If I Can No Longer Feel the Holy Spirit’s Presence Does That Mean I’m No Longer Saved, or That I’ve Committed the Unpardonable Sin?

How would you feel if you gave birth to a child, and felt no emotions of love and attachment for the baby? What if you felt no emotions of guilt if you were to steal something, tell a lie, or yell hateful words at someone during an argument – you were just stone cold in your emotions the entire time? What if you were to feel a feeling of intense delight after hearing your father passed away?

How about opposite feelings and emotions…what if you were sitting in church and a flood of holy feelings came over you. Would you conclude that you must have a very holy character to be feeling such emotions? Or perhaps you might conclude that the Presence of God was with you or that you were filled with the Holy Spirit.

What conclusions would you draw? What role do emotions play in determining the state of our character, and the state of our relationship with God, if any at all?

Is it a sin to be angry, or to feel depressed, or can anger or depression sometimes just be biochemical reactions and involve no guilt on the part of the person?

There’s a common fear people diagnosed with OCD, depression, or a psychotic disorder experience, where they fear they’ve entered a lost state and are currently destined for hell, or that they’ve committed the unpardonable sin and there is no way back to being saved and right with God. Along with this fear there is often a sense of complete disconnect between themselves and God. They report they can no longer feel God’s Presence. There may also be near-complete emotional numbness. They can feel feelings of fear and anxiety, but not of love, or sadness. They can’t feel feelings of guilt when they do wrong.

If a new mother doesn’t feel emotions for her baby, does that mean she doesn’t have love for her child? Is it going too far to conclude this, or is this the logical conclusion to arrive at? If a person tells a lie, and doesn’t feel any guilt, does this mean they are hard-hearted or cut off from God?

What does the Bible say the role of emotions is in the Christian experience? How much weight should we give them and what kind of significance should we place on them? Can they be used to evaluate the state of our heart?

Here are a couple case studies from my own experience talking with people…

Person 1 – we will call him Bill – believed he had committed the unpardonable sin. He said the Holy Spirit convicted him about a number of sins, including pornography which he had given up and no longer watched. He hadn’t watched pornography in over a year. Then the Holy Spirit told him to stop playing video games for months, but he didn’t obey. Finally one day conviction left him, along with all emotions. He no longer felt guilt or the Presence of God. His conclusion was that the Holy Spirit left him because he’d refused to give up playing video games, and he was now eternally lost.

He couldn’t work he said due to the fact he was lost and the fear that brought him. Also he said he had no motivation because there’s no point to doing anything if he’s eternally lost. Every day he had unrelenting strong emotions of fear sweep over him all day long, along with racing, anxious thoughts. He was confined to his bed. Later on his family had him hospitalized at a psychiatric hospital, and he was diagnosed with a psychotic illness.

After this a girl was kind to him and expressed interest in him, and they started dating. Slowly he developed motivation again, and he told me in conversation that the Holy Spirit returned to him and he now felt the Presence of God again. He said he realizes now that he hadn’t committed the unpardonable sin after all. He still believes God left him for that time though. He also believes he experienced psychosis and the psychosis was real but that God leaving him was the bigger problem and the real source of his problems.

Person 2 we will call Cindy. Cindy said she knew she’d committed the unpardonable sin because she could no longer feel conviction. She didn’t participate in doing wrong things because she knew them to be wrong, she said, but not out of conviction. She said she used to have a problem with cussing, and as a Christian refused to do it, but now she could cuss freely and it really didn’t bother her and she didn’t feel bad about it at all. This scared her. She was very emotionally numb. This numbness started after she abruptly went off all her psychiatric medications. She experienced terrible withdrawals but got through the experience. (Note: It can be fatal to go abruptly off all medications as your body builds up a dependency, so don’t ever do this. Taper off gradually under a doctor’s supervision.) She spent a year or so in this state of thinking she’d committed the unpardonable sin, until she met with pastors and people from church and they spent many hours showing her from the scriptures that she hadn’t committed the unpardonable sin and that Jesus would forgive her of her sins and accept her. She then reached a point where she believed she hadn’t committed the unpardonable sin after all. The feeling of the Presence of God returned to her and she said she can now experience conviction again.

From the details given here, and using the Word of God, what would you be likely to conclude happened to these people; Did they really lose their salvation and God withdrew from them for a time, and then returned? Were their conclusions correct, do you think?

When dealing with this most-important-of-all-subjects (our salvation) it’s especially vital that we do not judge by appearance or faulty principles. To know whether one is right with God, or is not right with Him, whether one is saved and filled with the Holy Spirit or lost and does not have the Holy Spirit, and the doctrine about committing the unpardonable sin, it’s vital that we know God’s Word. What is the correct doctrine on salvation and the unpardonable sin?

It’s necessary to tackle this question from 4 main angles:

1. The first being we need to examine from the scriptures in a general sense what feelings are
2. And the second being we need to know the role feelings play in determining spiritual reality such as can feelings be used as a gauge to determine our character and our standing with God (and whether the Holy Spirit is communing with us and is with us), in order to give them the proper weight in their intended sphere and not let them seep out into spheres where they don’t belong
3. Thirdly we need to know how a person commits the unpardonable sin according to the Bible
4. And fourthly we need to understand how feelings and emotions work biochemically in the physical brain and what can go wrong at the physical level and to understand the physicality of them.

The first question I usually ask someone who is experiencing this fear and concern, is what do they mean by “feeling?” When they say “I can no longer feel the Presence of God”, what is meant by “feeling”? By ‘feeling’ do they mean emotions of love and bonding that cause one to feel that they are in the presence of God? Do they mean the perception of an actual presence that is not an emotion but is more of an awareness of a Being? Similar to the feeling one gets when walking past a chair in a pitch black house. You can’t see the chair or really feel it, but you have this knowing sense that something is there. Is this the ‘feeling’ they are referencing? Do they mean they no longer experience the ability to be convicted about sin and to tell the difference between right and wrong?

It matters a great deal how they define ‘feeling’ and what kind of feeling they are saying left them and that indicates they lost the Holy Spirit. Biblically speaking, losing the ability to be convicted about sin due to a mental illness is a very different problem from losing the ability to feel a Presence or losing the ability to be touched in our emotions when we commune with God. Also the Bible doesn’t define this as a feeling, but I’ve noticed that sometimes people call it a feeling. The Bible calls conviction a knowledge. One of these problems is potentially spiritually fatal; the others is only a type of suffering and one’s salvation isn’t at risk. Which definition of ‘feeling’ is being used is what makes all the difference in answering this question.

With the people I’ve talked with about this condition, many of them say they’ve lost the emotions of God’s love and of his convicting voice, some say they’ve only lost the ability to feel his love but can still understand right and wrong. Others say they have lost the sense of His Presence, usually this symptom is felt along with the one where they can’t feel His love. There’s variation in how they responded and in what they are experiencing. Some initially said they understand right from wrong, but when I questioned them about what right and wrong really are and mean (my morality quiz that I will explain on page x), they had arbitrary or incorrect definitions, and failed the morality quiz, which to me indicated their brain really isn’t grasping the concept of right and wrong. These people seemed to be in a state of psychosis that caused them to lose their knowledge of right and wrong. In such a state a person cannot make a choice to follow and believe in Jesus. One must know the difference between selfishness and love in order to repent of selfishness and ask Jesus to forgive them and give them a new heart. Such people also cannot hear the convicting voice of God’s Spirit either (more on this coming up). If these people went into this psychotic state during a time of rebellion against God, they really are currently lost and if they were to die they in such a state they would not go to heaven, however the good news is antipsychotic medication has a 2/3rds success rate at bringing people out of psychosis enough to have basic awareness and to understand the general principles of right and wrong. They need medical treatment if they are a person in such a condition, in order to give them an opportunity to choose Christ and for their rebellion to not be their final decision in this life.

Maybe go into without law here.

As you can see, one of these conditions – that of no longer experiencing conviction and of understanding right from wrong – is very, very serious indeed. But the condition of simply not feeling emotions is not serious in a spiritual sense and is simple a form of suffering, and causes some very real problems in the family, in society at large, and to the individual, but nothing anywhere as serious as the person who went into psychosis while rebelling against God.

Sometimes people get things wrong and can’t tell the difference between right and wrong but don’t know they can’t. A number of people with anti-social personality disorder that I conversed with were in this condition, but didn’t know it. Others with the same personality disorder had a blunted or somewhat skewed perception of right and wrong, but could still understand the basic principles of selfishness and selflessness and see that they are opposite principles. These people could still make a decision for Christ and could still be convicted by the Holy Spirit.

Let’s Start at Square One

Let’s first look at emotions. What are they and what is their role according to the Bible? Can emotions ever be used to decide or gauge in any way what is truth? Or should emotions be completely left out when determining what is true and right and making moral decisions? Can emotions ever be used to gauge our standing with God? Do jealous emotions mean we are harboring sin and we aren’t walking with God, for instance? Do emotions of anger towards God mean one is not right with God? Does a sense of pleasure sweeping over us when someone we’re jealous of has a set-back mean we have jealousy in our character? Or can this just be a feeling? What about the absence of feeling? Does lack of feeling when something bad happens to a loved one mean you are hard-hearted in your character? Does lack of feeling for your kids mean you are a cold-hearted mother?

Below are 12 questions that I would like to ask the reader to ponder over briefly before reading and studying this chapter (or if you are reading this book in a study group with others use these questions as discussion questions). Pin-point what you already think or believe about emotions, and ask yourself why you believe this? Are these guesses? Could tradition or familiarity with certain ideas be playing a role? Or do you believe what you believe due to the Word of God? Do you have a Biblical basis for your beliefs about emotions and which Bible verses are behind what you believe?

The correct Bible doctrine on emotions isn’t something we usually think about in detail, but the Bible does hold the true doctrine on this subject and one of the hallmark differences between Christians and people in the world is that we believe in living by principle rather than living by feeling or for pleasure.

Below are the 10 questions to ponder and ask yourself:

1. What are emotions according to the Bible?
2. What are some things we consider to be emotions and what are some examples of things that might not be considered emotions? (For instance, is guilt an emotion, or is it a spiritual state of wrongdoing towards God, or is it both? What about hate? What about conviction? What about hormones and neurotransmitters – are these emotions?)
   3.Are feelings the same thing as emotions, or are they different? What are some things we might think of as feelings that aren’t emotions?
3. What do you believe God’s purpose is for our emotions, or what would you guess that it is (if you’re not sure)?
4. What role do our emotions play in our relationship with God? Are they essential or are they unessential and basically optional?
5. While we obviously shouldn’t rely on emotions to gauge truth and truth is known from the scriptures, can emotions ever be used along with the scriptures to gauge truth? Or should we be using the scriptures and the scriptures only? If feelings can be used alongside the scriptures, what would this look like, and what situations would emotions be used to gauge this, and how would this work?
6. Are emotions important? If so, what about them makes them important?
7. Are emotions part of what it means to be made in the image of God? If so, what about them is like God and reflects Him?
8. What would an emotion-less human being look like? Are there any potential hazards/dangers someone in this state could cause or potential dangers that could happen to this person as a result of them not having emotions? Why do you think God didn’t create us to be like this?
9. What are some examples of a wrong use of emotions? How does the Bible instruct us to use our emotions and in what contexts is it right to use them?
10. Is emotional fulfillment the end goal of our existence? Why or why not? If your answer is no, really flesh out why this is not the case.
11. How does the Bible say emotional fulfillment is attained? What does it take to make it happen?

1. What Are Emotions According to the Bible?

Jesus is the Truth, the Standard of Truth, the Creator and Originator of everything that exists. His truths are eternal doctrine that stem from His character that never changes. Those who love Jesus value and love truth; indeed to reject His truth is to reject Him.

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life.
John 14:6

Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
John 18:37

with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
2 Thessalonians 2:10

But while people (God’s people) love the truth, people are not truth. We are beings. And emotions are the human response to truth in our physical being. It is just and good and right for us to respond in a human way to great good or to experience righteous indignation to great evil. If you think about it, it wouldn’t really make sense to see or endure terrible things and not be affected by them at all and go about our way as though nothing has happened. While it’s tragic and horrible when painful things happen to us, the fact they make an impact on us, and that we need to process these things and work through them for healing to occur is actually a good thing, because if we could just be hurt and feel nothing and not respond in our emotions to the pain, then we wouldn’t really be human at all. It is right and makes sense that we react in our person to tragic or good things – in our psychology and in our emotions. The fact it takes time and processing to recover from emotional pain indicates the significance of the pain endured. Pain that isn’t that significant is recovered from quickly, but the death of a family member is never really recovered from because the loss of them is hugely significant. The same goes for good and righteous things. The more righteous and good something is the greater it affects our emotions. Studying the character of God for instance, brings a joy that is beyond description because He is so good and so significant. There is a direct cause and effect relationship here. Bad really is bad. Immorality really is immoral. Our world really is sinful and damaging. Tragic things really are tragic. And deeply wonderful things like God’s love really is wonderful beyond our ability to comprehend. And we react to this reality in our emotions.

If there were no ill effects from evil things then evil wouldn’t really be evil. Think about that for a moment. If evil didn’t cause harm to the creation – the physical world and physical beings in that world – then it wouldn’t really be evil.

Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
Romans 13:10

Love, the keeping of the law, does no harm to its neighbor, thus the opposite of the keeping of the law – sin – is defined as harming one’s neighbor. Murder for instance, harms one’s neighbor and murder is sin. This is harm done to physical beings in a physical world.

One way evil breaks down the creation is it injures us emotionally and causes inflammation in our bodies and brains.

Our bodies were created with a design that aligns with morality. For instance, if we think jealous thoughts, this imbalances our physical brain. Our physical brain and the neurotransmitters and hormones we were created with, can only stay in balance if we think noble, uplifting, hopeful thoughts. If we choose to brood over jealous desires, we imbalance our physical brain and bring harm to ourselves physically.

A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.
Proverbs 14:30

Notice how in the above verse a heart at peace with God brings health to our physical bodies, and envy and jealousy cherished in the heart brings ill health to our physical body.

Sadness is also harmful. People get depressed when a loved one dies, and it’s a physical depression of the neurochemicals in the brain, brought about because tragedy is unhealthy.

A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.
Proverbs 17:22

God didn’t create our loved ones to die; it’s out of alignment with His plan and it brings sadness which is not healthy, and we weren’t designed to ever experience sadness. However sadness also makes sense because that person was significant and mattered to us.

God thus cannot create beings who do not react in their emotions/psychology, and physical health to tragedy and evil. Otherwise evil wouldn’t really be evil and good wouldn’t really be good if it lacked the cause and effect relationship. The Bible says “wrong does harm to its neighbor” but if wrong didn’t cause harm it wouldn’t really be wrong, and there would be no reason for God to command us not to do immoral things. The fact it causes harm is what makes it evil and wrong. God can solve evil by sending His Son to die, but He can’t change the nature of evil to make it not evil or change the nature of good either to cause them to not work by the law of cause and effect. Good and evil are eternal truths. Goodness is found in God’s own character and nature. Since God never changes, the nature of goodness (and thus evil as evil is the opposite of and absence of good), can never change. It must be defeated and eliminated; this is the only way to end evil. God cannot give beings He created an inability to react to evil. This would be an impossible design for human beings. As explained in chapter 1, there are things God cannot do. He cannot lie or do any other form of evil. He cannot change the nature of good, as good comes from His own eternal character and is thus eternal. To change the cause and effect relationship would be to remove the effects of evil from evil (and thus the effects of good from good). Doing this would be akin to God changing His own eternal nature. The Bible says “I the Lord change not.”

There is an eternal truth about how the physical world relates and connects with morality. It’s shown in the text “The wages of sin is death” Romans 6:23. Keeping God’s law results in life to our physical being and to our world, breaking his law results in death to our physical body as well as the decay and illness we see so prevalent in all systems and creatures of the world due to sin.

God could not create a natural world that did not respond to and was not connected to moral truth. There is a right way to live that results in life, physically, and scientifically. Keeping the 10 commandments gives us a world where right actions are done and so we don’t injure others, ourselves, or our world. Breaking the 10 commandments does the opposite and breaks down and destroys our world. It would be impossible for God to create a world where moral principles did not affect the natural world. Such a world would mean that the wages of sin do not equal death, and would be illogical and un-Biblical.

Psychology is a part of this cause and effect relationship. There are ways to break God’s law that harm another person’s psychology. This is the law of cause and effect as it relates to the physical nature of human beings. We respond biochemically to things that go on in the world. God did not create us to simply recognize great good has been done, but not respond to it in our person, in our emotions. Evil is objectively evil. When an innocent young child is killed in cold blood this is objectively a great evil. This would be true even if we did not exist to respond to it, say we had not been created yet or we had been dead for some time. But if we are alive when it happens and we hear about it and learn about it, we experience a knowledge of the great evil and logically grasp what has happened, and then our emotions follow the logic and knowledge and understanding of what has happened. We experience indignation as a principle. Meaning we believe the criminals should be caught and prosecuted and we hunger for justice. We recognize that a child, a being made in God’s image possessing great value has been unjustly wronged. We are sad and angry as principles that reflect that value of that child and the reality of their worth. And then we feel accompanying emotions of anger and sadness.

If we were not there and did not exist, the act of murder would still be wrong and this is an objective truth. But since we are living beings if this act happens while we are living and we hear of it we respond in our physical person to this tragic realization.

Emotions are the person responding. Our brain has both logical ability and emotional ability; these both make up our person. Both of these can be damaged and malfunction with mental illness and mental symptoms. This chapter will go over some of these malfunctions.

Emotions don’t matter as much as truth does. In fact emotions only hold value as they relate to truth. To understand this, ask someone with a child which they would prefer, for their child to die but they felt deep biochemical joy as though everything were right in the world and nothing bad had happened, or for their child to live but they felt crushing depression and sadness that felt like their child had died. The parent will choose their child living and themselves feeling deep biochemical depression. Reality matters more than feelings. Truth matters more than feelings. Our feelings only hold value because they relate to and connect with the truths in the external world. A parent’s deep sadness when their child dies matters because the child has died and the parent is in pain. Even purely biochemical depression that is not from any external trauma and is a result of physical disfunction, only has value because of the value of the one suffering from the condition, and the significance of Adam and Eve’s sin in bringing malfunction and disease into the world by their disobedience to God. Emotions do not hold value separate from the truths in the external world. They are not an end in and of themselves. They do not hold meaning in a vacuum.

What Conditions Give Complete Emotional Fulfillment?

Complete emotional fulfillment then is only possible in a perfect world. In a world where no one we love is suffering, where no evil and immorality is being done. Just as pumping the grieving parent with feel-good medication will not take away their grief because their grief is more than a feeling, it is also logical and involves the higher part of the mind, so as long as there is any sin in us and we do not perfectly reflect Christ’s nature and we are not physically with Him in heaven, the Christian cannot have perfect emotional fulfillment. The scriptures say there is an unutterable longing in the heart of every Christian to be 100% like Christ in character and to be with Him in heaven without a veil between us. This longing couldn’t be fulfilled even if we could artificially be given the happy emotions of heaven. It isn’t just an emotional problem. And our brain would recognize that we only felt happy and we weren’t actually with God and we’d still be suffering due to that and desiring God. No amount of feel good medication or hormones can relieve a person of the knowledge of their guilt. An unconverted person needs forgiveness and God Himself dwelling within them by His Spirit, not feelings. Those of us who are converted need to reach that point when we are exactly like Christ in character and sin has been fully overcome and removed from us forever. There is no substitute that can meet this need. There is nothing in all of creation that can meet this need except for the thing itself. Emotions and feelings don’t change the state of our heart and thus cannot meet such a vital and important need. They will of course accompany such a state. Someone who is free of sin will have holy emotions that follow their holy desires and holy joy that is first a principle, and secondly an emotion. Likewise someone who has been converted and forgiven of their sin will have a similar emotional experience. We need to fully be free of sin in order to have perfect emotional fulfillment, and we need to be living in a world without sin, suffering, and death to have perfect emotional fulfillment too.

How Our Emotions Were Created to Work

You will see many texts in the scriptures that say to worship God because He is good, because of his benevolent acts in history culminating on the cross. (1 Chronicles 16:34, Psalm 117:1-2). First the mind grasps the significance and love of the cross, then the emotions well up within the person, and then they give shouts of praise. This is the order God created our mind to work in. He didn’t create us to feel appreciation without understanding and blindly offer praise and then only later intellectually grasp the significance of God’s love. This would be out of order.

You will see this order in Jesus Himself and how His emotions work.

“Then God saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.”

Genesis 6:5-6

Notice how God grasps logically what is happening and then His emotions respond to the tragic truth He is seeing before Him. His emotions respond to truths and reality in the world around Him. His emotions are not something He seeks to stir up apart from the external world and the truth about the situations He is seeing there. He doesn’t lead with emotion and work Himself up into an emotional state, with logic and truth following second.

Responding to the rebellion of His people, and knowing if they do not repent that they will be lost forever, God responds with emotional language in the following verse. You can hear the pathos in the words.

“O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!”
Deuteronomy 32:29

In a similar verse addressing a similar situation God cries these words:

“How can I give thee up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboam (people groups God had to destroy due to their wickedness)? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.”
Hosea 11:8

Jesus is an emotional God, but not in a way that is arbitrary and disconnected from truth and reality. Indeed emotions get their value from truth. There is no value in feeling joy if no significant thing has occurred, but if say a friend of yours has accepted Christ as their Savior and turned from a life of sin the joy is significant and has meaning because of the event and truth that caused the joy.

Jesus tells us there is joy and rejoicing in heaven over a sinner who repents. (Luke 15:7, Luke 15:10)

Emotions do not have value apart from truth and the world around us. They weren’t created to be disconnected things that we work up in order to get an emotional high. In fact it’s Satan who stirs up emotions devoid of reason and works our emotions according to ungodly and evil principles.

“They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and lead astray by various passions”

2 Timothy 3:6

We are not to live for emotional pleasure (or any other kind of pleasure), or use emotions against their correct design.

“She who lives for pleasure is dead even while she is still alive.”
1 Timothy 5:6

There are many passages in the scriptures about pleasure being used for pleasure’s sake rather than being attached to truth that is meaningful and used in its proper sphere and its intended purpose

“For at one time we too were foolish, disobedient, mislead, and enslaved to all sorts of desires and pleasures, living in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.”

Titus 3:3.

Living for emotion is really hedonism. I think people are more used to the term hedonism describing lifestyles where people are heavy into drugs and promiscuity, but it’s also true that living for any kind of pleasure, even the holy feelings one experiences at church is hedonism. Hedonism by definition is when one’s highest purpose is feelings, and they have no higher meaning or purpose. To put it another way, hedonism is when one lacks principle and doesn’t live based on principle but on feelings only. Enjoying feelings is not hedonism. If one lives for principle and enjoys feelings and values them as they relate to realities in the real world, this isn’t hedonism. But when one lives for no higher purpose than feelings, this is hedonism.

Unofficial Interviewing of Sociopaths
I’ve done some unofficial interviewing and discussing with people with antisocial personality disorder, (which I may develop into an official scientific study at some point) and other personality disorders, who experience a symptom called anhedonia where they cannot feel any emotions, good or bad. Some of them have moderate anhedonia and others have severe anhedonia. Many of them have had anhedonia since childhood. They cannot feel empathy or sympathy for others, and many of them never have been able to. It’s easy for them to harm someone to get ahead. They don’t flinch.

These sociopaths commonly bring up the argument that they are really just living the way the average person lives. They do this to excuse their behavior, which isn’t right, but they are also correct. The vast majority of people make decisions based on emotions and how that decision will make them feel, and not based on truth. The vast majority of people follow their natural inclinations and do not come to Christ for forgiveness and battle these evil inclinations until they get the mastery over them. It’s much easier to continue a cycle of abuse than it is to seek Christ for strength to work through your issues and make right choices. Even if the person isn’t as abusive as the parents who abused them, they usually end up abusing others to a certain extent in a similar way, just lesser if it happened to them and they were influenced by it to the point where it affected their inclinations and tendencies.

I do think that if average person felt zero empathy or sympathy they also would harm others to get ahead in life. The people with ASPD bring up the important point that most people have hedonism as their underlying life philosophy, not benevolence and truth. For many sociopaths the only way they can feel any emotion, since they have this symptom of anhedonia which can in many of them be moderate or severe, is to do something dangerous or violent in order to get a high. If the average person could not feel any good feeling at all unless they engaged in these types of behaviors, do you think they’d live their lives doing the right thing? I don’t think so.

The fallen heart does delight in evil; it doesn’t get it’s joy from righteous acts of love. That doesn’t happen until one is converted. So for these sociopaths, growing up unconverted as we all do when very young, they learned early the only way to feel was to engage in high risk or violent situations. The average unconverted person can enjoy life in a sinful way by perhaps teasing their sibling, engaging in demeaning banter, or stealing something small, or engaging in deceptive self talk such as that one should follow their heart and live for their selfish dreams. But these types of things don’t bring feelings to the sociopath; to get feelings of enjoyment they must do more extreme things that do not fit into accepted societal norms.

An interesting real life example of a man with ASPD who became a Christian is the case of x. He said he made an effort to fit into societal norms until he learned about evolution in school. He concluded that it was evolutionarily advantageous to have low empathy and sympathy and to be able to push others down to promote oneself and that he must have been fortunate to inherent these advantages. From this point he decided to no longer hold back his natural inclinations. He tried to murder his father with a hammer, because his father represented authority and rules and he wanted to live free, unrestricted from any authority figures. He saw his dad as holding him back. When he attempted murder he felt no emotions from it. (Thankfully his dad survived the assault).

In jail he had a cell mate who was a Christian. This man reasoned with him from the scriptures. Eventually he was becoming convinced in a purely intellectual sense, that Jesus was God. Both he and his cell mate had some compulsive, unhealthy behaviors (mental illness is more prevalent in the prison population than the general population so this is not surprising), and his cell mate would go on long fasts. Being extremely competitive in nature, X also started fasting, trying to outdo his cell mate.

He lost so much weight his health was at serious risk. He reached a point where he realized what his selfishness and ego were doing to him. They didn’t lead to good places. They were causing him to destroy himself and destroy others. He repented to Christ and he said he experienced a sense of peace he hadn’t felt before. However, his emotions in general were still shallow. When his best friend died he felt nothing and it didn’t affect him. He was still a clinical sociopath, but he was a converted sociopath who became an apologist.

While the vast majority of people with personality disorders will follow their natural inclination (every therapist says that a much higher percentage of them never decide to change than the general population), there are a small minority that are converted and believe in Christ. Since the majority remain unconverted and have inclinations to do strong evil, this means that they will become murderers and sexual abusers and abusers and convicts and thieves and calloused CEOs. Because that’s where their inclinations take them. They have greater temptations than the general population and since most people give in to their temptations as a lifestyle, sociopaths are no different. This makes them some of the most dangerous and harmful people in the world.

The ones I’ve talked to who are Christians or who maybe aren’t Christian but they recognize being selfish and hurting others to get ahead is wrong and they want to change, make the decision without emotions using similar logic as x. That it hurts and breaks down others and the world to harm them for selfish gain. It’s not helpful and doesn’t result in prosperity or beneficial results. They want to establish good will between themselves and the people in their lives, give and take relationships. They wouldn’t want to be crossed or used, and so they realize they shouldn’t cross or use others either.

Your typical person donates to charity when a particularly disturbing picture is shown, responding to feelings. But won’t donate as often or as much if simply asked to, with no disturbing picture of someone in need shown. The people with sociopathy pointed out to me that such giving is actually selfish. The person is giving to alleviate the painful or uncomfortable emotions they experience, not with the motive to lessen the suffering of the person they are donating to help, as evidenced by the fact that they give less money or less often when such images are not shown. This puts your typical unconverted person in the same place ideologically and philosophically as the typical sociopath – ascribing to a hedonistic philosophy, whether they realize it or not.

These sociopaths who understand these principles can understand truth they just don’t have emotions. But other sociopaths I’ve spoken with could not understand right from wrong. It seems to be a mixed bag with people with sociopathy.(More on this in the chapter on the conscience).

Living by Principle is What Makes Someone a Christian
As Christians we worship God and we esteem His truths and His principles as number one in our lives about everything else. If one makes pleasure – even feelings of holiness or the presence of God – first and above principle, they are no longer a Christian and have entered into an ideology that is not Biblical.

Why is this? Because Christians do not live for how they feel about truth. We live for the truth itself. We don’t value the rush of joy we get when we realize God loves us; we value God Himself and His love itself.

If you fear you may be living for emotion and not truth and God, ask yourself “If I was an unbeliever and I could be injected with a substance that gave me feelings of joy that felt like I was right with God, but I wasn’t actually right with God, or if I could live life as a converted Christian but for some reason I did not experience rapturous feelings and I was pretty emotionally neutral all of my life as far as feelings go but I had real experiences with God through His Word every day, and I was changed in character to be like Him, and I was forgiven of my sins, would I value the second option much more than the first?” If you have hesitancy answering this question or your answer is an honest “no”, then you’re probably esteeming feelings above truth. This is not a Christian life you’re living if this is the case, however if you will repent Jesus will forgive you and show you how to live a Christian life.

I don’t mean to imply with this question that emotions are bad things or that they hold zero value. They do hold value which we will talk about shortly. But they hold much less value than God and His truth, and their value exists as it relates to God and virtue and truth, not apart from God and His truth.

Emotions Have to be Managed and Ruled Over

Indeed we are adjured in God’s Word to rule our spirit. The Bible verses about ruling our spirits make it clear that if one does not rule their emotions they can get out of control and operate inappropriately and out of the natural order God created them to work within. Self control is one of the fruits of the Spirit and it is a huge essential part of the Christian life. Having proper self control over one’s emotions is thus a part of a Christian’s stewardship to God, just as thinking true and right thoughts and rejecting impure and selfish and evil thoughts is.

“He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city.”
Proverbs 16:32

While we can’t control everything consciously when it comes to emotions and they are sometimes outside of our control, here we can see that emotion regulation and management is a part of our Christian stewardship. We are not to let our emotions run wild, but keep the reins of our mind and our will upon them, managing them by the power of the Holy Spirit. Logic and understanding are to come first, and emotions flow and respond to logic and understanding. We are not to allow emotions to come first or to work ourselves up into an emotional state. We are not to value emotions above truth and seek for an emotional experience rather than an experience with God rooted in the truth of His Word.

“He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls.
Proverbs 25:28

“A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back.”
Proverbs 29:11

Let’s Review. What are emotions according to the Bible?

Emotions are a way for us to feel in our person the deep truths found in God’s law and the world around us that He created. They are the physical, biochemical reaction to justice, goodness, or injustice, and evil.

They are not a way to measure truth as they will steer us wrong if we use them for that purpose. Our emotions are tied in with a number of things including our character. If someone is unconverted and as a result selfish and cold-hearted, their emotional feelings about injustice and hate and cruelty will not be as in-tune as they need to be. If someone is wronged in front of them, they will experience only a blunted feeling of sadness and righteous indignation, because their character is hard-hearted and they are themselves unjust in the way they live their lives. 

The Bible tells us love – or someone with a loving character – rejoices in the truth, and that the wicked delight in wickedness.

“Love…Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;”

1 Corinthians 13:6

“Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.”

Revelation 22:15

These verses and others like them in the Bible explain that feelings are tied into and connected with the state of our heart and our character. When a person is unconverted, they delight in wickedness, and a converted person after being given a new heart by Christ delights in righteousness.

Emotions are not all that is involved with delight and joy and peace and the other positive emotions. There definitely is a character element to joy and peace, and this is the primary element. It’s really the emotions that follow and spring from the character; it doesn’t work the other way around.

In fact it’s right there in Galatians when Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,

gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

Galatians 5:22-23

Notice how Paul calls joy and peace fruits of the Spirit. What are fruits? In the Bible fruits are always used as a metaphor of deeds. 

“Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.

Matthew 12:33

For each tree is known by its own fruit. Indeed, figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor grapes from brambles.

Luke 6:44

Paul isn’t saying in this verse that the Spirit living in our hearts at conversion gives feelings of peace and joy merely, but that He gives us a new heart that can live by righteous principles and produce righteous attitudes in the inner man. We can joy in God and His attributes and His law, rather than have anger and hate towards Him and His law. We can have peace with God and surrender to Him rather than war against Him and seek to promote self above God.

Notice the verse that comes right after:

Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

Galatians 5:24

The unconverted heart has passions and desires that are not holy.

All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.

Ephesians 2:3

“For the joy set before Him He endured the cross…”

Hebrews 12:2

When one reads the accounts of Jesus enduring the pain of the cross, it’s clear He’s suffering unutterable agony. He isn’t beaming with joy. He’s crushed and bruised and chastised. The joy then being spoken of here is not an emotion; it’s deeper than an emotion. It’s the joy of the knowledge that by enduring this agony He would redeem His children. Why does He experience joy over this? Because Christ has a righteous character, one of perfect self-sacrificial love.

Notice also that the joy of seeing His children redeemed is Christ’s motivating force. It’s the reason He’s enduring the cross. His motive is self-sacrificial love.

“He will see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.”

Isaiah 53:11

Again, this state of being satisfied is more than an emotion; it is the satisfaction based on a very real reality of having His children redeemed for all eternity to Himself. It’s based on knowledge and truth.

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I unto you.”

John 14:27

What is the peace that Jesus gives us, is it merely an emotion? No, it is peace with God through His sacrifice atoning for our sins.

“Therefore since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Romans 5:1

So while emotions are tied into character and share a relationship, emotions follow and spring from character, not the other way around. It’s not our emotions that make us good. It’s our heart change at conversion that makes our character good, and then our new character now delights in and experiences emotions of joy when it does righteous selfless actions and thinks holy thoughts. This delight is more than an emotion; it’s a principle of righteousness that the character is now aligned with. But emotions follow the new configuration and are felt in response to the new principles moving the heart.

What is the Character and Where is it Located and What is it Made of?

It doesn’t really make sense to think of our character as a separate entity or concept from us. Our character is just us, our brain. Someone with a righteous character is a righteous, goodhearted person. Someone with an unrighteous character, is a selfish, immoral person. Where in the brain is the character? Again our character is just our brain; it’s us. The higher functions of the brain that the animals do not possess, such as the prefrontal cortex and associated regions are what make up our character. These are the parts of the brain that allow us to make moral choices and obey or rebel against God. We don’t know exactly all of the regions of the brain these functions rely on, but we know for sure some of the regions involved.

But while our character is us, it’s a little more complex than that. It’s really changes made to our frontal lobe, that solidify it in a state of love and obedience to God, or a state of selfishness and disobedience. We form character. Character is the changes made to the part of our brain that houses the self and moral understanding, that is molded by our moral choices.

We don’t start off with a moral character, or any character at all.

We start off with a blank state.

We inherit a fallen nature from Adam, but not a sinful character.

Notice what God’s Word says about this. It’s very specific to get into the finer points of detail here, to show us that Adam’s sin doesn’t make us guilty, it just makes us inherit a fallen nature. It’s our own sin that brings on us guilt and condemnation, which only Christ’s blood can then wash us clean from.

“Therefore just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned”
Romans 5:12 NIV

The wages of sin is death, according to the scriptures. Death came to all men how? Because all sinned. It’s at our first sin that we incur guilt and are condemned to death. What Adam did by his sin is he gave us a fallen nature which would mean we would all inevitably sin, but it’s only when we actually did our first sin that we became condemned to die and began forming an immoral character.

Jesus was able to take on a fallen nature, and yet be without sin, because a fallen nature isn’t the same thing as an immoral character, or an act of sin.

“For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”
Hebrews 4:15

Hebrews 2:17 tells us Jesus was made like us in every way.

Character is not something that is made when we are fashioned in the womb. It’s something that is formed after our creation, by our moral choices. By our decision to submit to God and obey Him, or to sin and rebel against Him.

Jesus in His human form, while tempted as Adam was chose not to sin, and thus He formed a character of love and goodness, and never went the way of Adam and sin.

Yes, Jesus really was tempted. Yes, He had the option of sinning. He resisted sin and chose to form in His human form a perfect character of obedience to God. He could then, having formed a perfect character, transfer His perfect righteousness to our account, and having paid our debt by His death, the Father when looking at us would see a perfect person because we are covered by Christ’s righteous life.

So, when God changes our heart – our character – at conversion, is He making changes to our physical brain? Yes. The Bible is clear that God gives us a new nature at conversion. More than this though, God fills us with His Holy Spirit at conversion. An unconverted person is a wicked person living without God’s Holy Spirit; and thus this person’s desires and goals and motives are all selfish and centered around self. It is God that makes us good and since an unconverted person is not filled with God’s Spirit the person isn’t good as goodness comes from God alone; we don’t possess it on our own. A converted person is given a new heart and filled with God’s Spirit. It wouldn’t be enough for us to just be changed; we need the living Presence of God in us in order to move us to think pure and holy thoughts and to do noble and righteous deeds. It’s the Spirit living within us and actuating our desires and motives that is what gives us a new heart. It isn’t just our brain being fine-tuned to love good and hate evil; God Himself comes to live in us and actuates us and this is why we love good and hate evil.

Our physical body, including our brain was created to be a temple for the Holy Spirit. This is its purpose. Not to be a home or a temple for our own spirit. We do not possess spirits separate from our body, rather the Spirit that lives inside us is God’s Holy Spirit.

Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.
1 Corinthians 6:13

In this verse you can see how our bodies were made for God. And notice it also says that the Lord is for the body. Our body was made with the exact attributes and dimensions in mind to be a perfect temple for the Holy Spirit. It is the right design for God’s Spirit to inhabit and dwell with us and within us and have a relationship with us.

And when one yields to Satan he gradually gets more and more control over them, and eventually such a person will became possessed by demons; they are then a habitation of devils. Our bodies are thus a battleground and we become the dwelling of either God or Satan.

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?
1 Corinthians 6:19

You, however, are controlled not by the flesh, but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.
Romans 8:9

Do you not know that you yourselves are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
1 Corinthians 3:16

What is Sanctification and How is This Related to Our Physical Brain?
Sanctification occurs as we go through the trials and tests and temptations of life, and we choose to yield and surrender our fleshly and selfish desires and motives to God rather than give in to them. The sanctification process is described in the Bible as a ladder that leads upward to heaven. It’s also described as the sun, shining brighter and brighter as the morning goes on, and changing its position in the sky, until it is directly overhead at noon blazing its undimmed brilliance upon the world.

Prayer and real battling with self is needed to be sanctified. Let’s say you have a temper and a tendency to yell back at those who say unkind things to you. You’ll need to battle that temper when someone insults you. You may need to go into the other room, bite your tongue, and pray to Jesus for strength not to yell back. If a person surrenders their desire to yell back unkind words, Jesus then changes their character a little bit due to their surrender and yielding to Him. The next day their character will be a little closer to Christ’s. They will also be a little more filled with God’s Holy Spirit than they were before they surrendered and yielded to God and won that victory for that day. Like the sun analogy in the scriptures, they will shine brighter for God than the day before. They will reflect His character more perfectly than the previous day and they will give Him more glory with their lives and their witness than the previous day. They are filled with more of His Holy Spirit than the previous day and their character is more in alignment with God.

God Doesn’t Use Force
God does not force us, and thus He will not make these little alterations to our character against our will. God’s goal is that everyone who becomes like Him and who goes to heaven will not get there own a whim. Neither will anyone who is lost be lost on a whim. We can’t make one decision to repent of sins and go to heaven and be instantly translated there. If this were possible a person could get there and be angry at God for the injustice of taking them to heaven so quickly and easily, when they actually wanted to be selfish and indulge in selfish ambition.

The nature of the war also does not allow for God to take us instantly to heaven or sanctify us overnight. In This war of good vs. evil God is revealing His good and perfect character. He thus must always make moves that are good and perfect. He cannot conduct the war in an immoral way. He must take people to heaven with just criteria, in a just and good and right way on the basis of just and perfect criteria. If God sins even once in this war, He loses the war and Satan would win.

If the Brain Becomes Damaged Does the Character Become Damaged Also?

No, when the brain becomes damaged the character does not become damaged. God fiercely guards our character, imprinting it on the books in heaven.

But here is where things get interesting. While it is not possible for a person who is saved and in right standing with God to lose their salvation from having a brain injury (God fiercely guards our salvation, making us the only person or force in the universe who decides whether we are saved or lost and he registers us in the books of heaven if we living obediently to Him), or for the record of their good deeds and faithfulness to be lost (God records those in heaven), it is possible for a person to lose their moral cognition and become unable to understand right and wrong from a brain injury or from inflammation from a mental illness. While God will always convict, we can lose our ability to discern His voice from a brain injury. We can thus lose our conscience, as the conscience is made up of two separate things: our understanding/logical ability, and the Holy Spirit’s convicting voice (more on this later).

If someone has been following God and living up to all the truth they know, and then they get in a car accident, suffer a stroke from brain damage, and the stroke happens in their frontal lobe, the part that houses the character, no they cannot lose their godly character. God formed that character in them by the power of His divine Spirit as they yielded to Him and surrendered self to Him over time. It is not lost. What can be damaged though is their moral cognition, also called their judgment, their ability to understand right and wrong.

Sometimes the damage is so severe that they completely lose their ability to understand right and wrong. Such people do not possess an evil character, rather they are no longer capable of understanding evil and of choosing it, and thus all their actions from this point on are morally neutral (unless they heal from their brain injury or recover from their severe inflammation with antipsychotics or something like this). They enter a state where they are “without law”. (More on this later.)

However being without law occurs in severe injury and in severe mental illness (SMI), the vast majority of people who have damaged or inflamed pre-frontal cortexes can understand right and wrong, but their understanding is blunted or impaired, but not completely unintelligible. These people are under obligation to do the right thing and to reject the wrong, but with an increased tendency and susceptibility to do the wrong thing since their brain is not seeing evil as being as evil as it really is. Their temptation is to downplay and excuse the evil things they do because to them they really don’t seem to be all that wrong. On them rests the responsibility of searching God’s Word to understand how wrong these things are and not to accept their blunted perception as the truth.

A lot of people with anti-social personality disorder have this problem (sociopaths). They often harm animals early in life because to them causing an animal high-level torture seems akin to just teasing the animal. Killing someone in cold blood might seem to them like slapping someone in the face, like just getting in a minor brawl. When people try to convince them that killing someone is a great wrong and deeply significant in its evil, since many of them have had this blunted perception their whole lives, and since killing has never seemed severe or significant, they can’t imagine that it could be that serious.

Others with AsPD don’t have blunted moral perception but absent moral perception. This is especially true if they have a psychotic disorder along with the AsPD as the two can co-occur.

It’s not just sociopaths that can get this symptom. Kids (and adults) with severe autism can have this symptom, as can those in psychosis. They can be a danger to animals, themselves, and others because they can’t understand that an animal dying from playing too rough with it is a significantly tragic and bad thing to happen. People in severe depression often are unable to see how wrong suicide is and can have a blunted perception of its evil. I’ve seen posts by loved ones online who lost a loved one to suicide, where the loved one shot themselves in front of them, sending them into an instant PTSD response. The loved one who committed suicide seemed unable to really gauge the horrific impact killing themselves in front of their spouse would have on their spouse.

Many of these people with severely blunted or absent moral cognition become business executives and CEOs, politicians, and powerful people in society because the grandiosity and narcissistic traits drive them to seek out power and authority, and because they lack a sense of how wrong it is to push people down to get yourself ahead they aren’t shy to do whatever they need to do to succeed.

Not only is there an increased tendency to do moral errors because of blunted moral cognition, but when our body and brain are in an inflamed state this state epigenetically makes us more oriented towards temptation than we normally are. An inflamed body and brain desires sex more than usual, desires stimulating and unhealthy food and drink more than usual, desires sensual music and lewd dancing more than usual – all the temptations of the flesh increase in intensity. So at the same time a person’s moral perception is more blunted from inflammation, the inflammation also increases their temptations to engage in immoral things.

Then there’s another element to this too. Our fallen bodies have a natural tendency towards sin. This is true even in those with upstanding characters who obey Jesus and don’t engage in an unholy lifestyle. We need new, glorified bodies because our bodies are prone to things like gay attraction, unhealthy food, intoxicating liquor, desires for violence, even if we don’t partake in these things and we resist them by God’s power.

When we start to lose control of our self-governance due to inflammation in the brain we tend to go the natural way of our biochemical fallen desires. This is why someone who is in complete psychosis and can’t tell right from wrong, may come across as proud and insensitive, or engage in promiscuity, and may do more immoral things than they ever used to do before entering psychosis. When they completely lose the ability to tell right from wrong, the frontal lobe and associated areas that would filter those fleshly urges and desires and resist them on the basis that they aren’t moral options, no longer can do any filtering. It may try to do a sort of psychotic filtering where the person refuses to do certain actions based on faulty logic. This happens a lot in psychosis. A person won’t walk by a certain street because they believe there are demons on that street and they will get possessed if they do. But they will commit adultery and call themselves a Christian because they think it’s not wrong and God’s voice told them it was ok. Illogical moral ideas. Or they may engage in lots of very immoral things because when the frontal lobe – the only thing that stops us from doing evil things that feel pleasurable – stops working there is nothing to stop the person from engaging in those things. Thus the person often adopts a proud, grandiose demeanor, puts self as the center without apology, may never admit they are in the wrong (or even question whether they are as the concept doesn’t really exist for them), engages in promiscuity and other sensual pleasures, and appears to worship self, but without the moral knowledge of what worship is. They go the natural way we’d all go without a filter.

Some people believe the look on a person’s face or their proud demeanor is evidence that the person knows they are being proud. Or that if a person acts sheepish when they have done the wrong thing that this is evidence the psychotic person can tell right from wrong. It’s common for people in psychosis to be judged based on appearances and with faulty judgment. This happens all too frequently in court cases and people who are actually psychotic are deemed “pure evil” by the public and the jury because they had no affect (emotional expression) in their face when the people they harmed were mentioned (lack of affect is actually a symptom of psychotic disorders but the general public doesn’t know this), or because of other behaviors and mannerisms. I saw one account where a man was being disruptive. The judge concluded he was being antagonistic and trying to delay his sentencing. But he kept saying he didn’t understand what the judge was saying, even after she broke down things logically to him several times, and all his statements lacked logical cohesiveness. He also mentioned he was being tortured with a device on his ankles that zapped him with nerve pain. This was likely a hallucination. But he was judged to be sane and sentenced to life in prison for murder he committed, and the general consensus is he’s pure evil. Is it right to label someone pure evil who lacks the ability to be logically coherent and to understand his actions?

Mannerisms and emotional responses should never be used to gauge character, and this is especially true in people with psychotic illnesses where there can be inappropriate emotions and emotional expression (or lack of expression) due to the psychosis.

Even dogs can act sheepish when they do the wrong thing. Their body acts biochemically in a way that produces a sheepish demeanor, but they can’t tell right from wrong, they are just reacting to you and your mannerisms. They know they aren’t supposed to do that thing, but they don’t know why. They don’t understand the principle behind it. In the same way the psychotic person’s body can produce expressions of shame or of pride or even of dominance and violence without real knowledge of right and wrong being present. Surges of dopamine that are often present in psychosis can produce exaggerated emotional expressions that looks like pride or even hate. It’s important not to label someone guilty of wrong just because of their demeanor or expressions because this is unjust. It often will create great distress in a person who honestly can’t tell right from wrong. They won’t be able to understand why you are accusing them. They may also just outright disagree they are guilty (because they can’t tell right from wrong) and you labeling them guilty may lead to verbal or physical fights, outbursts, and conflicts.

Logic Far Superior to Emotion

While our emotions are important, and they make us human, our logical ability is far superior to our emotions. Why is this? Another way to think of our logical ability is to think of it as understanding. The laws of logic are how a person understands anything, what their brain uses to understand. If one’s brain breaks the laws of logic due to a mental illness like schizophrenia, they can no longer understand the truths of God’s Word. If a person lives irrationally and illogically and lives by emotion rather than truth that person cannot worship God. Jesus is the truth and He values truth above all else, and He seeks those who worship Him in Spirit and in truth. Those who worship Him with understanding from a place of genuine love and gratitude. If someone lives their life by their emotions and not by their understanding, the person becomes incapable of worship to God.

Love and worship are principles. Principles are things understood by the logical part of our brain. If one loses their ability to be logical – or forfeits it by making an idol of emotions and making their choices in life based on emotion rather than on logic – in the first example the person is incapable of love and worship, and in the second they are choosing to reject love and worship and live for pleasure as their idol. In neither of these cases is the way they are living a loving way that worships God.

I experienced this when I went into full psychosis. I could no longer worship or love. I could not live based on principle. I could enjoy a good meal, and I made a point of trying to comfort others who were suffering from mental illness in the psych ward along with me, and I could feel emotions of pain if someone I loved was in pain, but I was completely unable to understand the principles of God’s law such as holiness, truth, personal rights and God’s rights. I didn’t know why lying was wrong and thought people were arbitrarily against it. I didn’t understand the principle of how lying violates a person’s rights to accurate information on which they can make their decisions. I didn’t understand cussing was wrong because I couldn’t see the vulgarity in cussing. I thought the F word was the same thing as shouting “ouch!” when you stub your toe. I had lost the ability to understand what purity and holiness are because one must be able to understand principles in order to understand these things. The common and profane were on the same level as the holy with me. There was little distinction, and eventually no real distinction when my condition worsened and I went into complete psychosis.

My existence was empty and painful in its emptiness. It felt like nihilism had become my existence. I hungered for something more, but I couldn’t find it anywhere because my brain was incapable of understanding principles. I thought I was getting visions from God because I was experiencing vivid dreams and seeing signs everywhere, a symptom of psychosis that many people with bipolar 1 like I have experience. But the visions while stimulating and intoxicating were not meaningful. I tried to get ones that were glorious enough to provide meaning but none of them ever did.

After I came out of psychosis I could again understand principles and live by them. Deep peace and deep meaning was now mine. I knew what it meant that people were in the image of God, and I knew the difference between right and wrong and I could choose to believe in Christ and walk with Him in holiness. Just being a person, while not intoxicating and stimulating like when I was in psychosis and thought I was a prophet, was deeply meaningful and was the perfect thing to satisfy my inner hunger. Just to be in the image of God, to be forgiven and redeemed by Him. I could see the value of our humanity and of what it means to be human, and I could see the attributes of God’s character. All of this met the needs of my soul. But all of it is lost when a person is in psychosis, or when they have a working brain but they willingly choose to live for feeling and pleasure rather than by principle.

Both psychosis and living for pleasure as ones purpose are types of suffering. Of course the psychotic person is innocent of any sin and there’s a distinct difference there between the psychotic person and the hedonistic person.

Is There a Connection Between Pride and Logic?
I’ve noticed in my discussions with people when I emphasize the value and importance of our brain’s ability to be logical, and our obligation to study and use the laws of logic, I’m often met with resistance. People say things like “but isn’t faith the most important thing?” I saw a comment made by someone on Youtube that said “where logic ends faith begins” The person making this comment didn’t realize it but what they are essentially saying is “where love ends faith begins” or “where worship ends faith begins” because we need logical ability in order to choose to love and to worship. Many tend to think of logic as being something atheists do and a way to worship self like the devil does, and it’s common for people to conclude that being too logical leads to self worship. Faith is seen as incompatible with logic in the minds of many.

But logic isn’t self-worship. That’s pride and self-sufficiency, not logic. Logic is an ability of the mind; pride is a moral issue and deals with character not mental function. However, since we have a sinful nature, there is a connection with any ability or talent or attribute, that if one is very beautiful for instance, or very good at logic, or very intelligent, there is a temptation to become proud and self-sufficient. This would not be the case if we had perfect characters like the angels and this really makes no logical sense if you think about it. When Satan determined that he was very beautiful and very talented and possessed amazing abilities, it didn’t really make logical sense for him to conclude he should be worshipped because of this. The logical conclusion is to attribute his beauty and majesty to God, the Creator who created Him. To recognize that although he is beautiful and talented, everything he is and has came from God, he is not immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, and he does not possess a single divine attribute or trait. He cannot even live one moment without the power of God sustaining him with life. This would have been the logical and accurate conclusion. His pride actually skewed his logic in this area, rather than making him more logical.

I think due to this temptation some have concluded that they do not want to be too logical lest they become tempted to be proud. This desire to not be proud is good, but you have to be careful here in how you combat this temptation. If the fear of becoming proud leads to the person neglecting logic in their life and not making it a priority and they begin to make choices based on emotion or without logic in mind, this can lead to the sin of neglect of one’s stewardship of their mind. Yes we’ve seen very proud atheists with brilliant minds turn from God. But most of us are not as logical as we need to be and the whole human race has a strong tendency to make decisions based on emotion rather than logic. Furthermore we have a positive obligation to live our lives based on truth and to “give a reason” for our faith to the world and represent God accurately. We are adjured in the Word of God to love the Lord our God with all of our mind and mental capacity, as well as all of our heart. Good mental stewardship is an act or worship to God. Poor mental stewardship violates one’s duty to God.

So while it is possible to be good at logic and to fall to the temptation to be proud and self-sufficient, it’s also possible to be bad at logic and commit the sin of making Christianity (and God) look unreasonable, illogical, and as though it is not the truth. To make a poor case for the gospel and the glory of God. This is as much a sin as the sin of pride is. Both need to be avoided. Only in Christ’s strength can we avoid both. This is not something that is done in human strength or with human power.

Having experienced reduced ability to be logical, to the point where I lost basically all logical capacity during psychosis, I can attest both to the suffering that comes from loss of logical ability, and later when I regained logic, but not completely, to the humbling effect loss of logic has on a person. God can certainly use mental illnesses and the loss of function as a way to humble a person. It’s rare to meet someone with schizophrenia who has received treatment and come out of their psychosis (but usually not fully and some symptoms remain) who doesn’t have a strong presence of humility in their character. They are usually very down-to-earth once medicated and have a strong sense of their finite nature and their humanity. Loss of mental function humbles a person in a powerful way. Nebuchadnezzar was probably one of the proudest men alive in his day. God took away his mental function in order to humble him and it worked. It was just what someone with such a proud spirit needed.

Can Our Thorn in The Flesh be Mental Handicaps?
It’s possible God may take away a person’s mental function and cognition, give them something like brain fog, or a full mental illness in order to humble them. Our Father knows when to discipline us in this way. But it doesn’t seem right to me to purposefully neglect the study of logic and the duty to make decisions based on principle and truth and to dumb oneself down in order to not be proud. This seems like false humility. Far too many Christians give Christianity a bad name and misrepresent God by not living lives based on principle and logic, and by not understanding the Bible and God’s nature and attributes. We have a duty to avoid living in such a way. With mental conditions on the rise, and even full mental illnesses, the study of logic is even more needed than it is in the past, not less.

And faith isn’t illogical, in fact one must have logical ability in order to have faith. Faith that is baseless, that isn’t based on the goodness of God, isn’t faith at all, it’s blind submission and as CS Lewis put it one who will love and worship God baselessly will just as readily love and serve a tyrant as they would God. Thus someone with great faith will be someone with a great understanding of God’s character and God’s love, someone who worships God based on logic and understanding, not baselessly.

The Relation of the Will (Faith) With Logic

Faith is an act of our will. It’s when we use our will to trust God. We have faith when we choose to trust and to follow God. Our ability to be logical and to understand truth is not the will. The will is different. The will is the choice. But logic and understanding are needed in order to make a choice. The devil sees the goodness of God, recognizes God is perfect love, understands this, and yet does not choose to surrender his life to God. It is definitely possible to have understanding and the ability to be logical, and yet not surrender one’s life to God. The Bible tells us “the demons believe and tremble”, yet this is not faith.

Logic alone is thus not faith. Both Cain and Abel saw the goodness of God, one chose to believe, the other to reject. There were two thieves crucified on either side of Christ, one yielded his life to God, the other mocked Him all the way to the grave. All of these people had the ability to be logical and understand the goodness of God. But they made different decisions. Logic gives us the ability to make our choice, but it isn’t our choice. It’s our will that we use to make our choice. Our will is what we use to have faith in God.

One cannot have faith without possessing the ability to understand logic. We love God because He is self-sacrificial; because of the motives in His heart, because of the principles He abides by. If we love Him for some other reason or we love Him senselessly without reason, this is not love, it’s not faith, and it’s not submission to Him. It’s not worship.

Choice is what makes the man, but logic is what makes choice possible. When a person chooses rightly, repents of their sin, and begins living a life of obedience to God we call that person a Christian, a force for good in the world.

When someone with the same logical ability rejects God and lives a life of crime the person is a poor example of a human being and a force for evil in the world.

It’s the will, the choice that makes the man or the woman. But there can be no moral agency, no use of the will if one does not have the ability to be logical. Thus logic is far superior to emotion so that there is no comparison, because emotion is not needed to make a choice and one can intelligently choose love and worship to God even if one has a condition that causes them to not be able to feel emotion (anhedonia, a negative symptom of depression and schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, or if they have a condition that gives them lots of intense and rapidly changing emotions as one with Borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder might experience, but one cannot choose to love and worship God if they lose the ability to understand logic. In cases of full psychosis or advanced dementia a person loses their moral agency and autonomy. Just as a contract signed by someone in advanced dementia doesn’t hold up because they don’t know what decision they are making (this is good because people would take advantage of them and it protects them from being taken advantage of), so no decision made to repent and believe in God (or to reject Him) holds up when one loses their ability to understand logic.

This is why loss of logical understanding is so important and so serious of a condition to have.

Logic And the Will Far Super to Emotion

It is with logic and understanding that we use our will to choose to love. The ability to love happens due to logic, not emotions.

Explain difference between men and women.

Are Emotions Valuable?

The answer to this question is yes. Why are emotions valuable? The answer is because people are valuable, therefore whether they are happy or sad, whether they are filled with holy joy or filled with unrest and unhappiness matters. Their expressions of joy or sadness matter for the same reason. Since we are valuable beings made in God’s image, the art we create, the personality we show, the deep thoughts we think, and the pain or joy we experience and our expressions of them hold value.

Indeed if we see someone hurting and sad it isn’t love to pass them by and not speak a kind word or do what we can to help them (in way appropriate to the situation). It doesn’t make sense to think of sadness as being an emotion in a vaccum; no it is the person who is sad and that’s why their sadness matters; because they matter.

Emotions are involved in mental and physical health. The health and happiness of people matters because that person matters. And thus if we care about them we will care whether they have happy and healthy emotions or whether they are crushed with sadness and unhappiness. We’ll also care if we see them seeking emotional highs as an end in themselves, too disconnected from truth, and if they haven’t been given correct Bible theology on the purpose and role of emotions in the Christian life. The church must care about educating its members about these important truths and upholding the Bible standard about emotions and their role, as a way to worship God. When we adopt unbiblical ideas and ideologies, we put people’s ideas above God’s truth and this is idolatry.

Not only is it wrong to seek emotional highs as an end in themselves because it’s truth that holds value, not the emotions we feel, but doing so actually imbalances the neurotransmitters in the brain and the mind of the individual seeking them out. Thus if we love people we will encourage them not to imbalance their minds through seeking these highs as it can lead to mental symptoms that can impair their lives and reduce quality of life, and add temptations for them that make it more difficult for them to walk in holiness (for instance someone prone to depression has more temptations to doubt God than someone not prone to depression, someone biochemically prone to anger has more temptation to foster and indulge unforgiveness than someone who is not biochemically prone to anger. More on this later).

Balanced Emotions Needed in Order to Have Health

Balanced emotions equal health to a person. Neurotransmitters that are involved in emotions are also involved in perception. Not only do these neurochemicals help us feel and respond to the world around us and the people in our lives in an emotional way, but they also help us perceive the world and the people around us accurately.

I don’t think I’ve ever met or heard of a depressed person that didn’t have some level of cognitive distortion in their thinking. The biochemical imbalances that cause them to feel depressed also affect their cognition and their perception. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone with an anxiety disorder that didn’t have some level of cognitive distortion and irrationality going on. This happens for the same reason as depression: the same neurochemicals that are affecting their mood affect their cognition and perception.

This is why it becomes hard in those with autism and very difficult or impossible in those with severe mental illness like schizophrenia to maintain relationships and interact in a human way with those around them. The ability to understand social cues and human behavior – called social cognition – is affected by mental conditions. Oxytocin in particular is involved in social cognition. And people with mental illnesses and mental conditions often have low oxytocin levels and see improvement in social cognition if they raise their oxytocin levels. Oxytocin has also been linked to empathy. People with personality disorders that lower empathy are often low in oxytocin.

Oxytocin and Social Cognition – PubMed (nih.gov)

Fine Line Between Emotions and Feelings

One of the questions I gave at the beginning of this chapter was “Is there a difference between emotions and feelings”. A healthy brain has baseline neurotransmitters that it feels all of the time, even when you’re not doing anything that would stir up emotions. Not only does the brain have baseline neurotransmitters, but the whole body does. The nervous system runs through the whole body and so the whole body should be feeling baseline neurotransmitters that cause it to feel content and happy at all times. Not euphoric, not deeply moved or deeply emotional, but content and happy. Thus neurotransmitters aren’t just a part of our emotions, they also cause biochemical feelings through our whole body. Since they consist of the same neurotransmitters there is overlap between what we might call feelings and sensations, which can be purely physical, things like shivering, or hormones moving through our body that cause feelings of hunger or sexual urges, and what we call emotions such as sadness, joy, etc..

I learned the hard way when I was very low in endorphins and other vital hormones and neurotransmitters from being chronically ill that if the body isn’t somewhat of a pleasure center it turns very quickly into a torture chamber. The body is supposed to feel content, and good at all times unless something reacts on it to feel bad. Your body does many different biochemical processes every day that cause wear and tear and fill it up with toxins. A healthy body shoots out natural endorphins so you don’t feel the wear and tear going on, repairs tissue, and neutralizes toxins. If your body is chronically ill and can’t make endorphins, you’re going to be in pain just from the natural biochemical processes going on in your body. While we don’t tend to refer to this calm, strong and centered state that is the healthy norm for a person as ‘feelings’, and we tend to ignore them for the most part unless we lose them and become ill, they are vital to health and they matter. It’s also important to note that those who aren’t in a calm and centered happy state will be extra tempted by Satan to seek out immoral ways to feel better.

Not only do the same neurotransmitters involved in emotions cause biochemical feelings of stability, they also do things like cause our intestines to contract so we can digest food and pass it through our digestive tract. They are involved in the heart pulsing and the rapid changes the body experiences to heart rate and blood flow when you exercise or when you go from a sitting position to a standing position. They have actual physical purposes too.

They are also very involved in perception. The same neurotransmitters that give us emotions also help us perceive the world accurately and interact in a human way with the people around us. Those who have mental illnesses that cause oxytocin to lower, not only cannot feel feelings of bonding and love for people, but since oxytocin is involved in social cognition and understanding people, they also have great trouble understanding social cues and knowing how to interact with others. They act in ways that are atypical, eccentric, and sometimes outright bizarre. These are painful and isolating conditions to experience and it can be very hard on the family and loved ones also when there is a change in their loved ones personality and a break-down in communication. It’s also very psychologically painful for the person who has the mental condition. If psychosis is involved psychosis is one of the most isolating conditions that exists. The person is in their own reality that no one else can enter, and often the illness fragments their mind and their sense of self so they don’t even feel in touch with themselves either, along with being disconnected from every other person on earth. Not only this but their reality itself can be fragmented and lack coherence.

So neurotransmitters do not just give us feelings and emotions, they also enable us to act human and understand others and engage in the world in a way that is in God’s image. Even our psychology is reliant on healthy biochemistry and when ill mental health happens our psychology gets hi-jacked. We stop engaging in a way that makes sense from a human perspective and we stop acting human and like beings made in God’s image (to be clear, we can never actually lose God’s image and a person can never lose their value – more on this in a future chapter – but they can stop acting in a human way due to mental illness). We may get feelings of joy when we call ourselves a prophet for instance and feel unfulfilled and unhappy if people fail to see us as a prophet and acknowledge us that way. Or we may feel that unless people call us the chosen one and accept our delusional discoveries that we can’t be happy. We may laugh when we hear a loved one dies and have disregulated emotions that don’t make sense. This is psychotic psychology and psychotic emotional responses. When our logic malfunctions so does our psychology and also our feelings and emotions become disregulated. This is because God created logical ability as the basis of our mental functioning and emotions stem out from it and mirror it. Logic is the rudder that steers the whole ship. So if a person’s logic becomes psychotic, their emotions will follow the distorted logic.

If you search for websites about schizophrenia and psychosis they will say psychosis changes how a person thinks, feels, and acts. This is what they mean by this. The thoughts become illogical, the feelings and emotional reactions become illogical also (you may feel happy when you hear a loved one died, or laugh out loud), and the behaviors become illogical also (you may not act in human ways and may live on the floor eating cat food, or may travel to Israel to be the new Messiah). When logic goes, all these other functions also malfunction because all of them stem from logic and thus all of them become skewed when a person’s logic is skewed.

You’ll notice if you study mental illness, that all mental illnesses that affect mood and emotions also to some degree affect perception. It’s certainly possible to have more of a mood problem and only minor perceptual problems, and the opposite also occurs too where a person has very distorted perceptual problems but few mood problems – but the second scenario is way more rare. Mood disorders are extremely common in people with psychosis and severe distorted perception. They are so common that it’s very rare for a person to have full psychosis and not have a major mood disorder, either anhedonia (complete lack of feeling), or depression, or mania which often has elated feelings with it, sometimes extreme agitation. I did an unofficial survey in a schizoaffective group on FB that I’m in and most of them had severe anhedonia, and the next highest group was moderate anhedonia. Only a few had mild anhedonia or no anhedonia.

I don’t know that it’s possible to find someone with depression who doesn’t have at least mild cognitive distortions in their thinking. The reason for this is that the same neurotransmitters that are out of balance when a person has mood symptoms are also responsible for perception, not just mood.

Another Role Neurotransmitters and Hormones Play

The same hormones and neurotransmitters involved in feelings and in emotions are also responsible for some of the differences in men and women and in how they interact, their mannerisms, and their demeanor.

Men and women are different starting from a chromosomal and cellular level, so I’m not implying that neurotransmitters are the only thing that makes men and women act or behave or operate differently in the world. But they are vital and necessary for the roles men and women have, and for expressing the nature of God in man.

So while both men and women have love, and keep God’s law and show His character (if they are Christians), there’s another element that is important besides just character, and this is the feminine way in which women love and the masculine way in which men love – the two roles that God gave to the human race.

Men and women were made in God’s image to reflect not only His character, but also our physical body is made in His image. We are to reflect Him in physicality, and in manner, and in roles. The roles of men and women reflect the roles of the Father and the Son in their eternal dynamic in the Trinity. For men to act in the role that mirrors the Father there’s a lot that goes into that biochemically as well as structurally and in their physical form. For women to mirror the relationship of the Son in the dynamic there’s much that goes into that.

Neurotransmitters and hormones are some of the things that give women the ability to act in a feminine way and give men the ability to act in a masculine way.

While both men and women are to have the character of God and to live by principle and to be logical in their decisions and course in life, estrogen and female hormones allow women to be nurturing and are closely related to neurotransmitters in the brain of women and interact with them. Testosterone enables men to act masculine and interacts with neurotransmitters in the brain of men.

A man may be just as loving as a godly women but even with all the love he possesses, he will not be good at nurturing someone. He doesn’t and can’t express his love that way in that role. Or he could try but would fail miserably. A woman also can have the same amount of love as a godly man but she isn’t good at protecting and providing, or sternly disciplining her kids when they need a masculine type of discipline.

Female hormones and neurotransmitters give women a feminine demeanor and feminine emotions that allows them to excel in their role. (Women also have a different psychology from men and vice versa. They are different in many ways). Women tend to have a broader range of emotions and are more emotionally sensitive. Men tend to only feel a few emotions but they feel them deeply. But our world tells us sensitivity is weakness. Is it weakness that when you touch a hot stove it hurts and you know to withdraw your hand? No, that’s the nerves working correctly and it’s an ability, not a weakness. Women aren’t weak for having a wider range of emotions and more sensitive emotions, rather it’s an ability that allows us to bond with and understand people and their emotional states and be nurturing to them when they are at their lowest and they need it the most. It allows women to serve in their feminine role, to serve both God and man. Women were first and foremost created for God Himself and our femininity allows us to bond with God and understand and relate to Him in ways that are different from how men bond and relate with God, something that God Himself needs. While it’s true that God does refer to Himself as ‘He’ in the Bible, it’s not true that only men are made in God’s image, as some have inaccurately concluded. Women are just as much in the image of God as men, and in order for the Godhead in man to be accurately represented, both masculinity and femininity were needed to represent these attributes of God, which is why both men and women were created. God doesn’t have a gender (Jesus is a man in His humanity only, not His divinity, and the Father and the Holy Spirit are not men), but there must be some attribute that He possesses that is not gender that our genders mirror and reflect, as we are in the image of God.

Those who study aerodynamics know that the design for planes is different depending on what the role and function of the plane is going to be. Freight planes that carry lots of soldiers in battle or important equipment like tanks need to be steady and sturdy. They can’t be capable of much mobility, because if they are too mobile they will be too prone to crashing and they will not be able to carry heavy loads. The drawback of being less mobile is they are hard to turn in the air and when you need to move them out of the way they move slowly. But fighter jets are created for the purpose of fast mobility in the air. They need to be very mobile. Mobility is their strength and allows them to duck out of the way of approaching missiles and other fighter jets, and to quickly turn to hit targets and do offensive warfare in the air. Their drawback is they are prone to crashing and losing stability in the air.

Men are more like freight planes and women are more like fighter jets. Women’s sensitive emotions are a great asset to society and a superb ability, but there are some weaknesses that come with them such as not handling stress as well as men do and being more prone to illnesses like bipolar (statistics show this; I’m not making it up) that involve mood swings and loss of emotional stability. Men’s emotional stability allows them to fight in wars and do things that would emotionally crush women, but they are not as good at understanding emotions and they aren’t able to connect emotionally with others and nurture them. These are the deficits men have. Men and women need each other and God needs both in order to represent the image of the Godhead in humanity. The health of our emotions and neurotransmitters matters. More and more we are seeing men who are too high in estrogen and women who are too high in androgens. This creates the temptation for embracing the ideology of transgenderism that is becoming so prevalent in our day. It’s harder to act in the feminine role if your female hormones are out of sync, and it’s harder for men to act masculine if their estrogen is too high and their testosterone is too low.

A Christian man experiencing high estrogen and low testosterone will know he is never to act in the feminine role even if he doesn’t feel manly due to hormonal dysregulation (or due to a mental illness) and the Bible safeguards us from being deceived in this area. But when your hormones are off you have to mechanically go in and make a point to act in a way that is different from what your disregulated hormones are orienting you to act. This is a lot more difficult than if a person’s hormones are balanced. And some of a person’s masculine expression may not be as strong if their hormones aren’t balanced. This is not a sin if the person is doing everything they can to be healthy, but it does make life hard and it does create a type of suffering. This is why health matters and doing what we can to keep our bodies in a state of health.

To be clear if someone has disregulated hormones and they’ve done everything they can to be in health but the problem persists it’s not a sin, and at that point it’s just a health condition that brings suffering as all health conditions do.

So this is another role that the neurotransmitters and hormones involved in feelings and emotions play, and why God gives us emotions and the hormones and neurotransmitters that create them, and He doesn’t just give us logical ability only.

What are Some Things We Consider to be Emotions and What are Some Examples of Things That Might Not be Considered Emotions?

Is Guilt an Emotion? Is Anger an Emotion? What About Depression, Jealousy, Hatred? What About Conviction?

If one feels guilty does this mean they are guilty and they need to repent? If one feels angry have they sinned against God? What about anxiety, doesn’t the Bible say to be anxious for nothing but by all prayer and supplication make your requests known to God? The Bible also says “Do not fear for I am with you, do not be dismayed for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee, yea I will help thee, yae I will uphold thee with my righteous right hand.” Thus being afraid and experiencing anxiety must be a sin right? 

What about conviction? If I feel a feeling of conviction does that mean I’m sinning if I engage in the activity I felt the feeling about? Do I need to stop this activity because every time I engage in it I feel a feeling of conviction?

What Do We Use to Gauge Our Character and Whether We Are Right With God?

The best way to gauge character when looking at others is their actions, the fruit of their lives. This is the most accurate way and Jesus says to use this when judging a situation. He doesn’t say we can judge the heart as only God sees the inner thoughts and it’s God’s place to pronounce someone saved or lost, right with Him or in rebellion, it’s not our place. The church is given the role of knowing truth from error and pointing the path to God, and the path to destruction. So we can tell someone that adultery that is not repented of and forsakes will result in eternal death. But it’s not our job to tell a particular individual that they are lost or saved. A pastor also has the added role of rebuking open sin in the members of the church. He can visit a known adulterer and correct them in love. But this still doesn’t mean the pastor knows the heart or thoughts of the person. He can only rebuke outward actions, not inner thoughts as these are known alone to God, and he cannot judge the motives of the heart.That’s between them and God. None of us can use fruit to know what is in the heart of the person. God alone knows. But when it comes to ourselves we can know what is in our heart since we’re the ones thinking our thoughts and having our desires and since God will tell us directly through His Spirit teaching us His Word.

Looking at Fruit in Our Own Lives

We can also use fruit and look at out outward actions and the course of our lives over the past few years or months. If we’ve been lying and stealing, if we’ve been involved in extra martial relationships that we never fully repented of and broke away from, if we’ve been spending our time trying to make our business successful, and we haven’t spent nearly as much time building up God’s church and God’s work, these are indicators our heart isn’t right with God.

Assessing outward actions is especially helpful in people who have trouble assessing their inner thoughts and motives and desires due to mental illness such as derealization symptoms, or depersonalization symptoms which can cause a person to have a blank mind where it seems like they don’t have any thoughts going through, they feel like their mind is being pushed up against a glass wall and they only have access to shallow superficial thoughts and not deeper more contemplative thoughts or emotions. Also conditions like personality disorders which fracture the sense of self and can also cause a person to have shallow thoughts and personality and emotions and lose access to the deeper parts of the self. Even depression can sometimes cause this and psychotic disorders certainly can too. The person may get medicated and come out of the psychosis but still have what are called negative symptoms like flat affect (difficulty or inability to move the face and have facial expressions and responses), anhedonia (inability feel happy emotions or experience pleasure or joy), poverty of thought and blank mind, and other similar symptoms, that can make it very hard to self-reflect and analyze one’s inner character.

It’s also very hard to gauge your motives and thoughts and desires if you still have some psychotic symptoms after treatment. Psychosis distorts logic and logic causes even one’s psychology to be illogical and nonsensical. Thus the person’s motives may not make sense, or they may have trouble understanding or gauging what their motives are. This is a difficult experience to go through. You can’t refute Satan’s charges against you that you aren’t walking with Christ and that you aren’t just living for self, because you honestly do not know because your motives may be nonsensical or you may lose access to that part of yourself. In such cases it’s good to know 2 things. 1. God will always do what is right and He will always judge righteously based on truth, and 2. God knows who you are even when you don’t know yourself. There’s also a 3rd point that’s really important: You’re right to be concerned about this symptom and if at all possible, you do really need to do treatments and work with health practitioners to try to get back logic or access to those deeper regions of your self and brain, depending on which symptoms you’re having. Health matters. Your agency and judgment can definitely be impacted by such symptoms and it will affect the choices you make in life. You can err and make mistakes in your choices through life if your judgment isn’t good.

Sometimes though people with these conditions also have compulsions or are still more in psychosis than their psychiatrist realizes and their outward actions may reveal addictions, or bizarre or criminal behavior that they can only gain control of when their illness is better treated. A person may have a series of suicide attempts or self harm for instance, and it may be because they are out-of-control rather than that they are giving in to Satan’s temptations. These mental illnesses can be complex and need wise and thorough evaluation to know whether the person is in control or not. Outward actions alone aren’t a perfect gauge, especially in people with compulsions or who are too deep into psychosis, though they can be helpful.

What about our facial reactions, our expressions, and our reactions? If someone laughs when they hear someone they know has died, does this indicate they have a malicious character and that they aren’t right with God?

The Bible does say the expressions of the face can reflect the character. The Bible tells us the wicked have proud looks on their faces.
The look on their faces testifies against them;
they parade their sin like Sodom;
they do not hide it.
Woe to them!
They have brought disaster upon themselves.
Isaiah 3:9

The Bible also tells us the righteous have holy looks of confidence and faith in God on their faces, knowing they are forgiven of their sins. The fact their shame and guilt has been washed away is reflected in their faces.

Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.
Psalm 34:5

The Bible speaks of haughty looks in those who are proud.

You save the humble but bring low those whose eyes are haughty.
Psalm 18:27

Indeed the Bible even says God hates haughty, proud eyes, grouping this expression of the face in with sinful things like a lying tongue and hands that shed innocent blood.

There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil,
a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.
Proverbs 6:16-19

But while the face does to an extent reflect the character and responds to the evil in the heart, the Bible is also clear that outward expressions are not a way to gauge character. Only God who reads the heart can distinguish truly proud eyes, from someone who may appear proud due to say high dopamine in the brain or some other condition or situation, but not have pride in the heart. So while our character does influence our facial expression, it does so imperfectly and there are many other things that influence our expression also. Someone can’t look at you and know your character – the face is not a measuring tool of the soul.

Also, it’s not righteous judgment to judge someone as proud who is psychotic and doesn’t understand the difference between pride and humility. Pride is a choice to harbor an attitude of self-righteousness and violence against God or others. It’s not pride if it’s not chosen. A facial expression that comes over someone due to dopamine surging too high in their brain – even if it looks exactly like a proud sneer – is not actually a proud sneer unless they know the difference between pride and humility and make the conscious choice to be proud. It’s not sin for them unless they can tell the difference, and it’s wrong to charge a psychotic person with the sin of pride when they are out of their mind. Perhaps if you know them better and have evaluated them, or they have had a thorough evaluation with a psychiatrist, one could narrow down whether that individual is capable of understanding the difference between pride and humility, and that if it’s determined they are, then a sneer is likely to be chosen pride in their case. But it’s wrong to jump to that conclusion with a psychotic person, based on outward facial expressions and demeanor alone.

In court rooms it is unfortunately all too common for the jury to give the guilty sentence to people based on superficial things like the way the person acted in the court room, whether they showed the appropriate facial expressions, etc. Jesus says to judge with righteous judgment. While the Bible is clear that our feelings and our facial expressions do reflect the state of our heart to an extent, it also tells us these things are not fool-proof and they are incomplete. The Bible is clear that the thoughts of the heart don’t show up perfectly on the expression and that only God can know the thoughts of the heart. God did create our expression and our demeanor and mannerisms to convey The Godly love that exists in our heart, but He made sure that they do this incompletely and imperfectly, so that the thoughts of the mind cannot be fully discerned on the face. This is an issue of individuality and privacy. Only God is allowed to know the inner thoughts and read them with perfect accuracy.

When it comes to psychosis, it produces psychotic logic, which then results in psychotic psychology (meaning the person is motivated by things that don’t make sense, delights in things that don’t make sense or delights in things that do make sense for nonsensical reasons, and is illogical psychologically), and then causes psychotic reactions in expression. A psychotic person may laugh when they hear a family member died because they have a delusion Hitler has been impersonating their family member and that it’s really Hitler that has died. They may have seen what they thought was a sign from God that day that Hitler was going to die, then they walk home and find out Hitler has died. The irony of it may cause them to laugh.

It’s also possible to laugh when tragic things happen as an involuntary stress response that even people without mental illness can get. If someone’s child has died and they are going through severe shock and grief they may have inappropriate responses such as laughing.

There’s a condition called Pseudobulbar Affect (PBA) that is a neurological condition that causes uncontrollable laughter or crying. So the nervous system being overwhelmed or fragile can cause these types of things.

It’s not uncommon for people who have been raped and gone through severe trauma to look very calm and closed off in their facial expression and responses. People have often incorrectly concluded the person couldn’t have gone through such horrific trauma if they seem so calm. But their body responded to the trauma by closing off emotions and this is how it coped with the traumatic event.

In juries all over the country people have the tendency to pass verdicts onto people based on appearances. This is a perversion of justice. It is not right. While the face does respond to the character, it cannot be used as a way to measure one’s character and determine their innocence or guilt. The face also responds to all kinds of other things too. It is unjust and evil to determine someone’s innocence or guilt based on anything else other than evidence and facts. They must be proved guilty by sound evidence and data.

And the Bible says fruit is the way we are to measure and judge others, but that even this is imperfect so we shouldn’t claim to know the heart. When it comes to measuring and judging ourselves, once again facial expression and reactions, do respond to character but not in a perfect way and thus we can’t use them to fully know our heart.

But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.
1 Samuel 16:7

ONLY God can see what’s in our hearts. To claim that we can gauge what is in someone’s heart by looking at them, or even speaking with them, is to commit 2 big sins:

1. It means we’re giving ourselves divine traits. We think we have perfect judgment like God does. We aren’t leaving room for God to be the Judge of the heart, acknowledging even with our best judgment we will miss things that only God knows and sees. We’re usurping His position.

“I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.”
Jeremiah 17:10

When it comes to evaluating others, if we think we can know the state of their heart by looking at their face or reactions, it means we don’t respect or believe in right to personal privacy. We are actually charging God with being a God who doesn’t give people personal privacy in their thoughts and airs out all their inner thoughts via their face. This would be a horrible dystopia if it were true. Privacy is a fundamental right. The privacy of our own thoughts is the most important privacy of all. The reason we can’t see inside someone’s mind or judge their thoughts and character with perfect accuracy is because everyone has a right to privacy in God’s government. They have a right to answer to God alone for their secret thoughts and secret sins, and if they are thinking good things and holding good desires, it is God in the secret part of their mind that inspires them and communes with them. No other person can be involved in this communion. Just God and the individual.

How does the Bible say to gauge whether a person is a believer and walking with Christ?
“Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
Matthew 7:16

“Even a young man is known by his actions–whether his conduct is pure and upright.”
Proverbs 20:11

Only God can see into the heart. The rest of us can see only your actions. Actions aren’t a perfect gauge of character, but they are the best we have access to, until the judgment when all the secret things of the heart will be revealed. The things only God knows will be revealed on that day and this is why we are to judge nothing before the time, until those things are revealed.

Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.

1 Corinthians 4:5
It is possible for someone to seem to have fruit, to seem to be walking with God, and to be harboring a spirit of rejecting Him in their heart, a spirit of doubt and accusation against God. So even actions aren’t a perfect way to gauge character or the status of whether someone is walking with God or rejecting Him.

There is NO way for a person to know for sure who is walking with God and who isn’t. Only God knows with absolute certainty. At the same time, we can know in a general sense how to live a Christian life and be right with God. We know what kinds of fruit (actions) come from being a converted believer.

Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.
1 John 3:7-8

But when people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning.

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions
and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.
Galatians 5:19-21

So What Can I Use Then?

The answer according to the Bible is our motives gauge character. As explained above, emotions naturally follow motives and desires. A converted person rejoices in the truth. An unconverted person rejoices and delights in wickedness. Their fallen character results in them having evil desires and motives, and their emotions respond to and flow out of these evil desires, reflecting them.

But while this is true, this doesn’t mean we can use emotions as a way to gauge what kind of character we possess and our standing with God. Rather it’s the motives and desires that the emotions are flowing from that reveal our character and that we are to use to gauge the state of our heart.

What makes something right is when the motive is giving, self-sacrificial love, this is the desire, and when the actions or thoughts focus on or carry out the good desire. Not stealing and respecting other people’s property is love, for instance. Being faithful to one’s spouse is love. Desiring to cheat on one’s spouse would be an unloving or an evil desire. Coveting someone’s things is an unloving or evil desire.

As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects the man.
Proverbs 27:19

As always what defines right is the 10 commandments. Taking a deeper look at the 10 Commandments reveals they aren’t just actions, but principles. In other words there is a motive actuating each of them. If your dog grabs a stranger’s bag and runs off with it, we don’t say the dog is stealing. Because we know the dog does not possess moral agency and therefore there is no immoral motive involved when a dog takes something that belongs to someone. But if a person does the same thing it’s stealing. Motive is present in all 10. Lying isn’t lying without a motive to deceive. Simply being incorrect about a fact and unknowingly giving someone false information isn’t lying. Lying is when the intent to deceive for personal gain at the expense of others is present in one’s actions and will. Same thing with all the other 10. If a person learning a new language intends to use a swear word to curse at their parents, but uses the wrong word and ends up saying something loving instead, this is still a violation of the 5th commandment. They intended to curse at their parents so they are disrespecting their parents. Likewise if someone intends to say something kind to their parent as they are learning a new language and they say a swear word by accident, this isn’t a violation of the 5th Commandment as the swearing was an accident. One could go on for some time with such examples about how motive is inherent within the concept of sin and of righteousness.

When we desire to fullfill these commandments and the inherent principles within them actuate us, then the desires and thoughts and motives that go in the direction or way of the commandments are holy and right desires and reveal a good character. If our thoughts and desires and motives (and actions) go in the way of breaking the commandments, then we are having sinful desires and motives and if fostered and not surrendered to God, these will make for a fallen, unconverted character.

It is possible to do the right thing with the wrong motives or to do the wrong thing innocently because of lack of knowledge. It isn’t just the thing done, but the motive behind it that makes an action sin for a person. In earlier chapters of this book we learned how someone in complete psychosis who cannot tell right from wrong is not guilty if they commit crimes while in psychosis, and how if someone has good motives but lacks Bible knowledge about a subject – say they live in a polygamous society that has had polygamy for hundreds of years, and is isolated from the rest of the world and has never had access to the Bible – then they may be innocent of breaking the 7th Commandment due to lack of knowledge.

To him who knows to do right and does it not to him it is sin.
James 4:17

Inclinations and Tendencies
This same principle applies to judging our own character, to see whether our hearts are right with God. It’s motives and desires that make all the difference. When I say ‘desires’ I do not mean physical inclinations, like having a physical inclination to cheat on one’s spouse, or a physical desire to engage in a homosexual encounter or a physical desire to eat unhealthy food, or a physical desire to be famous and worship self and feel a thrill from it. Our bodies can have all kinds of faulty physical desires that can be related to things like neurotoxins and histamine and other biochemical imbalances.

Do not envy the wicked, do not desire their company; for their hearts devise violence, and their lips declare trouble.
Proverbs 24:2

This text above shows motive. The wicked devise violence. They plan out how to harm others. Their goal is destruction and violence of that person, often due to envy or hatred.

Read the following text and note how motive is written into this entire text, in fact it’s spelled out clearly. You can see how what makes something an evil act and what makes someone a wicked, unrepentant person is when the intent and the motive is to harm another person or God in order to selfishly promote oneself above others and at their expense.

Of course even converted people will have some immoral and selfish motives. They will sometimes sin also. But the whole of their motives will be more like Christ than like Satan, and if unconverted it’s actually the other way around. If the Christian has selfish motives, they will surrender them to God, not foster and encourage or cherish them. They will hate the selfishness that still exists in their character and desire strongly for God to remove it from their character and mold them into His humble and pure character. They will make effort on their knees in prayer to gain the victory over self. They won’t celebrate the sin that still exists in their character or encourage it. The unconverted do the opposite.

If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause:
Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit:
We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil:
cast lots with us; we will all share the loot”—
my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths;
Proverbs 1:11-15

In the above verse the wicked covet the material possessions of others and so they kill them and take their goods.

Notice in this verse how the wicked kill and steal from innocent people “without cause”. This doesn’t mean they don’t have a reason or a motive. Their motive is selfishness, and they may have a number of reasons and past history factoring into why they gave into the temptation to do this. But what they are doing is still without cause, because by this the Bible means it’s without just cause. There is no just reason for them to be killing and stealing. A just reason would be something like a group of men capturing Lot and Abraham going and fighting and killing some of those men in order to rescue Lot. Or stealing back from someone something they stole from you (which really isn’t stealing at all; it’s just protecting your property). But when someone does something for an unjust reason such as stealing in order to get that person’s goods, the Bible calls this stealing without cause, meaning without just cause.

For among My people are wicked men; they watch like fowlers lying in wait; they set a trap to catch men.
Jeremiah 5:26

Jeremiah 5:26 is another verse depicting that to be evil one must have evil motives and showing clear evil intent.

Notice also the clear motive shown by the sacrifice of Christ.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Philippians 2:1-8

The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
John 10:17-18

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.
John 10:11

The person who biochemically desires a homosexual encounter hasn’t sinned. It only becomes sin if that person allows themselves to pine after and engage in fantasy over that desire, or if they actually go out and have a gay encounter with someone. A physical desire can be just a physical desire; it’s not sin. But if we let that physical desire become a cherished desire of the mind and heart and not just a feeling, then it’s a sin.

So when judging our heart to see if we’re right with God we’re not going to search our emotions or biochemistry to see if our body is oriented toward fornication or anger or any other sin. What we’re searching for is whether we are harboring a desire for fornication or sin that makes it an idol in the heart. Our body may desire wrong things. But our mind may be surrendered to God at the same time. But if our mind is angry at God for not letting us engage in fornication, if our mind is looking for a way to break this commandment and get away with it, if we are pining after it, then we’ve made it an idol, even if we aren’t actually engaging in it.

For the word of God is alive and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Hebrews 4:12

Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
v. 13

How do we determine whether our heart is right with God? By the Word, not by human reasoning. By searching our motives and intents of the hearts through lining our motives up with God’s Word and measuring them.

However, we cannot do this in our own power. Notice how the verse says the Word is alive and active. What it means by this is that the Spirit works through the Word both to teach us from God’s Word and to reveal the state of our hearts. Only the Spirit can open our understanding and make the Word clear to us. Only God truly knows our hearts. We don’t even know ourselves with 100% accuracy even when lining ourselves up with His Word, but He knows us with perfect knowledge.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
Jeremiah 17:9

Here we see a perplexing problem. Since the heart is deceptive, how can we search our own heart to accurately assess the state of our heart and our motives, if we’re so deceitful that we won’t be completely honest, even when we’re trying to be?

The answer is given in the text that follows:

I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.
verse 10

Praise the Lord, God knows our heart through and through; He can both assess and cure our sinful condition.

If we seek to engage in the process of searching our heart and measuring our motives and intents of the heart in our own mental power, we won’t be successful. We need God to try the heart, and to reveal the state of our heart to us through His Spirit working together with the Word (The Bible). This is the only way we can come to an accurate knowledge of the state of our heart. We can’t combine humanism with the Bible and seek to identify and cure our condition without Christ, using our own mental prowess and our will power. We must realize our dependency on God and ask Him to send His Spirit to teach us and reveal the true state of our heart. To see the true state of our heart will require humility. Those who are too proud will miss defects in their characters and evil desires in their hearts because they are too proud to be open to seeing the truth.

It’s necessary to magnify Christ and look to Him as the solution. It won’t be any benefit to us to get weighed down by the sins we see and there’s no reason for this because Jesus is the remedy. The purpose of revealing the evil in our hearts is for a redemptive purpose, to bring us to conversion, and also God periodically does this process with us through life as part of the sanctification process. He shows us our sins and our defects of character for the purpose of us working with Him on these specific weak points to overcome them. The goal is always redemptive, the end result is always victory. Through Christ we can overcome every one of our weak points and character defects.

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
John 8:44

For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.
Matthew 15:19

For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
Mark 7:21-23

Their feet run to evil; they are swift to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are sinful thoughts; ruin and destruction lie in their wake.
Isaiah 59:7

And you have done more evil than your fathers. See how each of you follows the stubbornness of his evil heart instead of obeying Me.
Jeremiah 16:12

All a person’s ways seem pure to them, but motives are weighed by the LORD.
Proverbs 16:2

The Conscience

What is our conscience? The conscience isn’t actually a single entity; it’s actually a union of two things. It’s us in our understanding grasping the concepts of right and wrong, and it’s the Spirit testifying to us and convicting us of right and wrong, and the deep truths in God’s Word.

Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, with integrity and godly sincerity. We have done so, relying not on worldly wisdom but on God’s grace.
1 Corinthians 1:12

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:
Romans 8:16

Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, with integrity and godly sincerity. We have done so, relying not on worldly wisdom but on God’s grace.
1 Corinthians 1:12

If someone doesn’t have the ability to understand right and wrong they are said to be without a conscience. The Holy Spirit cannot convict someone whose mind is so damaged or compromised that it’s fully malfunctioning when it comes to the concept of right and wrong. The Spirit can convict someone who has partial or full understanding of right and wrong.

There are a number of mental health conditions that can cause a blunted or absent conscience. Some of the most dangerous people in the world are people who have absent consciences but their brain is able to function in other ways effectively, so they can plan and execute, they just can’t tell right from wrong.

Pray for us; we are convinced that we have a clear conscience and desire to live honorably in every way.
Hebrews 13:18

Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.
1 Timothy 4:2

I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit—
Romans 9:1

Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)
Romans 2:15

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:
Romans 8:16

For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward.
2 Corinthians 1:12

Do not boast so proudly, or let arrogance come from your mouth, for the LORD is a God who knows, and by Him actions are weighed.
1 Samuel 2:3

But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or height, for I have rejected him; the LORD does not see as man does. For man sees the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart.”
1 Samuel 16:7

If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?
Proverbs 24:12

All a man’s ways seem right to him, but the LORD weighs the heart.
Proverbs 21:2

There is a generation of those who are pure in their own eyes and yet unwashed of their filth.
Proverbs 30:12

Turn my heart to Your testimonies and not to covetous gain.
Psalm 119:36

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Psalm 139:23-24

A crucible for silver and a furnace for gold, but the LORD is the tester of hearts.
Proverbs 17:3

Our Conscience Can Become Damaged Or Skewed/Perverted

One’s conscience can become damaged or skewed several different ways. The Bible tells us by engaging in sin we blunt our conscience and grieve the Holy Spirit away from us. By association with people in the world who sin and who believe in unbiblical ideologies and philosophies one can confuse their conscience, as our conscience only works right when grounded in God’s Word.

Another way our conscience can become damaged or blunted is by brain damage or inflammation in the brain, or biochemical imbalances in the brain. A lot of sociopaths have physical abuse in their background and there is a definite link between physical abuse and personality disorders known and recognized by the psychological profession and many studies have been done showing this link. A sociopath can be created. The same way someone can murder another person and take their life away from them, an abusive parent can damage their child’s developing brain and take away brain functions from them, such as the ability to feel empathy or to understand when they have inflicted pain on another person. This is a grievous sin and wrong done to this child. There’s also usually a genetic susceptibility involved but not always.

However, while a sociopath can be created, choice can never be taken away from us. No one can send us to heaven or the judgment fire of hell by force. God ensures only the individual themselves can decide their eternal fate and their character. So while someone who has Ant-social personality disorder may have more temptations to choose to be an immoral person and reject God, they still have choice (unless their brain has become so damaged that they have completely lost the ability to tell right from wrong), God will hold them responsible for the things within their control. Let’s say that perhaps their brain has been damaged and they can only tell right from wrong in 75% of the commandments, but they can’t tell right and wrong when it comes to the other 25%. God will hold them accountable for the 75% that they can tell, and He will be just and will not hold them accountable for the other 25% that they honestly have no moral cognition about.

As long as we choose God with the agency we do possess, He accepts that decision. Not everyone has agency though; it is possible to completely lose agency. In which case the choices and decisions the person made before slipping into the state of total loss of agency will register in heaven as the person’s choice. Murder can close someone’s probation in this world to make a choice for God, as can severe abuse that damages essential parts of the brain needed for moral choice beyond repair.

The sociopath that can tell right from wrong 75% of the time is still a danger to society even if they are following God to the best of their ability, because their mental handicap will cause them to make errors and harm to others could easily result since the personality disorder causes the person to be oriented towards danger and violence and self-centered ambition without regard for others, and often at the expense of others. The same is true of the person in psychosis who is medicated enough to function in society, but still has many symptoms of psychosis that the medication does not alleviate (this is common), the autistic child who grows up and can function enough to keep a job in society but has many mental handicaps. Harm to self or others can occur due to something called ‘mind-blindness’ in autism that can involve lack of empathy or understanding of social cues and what another person is feeling and thinking.

I heard of someone who had an autistic son and she probably had mental handicaps herself because she allowed him to get down to 50 lbs. He was a picky eater due to sensory issues from his autism and she only fed him bananas because that was all he was willing to eat. He was about 13 years old. She couldn’t tell he was near death, and when CPS came to take him away from her she thought it was a plot by Satan to take her kid away from her and inflict pain on her and she prayed harder to God for the child to not be taken away. This is someone who could function in society, she was not so mentally ill that psychiatrists thought she needed to be hospitalized, yet she almost killed her son from starvation because she could not tell how emaciated he was and thought he was healthy and that she was taking good care of him. Thank goodness for CPS who put the child in the care of his grandmother who fed him a variety of foods and a year later he was 14ish and something like 135 lbs.

It’s important that as a society we are aware that such people exist in our society and that we have proper measures in place and resources to help them and to protect others from the errors they will make due to their handicaps. Even a good person with these conditions – if they are severe enough – will make errors that can be dangerous to themselves and others.
Of course there are also bad people with these conditions. People who lack the feeling of empathy and so they choose to push others down to get ahead and promote self, taking advantage of the fact they feel nothing for people even though they know it’s wrong. Some of the most abusive people in society are people with these conditions that make them more tempted to do evil than the rest of us and who give in to these temptations. The law and law enforcement was made for such people, to bring them to justice (in jail God will give them an opportunity for repentance), and to protect the innocent among us from them.

I think a good plan to have in place is have regular questionnaires given to kids at school by their teachers and counselors, asking whether abuse is happening in the home. Let the kids know it’s safe to open up to their teachers and counselors, and give examples of abuse because many kids who are accustomed to abuse do not know they are being abused. They may not realize neglect is abuse for instance, and only see physical violence as abuse. Or they may not even know physical violence is abuse as their parent with skewed thinking may have taught them lies about the nature of the parent-child relationship and told them it’s normal for a parent to beat their kid for minor offenses and that the child deserves it.

Other Ways the Conscience Can be Skewed Besides Mental Illness

Mental illnesses aren’t the only way a conscience can become damaged or skewed, but they are unique in that if one has inflammation from a mental illness impairing their moral perception, they can’t correct the problem by studying the Bible or removing themselves from the influence of culture, or from stopping sin. They need to bring down inflammation and balance biochemistry; the problem has to be addressed at the physical level.

But for those of us without mental illness, engaging in unrepentant sin blunts the conscience and perverts it. The longer we engage in it, the less evil sin seems to us. Thus the answer is to repent and turn from sin and this will restore a sensitive conscience to us. Our conscience should become more sensitive and fine-tuned to God’s law the longer we are a Christian, because as we progress in sanctification and give up and overcome more and more sin, sin should look more and more evil to us because our conscience is not being blunted and skewed by engaging in it anymore. Familiarity with sin causes a blunted and skewed conscience, so as we give up sins that are deep-rooted in our character are sense of right and wrong will be more sensitive and align more closely with God’s Word.

Some of us aren’t in the Word of God like we should be, and we’re too involved in worldly ideas and secular culture. By beholding we become changed and if we surround ourselves with humanistic ideologies and practices, they will stop seeming so wrong and so evil. The Word is what tells us what is true. Without it we won’t have a moral compass that points to true north. While everyone hears the Holy Spirit speaking to the soul – even those who do not have access to the Bible – this conviction and conscience is prone to great error. While those who do not have access to the Bible must heed the conviction of the Spirit apart from the Bible, and they can still be saved if they do this, they will not have the blessings and advantages of knowing from the Bible what a Christian life should look like and they will make many errors innocently that will cause them grief and pain and real problems in the world to themselves and others. Even though they are innocently doing wrong things, wrong things still cause real harm in the world. Someone without the Bible may be a polygamist for example, and not know it’s wrong. They may live up to all the light they have and go to heaven. Having multiple wives though will cause psychological pain to the wives and children and to the man himself. He will live a life of anxiety and unrest.

For the rest of us who do have the Bible we are under obligation to study it – not just read it (Jesus said to “search the scriptures”) – and to look to it as our source of truth. If we do not regularly study the Word, we will lose our moral compass and our conscience will become blunted and skewed.

What if I’m Still Not Sure?

There are mental conditions that make it very hard to access the motives and evaluate them. Personality disorders for instance, cause a person to have a shallow personality and lose access to the deeper parts of the self. Dissociative symptoms close up the deeper parts of the self too. The parts of the brain involved in motive and desire and attitudes. Anhedonia is a symptom where a person loses the ability to feel any good emotions or pleasure or joy, and some people with anhedonia lose negative emotions too like sadness and just become completely emotionally numb. Not only do people with anhedonia lose the ability to feel and access their emotions, but they can also lose the ability to access their motives and desires as well. People in extreme cases of dissociative disorders like DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) can have the self – the brain – so fragmented that they don’t have access to their identity as a whole, and they experience different parts of their self at different times and never together. They don’t have access to all parts of the brain involving the self at all times and experience different parts at different times that are disconnected from the other parts.

It’s common with those with OCD to have what’s known as moral OCD and one of the symptoms is always trying to check their motives to see if their motives are in the right place, but never feeling like they have an answer to this question, because their motives and desires aren’t completely accessible due to their condition making it hard to access that part of the self and accurately evaluate it.

Many of these conditions and disorders came about due to abuse and trauma, or high amounts of stress caused by things like mercury toxicity, lead toxicity, mold illness. Since we’re finite beings our bodies can only handle so much stress before they break apart, and this is true of our physical brain as well. It’s important to exercise care and kindness towards the person experiencing these symptoms, and if that person is you, it’s important to be kind and gentle with yourself. The state of your heart and whether you are right with God is an extremely important subject, but it’s important to keep in mind that since mental illnesses are epigenetic (usually with a genetic predisposition and susceptibility but not always), stress will make your mental condition worse, and being gentle with yourself and reducing stress will make your mental symptoms lessen. It’s difficult to address an important subject like this one with care and gentleness when usually the person is experiencing great anxiety surrounding this subject and some cognitive distortions and perhaps religiosity where the person becomes convinced it’s their moral duty to push themselves to find the answer on this subject and not sleep or care for themselves adequately, but this is what you’re going to want to do. Keep in mind that your brain will function better the more gentle you are without yourself, and make sure you’re doing health treatments or counseling for your condition too to build up your body and strengthen yourself. Don’t lose sight of the fact you have a mental illness and that if Jesus were here on earth today He would be gentle with you and take care of your physical and mental needs along with meeting your spiritual need and giving you the truth about the state of your heart. He is the Great Physician of both the body and the heart. He wants to help you with your physical illness and your sin and forgive and cleanse you from it. Both are important to Him, thus a Christian who follows Him will take care of both of these things and value both.

What About Love, is Love a Feeling? Is it Character? Is it Both Feelings and Character?

Love is a principle. This is the definition of love according to the Bible. It’s the principle of self-sacrifice and care. It involves adhering to and respecting the rights of God and man, the inherent rights we have due to our nature that God created in us. Animal rights exist and human rights exist. We don’t treat people the way we treat animals because human beings have a unique nature being made in the image of God, and thus unique rights that stem from that nature. It is abuse and disrespect to treat a human being with the level of dignity one treats an animal. When someone helps someone in need this is love because the motive is to value and help another person. Sometimes the actions can be helpful but the motive can be selfish. One may help others so that they can impress someone they are trying to date and get them to say yes, and they may not care for the person they are helping at all. When the motive is evil, the person doesn’t have love.

So when the Bible says love rejoices in the truth, it means the principle of love is to rejoice in good and right and just things as a principle. And then of course, the emotions follow and flow out from the character.

This shows our emotions are connected with our character and they react to our character and follow the wiring of our character. Logic is of course needed in order to understand the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, so really everything starts with logic.

It goes logic – which then gives a person the ability to choose right or wrong in the character (to choose Jesus and forgiveness and receive the new heart or to choose selfishness and self-justification and the fallen heart) – which then results in the emotions following the character. Someone who chooses selfishness will delight in a lie.

“and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”
2 Thessalonians 2:12

Look at the following text:

The coming of the lawless one will be accompanied by the working of Satan, with every kind of power, sign, and false wonder,, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
2 Thessalonians 2:9-10

Notice that it says they received not the love of the truth. God offered to give them love for the truth, He offered to give them a new heart and character that rejoiced in truth, but they refused this offer. Righteousness does not come from us; it comes from Christ alone. He offers us His righteousness. Some say yes and some say no.

Notice that character is in the heart – the Bible also uses heart and mind synonymously. Character is not a spirit brain that floats outside of us. Character is in our physical brain. When God changes our character He must change some part of our brain. We know it’s our brain because the Bible says we are 100% created matter, and also it makes sense that if our emotions which are biochemical change to align with our character when we get a new heart from Jesus, then our character must also be biochemical and physical.

I am not saying that one can lose their righteous character by having a head injury or something. Someone can lose their perception of right and wrong from a head injury though, which is evidence that supports the Bible truth that moral perception is a brain function. I don’t believe we should get truth from anything but the Bible and it is the authority on truth, but since God created the world around us, the world should reflect and mirror the truth of the Bible. In fact those who do not have the Bible or the gospel can know there is a God by the testimony of the created world alone, which points to a Designer (Romans 1:20). Those of us who have the Word though need to be using it as our source of authority, not the world around us, however the Word explains the created world and the created world testifies of the truth of the Word.

Character is closely guarded by God and can be changed only by one thing: the choice of the person. The will. The will is like us using the hardware of our brain to make a decision. It’s like the software that we can use. Like with a computer I don’t use the hardware to write this chapter; the hardware is there for the purpose of uploading the software so I can then use the programs of the software to write books and articles. The hardware of the brain is the structure that supports the will and makes it possible. The brain stem that keeps everything functioning, the unconscious brain processes that hold memory so I know enough to write. The knowledge of right and wrong is also the hardware. Then I access the software and use my will and my choice to decide whether I’m going to surrender my pride and my selfishness to Christ or whether I’m going to worship self and continue having the fallen nature. The will is the part of the brain that we have conscious control over that is involved in moral choice.

Character is not the only thing that influences emotions though.

We were not created to have feelings of total happiness and satisfaction in a broken world. Rather our emotions were created to reflect and respond to our reality.

The Bible says that all of creation groans for the day when we will be restored to Jesus’ image and be reconciled with Him in heaven. Not only this but we ourselves also groan in our spirit for an end of sin and to be in Christ’s perfect likeness, at perfect peace with God. (Romans 8:22-23)

We can’t experience the feeling or emotion of being perfectly right with God when we’re still sinning and weighed down with our guilt. (We have an Advocate and Jesus forgives us of our sin, but we still sin daily and need forgiveness daily and we don’t yet exist in a state of always pleasing God and always being right with God like the angels have). God didn’t create our emotions to be in a vacuum disconnected from reality, or to lie to us and not reflect reality. Sometimes our emotions don’t reflect reality and there is such a thing that occurs in psychosis where a person cries when they should be happy, laughs when they are scared, and experiences disoriented emotions. This happens because the physical brain and the emotions located in the brain malfunction. The brain is not working according to God’s design when it does this. When things like this occur it really makes it clear that we are finite, created beings. When as someone with bipolar my brain breaks the laws of logic and I find I’m writing or thinking about an argument that is illogical, and my brain is oriented in that way and maybe can’t see around it for some time, when I come into awareness and see the lack of logic, I’m really made aware of how finite I am. I literally can’t function outside of my physicality. If my brain is off, I’m completely limited by the setting that it’s set to, and I can’t think outside of that setting. I’m definitely a kind of human machine, a creation, and not a Creator. A finite being and not Infinite. The fact I can understand my own finite nature takes a great deal of intelligence and is very amazing if you really think about it. God gave us this ability because we are beings fully made in His image, capable of understanding all the truths in His Word that are necessary for loving Him with understanding and understanding our relationship and relation to Him and something of His Nature.

We were created to be perfectly happy when sin is defeated and we exist in a perfect world with perfect bodies and no sin in our nature. Until that happens, we’re not supposed to be completely happy and we’re supposed to understand and feel the significance of the wrong of sin. It wouldn’t be just or right of God to make us happy in a vacuum, disconnected from reality and to have no choice or impact on reality as moral agents.

God wants a perfect world and perfectly happy beings. He died to make that possible.

Physical abuse causes the body to release histamine and histamine is a major neurotransmitter in the body. This condition of high histamine can become chronic, even after the abuse has stopped. It was facilitated and set in motion by the abuse, but it becomes a syndrome, a chronic state of ill health. When histamine goes too high it can bring on depression, feelings of guilt and shame and worthlessness, anhedonia (blunted or absent feelings), and even psychosis in extreme situations. This is a common reason why a victim may question their innocence. They feel so much guilt and they are used to associating that feeling of guilt with wrongdoing as up to that point they may have only ever experienced that feeling when they did actual wrong. This can be confusing, and if the person doesn’t know to gauge truth by the Bible and our logical mind grasping the truths of the Bible, and the person relies on feelings as a gauge for truth, they may come to the conclusion that they must be guilty, even though they don’t see any wrong that they’ve done. Similarly the person having feelings of worthlessness may come to the conclusion that they must be worthless or they wouldn’t feel that way.

Since we are physical creations of God and everything about us is physical and we do not have a spirit separate from our bodies, all feelings and emotions have their seat in the body; all feelings and emotions are physical in nature. What this means is that when a person does a guilty action, such as stealing from a store, the feelings and emotions they experience are 100% physical reactions. The person may feel emotions of elation and self-exaltation that they got away with the theft. The person may also feel feelings of guilt and shame simultaneously. When someone reads God’s Word they may be inspired with holy reverence and love for God that feel like healthy and spiritual emotions. These spiritual feelings the person may feel,
are not rooted in some higher sphere somewhere in another dimension where their spirit resides; they are all physical biochemical reactions in the brain and body. The brain is a physical organ capable of understanding spiritual truths and communing with its Maker.

Since the brain and its biochemical reactions are physical in nature, as explained above the brain can react on the body. The choice to steal, and the knowledge you’re stealing something sends electrical and biochemical charges through the body that actually push the body into ill health. This is why guilt doesn’t feel good. Shame doesn’t feel good. And even the thrill of self-exaltation is too excitatory to be healthy and it’s a thrill that pushes the body into an unnatural state with too much adrenaline and too little calming neurotransmitters. It’s also true that doing acts of mercy and justice in our lives, and confessing our sins and believing in Jesus, cause healing reactions in the body, boost and modulate the immune system, and give feelings of health and wellness. Since the brain and its biochemical reactions are physical in nature, it’s also true that the body can react on the brain. These same feelings we know to associate with guilt and shame can be caused by physical trauma to the body and physical abuse. Being beaten every day after coming home from school can cause these feelings. So can being exposed to pesticides, mercury toxicity, or infections like Lyme disease, HHV6, etc.

Truth is significant and it does not change no matter what feelings we’re feeling, or even if we were to go numb and are unable to feel anything emotionally.

There is a symptom called anhedonia which I and many others with mental illness have experienced. For instance, when my dad passed away my anhedonia was so strong at that time that I didn’t feel sad and I didn’t cry. This did not mean that my dad dying was not a significantly sad and tragic thing to have happen. This did not mean that my dad wasn’t made in God’s image and didn’t possess great worth. I couldn’t feel the significance of his death, but this didn’t mean anything about God’s eternally deep truths such as the value of a human being had in any way changed.

It’s also true that a healthy brain has baseline neurotransmitters that it feels all of the time, even when you’re not studying the scriptures or listening to beautiful music that speaks of the love of God or listening to a touching sermon that brings tears to your eyes. I learned the hard way when I was very low in endorphins and other vital hormones and neurotransmitters from being chronically ill that if the body isn’t somewhat of a pleasure center it turns very quickly into a torture chamber. The body is supposed to feel content, and good at all times unless something reacts on it to feel bad. Your body does many different biochemical processes every day that cause wear and tear and fill it up with toxins. A healthy body shoots out natural endorphins so you don’t feel the wear and tear going on, repairs tissue, and neutralizes toxins. If your body is chronically ill and can’t make endorphins, you’re going to be in pain just from the natural biochemical processes going on in your body. While we wouldn’t refer to this calm, strong and centered state that is the healthy norm for a person as ‘feelings’, they are vital to health and they matter. It’s also important to note that those who aren’t in a calm and centered happy state will be extra tempted by Satan to seek out immoral ways to feel better.

Emotions are also involved in human interaction and our interaction with God. The same neurotransmitters that give us emotions also help us perceive the world accurately and interact in a human way with the people around us. Those who have mental illnesses that cause oxytocin to lower, not only cannot feel feelings of bonding and love for people, but since oxytocin is involved in social cognition and understanding people, they also have great trouble understanding social cues and knowing how to interact with others. They act in ways that are atypical, eccentric, and sometimes outright bizarre. These are painful and isolating conditions to experience and it can be very hard on the family and loved ones also when there is a change in their loved ones personality and a break-down in communication.

So neurotransmitters do not just give us feelings and emotions, they also enable us to act human and understand others and engage in the world in a way that is in God’s image. Even our psychology is reliant on healthy biochemistry and when ill mental health happens our psychology gets hi-jacked. We stop engaging in a way that makes sense from a human perspective and we stop acting human and like beings made in God’s image. We may get feelings of complete satisfaction and contentment from staring at a balloon for instance or believe that if we just had a nice sweater we would be completely fulfilled in life. Or we may feel that unless people call us the chosen one and accept our delusional discoveries that we can’t be happy.

You’ll notice if you study mental illness, that all mental illnesses that affect mood and emotions also to some degree affect perception. It’s certainly possible to have more of a mood problem and only minor perceptual problems, and the opposite also occurs too where a person has very distorted perceptual problems but few mood problems – but the second scenario is way more rare. Mood disorders are extremely common in people with psychosis and severe distorted perception. They are so common that it’s very rare for a person to have full psychosis and not have a major mood disorder, either anhedonia (complete lack of feeling), or depression, or mania which often has elated feelings with it, sometimes extreme agitation. I did an unofficial survey in a schizoaffective group on FB that I’m in and most of them had severe anhedonia, and the next highest group was moderate anhedonia. Only a few had mild anhedonia or no anhedonia.

I don’t know that it’s possible to find someone with depression who doesn’t have at least mild cognitive distortions in their thinking. The reason for this is that the same neurotransmitters that are out of balance when a person has mood symptoms are also responsible for perception, not just mood.

Delusional or psychotic psychology is a very painful symptom. It’s something people in psychosis experience. Because our logic is off, our personality is fragmented, and our wiring is connected in ways that are wrong, our psychology is also oriented towards things that don’t make sense for a human being to want or desire, and our emotional wiring is also off. We may laugh at something tragic, or lose our ability to understand humor and not react to something truly funny. Not only this, but when under the stress from life and the immense stress that the inflammation of the illness causes, the way we gather strength to keep fighting and not give up is also wired incorrectly. We may get psychological strength from a delusional belief that we’re the savior of the world who is developing a new vaccine, and instead of our worth and sense of value coming from the fact we are personally valuable and in God’s image, we may not have the ability to access that logic and the emotions that accompany that logic, and we may only get emotions and resilience from the delusional wiring.

What can happen then is that any challenges to the delusion are actually a challenge to the sense of self and value, because in the place where the sense of self should be is the grandiose delusion, and more than an ability one possesses in being a scientist, we feel that if we aren’t a scientist we aren’t ourselves, have no connection with the self, no sense of worth, and it’s as though we don’t exist, because ‘self’ is under the category of ‘scientist’ in the brain. It has been re-wired that way.

This causes great psychological pain when the person develops enough awareness to know they aren’t some famous scientist, but they still lack the ability to access who they actually are, and there’s just nothing there under the category of ‘self’ and it’s as though they do not exist, and their very existence feels threatened. Psychiatrists and psychologists have written about this and I’ve experienced it. It happens when you come out of psychosis, but not enough to be fully in the real world.

This article is the best explanation of the pain of coming out of psychosis that I’ve yet found:

Spiritual aspects of psychosis and recovery (rcpsych.ac.uk)

Always Speak Truth to Them

I believe that if someone is partially out of psychosis and is experiencing this pain, that they should admit the truth to themselves and not seek to find comfort in the lie. I believe we have a Christian duty to embrace and follow and believe truth, and that only the truth is capable of setting us free, a lie is not. By embracing truth and steering yourself away from the lie, you will do neuroplasticity on yourself and train your brain to think logically.

I also believe we have a Christian duty to care for our bodies and the person partially out of psychosis needs to pursue health treatments to bring down inflammation and reduce cellular toxicity so that they can, if possible, come even more out of psychosis and gain back more of the correct sense of self. They shouldn’t be encouraged in the ill and distorted perception of self. Neither should they be chided for things they don’t yet have the logical ability to discern (it’s a mental handicap not a sin that they can’t see the truth), but anything that can repeat truth to them may help their brain’s neuroplasticity to shift to a more logical setting.

Then once you come out f psychosis even more, you can again access the category and sense of self in the brain. I remember going to a museum in Knoxville right after coming out of psychosis, and looking at the civil war history. I was amazed at just how barbaric it was that people had enslaved other people, because I could see distinctly that every single human being has great worth and is made in the image of God. I didn’t need a delusional grandiose belief; I already had the greatest honor a human being can have – being in God’s image – and it made sense to me that we are all equals and we all hold this worth. No one is ordinary in the way the world tries to make us out to be. With atheism saying we are animals and the beliefs of the South before the Civil War that depicted slaves as being less than a full person and not possessing full personhood.

The beauty in the truths of God’s Word is that everyone is valuable enough for Jesus to die for. Everyone is in God’s image, and it’s a big deal to be a man or a woman. It’s significant and eternally important. But it’s nothing like a grandiose delusion and biochemically it feels completely different to be in the correct perception than in the grandiose one. In the grandiose one you feel like you really don’t exist, like part of you you can’t access, and this troubles you and then you find the grandiose delusion a spark of the prospect of holding actual value, but you never quite get there to actually having value. Even though you’re excitatory and talking a mile a minute about your delusional inventions, you never feel the deep significance of the eternal value of being in God’s image. You can’t access that idea. Everything is excitatory but not enough, it never feels like enough, and you keep looking for more and hope you get more communications from God and more visions and more grandiose things because nothing is ever enough.

Nothing is ever enough because you can’t access truth and truth is the most important thing in the Universe after God. Jesus is The truth, and all truth stems from his righteous and just and perfect character. After you come out of psychosis and can access truth again and the sense of self and who you are to God, there is a deep, satisfying experience that yes truth is perfect and it is enough – more than enough. It’s beyond your comprehension and will be a source of satisfaction and joy for all eternity as you delve more and more into it. Just being a person means so much!

As I explained briefly above, our emotions help us sense in an emotional way the deep truths found in God’s Word. If we break this down and simplify this, I think our emotions are a reaction to moral realities in the world around us. Our emotions help us stay in touch with reality and respond accordingly. They are not mere feelings, but the same neurotransmitters that give feeling are also heavily involved in perception. If someone we love dies, that is significantly tragic because that person is significant and made in the image of God and because we had a close relationship with that person. Perhaps they were our spouse or our parent. If so we had sacred intimate ties with that person that God Himself recognizes and put into place. Our sadness at their death is a reaction to the significance of their death. Our emotions are not a barometer for what is unjust – God’s Word alone tells us which actions are just and which are unjust. We tune our moral perception by the Word of God, we allow Christ to change our character to be like His and surrender our selfishness and pride, and then our emotions match up with the Bible and its moral barometer. Our emotions were created to follow the setting of our logical brain. Our logical brain sees and embraces truth, and then our emotions follow. They are not to be used as a guide, but they can be taught to be in tune to God’s truth and then they will react accordingly. But it’s not always true that our emotions will match up perfectly. As I said above even things like physical abuse can offset our emotions and make them malfunction. They are not a safe guide. So, to summarize, I believe God gave us emotions so that we would think and behave in the image of God. They are a part of our humanity and they make it possible for us to act and think and interact like a human being. When they go haywire there is a break-down in psychology and a person doesn’t get joy from the things a person was created to enjoy and things like this happen. For instance, a previously social person may be perfectly content to stare at a wall all day when severely mentally ill, or they may enjoy illogical conversations and be unable to appreciate or enjoy logical conversations. They may want you to refer to them as the Queen of England and no longer get enjoyment or feel connected to their real name and their real history in this world. All of this represents a break-down in biochemistry and thus psychology, making the person not act or interact in the world in a human way.