Trusting God Over Your Feelings

Proverbs 3:5–6 (NIV)

5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.

Devotional Reflection

The Holy Spirit reminds us today that the best path for life begins with the heart.

The word heart signifies the deep center of our emotions and will. The strange thing about the heart is that our emotions and our will do not always align. Often, the person we want to be requires us to do something that we have no will to do. We want to be good parents, but we don’t enjoy discipline. We want to be healthy, but we love chocolate. This is akrasia, as Aristotle called it, within us. It causes us to act against our better judgment at times because our will and emotions often collide. The sinful nature pulls us toward lower desires even when we truly have the highest aspiration to be faithful to the Lord.

When we are exhorted to trust in the Lord with all our hearts, this requires a determination to trust God’s way in any situation, regardless of how we feel. Our will is to serve the Lord, but when we don’t want to forgive others, serve others sacrificially, or honor God with our wealth, we must reach over and take hold of the emotional part of the heart and bring it into alignment with our will to serve Him.

Everything in our culture is fueled more by emotion than by will. The secular imaginary presses us to submit to our emotions, even if it leads to deeply destructive behavior. But Scripture reminds us that the heart is deceitful above all things, and whoever trusts his own mind—even when it defies biblical principles—is a fool (Proverbs 17:9; Proverbs 28:26).

To trust the Lord with all our hearts requires us to choose obedience even when we don’t feel like it. We must resist what our emotions are driving us toward. Instead, we find God’s way in Scripture and commit ourselves to follow it in our actions.

The more we do this, the more we begin to see the results, and our hearts are changed. As our minds witness the fruit of obedience, our hearts begin to appreciate, then cherish, and finally love the ways of God. We can come to a place where we no longer have to force ourselves, because our hearts have been transformed through our obedience.

Prayer

Lord, help me to trust You with all my heart, even when my emotions pull me in another direction. Give me the strength to choose Your ways over my feelings and to walk in obedience to Your Word. Transform my heart so that I not only follow You, but truly love Your ways. Amen.