I’ve never been an emotional person. Is that okay?

My answer on this one is depending on what you mean, maybe. If what you mean is, is it okay to be just not that demonstrative or expressive? The answer is yes, absolutely. But there is a “no” answer, and let me explain a little bit more about what I mean in order to guard us and caution us on this in a way that hopefully sets you up, whether you're a highly emotional person or not a very emotional person, to do emotion and the absence of emotion better. So what do I mean? Scripture tells us that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. What does that mean? Well, it means many things, but the implication for us in terms of our emotions is that if you're a human being, you are going to have emotions. That's a non-negotiable. You will have emotions because you'll care about things. There will be things that matter to you. You will have things you treasure. You will have things that you value, that you worship, that are at the center of your life and that are valuable. Because you will have values, because you will have things that are important in your world, you will therefore have feelings. So when what you really care about is under threat, the experience is one of fear. When it's going great, your experience will be one of joy, contentment, peace. When it is wronged or harmed or treated unjustly, you will be angry and so on and so forth. We see all these things in all the characters of Scripture. We see these things in God himself. We've been made like God to have responses to this world, to look at the world and say, this is not as it should be, or this is wonderful and this is good. Those are the first words that God speaks of his creation. He brings into creation, he says, and he saw that it was good. He talks to his people, he orients them towards, this is good, this is bad. We are meant to hate what is evil and cling to what is good. So our emotion flows from the fact that we're human beings who love and care about things, and that's exactly right, and our emotions flow from that.

So having said that, there are huge differences in how human beings do all kinds of things. Some people are going to show very little emotion. Some people wear their heart on their sleeve, as the expression goes. Some people are, you're going to know exactly what they're feeling at every moment because it's going to be coming out of their mouth and out of their facial expressions. Some people can say an enormous amount of meaning by just shifting back a little bit in their chair. Whereas other people, they're waving their hands all the time and speaking. Different cultures have different levels of what is sort of the standard norm for how emotion gets expressed and for how we do that in our speech and in our body language, in our level of volume of our voice and so on and so forth. So you may be, in your cultural context, on the reserved side, and that is absolutely wonderful and fine. You still have strong feelings, and I bet most of us know people who are quite reserved, don't seem to have a lot of emotions, but you get them in the right context, right? You get them in front of a sports game of a team that they care about, and there's shouting and there's fist pumping or banging on the table, right? We have places where what we care about does come out and get expressed.

So why do I say “depends”? Why not just say, yeah, it's fine to not be emotional, a big emotional person. What I would caution us on, where I would say we want to be careful here, is those of us on the unemotional or the not-very-emotional end of the spectrum, there's a question to ask yourself, which is, am I loving as much as I should be? Am I caring about and valuing the things of the kingdom of God? Is the advance of the church, is the growth of the fruit of the Spirit in my own life and the lives of people around me, is that really of significance to me? Do I need to love the Lord my God with more of my mind and heart and strength than I'm currently doing? We want to be people who are every day more emotional than the day before in the sense that we want to be people who every day love God and love his kingdom and love his people more deeply than we did the day before and grow and grow and grow in that. Which means that as a Christian, the more you grow in loving what is good and hating what is evil, the more you grow in loving God, the more emotion you'll be experiencing, the more that will come pouring out in one way or another. Now, I don't say that to mean your goal is to become this super expressive, hand-waving kind of person. You can be completely calm in your affect and in your demeanor and still be rightly bearing on your heart the things of the Lord.

I'm not so much talking about how you express it. I'm simply saying every one of us ought to be someone who is loving more. So if you're on the reserve side, it's worth asking the question, are there places where I want my heart to be more drawn toward the things of the Lord, that my heart would reflect more of what is on his? And, it could be another longer conversation, but if you're on the other end of the spectrum, the question to you is, am I so wrapped up in my emotions that I'm actually losing sight of the good that God would have in this situation? Are my emotions and all these strong feelings and all the hand waving and the volume and the tears and the laughter, are those things actually oriented around what I should be loving? So in all cases, whatever your emotions are telling you, wherever you are on the spectrum of super emotional to not very, the question to us all at the end of the day is the same thing, which is, where is my heart? What is it that is driving my emotions? Is it an ever-increasing love for the Lord, or is an ever-increasing love for myself, which is where our natural sinful tendencies will take us to go? And thank God he never leaves us in those places. He always is drawing us back. We always, emotional, unemotional, are on his heart, and his heart towards us never changes. He's always drawing us toward him.