And to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Ephesians 4:24

Our English word “emotion” comes from the Latin participle emotum meaning “to move.” Emotion is the great prime mover of human behavior in one direction or another, and your emotions are vitally connected to your physical and spiritual lives. Emotions are strange. Unlike other aspects of our physical being, you cannot put a stethoscope on them, or put them under an X-ray machine, or put them in a breaker in a laboratory.

Emotions are the difference between a human being who can cry and laugh, and a robot who responds to electrical impulses. A study of great men and women reveals that most great leaders have been people capable of great emotional intensity.

Winston Churchill, affectionately known as the “Old Bulldog” to the British, was a man who had the proper mixture of reason and emotions. This helped to bring the British through one of their darkest hours in history. What emotion was packed into some of his speeches! Remember the line he spoke at the height of the Blitzkrieg over London? “A thousand years from now all the world will still say this was Britain’s finest hour.”

Christ was often moved by emotion in His ministry. And He wept openly. There was no shame or remorse for His emotion.

Emotions are like the steam in the boiler of an old-fashioned locomotive. Steam can be used to sit there and blow the whistle or it can push that old iron horse up the hill.

A.W. Tozer wrote, “Be sure that human feelings can never be completely stifled. If they are forbidden their normal course, like river, they will cut another channel through their life and flow out to curse and ruin and destroy.” Your emotions, in a real sense, control both your physical and your spiritual life, which led C.S. Lewis to write, “Unless you teach your moods ‘where to get off,’ you can never be either a sound Christian or a sound atheist.”

Your emotions are the prime mover of your behavior!

Pastor Gideon Gallo is Administrative Pastor at Gladbrook Community Christian Church – a Global Methodist Church – located at 715 Lincoln Street, Gladbrook. He can be reached at 641-473-2025, or gladbrookmethodist@windstream.net.