Why Doesn’t God Tell Us How We Are Supposed To Feel?

Instead, He always tells us the right way to behave.

Take baptism for example. Have you ever wondered why we are not told how we are supposed to feel when we rise up from baptism to walk in new life, (Romans 6:3-4)? I believe the reason is that salvation is by faith, not by feelings.

We can know that we have new life at the point at which we rise up from baptism because that is what God’s word tells us. Our faith is therefore based on His word rather than on our feelings. In all but the most extreme situations, however, if we get our faith right, the appropriate feelings will follow.

This is totally Biblical since the book tells us that faith comes by hearing the word of God, Romans 10:17. In other words, our faith is the result of learning what God has to say and is not the result of our emotions.

We are also taught repeatedly that the righteous will live by their faith, Habakkuk 2:4, Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11 & Hebrews 10:38. Faith is what we believe, not what we feel, and as stated above, what we believe is to come from what we learn when we are exposed to the word of God.

Feelings can be very misleading. If we allow them to dominate our thinking and guide our decisions we will eventually, if not immediately, make some bad ones.

If we use our intellect, however, acting according to what we know is right rather than what we are feeling at the moment, we will always come out ahead.

In the long-running television series Star Trek, there was a character named ‘Mr. Spock’. He was from a fictional race of people who were called ‘Vulcans’ who were unique in that they were totally void of emotion.

The writers of the series worked on the presumption that Vulcans, lacking emotions, would be totally logical in their thinking. As a result, Spock was the one character who never made a wrong decision because his thinking was muddled by emotion. There is something to that.

God gave you a mind so you could think things through, ‘The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer…’, Proverbs 15:28. God gave you feelings so you could fully experience and realize the results of your decisions; pride or pain, joy or dejection. Life would be bland and uninteresting without emotions, but troubled if they dominate.

James said that faith without works is dead, and he said it three times evidently for emphasis, James 2:17, 20 & 26. He was never inspired to tell us that faith without feeling is dead, just that faith without works was dead.

Conclusion? If you want to feel right, then do what is right. There is no substitute.