Chapter 11
New Clothes
What are the things we are to clothe ourselves in? The first that Paul identifies is, “a heart of pity and mercy.” In other words, an emotional life that is predominated by pity and mercy towards other people.
The first thing therefore that Paul indicates needs to be changed is our emotional life in relation to other people. Part of being made in the image of God is to have a strong and purposeful emotional life. The dictionary defines emotions as, “Strong feelings derived from our circumstances, mood or relationships with others.”
The first thing we have to recognise is that our emotions can be damaged. Our emotional life can be very fragile and it does not take much to damage our self-esteem, our faith in other people and our capacity to both love and feel love. Some, if not all of us, have to recognise that we will always have to live with some kind of emotional deficit in our lives. What do I mean by that? No matter how good our parents have tried to be, they will have failed to understand us completely and act appropriately to give us a perfect emotional experience throughout our childhood. We will enter adulthood and our Christian faith with some kind of emotional deficit. Here are some examples:
- We may never have been shown love or emotion by our parents. That does not mean that they did not love us, but that they never expressed that love to us in a way that made feel emotionally secure. We will find it difficult to accept that we are loved and lovable. We may indeed even go looking for love in some damaging and inappropriate ways. We may therefore find our new relationship with God wonderful, yet difficult. We may find our new life in the Body of Christ hard in terms of receiving love from other people when it is genuinely offered – indeed we may even recoil from genuinely loving expressions of emotion towards us from brothers and sisters in the Lord. We have got therefore to understand where we have come from and ask the Lord to start to heal the incomplete and even damaged emotional life we have become used to experiencing
- We may have been abused by someone close to us and therefore have shut ourselves down emotionally – we refuse to allow ourselves to “feel” anything. In some respects our emotional life is like a time-bomb. We may try to suppress how we feel and even rationalise what we feel, but we have never allowed ourselves to “feel what we feel.” I remember counselling a young woman over an extended period of time and it finally came to light that she had been abused by her uncle. She tried very hard to show that she was in control of what she was feeling but I could see her cracking around the edges, until she began to “feel what she was feeling” and then an emotional explosion took place – one that shocked her, me, her parents and her family. It was only then that the people that loved her most could understand her and begin to respond appropriately to her pain. It took time, and her healing would never be complete, but she started to be put back together emotionally and receive the love and support of her family.
- Our emotions may have turned into bitter and profoundly angry emotions. This may have been triggered by abuse, by some very disappointing event or relationship in our lives or by some unfulfilled ambition. There are so many angry people around, even in the church. Instead of expressing the emotion of love and forgiveness, they are carrying a burden of anger and bitterness. My mind goes to a woman in one of my former congregations. Before she and her husband had become Christians their past had been mirky. He had left his then wife as a result of an adulterous relationship with this woman. They had left their small community and gone hundreds of miles away to settle. Eventually he had got a divorce and the couple then married. However, they became Christians and then eventually moved back to their small rural community. They were not made to feel welcome in their former church, and felt this was understandable considering the circumstances. They eventually settled in another church. But this woman had a bitter, angry and unforgiving streak in her. She was angry at her former church, at life and even at herself [though she did not realise it]. It was sad to watch this person and the unpredictable explosions that would take place, along with the constant bitter streak that was in her. I think they made a mistake coming back and that they would have found personal and Christian growth much easier elsewhere. But quite apart from that, she needed to accept God’s forgiveness and forgive herself – even own up to and admit to the fact that what she had done was wrong and unacceptable, but then receive mercy from God and move on. Her damaged emotions would remain that and continue to be expressed negatively until she faced up to what was causing them to exist in the first place.
Of course, our lives may never have been subjected to these extremes of circumstances that cause such emotional distress. We may have had a very ordinary and reasonably uneventful early life – we might be emotionally well integrated. But this too will have an element of emotional deprivation. Jesus led a very well integrated life with an excellent mother and father – people who had integrity. Yet Jesus had to face his own emotional rigours when he went into the wilderness and was tempted for 40 days. Having to face trauma in life will indicate how emotionally secure and integrated we really are. No matter how much a parent will try to shelter their child from pain and try and give them all of the emotional and loving support they need, their children will one day have to face a life-transforming emotionally challenging event that will make or break them – we cannot take their place or prevent that from happening. Like most parents Linda and I have tried to be as supportive of our children as possible – we realise that this is not always achieved but such is the incomplete nature of all parenting. Our oldest son had glandular fever in his 5th year at High School and is now suffering from post viral fatigue – it has changed his life completely and this athletic young man is finding everything that had come so easily to him, quite a struggle. At the same time, he has had a very close relationship for nearly two years, that has now come to an end and this is causing him real emotional pain. We cannot prevent this emotional upheaval but it will be the making or breaking of him – he needs something like this to come into his fairly sheltered upbringing. All we can do is be there for him.
I believe that we have to come to our Father with whatever our emotional condition is [and we can be blind to our true emotional condition] and ask him to begin to show us what needs healing and transformation and ask him both to personally help us and/or send into our experience people who will be agents of healing. This is a much more significant area of our lives that needs transformation than we have been prepared to admit to as Christians in the past. We have placed a great deal of emphasis on knowledge – knowing the right things to do and think. This is important because we do have to be in possession of the wisdom of God in order to help us understand what is right and wrong for our lives, including our emotions. However, we have also got to feel the right things in our lives in order for us to be complete, loving and compassionate people. I have just left a congregation of people who knew the right things [especially to say] and yet were emotionally redundant – it was a soul-destroying period of ministry for me and our whole family. There is a real emphasis today being placed not just on academic and intellectual intelligence, but also on emotional intelligence – the emotionally intelligent are better equipped to deal with life.
There is a difference between the right expression of our emotions and emotionalism. There are times when I have to differentiate between the two experiences. When I hear the song, “The Dark Island”, I almost immediately fill up emotionally. I am being taken back to my childhood and our very strong family ties to the Outer Hebrides, and I am reminded of all of the people who have gone from my life – that is emotionalism, and with it often comes a sense of self-pity [at least that is what it does for me.]
I had a woman in one of my congregations who was capable of causing the most awful trouble in the church. She believed all of the right things, but if she put her mind to it she could cause havoc, and had done so for so many years. She would go through her times of loving and hating me [sometimes within the space of one day!!] But one thing was predictable about her: If I spoke about the plight of those people who were lost and without spiritual hope, she would start to fill up and cry – it always happened. You might think that this was a sign of genuine care and spiritual concern and deep down I suppose she did care. However, her behaviour was such that she was one of the greatest barriers to people from the immediate community coming to that particular church. Her behaviour belied her emotional responses. She was known by the lost as a woman with a wicked tongue and not as someone who cared deeply about their spiritual needs. Her responses [sadly] were pure emotionalism – feelings without substance.
I suppose the nearest I can get to illustrating the difference between a healthy emotional response and emotionalism, is Paul’s example of the difference between remorse and repentance:
Remorse is when I know I have done something wrong and feel bad about it – but not bad enough to change.
Repentance is remorse plus action. It is feeling bad about a sin in my life and putting [with God’s help] into action the changes needed to bring my life into line with the will of God.
In a similar way the difference between emotionalism and emotion is:
Emotionalism is a felt response to a circumstance. For example we see pictures in the news of the suffering of people in Darfur and sit and cry or are angry at the images or refugees and starving children. However, the image soon past and so does our feeling.
Rightly felt emotion is when we see the same image on the screen – we may or may not cry or be angry, but we are stirred in our emotions to action. We decide to send a donation and to give our support through a Christian organization. We decide to contact our MP and ask what the government is doing about the refugee camps. We go on line and sign an international petition and we decide to covenant to pray for the situation. That is the right emotional response – it is a response that goes beyond our feelings, to action. It is a stirring of our feelings that compels us to act and be an agent of change.
That is only one example. The principle is that our emotions are God- given. We need to ask the Lord to connect our emotions to His will through the Holy Spirit. I believe that is healthy for us to be passionate about the good things in life that God wants us to do. Duty that is controlled by the mind is good, but I also believe that we need to ask God to connect our emotions and duties so that the right things are been done with feeling. However, the right things have still got to be done, even when we do not feel like it.
I believe that we need to constant ask the Father to give us a deep passion for the Son of God, for His Church, for the world and for His will. Often our emotions are the impetus that helps us to convince other people of the rightness of a course of act. We have to stir people’s emotions as well as their minds, to move forward in the will of God.
From verse 12 to verse 17, I would like to inject into everything that is considered, the words of Jesus, “Love your neighbour as you love yourself.” In every consideration in these verses I want it to be applied as much to my attitude to myself as it is to other people.
Have “tender-hearted pity.” There is often a hardness of heart in us and in other people. I want to work on the basis of three principles:
- I cannot become what God wants me to be as a person without his help.
- I must change inwardly, in particular in relation to myself.
- I want to treat everyone with a tender heart of compassion.
If I want to become the kind of person God wants me to be I need his help every step of the way. I am not just to re-clothe my life with righteousness [right thinking, right actions and right emotions], I am to do so with the expert hand of the Master at every point along the way. Too often I have been challenged to change and then set off in my own strength to put this change into effect. Guess what? Often my good intentions did not last because I ran out of steam. Sometimes I started to become proud of my virtue and became unbearably self-righteous. Often I fell flat on my face or became selective about who I would love, forgive, show mercy to – in other words, there was a chronic lack of consistency because I was operating at a level of inadequate power – my own! Right from the beginning, every day and in every relationship, I have to recognise the validity of the prayer, “I need you to help me in every circumstance and relationship, because without you, Lord Jesus, I can do nothing.”
I am to be tender towards myself. Wow! That for me is so difficult. Why? Because I do not always feel I deserve it. Yet the truth is that the Lord has very tender feelings for me. He chooses to be tender towards me and show me infinite grace. He has pity on me. He sees that I am struggling. He sees that I am struggling some times to do the right thing. He sees me struggle to get up when I fall. He sees me struggling to love some people. He sees me struggle with so many temptations. He sees me struggle to find my place in this world and so often be confused as to who I really am. He sees me struggle with self-doubts. He sees me struggle as a father, a son and a husband – as a friend, a minister and in my calling. He sees all that and so much more. When I see all of this I often have a diminishing self-respect and not a lot of time or compassion for myself. In my worst moments there are times when I just want to give up – not because God is unreasonable but because I am just not consistently good. Do I look upon myself with tender-hearted pity? Hardly ever. Why not? Is it because I am afraid to admit to liking myself? Is it because I do not feel I deserve to be loved or to love myself? God only knows, but it drives me nuts sometimes!
Here is a summary of medical records I have just been reading. “Following a serious assault the child concerned has started to take grand mal seizures and there is evidence of an abnormality in the frontal lobe. He is having night tremors, is acutely anxious and severely depressed. The child is very nervous and the mother admits to being strict and at times very severe with him, the father tending to be permissive. Of late the child has become preoccupied with his condition remarking that he is not like other boys. I have rarely seen a child of this age as anxious and depressed. He practically requests to be admitted to hospital. The child requires intensive psychotherapy. His parents refused my advice for Iain to be admitted for a short time to hospital or to be seen by me as an outpatient as they feel confident they can support the child themselves.” I wept for the child in that report. That child was me. It was one of the few times I felt pity for myself. I knew things had been bad when I was 8 years old, but I had obviously blocked out the extent of my feelings at that age or the severity of my mother’s treatment [verging on abuse] of me. As I read my hospital files I realised I was now looking at my life through the lens of another group of opinions. Surely if I see my life through the lens of God’s love and grace then it is not unreasonable to feel pity for myself. I think that there is a difference between feeling self-pity and having tender-hearted pity for yourself:
Self-pity is to go to a place we constantly feel sorry for ourselves and lick our wounds. The person who is self-pitying becomes obsessed with themselves and begins to define who they are by how hard life has been on them. Self- pity cripples personal growth.
Tender-hearted pity is to look realistically at ourselves. It means to see ourselves with the love and compassion with which the Lord sees us. It is not lingering in a selfish place but understanding who we are and where we come from and when we fall, not being so hard on ourselves that we feel useless and unloved.
If we have to have this tender-hearted pity for ourselves then we must show it to other people – other people need to experience it from their relationship with ourselves. I am ashamed when I think of the times that I have been hard- hearted to some people. I could try and justify this by saying that they deserved, because of the way they behaved, to be treated in a less than gracious way. However that attitude is a pure cop-out that refuses to face up to the personal responsibility I have to treat everyone with grace.
There is a situation that I am currently having to deal with. I have let a friend down, treated him very badly. His estimation of me must have plummeted and I can understand him feeling very badly let down – someone he has looked up to and enjoyed good fellowship with has disillusioned him. I have humbly apologised on more than one occasion, and he ignored my correspondence. Finally I received an email which was an attempt on his part to say that he was not holding a grudge. However the following things were present/absent in his correspondence:
He could not go as far as saying that he had forgiven me, despite the fact that I had asked for his forgiveness.
Despite the fact that I had acknowledged my sin and in no way tried to justify it, he could not help but have a dig at me for what I had done.
He told me that he was not judging me for what I had done. What he in fact meant by that was that he felt he had a right in the first place to judge me, which no person has the right to do. I suspect that he was in fact judging me and using language in such a way to make himself sound more gracious than he really felt.
He told me that I would always be welcome at his door. In fact I was not told that I would be welcome in his home. The language was formal and an attempt to say the right thing.
You may, in reading this feel that I have a cheek after hurting a friend to expect that friend to treat me with grace. But I have a picture in my head of the return of the lost son and the overwhelmingly gracious and loving heart of the Father. Despite the way his son had lived and sullied his reputation the heart of the father was tender towards his son. At no point did the Father ever try and point the finger, remonstrate or get a subtle dig at the son. He knew when he saw his son, that the young man knew the mess he had got himself into and the regrets he now felt.
The lesson I have learned? It is really an on-going lesson. It is so easy to treat someone who has wronged you, with a spirit of judgment. It is not enough even to do or say the right thing [although that is important]. We have to go to the Lord and ask him to make our heart tender and to feel pity and grace towards the person concerned. We must also ask that the Lord keeps our hearts humble and that we never have a superior air about us when we show pity towards other people. We must always see ourselves as ruined sinners who but for the grace of God would be nowhere, allowing other people to move in grace towards us, and correspondingly moving in grace towards them.
A prayer?
“Lord help me to feel pity and mercy for myself, realising how weak I am and how much I need you and your forgiveness. Help me to feel about myself, especially when I have fallen, the way you feel about me. Help me when other people disappoint me, to remember what I am like, and to respond in humble, forgiving grace.”