Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

• Ephesians 5:15-20

“The sovereign emotions are guided and controlled by love, but bear in mind that love in its highest moral meaning is the preference of one person for another person. A Christian’s love is personal, passionate devotion to Jesus Christ, and he learns to grip on the threshold of his mind as in a vice every sentiment awakened by wrong emotions. God holds the saints responsible for emotions they have not got and ought to have as well as for the emotions they have allowed which they ought not to have allowed. If we indulge in inordinate affection, anger, anxiety, God holds us responsible; but He also insists that we have to be passionately filled with the right emotions …
“If we have no emotional life, then we have disobeyed God. ‘Be filled with the Spirit’; it is as impossible to be filled with the Spirit and be free from emotion as it is for a man to be filled with wine and not show it. The reason some of us are so amazingly dull and get sleeping-sickness is that we have never once thought of paying attention to the stirring up the Spirit of God gives the mind and our emotional nature. How many of us are terrified out of our wits lest we should be emotional! Jesus Christ demands the whole nature, and He demands that part of our nature the devil uses most, viz., the emotional part.”

• Oswald Chambers, Biblical Ethics (Daily thoughts for Disciples, June 20)

Rev. Chambers is very exacting in his instructions, many devotions taken from his lectures to missionaries going out into the world.  But should we not be of the same mind?

Some emotions, when burst out of control can be very detrimental, but other emotions are simply a part of life.  Jesus wept, and more than once was recorded that He did.

As a boy with a wide range of many emotions, my Dad tried to teach me that real men do not cry, but he did when telling me about the most important thing in the world was loving Jesus.  This was at a point when my earthly working career was being destroyed.  I found work, but it was simply to put food on the table.  And oddly, it almost always involved writing.  God was grooming me in the roughly forty years that I wandered in the wilderness for what I do now.  My Dad was emotional while trying to refocus my heart toward Jesus, and the career did not matter.

But since my wife passed away, I have had no problem crying.  But the outbursts are more rare than they were a couple of months ago.

I think of how my bursts of anger have hurt other people.  I have had some success, but I am like Rev. Chambers when it comes to me.  One slip of the tongue at the wrong time, and I realize that I am not there yet.  I keep wondering if I can reign that emotion in.  But then, I think of my father-in-law.  My wife said he was a lot like me in his younger adult life, but after his open-heart surgery, he had mellowed.  I cannot curb my temper on my strength.  I have to rely on God for that, but I must be a willing participant or it might not work so well.

But love is something we can all show, and this world needs real love rather than the brand we see on television and the movies.  Real love is sacrificial and as some recent commercials on the local Christian television station say, “Love is a verb.”

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.