In this sermon titled 'Salvation by Emotions' by Scott Brown, the speaker emphasizes the importance of resting our lives on the objective truth of God's words and sayings. He cautions against relying on subjective feelings and emotions, which are unreliable. The sermon addresses the dangers of subjectivity in marriage and the church, and explores various factors that shape our emotions. Brown uses a sermon by Charles Spurgeon to discuss the assurance of salvation and how relying on emotions can hinder it. He highlights the need to rely on what Jesus Christ has said rather than our own feelings. The sermon concludes by stressing the importance of guarding our hearts with objective truth.

Please open your Bibles to Proverbs chapter 4. Proverbs chapter 4. Find verse 20. Proverbs 4 20. Give you a second to get there.

Proverbs 4 verse 20. These words call us to rest our lives on things that are fixed, objective and true. And so these words, Proverbs 420, My son, give attention to my words. Incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your eyes.

Keep them in the midst of your heart, for they are life to those who find them and health to all their flesh. Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life. Put away from you a deceitful mouth and put perverse lips far from you. Let your eyes look straight ahead and your eyelids look right before you. Ponder the path of your feet and let all your ways be established.

Do not turn to the right or the left. Remove your foot from evil. Let's pray. Oh Lord, Pray that you would just give us joy in considering your word, your matchless, beautiful word that's so helpful to sort things out in our own hearts, minds, emotions, relationships, everything. Lord, we're just so grateful that you're a good shepherd and these words here I pray that they would shepherd this flock amen.

So this this passage of scripture has its emphasis on the word my. My words, my sayings, the things of God, to have a life that rests on the foundation of the things that God has said. We live in a world where you're told to rely on your feelings. We live in a world that teaches us to rely on our impressions. We live in a world that teaches us to trust our own emotions and to actually rest our lives on what people call my truth.

They call it my truth because It isn't a universal truth. It's just my truth. But the Bible actually comes to us with a completely different way to rest your soul and your thinking and your emotions and everything. And it's his truth. That's why in Proverbs four it's my words, my sayings.

And it's such a critical thing. We live in a world where subjectivity is truth. The whole culture is wrapped up in a subjective vortex of my truth. And it's, this culture that we live in does it does if we take it on ourselves it does damage to us in a lot of different ways. Subjectivity in your marriage is dangerous.

Subjectivity in your church is dangerous. We just heard a sermon about objective ways that we relate with one another. It has not based on our feelings, it's based on what God has designed. You know, Trent was really talking about God's relational design for the church. In the church, you just don't do your own thing, you do God's thing.

Subjectivity plunges you into your own thing, and subjectivity causes you to think wrongly about lots of things. Mike was telling me about a sermon series he heard several years ago that was entitled It was entitled reigning subjectivity, reigning subjectivity. And, you know, we live in a world where narcissism is praised That's why we praise my truth and A narcissist is a person that has an excessive admiration for themselves Another way to say it is an excessive admiration for their own thoughts, their own ways. That's what a narcissist is. A narcissist is a person that's focused on himself, not on objective truth.

Now in Christianity we have objective truth. This is the great thing about Christianity, is that everyone is delivered from himself. We all have different reasons that we feel the way that we feel. Some people feel very badly because their bodies are acting up. Their bodies are sick and they feel bad.

There are hormonal gyrations that make people feel bad. There are things that can happen to you in your past as a child or even as adult that actually, they shape your emotions. And, you know, this is why parenting is so important Because one thing that you're doing by being a good father or a good mother is that you're shaping your children with good things, not with harsh and defiling things. You know, when you've experienced divorces and abuses and things like that, it has an effect on your emotions, often to the rest of your life. So there are many things that shape our emotions.

We, in many ways, are a product of the way that we were brought up and the things that we sang, the things that we saw, the books that we read, the people that we were around, those things all have an effect on our emotions. So we live in a world where there are lots of forces at work in in our emotions and and they're real and and they they do affect us greatly. But here's a reality. When you rely on your emotions and or your feelings, if you want to make them the same thing, you are relying on the most unreliable part of your entire personality. You're relying on the least stable part of your being.

That's the problem with relying on your emotions. They jerk you around and you know they they're they are a there are a rickety bridge and relying on emotions to live your life to have your devotions to relate with your spouse to get married all these kinds of things Relying exclusively on your emotions can mean that you really are relying on the most unreliable part of your life. At the same time, and this is what makes it difficult for all of us, is that God gave us emotions. There was a book written many years ago called The Emotions of Jesus. Jesus expressed various emotions.

He expressed all of them in a holy way. Even when he said, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He was expressing emotions according to truth. And those emotions were not shaped by any sin or anything like that. But our emotions are real.

And one of the greatest troubles that people get themselves into is when they get married and they create their marriage on emotions. Now, the truth is, we've talked about this before, infatuation lasts somewhere between 12 and 18 months, maybe two years, in marriage. But then the infatuation goes away. So what are you left with? Well you're left with a covenant.

You're left with a covenant. What holds a marriage together is a covenant. Trent was referring to our membership covenant. Churches are held together by covenant, not by fleeting emotions, and not even by offenses that take place. They're held together by something greater than emotions.

You might feel up and down about your church, but what holds you together with the people in your church? It's a covenant in the same way that a marriage is a covenant and a marriage covenant keeps you in long enough to where it can just continue to be a blessing. So I want to talk about this matter of emotions and in two areas. One area is being motivated by feelings and secondly, by assured of salvation by your feelings. And I want to use something that I read recently that's in the Chapel Library rack back there that Jessica Yawn came up and gave to me and I read it immediately because we were going through these matters of assurance of salvation.

Here it is, we ordered a bunch more, we ran out of, I think I took the last one, and Struggles of Conscience by Charles Spurgeon, it's part of a sermon that he preached, and I want to, I was so taken by it that I actually took sections and typed them up. And I just want to, I want to walk through some of the things that he said here, particularly regarding emotions and your salvation. Now, this is a tricky subject because it would be sad and tragic if you had a person who had no emotions for the Lord, no genuine heart love for the Lord. That would be actually an aberration, but you might go through a period or two that's different. So it's a difficult subject because I would never want to say that knowing the Lord has nothing to do with your emotions.

I think it has a lot to do with your emotions, but it doesn't have everything to do about your emotions, particularly when you're dealing with assurance of salvation, because your emotions go up and they go down. So I just want to walk you through some of the things that really struck me about this. Spurgeon, relying on your emotions for your assurance of salvation, he calls it an evil assumption. He calls it a spiritual disease that doesn't allow people to get through different times and seasons in their life. He talks about when you don't feel your need enough.

You don't, you just feel like you don't need God. And he says, I've met many hundreds who say they dare not come to Christ and trust Him with their souls because they do not feel their need of Him enough. They do not have sufficient contrition for their sins. They have not repented as fully as they have rebelled. And then He comes out kind of hard on this whole idea.

He says that this, you know, it can come from a root of self-righteousness. He says, brethren, it is the same evil from the same germ of self-righteousness, but it has taken another and more crafty shape. Satan has wormed himself into many hearts under the garb of an angel of light and he has whispered it to the sinner, repentance is a necessary virtue. Stop till you have repented. And when you have sufficiently mortified yourself on account of sin, then you will be fit to come to Christ and qualified to trust and rely on him.

He's saying that's the devil. The devil is the one that says you've got to reach a certain level of contrition. He calls it self-righteousness. And then He talks about how critical it is not to rely on what you feel, but to rely on what Jesus Christ has said. That's objective truth.

So you're shifting from the most unreliable part of your personality to the most reliable being in the universe. And he says, He says that these descriptions of a person having a sense of repentance and things like that are things that actually grow after a person is saved. He's addressing the person who says, I'm not saved, I'm not worthy to be saved, I don't have enough righteousness to be saved, I don't have enough contrition to be saved. He's talking about that person. He's talking about the unbeliever who's saying, I can't come to Christ until I reach this level of repentance.

He talks about those who really want to have a deeper sense of their sin. And you know, he talks about the kind of person that doesn't want to take their sin lightly, but they fear they're not saved because they don't take their sin heavily enough. He says this, The more a man gets rid of sin and lives above his daily faults and errors, the more he cries, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting." He's quoting Psalm 139 verse 23 and 24. And he says that bad men do not want to know their badness, But men who want to love God, they do want to know their badness.

So if you want to know your badness, don't necessarily write that off as being badness. That's what Spurgeon is saying. The bad person doesn't want to admit his sin. The person who does not know the Lord does not want to see his sin. He said only the good man who has been renewed by grace is anxious to discover his disease that he might have it healed.

He says that this type of thing is simply a sign that God is working in your heart. He says surely the Lord is doing a good work in you, for you would not have such wishes and desires as these unless he had put his hand to the plow and began to plow the barren dry hard soil of your heart. He talks about groaning before the Lord, not groaning enough. He says, when you go down on your knees and say, Lord, I groan before thee because I cannot groan, I cannot feel, Lord, help me to feel. He says, you've got the mustard seed of repentance.

It's like a tiny grain. He says, let it alone, it'll grow. Foster it with prayer, it'll become a tree. The very grace which you are asking from God is speaking in your prayer. Then he talks about repentance.

He says it's repentance which asks God that I may repent more. It's a broken heart that asks God to break it. He says this is not a hard heart It's not a he says it's not a hard heart When you say Lord, I have a hard heart Soften my heart. He says that's not a hard heart. That's a heart that wants to be softened He says it's a soft heart already Then he talks about thirsting, you know, thirsting after the Lord.

He says, you know, Christ came that there might be drink given to the thirsty. You say, well, I'm not thirsty. I don't feel that I'm thirsty. I only wish I was thirsty. Says, why, why, why do you wish to feel thirsty?

Your desire to be thirsty is thirst. Okay? Talks about, you know, feeling heavy about your life. Have you ever felt heavy about your life? It just isn't, you're just not what you want to be.

He says, when I say come unto Christ, all you that labor and are heavy laden, Matthew 11 28, and you say, oh, I don't feel heavy laden enough. He says, why, you are the very man in that text. And then he talks about Satan's work and all this. That Satan's work is to call you a liar. He's a deceiver and he's a liar.

He's a liar from the beginning. And he says, it is only one of Satan's quibbles and a bit of hell's infernal logic to drive you from Christ Satan says this you lying fiend you tell me that I do not feel my need for a Savior enough I know I feel my he says say this to Satan, I know I feel my need. He says, as long, I know I feel my need, as long as I long to feel it, I do feel it, and Christ bids me to come, and I will come now. I will trust my soul just as it is in the hands of him whose body hangs on a tree." And then he talks about sins, you know, feeling that you're too sinful. And he says, if you're going to say that it's your sins that are overwhelming you.

He says, well look, particularize your sin. What sin are you talking about? Exactly, name the sins. You know, our confession says, confess your sins, particular sins, particularly. Well, there's a reason for that.

Do you have just this vague sense that you're a sinner or is are there actual sins? That you're dealing with are there actual infractions of God's laws or is it just this general? Fog of I'm I'm such a sinner So he says particularize your sins. He says, don't say I'm a sinner, it means nothing. He says, everybody says that.

He says, you need to say, I'm a liar, I'm a thief, I'm a drunkard I have unchaste thoughts You know, I I have committed unclean acts Am I covetous? Do I love the world? He's saying You might have this cloud over your soul that says, I'm just such a great sinner. I'm so discouraged about it. Well, then you should identify what sins they are particularly, because your emotions are going to run you off a cliff and bring you to conclusions that aren't really true.

He talks about the work of the Spirit and the work of the devil. He says, it's the work of the Spirit that make you feel that you're a sinner. But it never was his work to make you feel that Christ could forget you. It's the work of the Spirit to make you repent of sin, but it's not the work of the Spirit to make you despair or pardon. This is the devil's work.

You know Satan always works to try to counterfeit the work of the spirit as he did in the land of Egypt. So he takes a genuine desire to turn away from sin and he counterfeits it and he turns it against you because he's a liar. Take care that you do not try to make a righteousness out of your feelings, he says. He talks about this whole thing as a kind of a form of legalism. He says, if you say, I may not go to Christ till I feel my need of Him, that is clear legality.

You're on the wrong track altogether because Christ does not want you to feel your need in order to prepare for him. He wants no preparation. He says, it is written, when I see the blood, I will pass over you. It is not when I see your feelings about the blood. And it's not when I see your faith in the blood, but when I see the blood I will pass over you." He says, learn to discriminate between a sense of sin which would humble you and a sense of sin which should only make you proud.

When you have come to say, I have felt my sin enough and therefore I'm fit to come to Christ. It's nothing but pride dressed in the garb of humility And then he talks to people in his congregation who they keep saying the same thing, I'll come to Christ when I feel my need enough, my sense of repentance is deep enough, that my passion is strong enough. He talks about those kinds of people, but they never come to Christ He says Seven years ago you were saying what you're saying now in seven more years You'll be saying the same thing seven years ago. You said I would trust Christ, but I don't feel as I ought. Do you feel any better now?

When another seven years are come, you will feel just as you do now. You will say, I would come, but I do not feel fit. I do not feel my need. And it will keep going on forever until you go down to the pit of hell, saying as you go down, I do not feel my need enough. I'll conclude with this.

Hear me, sinner. When I ask you to come to Jesus as you are and give you these reasons for it, It is a very great sin not to feel your guilt and not to mourn over it, but it is one of the sins that Jesus Christ atoned for on the tree. When his heart was pierced, he paid the ransom price for your hard heart. And he paid the ransom price for those who feel differently as they go up and down. Salvation should never be resting on the most unreliable part of your being.

It should be resting on objective truth. And that's why Solomon says, hold fast to my words, my statutes. And he says, above all else, guard your heart. And how do you guard your heart? With objective truth.

Would you pray with me? Lord, we thank you that you have given us such helpful ways to understand our emotions, understand the things that drive our opinions about things. And you've given us objective truth. You've given us a way to live that's far above, far better than our truth. Far better than our narcissistic impulse.

Far better than our subjectivity. Your word is in the heavens and not one word has fallen to the ground unreliable. So I pray Lord that you would give all of us such an ability to push aside any confusing emotions by the word of God. Amen. Okay, we are dismissed.