“Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.” – Psalm 62:8
Where do you go with your strong emotions? A lof of times, they just run around in our head. They keep us from important duties, people, and fun. They cause problems with our health, our relationships, and our work.
Emotions need an outlet. We often seek an outlet in other people: withdrawing from them, attacking them, or complaining to them. We often seek outlets in busy-ness, trying to getour mind off of these things or solve them. We sometimes seek an outlet in trying to escape our issues, like endless hours of Netflix or alcohol. We often seek outlets in stres-reducers such as eating, exercise, sleep, planning, and so on.
Sometimes these things help. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes things gets worse. Sometimes our attempt to deal with our emotions hurts the people around us.
The Right Refuge for Our Emtions
The Psalms in the Bible give us a different picture of how to deal with our emotions. What the Psalms teach us is that emotions are not intended to remain on the horizontal plane. They are meant to go vertical. We are meant to resolve them in God.
The Psalms have a word for this. God is our refuge. God is an emotional refuge: “pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge” (Psalm 62:8).
This is a big part of what it means to love God the most, and this is our highest duty. Loving God the most means making Him the one in whom we find our emotional refuge. The heart that loves God the most is one that says most clearly and most often, “I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust'” (Psalm 91:2, cf. v. 14). Seeing God as our ultimate help, protector, and shield is the way that we can love Him the most.
Making God the outlet for emotions is not only about our negative emotions. It is also about our positive emotions.
“Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart!” (Psalm 32:11). Where do we find our joy? Our joy needs an outlet as well. The Psalms are about finding our joy in God. When we see Him as our highest joy, then we love Him above everything else.
The Benefit of the Right Refuge for Our Emotions
Loving God the most in this way not only honors the Lord, it also blesses us. If we make God our emotional refuge, we will be living the best life we can possibly live. Our emotions were made to have an outlet, and God is that outlet. When He is the outlet for our emotions, then we will be living as God created us to live.
Here are a couple of examples. There are endless problems we can worry about that we have little control over. Where else can we go for assurance and peace in these situations but to God’s control of the world and determination to do us good? That’s what David found when He was literally surrounded by people who wanted to kill him (Psalm 3:1). When he took his anxiety to the Lord, He saw that the Lord was “a shield around Him” (Psalm 3:3). Making God his emotional refuge enabled Him to let it go and even lay down and sleep in the middle of enemies (Psalm 3:5). That’s what making God our emotional refuge can do.
What about when we are frustrated with wrongs in the world? Psalm 37 tells us to put our confidence in the Lord that He will make it right. Psalm 37:8 says, “Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret—it leads only to evil.” Holding on to anger just makes us bitter and ends up hurting us. But what gives us power to do it? It is the confidence that a day of reckoning with all evil is coming, “For those who are evil will be destroyed, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land” (v. 9). God is going to sort everything out. He is a just judge, and He will sort it all out. We can wait on Him and focus on the things He wants us to do right now instead of worrying about all the wrongs that we can do nothing about.
What about joy? “The righteous will rejoice in the Lord and take refuge in him; all the upright in heart will glory in him!” (Ps. 64:10). It’s fine to find joy in the things of this world, but these things also fail us. They definitely can’t fill us. Those who have joy in God have a joy that is always available and that never fails. It is a joy that the world cannot give and so neither can it take it away.
Conclusion
So, where do you go with your emotions? When you feel great joy or great sorrow, where do you go? Do you let things run around in your heard? Are you finding your joy in something that is setting you up for disappointment? Do you rely on other human beings to be the outlet of your anxiety? Humans can help, and the Psalms are written to be sung with people. People are important, but only God can be our ultimate emotional refuge, for both our joys and sorrows. This is our great privilege, and it is also our highest duty. There is no other greater commandment than to Love the Lord our God with all our . . . heart.
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