Fact + Beliefs + Actions = Feelings

Friday, July 05, 2013        Fact + Beliefs + Actions = Feelings

“Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Romans 7:24-25a

As followers of Jesus who have experienced God’s grace, we are building a new life based on our identity as a child of God. A fruit of this identity is that we are no longer living under the tyranny of emotions. Virtually all of the stimuli in our culture are aimed at our emotions. Almost all sales advertising is aimed at trying to get you to feel good about a buying decision. When your life becomes steeped in emotional messages, your life decisions tend to become tied to your emotions or feelings. However, for this benefit of being delivered from the tyranny of emotions to fully mature, we want to remember that this is a byproduct, not the object of our faith. We do not worship God just to make our life better. We worship God because our life belongs to Him. He created us and He redeemed us and we seek to honor Him through the way we live our life. In this journey, God fulfills His promises to us, and one of those promises is that our life will be transformed to become like Jesus. No longer do we live by our emotions. By faith we have reversed the flow of our life.

Before I understood and accepted God’s grace for me, I had been living my life based on my emotions or feelings. My feelings told me that I was unworthy, that I was ugly, and that I was not smart. The result was that for most of my life I suffered with incredibly low self-esteem. I never felt as though I fit in or that I was worthy to receive life's blessings. I became a classic over-achiever, yet I always feared that I would be discovered as not being worthy. I can remember the year I was elected president of my Rotary Club. I did not tell my family until it was almost time for the installation banquet, because I feared the club would change their mind. Those feelings determined the actions I would take. As time went on, these feelings and actions began to develop my belief system about how I understood myself. If left unchecked, my self-perception would have become fact in my life. I use a little formula to illustrate this.

Feelings + Actions + Beliefs = Fact

So, how do you reverse the flow?”

Begin with the fact that the Bible says God loves you. When you choose to believe this fact you can choose to take actions based on your belief that God loves you and will provide for you. Because of our past, secular and culturally based beliefs, we all still have a lot to unlearn, but eventually our feelings will line up with our beliefs. 

So the reversed flow is, Fact + Beliefs + Actions = Feelings.

Learning to live this way is a process. I heard Tom Long describe this process in a sermon. He said that God’s promises are impossible to prove in advance. But, live them, and you prove every one of them true. That has been my experience with this little formula. (Dr. Thomas G. Long is a Professor of Preaching, Candler School of Theology Emory University.)

Sē’lah

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(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  In addition to this BLOG they are distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com. The BLOG is also available on Amazon Kindle, by subscription

Publications by Alex M. Knight:

·        Seeking the Life in Christ, Meditations on the New Testament and Psalms has been published and is now available at Amazon.com. The Kindle version will follow soon.

·        The second edition First Think – Then Pray has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.

·        Meditations on The Story of My Life as told by Jesus Christ has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.