Led by the Spirit or Emotions?

So, recently I was thinking about the past and how we tend to put way too much of an emphasis on “feelings” rather than facts.  Too often we enforce those feelings on others, sometimes without even realizing it and tend to use it as a basis for salvation.  Do you “feel” the Holy Spirit. I “feel” like God is telling me something. I “feel” like I’m being nudged.   The problem with going by feelings is that emotions are highly erratic, they are always changing and are easily influenced without our knowing it.

Imagine someone feels God is telling them to not eat meat.  That may very well be true. For them.  The problem comes when they FEEL that if someone else eats meat then it must be wrong and so they step in and let that other person know that what they are doing is wrong because they “feel” it is wrong.  A similar situation happened to be a long time ago where feelings were pushed on me by someone who barely even knew me.  I’ve spoken with others who faced the same types of issues.  These are the dangers of combining faith and emotion.  We are emotional creatures, this much is true. It is how we are build.  But faith is not an emotion, it is a belief.  We can have a passion for that belief, but it has to be on a much more solid foundation than feeling.

Don’t get me wrong…there is nothing wrong with fellow Christians helping others on this long road of life.  In fact, we NEED that 3^rd party view to get ourselves back on the right path.  The problem is that too often personal feelings mix in with our faith and influence what we say and do towards others and how we perceive certain things.

So, I just think it’s very important to remember that we should be led by the spirit and not by our own personal feelings on issues and that what may seem wrong to one person isn’t always wrong to everyone else.

Romans 14:21 “ It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall.”

Or to modernize that…if your brother or sister stumbles when they watch a rated R film…don’t take them to a rated R film or you too will have sinned by causing them to stumble over something you knew was an issue for them.