When Feelings and Truth Don't Line Up
The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it?
Our culture has a favorite piece of advice: follow your heart. Do what feels right. Live your truth. There's something appealing in this—we don't want to be people who bury our emotions or pretend they don't exist. Feelings matter, and paying attention to our emotional lives is part of being human.
But Scripture offers a sobering caution right alongside that impulse. The heart, the very seat of our feelings and desires, is described as deceitful and corrupt—so much so that we can't even fully know it ourselves. This isn't a call to distrust every emotion as evil, but it is an invitation to hold our feelings a little more loosely than our culture suggests. If our hearts can deceive us, then blind trust in whatever we feel in the moment is a risky foundation for how we live.
This means that when a feeling rises up—a conviction, a longing, a sense of certainty—it's worth pausing to ask what God's word actually says about it. Feelings aren't automatically wrong, but they aren't automatically trustworthy either. The wise move is to bring our emotions into conversation with Scripture rather than letting them run unchecked or unquestioned.
And when there's a gap between what we feel and what God's word says, the call is to submit our feelings to the truth of Scripture rather than the reverse. That's not about suppressing emotion; it's about recognizing that our hearts need a steadier guide than themselves. Scripture becomes the plumb line, the place we return to when our inner compass is uncertain—which, if we're honest, is more often than we'd like to admit.
If this tension between feelings and faithfulness is something you wrestle with, Crossway's piece "What to Do When Your Feelings Don't Line Up with God's Word" is worth reading in full for more on how to navigate it well.
Read the source: Crossway →