Mental Health (Part 3)
Emotions
Emotions are our feelings, how we react to situations in life. Emotions can be broken down into two categories — beneficial and detrimental.
Beneficial emotions are those like passion and compassion. Emotions are good when they from the truth in your heart, your relationship with God.
So if an emotion flows from the love of God or the love of your neighbor, if an emotion flows from the Spirit inside of you those are wonderful. But if emotions flow from anything but the truth, they are major stresses to our total health. For example, if I told you that you just won the lottery; your reaction would be one of extreme happiness. But when you found out it wasn’t true, you would again feel down, depressed, or angry. If I told a parent their child was just hit by a car and killed, immediately their heart would pound, tears would pour, and deep sorrow would overwhelm them — even if it wasn’t true, just because they believed it.
The point I am trying to make is that emotions should only be a reflection of the truth, not of lies. So if people tell you you’re no good, you shouldn’t react with negative emotions, because you know you are perfect — unblameable and unreproveable — in God’s eyes. Who are you going to believe, God or man? If someone says, “You’ll never be able to do it,” you don’t have to feel inadequate or sad, because you know you can do “all things through Him who gives you strength”. If you feel down because you lost your job, the higher truth is that God will meet your needs and He would never leave you or forsake you. He knows what you need before you know, and how much more precious are you to Him than the lilies of the field and the birds of the air .
To summarize, if your emotions are based on the Truth — What God speaks to your heart — then they are beneficial to your total health. But if they are based on situations, people, places, and things, they can be detrimental to your total health.
The Will
The last part of the soul, and the most important, is the will. Your will is your choice. When God made you, He did not make you a robot, but a living spirit in a body with a free will to choose — right from wrong, to obey or disobey, to choose whatever direction you want your life to go in.
The will is like a switch, deciding whether we walk in the strength of the Spirit or in the strength of the ego-filled mind. Living in the ego-filled mind means you depend upon your ability, your strength, your discipline, your self — without God. Living in the Spirit is to live totally dependent on God — depending on His Word, His Spirit, His power, His self control. Picture the will as a fork in the road. One path — dependence on God — leads to abundant life, love, joy and peace. The other path — dependence on self — leads to a stressful roller-coaster life of ups and downs.