Ways Christians Can Develop and Maintain a Healthy Emotional Life

Be Vulnerable and Notice

You’ve got all kinds of emotions if you’re a human being, and you have them because of the things you love. What you love is going to shape what you feel, and the overflow of what you treasure and care about is going to flow into how you have an emotional life.

So the question then becomes: What is a healthy Christian emotional life? What does a godly emotional life look like? How do you nurture that? How do you actually pursue that? At the end of the day, there’s no limit to the number of answers there.

And happily, if you never thought about that question again for the rest of your life, chances are that living simply in the things that it means to be a faithful Christian would be accomplishing that. So the most basic answer is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. That is going to shape and nurture a healthy emotional life nine times out of ten or ten times out of ten, although you may need to do a little nuancing.

But if I were thinking even slightly more specifically and particularly about what you can do if you want to have a rich, godly, Christian emotional life, I’d give two thoughts.

Number one is you actually have to open yourself to more vulnerability to the heartache of the world. That sounds counterintuitive. You might think, No, I asked for a healthy emotional life. I didn’t ask for sadness and sorrow. But actually, a godly, Christian, healthy emotional life means more sorrow. It actually means more burdens on your heart.

Paul, in 2 Corinthians 11, talks about how he daily bears his anxiety for all the churches. He’s not confessing that. He’s saying, I have a burden on my heart because I care about the church. I care about the spread of the kingdom, and it matters to me that that goes forward. I know the dangers, threats of persecution, false teachers, temptations, rivalries, and envious dissensions. That weighs on me, and I want that.

What you love is going to shape what you feel.

As C. S. Lewis put it, “If you love at all, you’re going to be vulnerable.” So, recognizing you actually need to open your heart more to the heartaches of the world, that’s piece number one in having a really rich, godly emotional life like our Lord, like Paul, like Peter, like David all throughout the psalms.

On the other side, I think nurturing a healthy emotional life so often means finding the little things. The Israelites crossed the Jordan and they set up stones to remind them of what God has done.

Where are those Ebenezers? Where are those altars? Where are those reminders? Where are you taking communion with your congregation? Where are you having that little thing that sits on your nightstand and just says to you, God is faithful; he’s been there; he will be there?

And the more you can have those triggers and reminders built into your world, the more you push that into your conversation with yourself, your roommate, your spouse, or your kids of just where the Lord is active in your life, the more you will see the world through the lens of Scripture and through the lens of a relationship with the Lord. There’s nothing better in nurturing your emotional life than to have those places where you see God is active, present, and good.

J. Alasdair Groves is the author of Untangling Emotions.

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