Faithfulness to God involves both emotional honesty and wholehearted obedience. Learn to integrate authentic feelings with faithful action as a disciple of Jesus.
The Paradox: Faithfulness to God involves both emotional honesty and wholehearted obedience. But daily, it often feels like we can either be authentic or righteous.
In the Scriptures, we see that God calls us his friends, and we may speak to him with the intimacy, freedom, and vulnerability of a beloved son talking openly with his caring father. At the same time, God invites us into this loving relationship so that we should keep his commands, even to the point of laying down our lives for the benefit of others (see John 15:1-16:15). A reoccurring challenge is that we become disconnected from God, others and ourselves when we either deny our feelings and force ourselves into behavioral compliance or when we elevate our feelings above the call to obedience.
To develop wholehearted obedience that integrates emotional honesty with faithful action, recognizing that God cares for both our hearts and our choices.
When I lived in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, I rented a small room in a property owned by the legendary Idene Wilkerson, known as Ma Siss. She started a church, food bank, and thrift store for the benefit of her neighbors in an area known for drug dealing, prostitution, and theft. While I lived there, someone fired a gun at the house, embedding a bullet in the siding.
Perhaps it was more foolishness than courage, but I never felt afraid while I lived there. I felt that God had called me to live in this under-resourced environment, to love and serve my neighbors, and to invite the community to know and follow Jesus. Even when cops stopped me for questioning (they suspected I was running drugs to the suburbs), I saw it as an opportunity to share the gospel with them. I lived in a faith-filled confidence that God was watching out for me. Every Sunday afternoon, as we gathered for the humblest of church services, our misfit group of disciples would hold hands and sing together, "I have decided / to follow Jesus / no turning back / no turning back."
Yet after living in a relatively cold apartment through another freezing Bostonian winter, with a barebones kitchen, in a neighborhood far from my work, school, and primary church, I realized I needed to move. Living in Dorchester was lonely, stressful, and difficult. In addition, one benefit of my campus ministry position was access to a beautiful home next to Harvard's campus. Beaten down and worn out, I left before my lease was up.
A week after I moved, I came down with shingles—an unusual condition for an otherwise healthy man in his twenties. The overload of an intense year had crashed my system, and it took a couple of weeks to recover.
The bigger challenge was the feeling of shame: had I abandoned God's call to love the poor out of a selfish desire to live in comfort? I had felt called by God to live there! Had I turned back on following Jesus?
So, what does it look like to respond to God's call in our lives? Do we embrace suffering to love our neighbors? Or should we first care for ourselves so we can persevere? Is it self-justifying logic to convince myself that living in Harvard Square was the best way I could honor the Lord? Jesus died on the cross for my sins; could I not endure unpleasant weather and social isolation?
I've continued to wrestle with this tension. Yet with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that I was trying to do too much, for too many, too often. It was by listening to my heart that I gained the wisdom I needed to follow Jesus with greater faithfulness. Instead of living as God's beloved son, I was trying to prove to God that I deserved his love. And over time, the Lord has led me to other, more sustainable ways of serving the poor.
This inevitable collision between our authentic emotions and our commitment to faithful obedience is a challenge for every disciple of Jesus.
Whether it is an everyday challenge like reading the Bible when you'd rather swipe through Instagram, choosing to forgive someone when you want to take revenge, or serving in the nursery at church when you want to be catching up with your friends, we all face the tension between being true to ourselves and denying ourselves for the sake of others.
To grow as disciples of Jesus, we need God's wisdom, strength, and love to live in this tension.
I still remember 'winning' an argument with a friend in high school. He argued that emotions mattered to God. I scoffed and obliterated his position with a variety of logical arguments that demolished his case. Of course, I was completely wrong, and too smug to recognize it.
But somewhere between reading the Scriptures, falling in love with my wife, and becoming a Dad, I came to understand that God gave us emotions as a gift. Emotions are God's design for how we experience and respond to life.
It took him over a year, but a counselor eventually helped me understand that emotions are like an internal navigation system—joy points us toward what's life-giving, anger alerts us to injustice, fear warns us of danger, sadness helps us process loss, and peace can confirm when we're aligned with God's ways.
Rather than being obstacles to faith, our emotions are part of how we bear God's image. They're a gift that connects us to our internal realities, to other people, and to our circumstances. When we acknowledge, understand, and share them, they deepen our relationship with our friends and with God.
Whether we are praying with the raw honesty of the Psalms, reading the journals of the prophets, or witnessing Jesus cry out in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see a consistent pattern of emotional authenticity.
If you feel afraid of your emotions, consider Jesus. As a fundamental principle, we know that Jesus was fully human, and so he experienced the full range of human emotions.
Yet lest we be tempted to think this only includes the 'good' emotions, the Gospels record how Jesus experienced grief, anger, and distress. He wept at Lazarus's tomb (John 11:35), expressed anger at religious hypocrisy (Mark 3:5), felt compassion for the crowds (Matthew 9:36), and experienced deep distress in Gethsemane (Luke 22:44).
And we know that in his heart, he wrestled with the cost of obedience yet without ever disobeying. In Gethsemane, he cried out, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." He begged God for another option, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me." And on the cross, he expressed despair, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
How much more clearly could God demonstrate to us that he values the entire human experience? God's care for our emotions isn't just theoretical—it's incarnational. It's who he is. Just like we see in the Gospels, our emotions are physically experienced as racing hearts, wet tears running down our cheeks, tension in our shoulders, lightness in our step, or warmth in our chest. God intentionally made us so that our emotions were built into the experience of being embodied human beings. And so, like Jesus, faithfulness doesn't come by escaping our emotions but by integrating all of who we are into a loving response to God.
However, it's very convenient to use God's invitation to authentic relationships as an excuse to avoid doing what God says! Instead of living under God's authority, we become ruled by our emotions. Then, we can leverage our emotions to doubt God, which eventually leads us to become double-minded and unstable (see James 1:5-8).
Second, when we never push through our emotional resistance to obedience, we stunt our emotional development. In the movie About A Boy, the character Will, played by Hugh Grant, is literally a playboy. He's reached the desperate level of attending single-parent meetings to seduce women! It isn't until he meets an awkward 12-year-old named Marcus and decides to make sacrifices to help him out that he develops into an adult. While it's a secular movie, the story powerfully demonstrates that living for ourselves keeps us from developing emotional and relational health.
At yet another stage, when we cannot see beyond our emotional experiences, we can become self-deceived. We can no longer hear what God is saying to us because we are only listening to our hearts. We can read the Bible to hunt for promises that we convince ourselves to mean that God will prosper us. We skim over or ignore the stories that make us uncomfortable. Instead of an accurate picture of God and ourselves, we only believe what makes us feel good.
Another struggle I've had is thinking that salvation is good, and sanctification is bad. I want to be with Jesus, but I don't want to be like Jesus. Yet God repeatedly asks his people to obey him, even when it is hard, painful, and emotionally torturous.
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins famously said about Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac, "By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: 'I was only obeying orders."
Yet far from being a valid critique of Christianity, Dawkins has only explained the cost of discipleship: Yes, we must obey God's orders! One reason he misunderstands them, perhaps, is that he is viewing God's commands from the outside, which leads to the mischaracterization of them as brutal and harsh.
Of course, Dawkins could have picked from many other examples: Moses being sent to confront Pharaoh with the demand to "Let my people go!", Job bearing witness to God after losing everything, Daniel accepting the terror of the lion's den, or Stephen preaching the gospel to those who were stoning him.
Yet all these stories point to the ultimate price that Jesus paid: his grisly, bloody, but voluntary death on the cross. The physical, psychological, and social torment was only a shadow of the actual price: the spiritual payment for our sins.
What Dawkins misses and what I have often missed, too is that God is not demanding obedience to make us miserable. Rather, as God proved on the cross, he is with us in all of our challenges to obey him. He has not asked us to do anything he has not done himself. Give up his son for the benefit of others? He spared Isaac because Jesus was willing to take his place.
Yet at another level, Dawkins' critique is sometimes an accurate description of the Christian experience! Whenever we believe that God is a harsh taskmaster, we shut down our emotions and force ourselves to do what we hate. The sad consequence is that when our hearts shut down, we cannot love God or others. At best, we can maintain an external compliance with rules. But Jesus said that to honor God with our lips, while our hearts are far from him, is no good at all (Matthew 15:7-8).
The longer we prolong a separation between our "spiritual self" and our "real self", the more inevitable it becomes that we collapse out of exhaustion. I suspect that many Christian leaders get into darker and more perverse moral failures as a kind of compensation for living with the pressure to always be spiritually perfect. Their hidden sin continues to fester and grow, with no safe outlet to speak honestly.
At its root, obedience without emotional engagement stems from a belief that God values us if and only if we perform for him. We are engaged in a desperate effort to earn his love through religious duties, when he is offering us his steadfast love, abundant grace, and faithful friendship.
I've tried to white-knuckle my obedience to God, but it's never worked. A sincere desire to deny myself, do what's right, and obey God is unsustainable without the ongoing experience of God's love, an intimate friendship with Jesus, and living by the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit.
We need to have time with God where our only goal is to receive his loving-kindness. Unless we are recipients of his love, we will lack the strength to love him and our neighbors. It's when we view obedience from the inside-out, as a response to a God who has proven his love through the ultimate sacrifice, that we see how his commands are good for us even if they lead to martyrdom!
So how does God develop us into wholehearted disciples of Jesus? What does it look like — and feel like — to want to obey God?
The journey begins when we confess that both our emotions and our wills need to be repaired. On our own, both our feelings and our decisions will take us away from God. When we come to Jesus empty-handed and broken-hearted, we ask him to forgive us for our waywardness, restore our humanity, and make us new creations.
Sometimes, the Christian journey is visualized as two points on a line: the moment we pray to God to become a Christian and the moment we pass into heaven. But of course, Jesus promised to never leave us or forsake us, but to be with us always, to the very end of the age. God is with us, moment to moment, reshaping us from the inside out, to genuinely love and obey him.
Like any good Father, God wants our entire selves to be integrated with the experience of his love. Here are some practices that can help us develop into Christlikeness:
**Practice emotional honesty with God.**
We can't be honest about feelings we haven't acknowledged. Developing emotional awareness—the ability to recognize and name our feelings—is an invaluable way to understand ourselves and God's care for us. We can start with simple questions like these:
David modeled this practice in Psalm 139 when he prayed, "Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my concerns. See if there is any offensive way in me; lead me in the everlasting way." (Psalm 139:23-24). Prayer is an opportunity to trust God with all of our hearts.
When I struggle to find these honest words, I often turn to the Psalms for help. Sometimes I just pray them as my prayer; at other times, I use them as springboards to help me find my voice. It's hard to be angry, disappointed, or frustrated with God. But taking the risk of being real with God is how our relationship grows with him.
**Build close, trustworthy relationships with other disciples of Jesus.**
When we are worthy of others' trust, and they have proven worthy of ours, it becomes increasingly safe to be vulnerable with one another. When God brings godly friends and mentors into our lives, we will experience humility, gentleness, and patient encouragement. As we share our raw feelings with one another, our struggles with obedience, and our need for God's help, we naturally develop both emotional maturity and a desire to honor God with our lives.
A mature spiritual community creates space for authentic expression while also encouraging faithful action. Such communities recognize that "I'm struggling with this command" is not the same as "I'm rejecting God." We bear one another's burdens when obedience feels impossible, and we speak truth in love when emotional authenticity becomes an excuse for unfaithfulness.
**Ask God (and trusted Christian friends and mentors) to give you discernment.**
It's one thing to name our emotions. It's another to know what to do with them. If a friend betrays us, the emotional experience of anger is like an instant download of gigabytes of reality. The anger is telling us that we have been violated by someone we trusted.
But what comes next? With the guidance of God and the help of others, we can better discern how to honor Christ. In some circumstances, it might mean the end of the relationship, and protecting ourselves from further harm. In others, perhaps we are called to forgive, to reconcile, and to seek to rebuild the relationship.
Listening to our emotions can give us important awareness of our environment, but they cannot give us the wisdom to know what to do next. To gain this perspective, we need to immerse ourselves in the Scriptures, living openly with our friends, and seeking God's guidance to live obediently.
**See God's ways as an invitation to thrive.**
One of the breakthrough moments in my discipleship came after intensively studying the Sermon on the Mount. It's one of Jesus' "signature sermons," but to my mind, it is often wildly misunderstood.
To summarize his message, Jesus is giving his newly gathered disciples a vision for their life together with him. He's telling them: if we live like this, loving God and others, then we will thrive because we will live the way that God has always taught us to live—a way of life that is good both now and forever.
God isn't against our happiness, but he is committed to our holiness. Whether we like it or not, at least at first, growth comes when we recognize that Christlikeness is the only path to lasting joy. It's not about 'following the rules' so much as it is about aligning ourselves with the ultimate reality: a Triune God of love, who loves us so much that he invites us to participate in a community of wholehearted love for God and others.
Ultimately, the ability to thrive comes as we shift from doing life for God to living life with God. As Paul guides us, "walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh" (Galatians 5:16). Obedience is not a series of endless tasks assigned by a perfectionistic and distant boss, but a way of living in God's loving presence.
In my loneliest and most empty moments, I've regularly turned to one hymn. George Matheson, a blind pastor, wrote the classic hymn, 'O love that will not let me go,' in the summer of 1882. He said about it, "It was composed with extreme rapidity; it seemed to me that its construction occupied only a few minutes, and I felt myself rather in the position of one who was being dictated to than of an original artist. I was suffering from extreme mental distress, and the hymn was the fruit of pain."
Whether you are in crisis or living with joy, I pray that his inspired words will encourage your heart:
O love that will not let me go, > I rest my weary soul in thee; > I give thee back the life I owe, > That in thine ocean depths its flow > May richer, fuller be. > > O Light that follows all my way, > I yield my flick'ring torch to thee; > My heart restores its borrowed ray, > That in thy sunshine's blaze its day > May brighter, fairer be. > > O Joy that seekest me thru' pain, > I cannot close my heart to thee; > I trace the rainbow thru' the rain > And feel the promise is not vain > That morn shall tearless be. > > O cross that liftest up my head, > I dare not ask to fly from thee; > I lay in dust life's glory dead, > And from the ground there blossoms red > Life that shall endless be.
Christian, bring your weary soul to Jesus and find that in his ocean depths, sunshine's blaze, faithful promises, and sacrificial love, he gives you himself, and life that shall endless be.
Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he told the disciples, "Sit here while I go over there and pray." Taking along Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled. He said to them, "I am deeply grieved to the point of death. Remain here and stay awake with me." Going a little farther, he fell facedown and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. He asked Peter, "So, couldn't you stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray, so that you won't enter into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Again, a second time, he went away and prayed, "My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done." And he came again and found them sleeping, because they could not keep their eyes open. After leaving them, he went away again and prayed a third time, saying the same thing once more. Then he came to the disciples and said to them, "Are you still sleeping and resting? See, the time is near. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up; let's go. See, my betrayer is near."
How does this passage reveal the importance of Christian friendship?
How do the disciples express the tension between desire and duty?
How does their inclusion in this story demonstrate God's grace?
How does Jesus express his authentic feelings to God?
How does Jesus model faithful obedience to God?
What's one step you can take to talk to your Heavenly Father like Jesus does?
Father, thank you for welcoming my honest emotions while also calling me to faithful obedience. Help me to experience that you are smiling at me, loving me, and caring for me, no matter what.
Jesus, you showed me how to bring my true feelings before God while still choosing obedience. Teach me to follow your example, especially when obedience feels most difficult.
Holy Spirit, give me self-awareness. Search my heart and reveal to me where I am neglecting emotional honesty—and faithful obedience. Renew my heart and my hand, so that I might become full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
We will discuss Matthew 26:36-46 together.
Reflect on your spiritual journey. Do you tend to 'get real' with God? Or attempt to obey him, whether or not you feel like it? How has this preference shaped how you experience God?
Consider a recent situation where you felt resistance to obeying God. How did you handle the tension between your feelings and your call to obedience?
What fears or concerns arise when you consider being more emotionally honest with God? What would it be like to tell him everything, with no filters?
Reflect on your spiritual journey. Do you tend to 'get real' with God? Or attempt to obey him, whether or not you feel like it? How has this preference shaped how you experience God?
Consider a recent situation where you felt resistance to obeying God. How did you handle the tension between your feelings and your call to obedience?
What fears or concerns arise when you consider being more emotionally honest with God? What would it be like to tell him everything, with no filters?
Holy Spirit, I long to love you as you have loved me. Even when you find me sleeping, you wake me up and invite me to follow Jesus again. I need your help now and always.
Start or update your 'rule of life.' What practices will help you to be wholeheartedly obedient?
Share with a trusted friend or small group member about an area where you're experiencing tension between your feelings and your sense of God's calling.
Listen to someone else's struggle without rushing to either validate their feelings at the expense of obedience or push for obedience at the expense of their feelings.
What's one specific step you'll take this week to practice wholehearted faith?
Do I want to share this goal with the group for accountability?
Get a daily, five-minute Bible study to discuss with a friend.