In my last post I said I would give you a renewing of the mind challenge for the emotions, so I thought I better get that challenge going! Here's the challenge: to choose one emotion or situation and commit to renewing your mind every time you experience that emotion or situation for the next two weeks. Here are some tips to help you get started:
1. Choose an emotion or situation that doesn't occur more than once or twice a day. For example, if you tend to be an easily annoyed person and you want to work on anger, just choose one person to journal about, preferably one that you get mad at often enough to journal about, but not so often that you'll have to spend the whole day journaling about them!
2. Commit to journaling as soon as possible after you experience the emotion, but for sure you before you go to bed that night. If you wait until the next morning two things will happen. First, you'll have a hard time remembering the thoughts that led to your negative emotion, and second, there's a good chance you'll wake up thinking, "Oh, that wasn't such a big deal. I think I'll just forget it." And then you will. Without journaling!
3. Try different ways to renew your mind to see if one works better for you than another.
4. Try to come to a point of peace each time you renew your mind. If you don't, there's a good chance you haven't yet accepted what you need to accept to find peace. Option charts always seem to make it easier for me to accept what I need to accept.
5. Don't expect it to be easy. Think of how many times Jesus had to go back to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane to line up His will with the Father's will. He didn't just say a quick little prayer and then force Himself to go to the cross. He really worked to bring His heart in line with the Father's heart. Yes, our trials are much smaller than His, but shouldn't we give the same diligence to lining up our will with the Father's?
6. Before you begin your challenge, get a notebook ready, preferably one you can tear the pages out of. That way if you write something you don't want anyone to read, you can tear it out, crumple it up, and even hide it underneath a banana peel in the garbage can if it's really bad!
7. Sometimes after I journal, especially in a situation where I'm not feeling loved, I like to listen to praise music and think of how much God loves me. I lie on the couch, close my eyes, and worship God. I often feel very cherished by Him during those times--and it always makes me feel like it was worth giving up whatever I needed to give up for Him.
Well, that's about all the tips I can think of. From my experience it takes about six to eight weeks to really have lasting results, but if you do it for two weeks the peace you enjoy may be enough to motivate you to do it another four weeks!
Showing posts with label emotions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emotions. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
Working on Your Emotions
When I first began teaching Freedom from Emotional Eating two or three years ago, I had a couple of women drop out of my Bible study. They didn't want to discourage me, they said, but it was just too painful to work on their emotions to keep going. I can sympathize with those ladies. I know how hard it is to work on some of these things.
Our tendency is to blame our feelings on other people or on situations we have no control over. It's hard to recognize that we also have a certain amount of responsibility when it comes to our emotions. And it's hard to go through all the work we need to go through to find peace and joy in difficult situations.
When you first start working on an emotion, it may take awhile to bring your thoughts captive to Christ. You might need to spend a long time wrestling through a situation with God before you experience peace, and even then, the peace will feel somewhat shaky. But the more you do it, the easier it will get and the more long-lasting and all-encompassing the peace will be.
At some point you'll find that situations which at one time would have annoyed you or sent you into a frenzy of worry no longer affect you that much. You'll begin to see the benefits of renewing your mind, and that in and of itself will make you want to keep going.
If you're not at that point yet, I'd like to encourage you to work on your negative emotions. Here are four benefits I see as a result of regular renewing of your mind in the area of your negative emotions:
1. It will bring you closer to God.
The Bible actually has a lot to say about negative emotions. For example, in Matthew 5:22-28, Jesus implies that both anger and lust are sin. In Romans 1:28-30, envy, greed, and arrogance are included in a list of wrongdoings that also includes murder and hating God. In Matthew 6:25-34, Jesus doesn’t say that worry is a sin, but He does tell us not to do it.
Now here’s the interesting thing. We all know that sin separates us from God, but usually we focus on behavioral sin. What we need to recognize is that sins of the heart can cause distance in our relationship with God just as easily as sins of behavior. If I’m constantly wallowing in an emotion that God has told me I shouldn’t be wallowing in, then that emotion is going to affect my walk with Him, whether it’s labeled sin in the Bible or not.
Renewing my mind on a regular basis has done more for my walk with God than any other discipline. It keeps me feeling close to Him, and it keeps me wanting to spend time with Him, both in the Word and in prayer. What I've found is that when I'm all wrapped up in emotions that don't honor Him, I don't want to be with Him. Renewing my mind not only gets rid of the negative emotions--it also brings me back to God.
2. It will improve your relationships.
Here’s an interesting exercise. Take out a piece of paper and list the three negative emotions you deal with most. Then ask yourself this question: How does this emotion affect my relationship with God and others? We can easily see how an emotion like anger hurts our relationships, but the surprising thing is that seemingly benign emotions like stress and worry also hurt our relationships.
3. It will make your life more peaceful and joyful.
This is kind of an obvious benefit. The problem is that the peace and joy don’t come the minute you start working on the emotion. Instead, life is less peaceful and joyful in the beginning because of the stress working on that emotion brings into your life. Depending on your situation, you may want to think about working through some of those really difficult emotions with a counselor.
4. It will help you lose weight.
Renewing your mind in the area of food will help you lose weight, but renewing your mind in the area of your negative emotions will help you lose even more weight. That’s why five out of eight chapters in Freedom from Emotional Eating deal with the emotions.
Think of it this way—if you tend to eat when you’re worried and all of a sudden you start going to God whenever you’re worried, you’ll eventually learn to trust in Him and you’ll begin to live a life of relative non-worry. It will take a lot of renewing your mind to get to that point, but you will get there if you keep pursuing God each time you’re worried.
Once you get there, you may still eat when you’re worried. But since you won’t worry much anymore, that won’t be a big deal.
One Last Thought
Before I close, I just want to say a word to those of you who either have experienced or are experiencing devastating things in your lives that are causing your negative emotions. I can’t claim to know what you’re feeling, because I haven’t walked in your shoes, but God knows.
Think of all Jesus Christ went through when He lived on earth. He knows how you’re feeling, and He grieves over what happened to you. He doesn’t condemn you for your feelings—but He doesn’t want you to continue on in those feelings either.
Often we don’t find peace until we’re willing to accept the unacceptable. Renewing our minds helps us see life from God's point of view. Through it, God can show us if there's anything we need to accept--and He'll also give us the strength to accept what we need to accept. Renewing our minds in the area of our emotions can be very difficult, but it's worth the peace and joy and intimacy with God that comes with it.
In my next post, I'll give you a renewing of the mind challenge for the emotions.
Our tendency is to blame our feelings on other people or on situations we have no control over. It's hard to recognize that we also have a certain amount of responsibility when it comes to our emotions. And it's hard to go through all the work we need to go through to find peace and joy in difficult situations.
When you first start working on an emotion, it may take awhile to bring your thoughts captive to Christ. You might need to spend a long time wrestling through a situation with God before you experience peace, and even then, the peace will feel somewhat shaky. But the more you do it, the easier it will get and the more long-lasting and all-encompassing the peace will be.
At some point you'll find that situations which at one time would have annoyed you or sent you into a frenzy of worry no longer affect you that much. You'll begin to see the benefits of renewing your mind, and that in and of itself will make you want to keep going.
If you're not at that point yet, I'd like to encourage you to work on your negative emotions. Here are four benefits I see as a result of regular renewing of your mind in the area of your negative emotions:
1. It will bring you closer to God.
The Bible actually has a lot to say about negative emotions. For example, in Matthew 5:22-28, Jesus implies that both anger and lust are sin. In Romans 1:28-30, envy, greed, and arrogance are included in a list of wrongdoings that also includes murder and hating God. In Matthew 6:25-34, Jesus doesn’t say that worry is a sin, but He does tell us not to do it.
Now here’s the interesting thing. We all know that sin separates us from God, but usually we focus on behavioral sin. What we need to recognize is that sins of the heart can cause distance in our relationship with God just as easily as sins of behavior. If I’m constantly wallowing in an emotion that God has told me I shouldn’t be wallowing in, then that emotion is going to affect my walk with Him, whether it’s labeled sin in the Bible or not.
Renewing my mind on a regular basis has done more for my walk with God than any other discipline. It keeps me feeling close to Him, and it keeps me wanting to spend time with Him, both in the Word and in prayer. What I've found is that when I'm all wrapped up in emotions that don't honor Him, I don't want to be with Him. Renewing my mind not only gets rid of the negative emotions--it also brings me back to God.
2. It will improve your relationships.
Here’s an interesting exercise. Take out a piece of paper and list the three negative emotions you deal with most. Then ask yourself this question: How does this emotion affect my relationship with God and others? We can easily see how an emotion like anger hurts our relationships, but the surprising thing is that seemingly benign emotions like stress and worry also hurt our relationships.
3. It will make your life more peaceful and joyful.
This is kind of an obvious benefit. The problem is that the peace and joy don’t come the minute you start working on the emotion. Instead, life is less peaceful and joyful in the beginning because of the stress working on that emotion brings into your life. Depending on your situation, you may want to think about working through some of those really difficult emotions with a counselor.
4. It will help you lose weight.
Renewing your mind in the area of food will help you lose weight, but renewing your mind in the area of your negative emotions will help you lose even more weight. That’s why five out of eight chapters in Freedom from Emotional Eating deal with the emotions.
Think of it this way—if you tend to eat when you’re worried and all of a sudden you start going to God whenever you’re worried, you’ll eventually learn to trust in Him and you’ll begin to live a life of relative non-worry. It will take a lot of renewing your mind to get to that point, but you will get there if you keep pursuing God each time you’re worried.
Once you get there, you may still eat when you’re worried. But since you won’t worry much anymore, that won’t be a big deal.
One Last Thought
Before I close, I just want to say a word to those of you who either have experienced or are experiencing devastating things in your lives that are causing your negative emotions. I can’t claim to know what you’re feeling, because I haven’t walked in your shoes, but God knows.
Think of all Jesus Christ went through when He lived on earth. He knows how you’re feeling, and He grieves over what happened to you. He doesn’t condemn you for your feelings—but He doesn’t want you to continue on in those feelings either.
Often we don’t find peace until we’re willing to accept the unacceptable. Renewing our minds helps us see life from God's point of view. Through it, God can show us if there's anything we need to accept--and He'll also give us the strength to accept what we need to accept. Renewing our minds in the area of our emotions can be very difficult, but it's worth the peace and joy and intimacy with God that comes with it.
In my next post, I'll give you a renewing of the mind challenge for the emotions.
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