By Graham Glover –

Your feelings mean very little.

I don’t much care about them.

In fact, you shouldn’t put a lot of stock in them either. They will betray you. They will deceive you. They will make you say and do things you will later regret. Their subjectivity is the source of eternal uncertainty.

How you feel matters not.

The problem is that our feelings dictate so much. They drive our politics. They feed our theology. They dictate what we consider to be right and wrong.

In our world, feelings mean everything. And this is a problem. In fact, it is THE problem.

It shouldn’t be this way – our feelings demanding and driving things. Our feelings should have little, if anything, to do with determining the truths of our polity, policy, and culture.

Sadly, though it is this way. Our feelings dictate everything. They determine everything. Our feelings are everything. And because of this, everything is in flux – from our governance to the manner in which we practice our faith, both of which set the very foundation of the society in which we live.

Consider how so many come to determine who they will vote for, what drives them to a particular church, or how they determine whether something is good or bad. Feelings. Peoples subjective, fluid feelings. Emotions left unchecked, without any sense of eternal truth. Ideas prone only to how one thinks a particular issue should be addressed. Our feelings aren’t fact. They are nothing but selfish sentiments that change by the day. They may feel good. They might look good. But they offer nothing substantive for us to ground ourselves in or develop our societies.

We may talk a lot about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We can quote endless passages about loving God and our neighbor. But when we’ve lost the ability to understand what life means, we have lost our ability to be fully human. When liberty means only what we want it to mean, then it really means nothing at all. When happiness is measured only in how we feel, we forget that true happiness doesn’t involve feelings at all. And when our faith is littered with talk about love, but does not and cannot talk about justice, then the love we think we know – the love we say our faith is about, is as shallow as our clichés about the modern understanding of love.

If a law is good because it makes us feel better, then shame on us for thinking that’s effective politics. If church practice is guided by the emotions we bring to worship or our interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, then what’s the point in believing in an eternal God? If there is no such thing as Truth, then our culture will continue to unravel until there is nothing left worth preserving.

I really don’t care how you feel because your feelings offer me nothing. Your feelings offer our politics nothing. Your feelings offer the faith nothing. When it comes to things of politics, faith, and culture, the only guiding principle worth considering is what is True, what is good, what is right. And this principle knows nothing of feelings.

So, how do you feel about that?