Emotional Intelligence: The ABCs of Emotions

Part 10: Holding Onto Hope

Introduction: You’re reading Part 10 in a blog mini-series on Emotional Intelligence. Read Part 1: Emotions: God’s Idea, Part 2: Why We Feel What We Feel, Part 3: Good News about Good Moods, Part 4: What Went Wrong?, Part 5: Our Emotions and Our Bodies, Part 6: How’s Your EI?, Part 7: Become an Emotional Mentor, Part 8: Emotions Gone Mad, and Part 9: What’s Wrong with Stuffing Our Feelings? I’ve developed this series from material in my book Soul Physicians.

Nancy Guthrie’s Story

When Nancy Guthrie endured the death of her two babies to Zellweger Syndrome, she was tempted to anesthetize her feelings. Ponder her testimony after her second child, Hope, died.

“The day after we buried Hope, I understood for the first time why so many people choose to medicate their pain in so many harmful ways. That day I tried to sleep it away. And in the days that followed, I discovered that I could not sleep it away, shop it away, eat it away, or travel it away. I just had to feel it. And it hurt. Physically. I realized I had a choice—I could try to stuff the hurt away in a closet, pretend it wasn’t there, and wish it would disappear, or I could bring it out into the open, expose it to the Light, probe it, accept it head-on, trudge through it, feel its full weight, and do my best to confront my feelings of loss and hopelessness with the truth of God’s Word at every turn” (Guthrie, Holding Onto Hope: A Pathway Through Suffering to the Heart of God, p. 12).

Nancy lives poetically. Nancy knows how to grieve, but not as those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Nancy models for us mood reorder—she shows how our salvation in Christ brings wholeness and holiness to our emotions.

Emotional Maturity: Alive to Life

In Christ, we are enlivened to honestly experience life in all its grief and hope. We are not ashamed of our emotionality. We don’t consider emotions the “black sheep of the image bearing family.” We don’t hide from our feelings. We are alive to life in all its external vicissitudes and internal joys and sorrows.

What a reversal from our fallen emotionality where we feared feeling anything deeply, honestly, and ended up living for shallow emotional highs and avoiding personal pain at all cost. We practiced either: emotional stoicism (repressing our moods) or emotional sensationalism (expressing moods without control or concern for others).

The Bible teaches that mature emotionality enables us to face our feelings and manage our moods. We learn candid honesty with ourselves about our feelings. Like Jeremiah, we identify our mood states, “My soul is downcast within me” (Lamentations 3:20).

We learn to courageously express our feelings to our heavenly Father and to soothe our soul in our Savior. “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

We learn to bring rationality to our emotionality. “In your anger do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold” (Ephesians 4:26-27).

Emotional maturity should permeate every aspect of our new person in Christ.

• Spiritually, we can soothe our soul in our Savior.

• Socially we can, empathize with others, helping them find God’s sustaining comfort and healing hope.

• As self-aware beings we can admit, understand, accept, and manage our moods.

• Rationally, we can bring rationality to our emotionality by understanding with wisdom the causes and nature of our feelings, and by envisioning with spiritual eyes imaginative ways to handle our moods.

• Volitionally, we can consciously and courageously choose to creatively respond to our emotional mood states.

Of All People…

Of all people, Christians should be the most emotionally mature—for all the reasons mentioned above. Yet, often Christians seem to be the least emotionally mature and the most emotionally tone-deaf.

Which of us hasn’t shaken our head in dismay, disbelief, discouragement, and disappointment after an interaction with a Christian leader who just doesn’t get it emotionally? And, if we’re honest, which of us hasn’t shaken our head in dismay at our own emotional immaturity?

Christians tend to be kindergartners when it comes to emotional maturity. We’ve barely learned the “ABCs” of emotional intelligence. That’s why I’ve sub-titled this blog mini-series (okay, not so “mini” anymore!) The ABCs of Emotions. That’s why we need…The Rest of the Story.

The Rest of the Story

Here’s what we’ll learn in our upcoming posts on The ABCs of Emotions:

• A: How are our emotions and mood states of value to us?

• B: How are our emotions and mood states of value to others?

• C: How can we practice the hallmarks of emotional maturity?

Join the Conversation

Why do you think Christians struggle with emotional maturity?

Emotional Intelligence: The ABCs of Emotions

Part 9: What’s Wrong with Stuffing Our Feelings? 

Introduction: You’re reading Part 9 in a blog mini-series on Emotional Intelligence. Read Part 1: Emotions: God’s Idea, Part 2: Why We Feel What We Feel, Part 3: Good News about Good Moods, Part 4: What Went Wrong?, Part 5: Our Emotions and Our Bodies, Part 6: How’s Your EI?, Part 7: Become an Emotional Mentor, and Part 8: Emotions Gone Mad. I’ve developed this series from material in my book Soul Physicians.

Stuffing Our Feelings

In Part 8, we explored the first of two typical ways that emotions go bad: using our emotions as spears—out-of-control expression of our feelings that end up harming others.

For most people, especially Christians, this “spearing of emotions” seems like the worst possible scenario. Additionally, many Christians seem to assume that the opposite extreme is actually a healthy emotional response: “stuffing our feelings”—over-controlled repression of our feelings. Such is not the case.

Emotional Stoics Versus Emotional Poets

God calls us to be emotional “poets.” We are to manage our moods the way the psalmists did— facing our feelings face-to-face with God and soothing our soul in our Savior.

Instead of being passionate poets like the psalmists, we become apathetic stoics. We try to live without pathos, without passion and feeling. Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame was a stoic. He tried to repress his emotions, deny them, if he could, eradicate them.

It’s easy to understand stoicism’s attraction. Hatred, despair, and terror are not exactly the most attractive experiences. When they sweep over us, we flee them like an invading army.

We can understand stoics by contrasting them with poets. What should biblical poets do with their anger, hatred, and rage?

1. Option One: Acknowledging Our Moods or Trying to Eradicate Our Moods

We should not try to eradicate our feelings. Paul tells us to be angry but sin not; he does not tell us never to be angry (Ephesians 4:26). Emotional poets acknowledge their moods to themselves (candor) and to God (lament).

Psalm 73 is a classic expression of a believer’s struggle to comprehend and control his envy, jealousy, and hatred. Asaph is dismayed that a good God could allow bad things to happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. He faces his envy coram Deo (face-to-face with God) telling God all about it. He doesn’t wait to be rid of his envy before he dares enter his Father’s presence. He takes himself, all that he is, including his envy, to God.

Stoics, on the other hand, try to eradicate their hatred. “If I don’t think about it, it’s not there. If I repress it, it will go away.” They choose denial over candor and lament.

2. Option Two: Seeing Our Feelings with Spiritual Eyes or with Eyeballs Only

As emotional poets, God wants us to explore our moods with spiritual eyes. Asaph enters the presence of God to gain perspective on his perspective. “When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny” (Psalm 73:16-17). God calls us to view our external situation and our internal moods from His eternal perspective.

Those who repress their moods try the opposite approach. When a mood doesn’t vanish, they mull it over and over and over again with eyeballs only—from a worldly perspective. Asaph was once trapped there, seeing only the prosperity of the wicked. We’re doomed to defeat whenever we look at our situations and our feelings only from a temporal perspective.

3. Option Three: Confessing My Sinful Anger or Playing the Pharisee with My Sinful Anger

Third, emotional poets confess their sinful anger to Father. “When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you” (Psalm 73:21-22).

Of course, not all anger is sinful. But sinful anger—anger that is self-centered and self-protective, anger that pushes us away from God and others—we confess that anger.

Stoics, on the other hand, don’t confess their mismanaged moods to God. They don’t believe that they could come to God unless they perfectly, serenely suppress their rage. They play the emotional Pharisee—trying to deal with their emotions through the flesh, through works, and through self-sufficiency.

4. Option Four: Facing Feelings with Grace or with Works

Fourth, poets receive grace. “Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand” (Psalm 73:23).

Not so the emotional stoic. In self-righteousness, they never receive grace. They think, “Why do I need grace? I manage quite well on my own.”

5. Option Five: Choosing God-Sufficiency or Self-Sufficiency

Fifth, poets recognize that only God is enough. “Whom have I in heaven but you, and earth has nothing I desire besides you” (Psalm 73:25). Godly emotional poets choose God-sufficiency.

Emotional stoics choose self-sufficiency by denying and attempting to repress their feelings.

Why? Facing moods forces us to face our insufficiency. Nothing makes us feel punier than being overwhelmed by feelings. No one wants to hear the derogatory comment, “He’s so moody.” “She’s so emotional!”

When feelings overpower us we feel powerless, impotent. In our flesh, we would rather stuff our moods, would rather survive self-sufficiently, than admit that we need help managing our moods.

That’s why stuffing our feelings is sinful—it is a work’s orientation. It displays a self-sufficient denial of our need for God. Though more subtle than out-of-control expression (spearing) of our feelings, suppression is equally sinful.

The Rest of the Story

We’ve explored mood order—how God designed our emotions to function. And we’ve probed mood disorder—how sin mars God’s design for our moods. We never want to stop at sin. Where sin abounds, grace super-abounds (Romans 5:20). In our upcoming posts, we begin to discuss mood reorder—how does our salvation in Christ bring wholeness and holiness to our emotions?

Join the Conversation

How surprised are you that repressing, suppressing, and stuffing our feelings is just as harmful and sinful as using our feelings as spears?

Emotional Intelligence: The ABCs of Emotions

Part 8: Emotions Gone Bad and Mad

Introduction: You’re reading Part 8 in a blog mini-series on Emotional Intelligence. Read Part 1: Emotions: God’s Idea, Part 2: Why We Feel What We Feel, Part 3: Good News about Good Moods, Part 4: What Went Wrong?, Part 5: Our Emotions and Our Bodies, Part 6: How’s Your EI?, and Part 7: Become an Emotional Mentor. I’ve developed this series from material in my book Soul Physicians.

Mood Disorder: Emotions Gone Mad

So far in our blog series on emotional intelligence, we’ve focused on how God designed us as emotional beings. We’ve called this “Mood Order.”

However, we’d be quite naïve to imagine that our emotions and moods are always well-ordered. Because of our fall into sin, we’re not the way we’re supposed to be—we are depraved and disordered. For emotions, we call this “Mood Disorder.”

In Ephesians 4:19, Paul chooses a very rare Greek word, apēlgēkotes, to describe mood disorder. The word literally means “past feeling.” We cease to feel and care. Tired of feeling, we shut ourselves down to the messages that pain sends. As a result, we lack emotional intelligence, sensitivity, and awareness.

Designed to be responsive to the world, others, and God, we close ourselves off. We think we’re too smart to smart anymore. In our folly, we decide that hurt is too painful, even if reflecting on hurt enhances our relationships. We become obtuse to emotional messages—emotionally dense, relationally stunted.

Refusing to Need God: Emotions Gone Bad

What is the essence of fallen emotionality? Instead of using emotions to experience deeply the life God grants us, we misuse our emotions to forget the pain in our soul and the sin in our heart. We pursue whatever pleases us for a season. We live as if this world is all there is.

We also pursue whatever pleases us for a reason. We live to survive, to make it somehow—without God. You see, facing our feelings force us to face the fact that we must live face-to-face with God to survive.

In our refusal to depend upon God, we pinball between two self-centered, self-sufficient emotional survival modes.

• Out-of-Control Emotional Expression

• Over-Controlled Emotional Repression

Both styles share the refusal to listen well to our emotions, the refusal to use our emotionality to evaluate where we are spiritually. We refuse to face our feelings because we refuse to need God.

Using Our Feelings as Spears: Out-of-Control Emotional Expression

Paul further describes sinful emotions in Ephesians 4:19 as “giving themselves over to sensuality.” We’re ungoverned. Out of control. We’ve taken the brakes off our emotions.

We decide that we want nothing to do with managed moods. If we feel it; we express it. If it hurts others; so be it.

Consider King Saul. He massaged his jealousy toward David. When the women of Israel met Saul and David with dancing and song, they sang, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7). Saul was enraged. This refrain galled him. “And from that time on Saul kept a jealous eye on David” (1 Samuel 18:9).

Caressed anger leads to expressed anger.

“Saul had a spear in his hand and he hurled it, saying to himself, ‘I’ll pin David to the wall’” (1 Samuel 18:10b-11a). Saul perfectly pictures imperfect, sinful emotions—we use our feelings as spears to hurt others.

Like all unmanaged moods, Saul’s resulted from a foolish internal evaluation of a difficult external situation. No doubt it would be emotionally distressing for most leaders to hear subordinates praised to the extent people praised David.

Experiencing this, Saul kept thinking to himself, rather than talking to God. “They have credited David with tens of thousands,” he thought, “but me with only thousands. What more can he get but the kingdom?” (1 Samuel 18:8b).

Saul catastrophized. Imagining God to be a Hoarder, Saul could not imagine that there was enough respect and responsibility to go around for both David and himself. This town was not big enough for the both of them because God was not big enough for Saul.

Emotional sensationalists wear their emotions on their sleeves and hurl their feelings like a spear. They will not be controlled. They refuse to be inhibited. Their feelings become their god.

Yet, their feelings never direct them to God. They may feel their feelings, indulge their feelings, but they never engage their feelings, never use their mood states to detect their spiritual state.

And Us?

I know. We’re all thinking about people—other people. People who have treated us like this.

But what about us? Am I, are you, are we ever guilty of indulging our feelings? Do we ever use our feelings as spears to harm others? Do we refuse to face our feelings face-to-face with God?

The Rest of the Story

Some may wonder, “Well, yes, I do this—so how do I cling to God so I can change?” Great, honest question. We’ll address that later in our series.

Others may say, “Well, that’s not my style. I do the opposite. I stuff my feelings.” In our next post, we’ll examine that mood disorder in: Why Stuffing Our Feelings Is Sinful.

Join the Conversation

If you’ve used your emotions as a spear to harm others, what is God’s Word calling you to do?

Emotional Intelligence: The ABCs of Emotions

Part 7: Become an Emotional Mentor: How to Help Others with Their Emotions 

Introduction: You’re reading Part 7 in a blog mini-series on Emotional Intelligence. Read Part 1: Emotions: God’s Idea, Part 2: Why We Feel What We Feel, Part 3: Good News about Good Moods, Part 4: What Went Wrong?, Part 5: Our Emotions and Our Bodies, and Part 6: How’s Your EI? I’ve developed this series from material in my book Soul Physicians.

Emotions Are God-Given

Of course emotions are God-given because God created us in His image, including His emotional image. As John Piper notes, “God’s emotional life is infinitely complex beyond our ability to fully comprehend.”

While our emotions are not infinitely complex, they are complex. So, in ministering to others, let people have their feelings. Face people’s feelings, don’t fear them, don’t run from them.

Since emotional maturity includes experiencing life deeply and acting on feelings wisely, help people to face their feelings. Point them out. Explore them. Think about them.

Emotional Maturity Is Learned

Explore where your spiritual friends learned how to handle their emotions. Trace their emotional education to its roots. Then help your spiritual friends to unlearn (put off) unhealthy emotional living and learn (put on) healthy emotionality.

Bring rationality to emotionality. Explore the Scriptures with your spiritual friends to discern how they can respond to their emotions and to understand how their emotions reveal their deepest attitudes toward God.

Spiritual Discipline Is Vital to Emotional Health

Help people to tune their whole person—body and soul, mind and emotion—to be ready recipients of God’s grace. Teach the spiritual disciplines—like prayer, biblical meditation (Psalm 1), silence, solitude, simplicity, submission, service, etc.

Help people to understand that the Psalms are “emotional mentors.” Meditating on, applying, and paraphrasing psalms help us to face our feelings face-to-face with God.

The Rest of the Story

In our next post, we shift gears considerably as we move from God’s design for our emotions to sin’s distortion of our emotions, feelings, and moods. Read all about it in Emotions Gone Bad and Mad.

Join the Conversation

Of the three foundational principles of helping people with their emotional maturity, which one do you most want to add to your tool box of spiritual friendship?

Emotional Intelligence: The ABCs of Emotions

Part 6: How’s Your Emotional Intelligence? 

Introduction: You’re reading Part 6 in a blog mini-series on Emotional Intelligence. Read Part 1: Emotions: God’s Idea, Part 2: Why We Feel What We Feel, Part 3: Good News about Good Moods, Part 4: What Went Wrong?, and Part 5: Our Emotions and Our Bodies. I’ve developed this series from material in my book Soul Physicians.

IQ or EQ?

People talk a lot about IQ—Intelligence Quotient. However, we all know that “book smarts” and “people smarts” are two different skills. Today, we’ll summarize and apply what we’ve said so far about emotions by taking an Emotional Intelligence Test.

What’s Your EQ?

Evaluate yourself using 10 as “Emotionally Mature” and 1 as “Emotionally Immature.”

1. I’m aware of my feelings and moods as they occur.

2. I’m able to recognize and name my feelings and moods.

3. I’m able to understand the causes of my feelings and moods.

4. I maintain a sense of ongoing attention to my internal mood states.

5. I’m aware both of my mood and my thoughts about my mood.

6. I actively monitor my moods as the first step in gaining control of them.

7. I soothe my soul in God—I candidly take my feelings and mood to Christ.

8. I have a sense of self-mastery—frustration tolerance and anger management.

9. I self-regulate my emotions—self-control.

10. I can harness my emotions in the service of a godly goal.

11. I can stifle my impulses (“passions of the flesh”) and delay gratification.

12. I’m a hopeful person.

13. I turn setbacks into comebacks.

14. I’m resilient and longsuffering. I demonstrate perseverance.

15. I practice Christ-centered hopefulness: “I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me.” “I can meet challenges as they arise.” “I’m competent in Christ.”

16. I’m learning contentment in whatever state I’m in (external situation or internal mood).

17. I’m attuned to others, not emotionally tone-deaf. I have the ability to sense another’s mood.

18. I have empathy built on self-awareness. I’m open to my own emotions and, therefore, skilled in reading the feelings of others.

19. I practice the creative ability of perceiving the subjective experiences of others.

20. I make another person’s pain my own.

21. I can take on the perspective of another person.

22. I forgive.

23. I’m emotionally nourishing toward others.

24. I leave others in a good mood.

25. I’m effective in interpersonal relationships.

26. I help others to soothe their souls in their Savior.

27. I can initiate and coordinate the efforts of a group of people—helping them to move with synchrony and harmony.

28. I can negotiate solutions—mediation, preventing or resolving conflicts.

29. I can make personal connection—ease of entry into an encounter along with the ability to recognize and respond fittingly to people’s feelings/concerns.

30. I’m a good team player.

31. I’m skilled at social analysis—being able to detect and have insights into people’s feelings, motives, and concerns. Ease of intimacy and rapport.

The Rest of the Story

Today we focus on personal application. In our next post, we focus on ministry application. Read all about it in Helping Others with Their Emotions.

Join the Conversation

So, how’d you do? How’s your EQ or EI? What biblical principles could you follow to grow in emotional areas where you are currently not quite as mature?

Emotional Intelligence: The ABCs of Emotions

Part 5: Dust and Divinity: Our Bodies and Our Emotions

Introduction: You’re reading Part 5 in a blog mini-series on Emotional Intelligence. Read Part 1: Emotions: God’s Idea, Part 2: Why We Feel What We Feel, Part 3: Good News about Good Moods, and Part 4: What Went Wrong? I’ve developed this series from material in my book Soul Physicians.

A Defining Question

In a recent CCEF Ask the Counselor video, biblical counselor David Powlison addressed the question, “Do you believe that there is a biological basis for depression which may endure, despite the fact that heart issues have been successfully addressed through biblical counseling? If so, is there a place for long-term use of medication?”

In his nuanced, loving, balanced response, Dr. Powlison noted that, “this is one of the defining questions of our age.” Listen to David’s full response at Is Depression Purely Biological?

A 1,000-word blog post can never provide the final word on this defining issue. Instead, consider these words simply an introduction to the Bible’s teaching on the complex inner-working of our body/soul, brain/mind connection.

Jars of Clay

In the beginning, God designed us as body-soul beings. “The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). Even before the fall, we were more than inner person—we were and are embodied beings.

Our bodies are works of art fashioned by our heavenly Father who fearfully and wonderfully handcrafted us (Psalm 139:13-16). We are works of God’s hand; made, shaped, molded, clothed with skin and flesh, and knit together with bones and sinews (Job 10:3-12). We are not to despise our physicality.

After the fall, the Bible teaches that we inhabit fallen bodies in a fallen world (Romans 8:18-25). Paul calls our fallen bodies “jars of clay” (2 Corinthians 4:7). As one commentator has mused, we are cracked pots! Paul also describes our bodies as a mortal earthly tent—perishable, weak, flesh and blood (1 Corinthians 15:42-47).

Paul is not saying that the flesh is bad or evil. He is saying that our bodies are weak and natural, prone in our fallen state to disorder and dysfunction.

Some modern Christians seem to take a hyper-spiritual approach to the brain/mind issue. They act as if inner spirituality eliminates all the effects of outer bodily maladies. Some seem to imply that giving any credence to the fallen bodies influence on our emotional state is something of a Trojan Horse that sneaks secular, materialistic thought into Christian spirituality.

Not So the Puritans

The Puritans would have been shocked by such a naïve perspective on the mind-body issue. Puritan pastors and theologians like Robert Burton, William Ames, and Jonathan Edwards recognized that problems such as scrupulosity (what we might call OCD) and melancholy (what we might call depression) might, at least in part, be rooted in the fallen body. They warned that such maladies sometimes could not be cured simply by comforting words or biblical persuasion (see A History of Pastoral Care in America, pp. 60-72).

Edwards described his sense of pastoral helplessness in the face of the melancholy of his uncle, Joseph Hawley. He noted that Hawley was “in a great measure past a capacity of receiving advice, or being reasoned with” (see A History of Pastoral Care in America, p. 73). Eventually, Hawley took his own life one Sabbath morning. Shortly thereafter, Edwards advised clergy against the assumption that spiritual issues alone were at work in melancholy.

Emotions: Bridging Our Inner and Outer Worlds

Emotions truly are a bridge between our inner and outer world. Think of the word “feeling.” Feeling is a tactile word suggesting something that is tangible, physical, touchable, and palpable. “I feel the keyboard as I type. I feel the soft comfortable chair beneath me. I feel my sore back and stiff wrists as they cry out, “Give it a rest!”

We also use this physical word—feeling—to express emotions. “I feel sad. I feel happy. I feel joy. I feel anger.” It’s no surprise that we use this one word in these two ways—physical and emotional. We know what the Israelites understood—our body feels physically what our emotions feel metaphysically (see my Th.M. thesis Hebrew Anthropological Terms as a Foundation for a Biblical Counseling Model of Humanity).

When I’m nervous, my stomach is upset. When I feel deep love, my chest tightens. When I’m anxious, my heart races. When I’m sad, my entire system slows.

We know much more about the brain than the Israelites knew. It is a physical organ of the body and all physical organs in a fallen world in unglorified bodies can malfunction. My heart, liver, and kidneys can all become diseased, sick. So can the physical organ we call the brain.

Embracing our Weakness/Embracing God’s Power

It is important to realize that every emotion involves a complex interaction between body and soul. Therefore, it is dangerous to assume that all emotional struggles can be changed by strictly “spiritual means.”

For some, spirituality includes embracing physical weakness. In fact, this is the exact message Paul communicates when he calls us “jars of clay.” Why does God allow us to experience physical weakness? “To show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). It’s the same message Paul personally experienced in his own situational suffering (2 Corinthians 1:8-9) and in his own bodily suffering (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).

We can act as if we are more spiritual than the Apostle Paul. However, in actuality, pretending that our external suffering and our physical bodies do not impact us emotionally involves an arrogant refusal to depend upon and cling to Christ alone.

Certain emotions, especially anxiety and depression, involve physiological components that sometimes may need to be treated with medication. When we ignore the importance of the body, we misunderstand what it means to trust God. It is wrong to place extra burdens on those who suffer emotionally by suggesting that all they need to do is surrender to God to make their struggles go away. 

On the other hand, it would be equally wrong to suggest that medication is all someone needs. That would be like a pastor entering the cancer ward to talk with a parishioner who was just told that she has cancer. “Well, take your medicine. Do chemo. You’ll be fine. See ya’ later.” No! That pastor would support, comfort, talk with, and pray for his parishioner.

Sickness and suffering are always a battleground between Satan and Christ. So, while medicine may sometimes be indicated for certain people with certain emotional battles, spiritual friendship is always indicated. Physicians of the body (and the brain is an organ of the physical body) prescribe medication. Physicians of the soul (and the mind is an inner capacity and reality of the soul) prescribe grace.

The Rest of the Story

So how’s your EQ—your Emotional Quotient? In our next post, we’ll summarize and apply what we’ve said so far by presenting an EI Test: an Emotional Intelligence Test.

Join the Conversation

I know today’s post is controversial. What’s your take? Where do you stand on the issue of causes and cures for emotional distress? Does the body potentially play a role? Is medicine ever part of God’s ordained treatment?