Embracing the power of listening to your heart
The biblical view of emotions and the vital role they play in our lives.
“When you open the scriptures, almost on every page, emotional words pop-out at you…love, joy, anger, sorrow…all these things are so integrated into the scriptures and they should be into our faith.”
Why does God care so much about the state of our hearts and feelings?
How do emotions reflect the true depth and vitality of our spiritual lives?
How can we learn to understand our emotions and through this learn to understand ourselves?
Feel
This landmark book teaches you how to clarify your feelings and why that matters.
Feel: The Power of Listening to Your Heart shares Dr. Elliott’s journey of years of intensive study resulting in a practical map for understanding how God has created us to feel. Some of the things you will discover in the pages of Feel are how to:
- Use your emotions to identify the real values that drive you
- Become emotionally adept, emotionally wise, and emotionally skilled
- Experience freedom from legalistic, religious expectations
- Transform the way you battle temptation
- Liberate yourself to really celebrate joyful occasions and blessings
- Achieve more authentic communication with your family, kids, and spouse
- Strengthen your ability to express genuine love to someone
- Transform destructive anger to constructive connections to God and others
In Feel you can learn to throw-off the shackles of trying to manipulate, control, and out-think your emotions. You can learn to pursue the new heart that God has promised. Feel confronts the myths that many of us have been taught and gives you the tools to properly understand your feelings to live in emotional fullness. The truth in this book could rock your world!
Jesus and Paul displayed a wide range of emotions in their lives and teaching. Thomas Aquinas, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and many others have recognized the vital importance of emotion in Christian experience. However, in recent times, many preachers and theologians have relegated it to the margins. Our thinking on the relationship between reason and emotion is often confused or obscure, and this book brings clarity to what the Bible teaches.
Faithful Feelings
Faithful Feelings: Rethinking Emotions in the New Testament is Dr. Elliott’s first book and is based on his PhD in New Testament. If you are a pastor, counselor, or student of the Bible, Faithful Feelings will renew your faith as you dig deeper into the truths about emotion found in the Scripture. It will inspire you as you understand all God has to say about emotions.
Learn to:
- Replace confusion over what the Bible teaches with a clear biblical
theology of emotion - Counsel others effectively by understanding what God has to say
about how Christians should feel - Call people to a passionate faith when you understand the emotions
of Jesus, Paul, and the passionate God of the Bible - Renew your faith, refresh your spirit, and return to Him as you feel again.
Pastors and leaders are talking about the impact this book has had on the way they do ministry!
Christianity Today Review
GODLY EMOTION
Faithful Feelings takes another look at emotions.
Review by Stanton L. Jones
“Emotion is to be subdued, because it expresses the passionate, irrational sin nature”—such deficient, unbiblical views of emotion have distorted pastoral guidance of God’s people. They have also led to inaccurate translations and biblical interpretations, such as drawing a stark distinction between agape and eros and concluding that agape is a passionless exercise of the will to do good.
Related articles and links
Faithful Feelings is a scholarly argument to reorient our thinking about emotion. It presents a sophisticated view of emotion that engages the whole person. Emotions are more than cognitions, but they must involve rational thinking. Only with this view can we properly understand Scriptures that teach us that emotion is central to life in Christ, that certain emotions are righteous or sinful, and that we must manifest righteous emotion and dispense with sinful emotion. When viewed rightly, says Elliott, president of Oasis International, “Emotion is free to play a prominent and influential role in theology and the Christian faith.”
Faithful Feelings is a great example of faithful engagement with Christian and secular scholarship.
Other Published Works
Affections, Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, Zondervan, 2011
Emotions, Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, Zondervan, 2011
The Emotional Core of Love: the Centrality of Emotion in Christian Psychology and Ethics, Journal of Psychology and Christianity (Vol. 31, Issue 2), 2012.
Books’ Impact
Influential church leaders, such as John Piper, hailed Dr. Elliott’s first book, Faithful Feelings: Rethinking Emotion in the New Testament” (Kregel; 2006), as a landmark work and “the most thorough study on emotions in the New Testament.”
In addition, Randy Alcorn, author of Heaven and Deception, endorsed Dr. Elliott’s book, Feel: The Power of Listening to Your Heart (Tyndale; 2008), as “an engaging book that is potentially liberating.”
National media seeks out Dr. Elliott’s insights to help audiences find freedom from emotional confusion and repression.
He has appeared on television and radio programs, such as The Harvest Show, Key Life with Steve Brown, and published articles in the Journal of Psychology and Theology.
