Emotions are powerful. Our emotions profoundly impact the quality and condition of our lives and our relationships. Learning how to understand, process, and express our emotions is an important part of practicing the way of Jesus together. This is perhaps never more clearly revealed than in the book of Psalms. The gift of the Psalms is that they gi...
Anger, in some form or another, is part of our lives. Some of us spend a lot of time angry at the world and others. Others of us spend most of our time being angry at ourselves. And some people have been so angry for so long that they aren’t even sure what they are angry about anymore. In Scripture, there are examples of those who pursued what we...
Fear is “that sense of uneasiness or uncertainty that we experience in the face of perceived danger.” Fear meets us in countless ways, but not all in the same ways. Over and over again, the Psalms encourage us not to be fear-free, but to fear the Lord. People who fear the Lord above all are able to put all of their other fears in perspective....
Envy is wanting what you think other people have because you think it will make you happy. Our constant striving–for more, for bigger, for better–betrays the fact that there is a deep longing in the soul of every human being that we do not know how to satisfy. In Psalm 73, the story of Asaph’s struggle with envy was finally resolved when He g...
Despair is the word we use to describe our feelings around hopelessness. As we’ve seen in each week of this series, the Psalms meet us where we need it most regarding negative emotions. The various writers of the Psalms were well acquainted with despair. A prayer like Psalm 88 provides us with the necessary guardrails to despair well before God...
Contempt can be defined as an emotion, often stemming from pride, that leads us to disrespect another image bearer of God. It can be a problem for all of us daily. In Psalm 123, when the Psalmist fixes His eyes on God, he discovers a fresh perspective. He finds that the respect he feels toward God, His King, becomes the antidote for the disrespect ...
Shame and guilt are two of the most powerful emotions a human being can experience. These emotions are normally the result of something bad we have done, are doing, or even the result of bad things that have been done to us. They make us feel unworthy, unlovable, and unredeemable. The gospel, however, says that your guilt and shame are the prerequi...