Flowing in the right direction

(new article tomorrow)

God wouldn't put emotions as part of our soul and body if they weren't critically important, but they're not to be the source of our thinking, says Richard Jordan. They're not the basis of your choices; they're designed to be RESPONDERS to what your will has decided upon as truth.

If truth sets you free, error binds you. Now, that's the way you're made to function. Emotions are designed to identify for you, in your thinking, what's going on in your inner man.

You've never seen your soul. You've never seen your spirit. You've never felt your spirit because it's a non-experiential thing. You've never felt your will. The way you know what's going on inside of you is through your emotions.

Emotional pain is designed to tell you there's something wrong with the way you're functioning inside. You have no other way to know what the actual status of your inner man is. It's a matter of the flow being in the right direction. While God says it's "spirit, soul, body," Satan says, "Body, soul, spirit."

If your mind is programmed by error, it's going to be produce some real predictable emotions and desires that come out of error. Ephesians 4:31 is a verse that will just change your whole life. It says, [31] Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice.

You know where all that stuff comes from? Dumb, bad, erroneous thinking authored by your old sin nature. It comes from the "sin that dwelleth in me." Jesus said, "It's by the heart the things that come out of a man defile a man."

The things that defile you are not the places you go and the things you see. What defiles you is the response you have to those things in your heart.

Instead of programming the mind with error, program it with truth, because programming with error causes you to produce some actions that are counter-productive. If I program my mind with truth and facts then I can take actions based upon faith that will produce some fruit and the feelings show up later.

Have you ever noticed that your feelings . . . I have never walked up to an elliptical machine and said, "Man, I'm just so happy I'm here." But there's a strange thing. If you get on it, in about 10 minutes, you think, "This wasn't near so bad." About 20 minutes later, you say, "Well, you know, I think I can do another 10 minutes."

You get the body and the endorphins going and you feel differently about it. Emotions do that. They'll follow, but you had to make that choice over there. They're not to be the ones that inform you truth; your mind is to be programmed by God's Word.

Volition is a function of our will where we make choices. We make choices based upon what's in our mind; this memory center we have. Those thoughts become reality to our emotions because emotions don't think; they're dumb. They have no intellect; they are only designed to be responders to what you're thinking.

This is critical. You think about something, you have the information, you make a choice what to do based upon the truth in your heart and your emotions see that choice that you've made and say, "There's reality," and they respond appropriately.

When they respond, that's what they are for--the word emotion is for motion. They are to produce activity but they're not to be the source of the action. When they become the source, where the action comes from, all of a sudden, rather than the truth residing in your mind being what your will makes its choices based upon, your emotions become the ones running the show.

The "tyranny of emotional revolt" is when the emotions say, "I'm going to be the one to sit on the throne and I'm going to be the one who decides how we respond and what we do!"

You face a difficult situation and your emotions say, "I know what we better do!"  and your mind says, "Okay, okay, okay, okay." Your mind begins to think your emotions know what they're talking about so your mind begins to think what your emotions are feeling is true.

What's your will going to do? He's got to make choices based upon what your mind is programming, so now your will winds up making good choices or bad choices? Well, it might be as good of a choice as you can make under bad information, but the problem is the whole source is backwards. So now what's running you? Error. If you can get that concept in your thinking it will change everything."