Psalm 13:1 How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?
How long will You hide Your face from me?
2 How long shall I take counsel in my soul,
Having sorrow in my heart daily?
How long will my enemy be exalted over me?
The failure in the Christian life in terms of how we handle our emotional life is not in having difficult and even negative emotions. The failure in the Christian life is thinking that God has never seen those emotions before and wouldn’t know how to handle them if you brought them before Him. In the Psalms we see a wide range of human emotions set in the context of prayer and praise.
Thus far we have seen then that while the Psalms are Theocentric / Christocentric they also demonstrate how to not get lost in our emotions. This is important to note. Modern man has become almost an exclusively emotional being. He is completely conditioned and blown about by his emotion. This sense of no anchor for the uninformed and macro-contextual-less emotions makes for a reckless instability in modern man. The Psalmists reveal where to find an anchor for our emotions. The anchor is found in the Character of God. Whatever the emotion … whatever the turmoil … whatever the joy … the Psalmist takes it all before God in Prayer and / or praise. He allows the character of God to be an anchor to his emotion unlike the Modern who allows his emotion to be his God. The Christian thus allows the Character of God to be the context in which his emotion is conditioned and so finds meaning as opposed to the Modern whose emotion is like a loaded pistol in the hand of a 3 year old.
