Tried With Fire

I don't consider myself a very emotional person, but I was a watering pot yesterday. It started with Pastor Ryan's sermon on Hosea which culminates in God's call to return to him in chapter 14. This chapter is very personal because it was the text of one of the first sermons I ever read by C.H. Spurgeon after my ex-husband walked out. I wept then as I prayed for him to return to God and to his family. So yesterday's sermon brought a flood of memories. But God's faithfulness to the unfaithful isn't only true of those who commit obvious "bad" sins. His faithfulness extends to all of us because who among us hasn't gone after other gods in our hearts? Yet God continues to draw us again and again with a love that does not let us go. Then in the evening, a lay brother, Will Brown, spoke on Christ fulfilling the office of prophet, priest, and king using John 17 as the text. There were so many messianic expectations over the years, so many wrong ideas...

It's easy to assume that emotions have little place, if any, in thinking well. After all, an argument based on "I just feel this is the way it is" isn't much of an argument at all. So should we check our emotions at the door? To continue in  How to Think , Alan Jacobs uses the example of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. He was raised by his father to be a thinker, no emotions necessary with a true Brit stiff upper lip. But as brilliant as Mill was, he reached a point of mental collapse. What rescued him from the brink was a volume of Wordsworth's poetry in which he experienced a delight that had been missing for so long. Mill's writes "the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings... when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives." Jacobs interprets this as "The analytical mind constantly separates, divides, distinguishes until its whole mental wo...