Feelings

It was the middle of the night—dark, quiet, and foreboding--and I was eight years old, wide awake in my bed, distressed by suffocating fear. Although I had asked Jesus to be my Savior three years earlier, I still struggled with doubts about my salvation. I thought about the time I had found a purple crayon on the floor at school and drew pictures all over the carpeting in my kindergarten classroom. Surely a “real” Christian would never commit a terrible sin like that! Maybe I wasn’t really saved. Maybe I was hopeless.

The darkness seemed to thicken as my imagination overwhelmed me. Suddenly in the shadows, I thought I detected a figure looming toward me. It must the devil! I was doomed! In panic, I screamed for my Dad. And the shadow disappeared as soon as my Dad appeared.

That night, sitting in the living room on Dad’s lap in our wooden rocker, my Dad explained to me that the devil likes to use our emotions as weapons against us. Since I was a Christian, the devil had lost his battle for my soul. But if I allowed him, the devil could still cripple my effectiveness for God, through my own emotions.

The valuable lesson in the rocking chair has helped me many times since. The devil still tries to use my emotions, watching in smug satisfaction while I struggle under the crush of anxiety, inadequacy, pride, selfishness, comparison, fear, hopelessness, anger, resentment, self-pity, doubt, defensiveness, and other ugly feelings that sap my joy.

But the shadows disappear when our Father appears. Listen to these comforting words of Jesus in John 16:33, and claim them for yourself when Satan tries to defeat you as he often does me:

“These things have I spoken unto you, that in me, ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”