Dr Paul Allen

For many believers, distinguishing between one’s feelings and the guidance of the Holy Spirit can be very challenging. It is easy to mistake a deep emotional state as something influenced or guided by the Holy Spirit. Oftentimes, this even happens to very well-intentioned Christians. We can long so badly to be “in God’s will” that in a desperate search for some supernatural guidance, we fall victim to letting our emotions take the lead. Many well-meaning Christians are being led by emotional experiences. Learning how to discern feelings from the Holy Spirit is an important lesson for every single Christian. This begs the question: how can Christians rightly discern feelings from genuine works of The Holy Spirit? To find the answer, I think we first remember that works of the Holy Spirit are ultimately elements of our sanctification (which is firmly rooted in our justification). Both justification and sanctification are works of a sovereign God – not man. The whole process of salvation

The first thing I want to do is give her a big hug and say, “You are a walking miracle. Do you realize how many millions of twentysomethings are so wrapped up in their private worlds that almost all they do is think about how they look or how they sound to others, and whether anyone likes them or thinks they’re cool? Here you are struggling to keep your spiritual nose above water because of the wake of empathy you feel for the suffering of others around you. Forgive me if this sounds wonderful.” “The emotional life of the new creation in Christ is of a different order than what the world experiences.” First a word about her lead question. She says, “Do you think Christians feel more than unbelievers?” Well, if we only talk about natural feelings, the answer is that it will vary from person to person. Some unbelievers will feel more than some believers and some believers will feel more than some unbelievers. If you’re talking about spiritual feelings, the kind that only the Holy S

We’re living in a day when personal experience has been elevated above everything else as the final criterion of right and wrong . Just think of all of the people who try to justify themselves on the basis of what they feel. Divorce is routinely excused on the basis of a married couple’s no longer feeling like they are in love. We are told that homosexuality should be embraced as a moral good because some homosexuals report having felt an attraction to the same sex from a young age. Even many professing Christians make their decisions about right and wrong based on what they feel. It’s hard to have a discussion with someone who makes their experience the final arbiter of reality. Many people embrace the old adage that “a person with an experience is never at the mercy of a person with an argument.” Ultimately, we have to disagree with this assertion, but not because experience is not a valuable tutor. It can help us connect theory to practice and abstract concepts to concrete situ