The Lord Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man, and thus experienced emotions. However, unlike us, Jesus exercised the full range of human emotions, yet without sin. The emotions of Jesus were always in perfect harmony and balance. The rescue and redemption of the Christian must include the emotions, as well as the other aspects of our humanity. In heaven, Jesus still bears His human body, and thus His emotions.

Well, it's my topic that's been assigned to me for just a short introductory few statements, about 10 minutes, is the emotional life of our Lord. When we study the humanity of Christ, there are loftier topics when we think about theology, but few of them are so directly connected with what we understand to be the Christian life. Few of them are so intimately connected with how you measure your process of sanctification. If We settle for unclear views of Christ kind of vague ideas of the Jesus that we've heard about then our following of Christ tends to be vague When we study Christ we want to study more than his outward responses or his actions. We must include how Christ dealt with the emotional aspects of humanity.

Loving God calls for all of our mind and strength, but also for all of our heart and soul. In other words, the process of sanctification will not only include the way that we act and think and choose and talk, but also the emotional side of our humanity. Now if we give serious consideration to the gospel accounts of Christ's emotions, I think two things surprise us. One is how much material there actually is in the gospels, which we may not have noticed, and how little We've taken that as the only pattern for the Christian and how we feel about things. Of course, we are bombarded by so many other options.

We have the way that people feel and respond that we live with, that we meet at church, that we work with. We have favorite characters in books. You have television, where people are always showing their emotions. So I want us to take just a few moments to look at some statements about the emotions of Jesus Christ, general statements, just to kind of whet your appetite for further study with some application. First, Jesus being truly and fully human, possessed and exercised the full range of human emotion, yet without sin.

B.B. Warfield, the theologian in a small treatise that he wrote called The Emotional Life of Our Lord, which I recommend to you. It's a really very clear biblical treatment of this topic. He writes this, he says, it belongs to the truth of our Lord's humanity, that he was subject to all sinless human emotions. In other words, as evangelicals, we do not find it difficult to emphasize the deity of Jesus, that he really was fully God.

But sometimes when it comes to the practical, nitty gritty application of the humanity of Jesus to how we understand him, sometimes we become a little nervous. We would never want to reduce his majesty and his dignity, his transcendent godness, but sometimes we're not so careful when we reduce his humanity. And as His humanity is part of His glory, that God did unite Himself to true humanity in the person of His Son, we want to be very careful not to reduce that humanity at all, including His emotional life. Second thing, the emotions of Jesus were always in perfect harmony and balance. I think that this is often why when we read the gospels, we don't notice the emotional life of Jesus as much as we notice other elements, because they're never out of balance.

Nothing really sticks out. I mean, we do often think of the love of Christ, but perhaps that's because we're so keenly interested as recipients of that love. But when you think of the zeal or the passion of Christ, when you think of the wonder of Christ, when you think of the disgust of Christ, the anger of Christ, the rage of Christ, when you think of the pity and compassion of Christ, and as you're reading through the gospels in your own study of the Bible, perhaps no single one really leaps out at you. If we say that someone is an emotional person, all right? If so, if Scott introduced a speaker and he said, now you haven't heard this speaker, but I want to tell you, he's a very, he's an emotional person.

Well, you, you have a certain idea in your head that certain emotions in that person are expressed in unbalanced ways, but never with Christ. The compassion, the anger, the zeal, the gentleness, the delight, the grief, the joy, the disgust of Christ and every other human emotion Were held in such perfect balance. He was not fragmented and disconnected as we are Third the rescue or the redemption of a Christian must include the emotions as much as any other aspect of your humanity. Have you ever asked yourself, why is it that the body you're in right now, if you're a believer, that body must be laid in a grave if Christ delays and that same body must be raised and glorified? Why not another body?

I think one answer is that Christ has purchased this body, and he will not leave any aspect of this body as a trophy for the enemy to boast over in eternity. And the same could be said for our emotions. It's not just certain aspects of our personality, but it's the whole of us that Christ has purchased. It's the whole of us that was entrusted into his hands. It is the whole of us that he will present to the Father at the final day.

And your emotions will be Christian, glorified along with your body, and all the aspects of your spirituality so that your emotional life will be as holy as his on that day. Redemption does not dull our emotions, but it does free them and bring them under a new master. And I wonder if you think of that as a burdensome thought. So you think, well, I know that following Jesus Christ means I have to treat my wife or my husband in a certain way, I raise my kids in a certain way, I respond to my parents in a certain way, I go to work in a certain way, I witness, I spend money, I eat, I dress, I sleep, I do everything as unto the Lord, and then someone comes up and says, oh, by the way, in 10 minutes, I want to add a whole new realm to this, you're also going to have to bring all your feelings under the rule of Jesus Christ. Do you think of that as a very burdensome thing?

Kind of like being told in the midst of doing a lot of work and the boss comes and drops a whole nother pile of work on the desk and says, oh yeah, by the way, there's a whole nother thing you haven't even paid attention to yet. You gotta do that as well. You mustn't think of it that way. Think of it rather as this way. There are whole realms in your soul that have been ruined by sin.

Emotions are certainly one of them. And Christ takes you by the hand and leads you into that realm and intends to make that place as beautiful as He intends to make every other place. Will you measure the possibility of God ruling over your emotions by your own past experiences or by the true humanity of Jesus? One example, when we look at the pity of Christ, alright, just one example. Christ has pity and compassion.

He has pity and compassion for the needy man, the lame man, the blind man. He has pity and compassion over the hungry crowds. But he also has pity and compassion. A profound pity moves in his heart when he sees the sinner whose sin is destroying him. It is so easy to become jaded toward lost people when we watch them destroy themselves, and rarely do they only affect themselves but bring other people down with them.

It is so easy to become jaded when the lost people around us are ruining the little utopia we would love to build here on earth, at work, at church, or in the home. And it is easy to become jaded when this lost person that you have shown pity and compassion to repeatedly rends your heart. But if our idea of becoming more like Christ or more holy does not also include an ever-increasing profound pity for the lost person who destroys themself, then we really will not resemble the Lord in our emotional life, but the Pharisee. Well, one last thing. Jesus of Nazareth in heaven bears the body that He bore on earth.

Of course, it's glorified, but we know it still has scars. It is still the same body. And He is still fully human. He doesn't lay that aside. That wasn't a temporary alteration.

That means Jesus of Nazareth still possesses his human emotions in heaven and so the one who sits upon the throne of heaven and earth beside the Father has the same emotions you have, the same categories. Do you think there is any reason to doubt that if you're a believer, He can teach you to bring your emotions and lay them before the Father day by day, like he did by the work of the Spirit, so that according to the mercies of God, you too would present not just your body, but your feelings, a living sacrifice to God. Well, let's pray. Father, we pray that you would conform us outwardly and inwardly, that the whole of us might smell like Christ to you. Father, you know our feelings, how they feel so unruly, and while we struggle in other areas the emotions almost seem beyond imagination when we think of sanctification so we're asking you to open our eyes to see the portrait of Christ to entice us to captivate us by that sight but also God to take us by the hand and teach us how to follow.

In Christ's name we ask, amen.