If you feel out of control of your emotions, or if your mood is based on what happens throughout your day, then this episode is for you!

You have the ability to get off the emotional rollercoaster that you’re on! Today, I’m sharing biblical ways you can identify and experience your emotions so you control them instead of them controlling you.

Resources mentioned:

Emotions List (Free): https://ashleyvarner.com/free
The Mindset Reset: https://ashleyvarner.com/mindset

Highlights from the Podcast

Welcome to The Renewed Mind podcast!

If you haven’t listened to last weeks episode called Thoughts Matter, make sure to listen to it, it’s going to give you the ground work. In fact, it’s so important, if you haven’t heard it, please pause this episode and go listen to that one first. That episode is where I lay everything out and explain how you
can take your thoughts captive.

Okay, let’s talk about Unstable emotions.

Emotions are not caused by what happens to you throughout the day.

• You are not stressed because you’re running late.
• You are not upset because your husband forgot the milk.
• You are not depressed by what the scale said.

All of your emotions are caused by your thoughts about those circumstances.

I want you to get to the point where you can experience any emotion and stop being controlled by your own emotional life. That’s what Paul was talking about when he told the Corinthians to take their thoughts captive.

When you find yourself all over the place emotionally, I want you to stop for a moment and put a name to your emotion.

Describe your Feeling in one word – I want to give you a pdf of one word emotions, and in the mindset reset, we talk about these and I actually give you a multiple page document of even more emotions.

Try to stay away from vague emotions like sad, happy, mad, or upset.

Instead you might feel: isolated, frustrated, powerless, peaceful.

You may say “I feel like he doesn’t care about me.” That’s actually a thought.

I want you to dig deeper and figure out what emotion you are feeling.

Remember, it will usually be one word. Maybe you’re feeling is neglected or undervalued.

After you identify your feeling, I want you to figure out what thought is causing that feeling.

The reason why this is so important is because we’ve learned that we have the power to take our thoughts captive. The thoughts that are causing your feelings, may not line up with God’s word. We want to take every thought captive and what? Make it obedient to Christ.

Now does that mean that Christians are always happy and have no problems in life?

Absolutely not!

Even Jesus had negative emotions like sadness, anger, and sorrow.

The goal of the Christian life is not to never experience negative emotions. The goal is to become more like Jesus. And Jesus experienced negative emotions.

Jesus was fully God, but He was also fully man. He fully experienced the humanity. And He is the picture of perfect.

Eric Johnson, a Professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, describes Jesus as “emotionally appropriate.”

Yes, Jesus was gentle and kind when He spoke to children. He was loving and forgiving when He needed to be. But also, think of when his friend Lazarus died and Jesus wept. Or when the people were disrespecting the temple and He got angry and threw over the tables. Or when, right before He went to die on the cross, He cried out to His Father to take that cup from Him.

Our goal to be like Jesus and fully feel those emotions, then you can take those to the cross so Jesus can comfort and console you.

The truth is that negative or even uncomfortable emotions are appropriate for the fallen world we live in. And I want you to know that you can experience negative emotion.

You’re probably thinking, trust me, Ashley, I’m experiencing negative emotion all the time. I’m upset and angry and then I’m sad and lonely. I’m experiencing it all.

But most of the time we aren’t experiencing our emotions.

Instead we’re avoiding them and I’m going to talk more about that in a future episode, but the truth is that we’ve gotten attached to the drama of our emotions. You have to let go of the desire to react to feelings. You can just feel the emotion and experience it, you don’t have to react to or avoid it.

Let me give you an example of reacting and avoiding emotions: you have a hard day at work, a colleague took credit for a project you did, or your boss didn’t respond to an important email you sent. So you decide to go to Target on your way home and end up filling your cart with pretty stuff from Joanna Gaines home collection.

Your day had certain events in it, your thoughts about those events are that you had a hard day. And you’re not really dealing with the emotions of frustration. Instead of taking time to feel your frustration, you’re avoiding it by shopping.

For you moms out there, we’re the worst culprits! Our child gets a bad grade and we make it mean something about us and our mom abilities.

Once, my son made a basket in the other teams hoop in basketball and the old me would have been embarrassed, instead, I cheered for him! Because I didn’t make that mean anything about my parenting abilities or his worth.

The circumstance was the same, but what I thought about it was what determined my feelings.

I see many women who are on emotional rollercoasters. They are letting themselves be tossed around by whatever life throws at them. In the Thoughts Matter episode, I talked about Paul and Silas, but there are so many stories in the Bible of people who stayed steadfast. They didn’t allow the huge things going on around them to dictate what they were going to think or how they were going to feel.

Think of Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednigo in the fiery furnace.

Think of Joshua marching the seventh time around Jericho.

Think of Ruth who lost her husband and found herself in a foreign land.

These were people who had every right to be on emotional rollercoasters. But instead, they thought of God’s goodness and faithfulness and allowed that to dictate their feelings.

The more you renew your mind with God’s Word, the more you’re able to live in that same confidence, the way God created you to be. You can take those frustrations or guilt or sorrow or anxious feelings to the cross. When you do that, it’s not that He will automatically take those feelings away, but instead
Jesus changes you through them.

Like, I said, the goal is not to have zero emotion. The goal is to be aware of your emotions and give God the authority to be in control of your emotions by taking your thoughts captive.