and truly worshiping…. this happens in worship services set up to excite the congregation…typically there are lights, fog machines and songs chosen to stir up people. It sets up the congregation to get caught up in the emotions of everyone around you… the loud music …. the whole show, and you can end up confusing your strong emotional reaction for the moving of the Holy Spirit, which is why false teachers use this kind of thing to begin with….and this can lead to a person being led astray. Perhaps the biggest false leader we face is the one we know as our own feelings. We need to make a conscious effort to disqualify our emotions when we are looking for a leader for our actions. Our feelings matter, but they are very poor decision makers.

2- We may not be able to control our feelings, but we can control our actions
Just like those mornings when the alarm goes off, and you want nothing more than another hour of sleep….you get up anyway…you get dressed anyway…you head off to work anyway because you know without working for a living you won’t have your physical needs met. You’ve told your body, “No, another hour may feel good for that hour, but if I don’t work…I won’t have what I need to live on.” We are going to feel what we feel for a while, but the feelings we have are not in charge of our actions unless we surrender our will to them. We can choose God’s way and refuse to allow our emotions to rule our behaviors.

3- We are called to deny our flesh (feelings) take up our cross and follow Jesus.
Whenever emotions are leading me one way and the Holy Spirit is leading me another, I have to make the choice which voice I will listen to. Once we decide to follow Jesus …I mean, truly decide to follow him, we are surrendering our lives to him. We recognize that the ways of the flesh is death, so we repent for our sins. Repentance is not feeling sorrow over something we’ve done in the past…. it’s feeling sorrow plus seeking forgiveness from Jesus plus committing to changing plus following through. It’s a change of mind to abandon the sin nature to follow Jesus. It’s a surrender of our life to Jesus and a commitment to lay the flesh down on the cross and die to it. We do this by denying our flesh and proclaiming, I chose God’s way… I will follow Jesus.

4- Crosses are for dying
Our fleshly desires are abandoned at the cross, where our Savior Jesus died for them…to pay the price we could not pay to provide for us eternal life. So, we lay down our way of doing things….and we pick up the salvation Jesus provided and chose instead to do it his way. This will mean we will feel those feelings at first… as they die off having been denied and replaced with God’s plan. We sacrifice our will to Jesus and die to our flesh by not allowing it to control our actions anymore. It doesn’t feel good to die to the flesh…but we walk by faith and not feelings.