- Will and Emotion in the Christian Life

Emotion, says Drever’s Dictionary of Psychology is a state of excitement or perturbation, marked by strong feeling and usually an impulse toward a definite form of behavior.
“Excitement, perturbation, feeling.” These are states of mind we are all familiar with. In a world as violent and full of conflict as this these come and go, blaze up and die down in the average mans bosom a hundred times a day. The normal man and woman will in the course of a few months experience every degree of emotion from near ecstasy to mild dejection without apparently being any the better or the worse for it. Of course I have in mind here only the normal man and woman. The psychopathic personality lies outside the field of this study.
The emotions are neither to be feared nor despised, for they are a normal part of us as God made us in the first place. Indeed the full human life would be impossible without them. One recoils from the thought of the man who lacked all feeling. He would be either a cold, naked intellect such as inhabits the pages of the science-fiction novel, or a mere vegetable, such as is sometimes found in the incurable wards of our mental hospitals.
The right relation of intellect to feeling and feeling to will is disclosed in Matthew 14:14. “And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick.” Intellectual knowledge of the suffering of the people stirred His pity and His pity moved Him to heal them. This is how it was with the ideal Man whose total organism was perfectly adjusted to itself; and this is the way it is with us in a less perfect measure.
A state of emotion always comes between the knowledge and the act. A feeling of pity would never arise in the human breast unless aroused by a mental picture of others’ distress, and without the emotional bump to set off the will there would be no act of mercy. That is the way we are constituted. Whether the emotion aroused by a mental picture be pity, love, fear, desire, grief, there can be no act of the will without it. What I am saying here is nothing new. Every mother, every statesman, every leader of men, every preacher of the Word of God knows that a mental picture must be presented to the listener before he can be moved to act, even though it be for his own advantage.
God intended that truth should move us to moral action. The mind receives ideas, mental pictures of things as they are. These excite the feelings and these in turn move the will to act in accordance with the truth. That is the way it should be, and would be had not sin entered and wrought injury to our inner life. Because of sin the simple sequence of truth—feeling—action may break down in any of its three parts. The mind which is created to receive truth is often turned over to falsehood, and the feelings thus aroused may incite the will to evil action. The contemplation of any wrong or forbidden thing cannot but inflame the feelings to sympathy with evil.
A regrettable example of this was David’s long gaze at the beautiful Bathsheba in the act of bathing. The king was moved by what he saw and acted accordingly, and the bitter and tragic consequences dogged him to the end of his days. He saw, he felt, he acted, precisely as his Lord did centuries later when He healed the sick. The difference in the moral quality of the acts of the two men resulted from the difference in their feelings, and these were the result of the objects that aroused the feelings. David saw a beautiful woman; Christ saw a suffering multitude. One gaze led to sin, the other to an act of mercy; but both followed the simple law of their inner structure.
Another breakdown in the truth-feeling-act sequence comes when the heart for selfish reasons deliberately hardens itself against the Word of God. This is the state of all who love darkness rather than light and for that reason either withdraw from the light altogether or when exposed to it stubbornly refuse to obey it. The covetous man looks on human need and sternly refuses to be moved by it. To yield to the impulse of generosity naturally aroused by the sight of poverty would require him to give up some of his cherished hoard, and this he will not do. So the fountain of generosity is frozen at its source. The miser keeps his gold, the poor man suffers on in his poverty and the whole course of nature is upset. Is it any wonder that God hates covetousness?
But be sure that human feelings can never be completely stifled. If they are forbidden their normal course, like a river they will cut another channel through the life and flow out to curse and ruin and destroy.
The Christian who gazes too long on the carnal pleasures of this world cannot escape a certain feeling of sympathy with them, and that feeling will inevitably lead to behavior that is worldly. And to expose our hearts to truth and consistently refuse or neglect to obey the impulses it arouses is to stymie the motions of life within us and, if persisted in, to grieve the Holy Spirit into silence.
The Scriptures and our own human constitution agree to teach us to love truth and to obey the sweet impulses of righteousness it raises within us. If we love our own souls we dare do nothing else.