What to Do When Things Don’t Sit Right?
Have you ever felt unsettled by something—a conversation, a decision, or even a passage in the Bible? Intuition, our ability to quickly sense and assess, is a powerful gift. But as helpful as it can be, intuition can also mislead us, especially in our spiritual lives. What do we do when God’s word challenges our feelings or instincts? This article explores how progress in faith often means embracing discomfort, trusting God’s truth over our emotions, and growing through what doesn’t sit right.
Intuition is one of the most powerful and amazing qualities of a human being. It is amazing that humans can walk into a room full of people, take in thousands of bits of data—sounds, facial expressions, smells—and synthesize all that data into a judgment about that room full of people. Am I welcomed? What are these people like? Would I fit in here? What an incredible superpower to simplify such complex data so quickly. Each of us has the ability to sense certain things that we might not even be able to explain. We get a good feeling about a person, or our spidey senses tell us something is not right with another person. This is the power of intuition.
Our intuition is deeply tied to our emotions. Emotions are how our bodies make physical judgments about the world around us—wonder, grief, anger, love, excitement, disgust. Hormones released in our bodies correspond to judgments about the world: is the world good or bad, beautiful or ugly.
Christian growth and maturity can only come by hearing things I don’t like.
Intuition and emotion are important for us to understand in our generation because we live in an age of emotivism. Emotivism has been described by numerous philosophers and historians (Alistair MacIntyr and Carl Trueman, for example), and many people trace it back to the philosopher Rousseau and the romantic poets of the 19th century. Emotivism has put a tremendous emphasis on the “feels.” Counselors have trained us to trust our own emotions more and to listen to our bodies.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE?
It is true that the Bible clearly sees the importance of the emotional component to being human; and, especially as cerebral Presbyterians, we could likely do well to be more emotional. The whole array of emotions is displayed in the Psalms, and in the Gospels we read about Jesus weeping and being angry and having joy. Emotion and intuition are crucial aspects of the Christian life.
However, many scientists have pointed out that intuition, while very powerful, can be amazingly wrong (see, for example, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman). A human mind synthesizes not only our sensory data, but also all of our memories, experiences, and what we know about God and his word and other knowledge. Though we might make incredible connections, we will also make some incredible errors. Intuition should be used but not always trusted.
Another academic who has written about this topic is Jonathan Haidt. In The Righteous Mind, Haidt talks about how dominant human intuition and emotion are in guiding our decision-making. He says that using emotions to make decisions is like a man riding an elephant—the emotions are really the ones in charge.
We need to have in mind a sort of “pecking order” of authority, or sources we trust more than our intuition.
Part of the reason this is important to understand in the Christian life is because God is going to say and do many things that will not sit right with us. This should absolutely be expected. If God never did anything that surprised or upset us, or never went against our intuition, it would mean that we are basically God and have his perfect wisdom.
We should expect that there will be countless times in our spiritual journey when we will say, “I never could have seen myself believing this thing, but now I see it is true.” That is not just the beginning of the Christian life—that is all of it.
PROGRESS RARELY FEELS GOOD
C.S. Lewis, in an address he once made to Anglican priests, made a profound observation about the importance of obscure or repulsive ideas in the life of a Christian. The point applies to all of us, not just pastors or priests:
Secondly, this scrupulous care to preserve the Christian message as something distinct from one’s own ideas, has one very good effect upon the apologist himself. It forces him, again and again, to face up to those elements in original Christianity which he personally finds obscure or repulsive.
Notice how Lewis acknowledges that we will all, at various times, find aspects of the Christian message repulsive. He is talking about our intuition. We will all find things that emotionally or intuitively do not sit right with us. And Lewis is insisting that we have to own those aspects of Christianity and not dismiss them. He goes on:
He is saved from the temptation to skip or slur or ignore what he finds disagreeable. And the man who yields to that temptation will, of course, never progress in Christian knowledge. For obviously the doctrines which one finds easy are the doctrines which give Christian sanction to truths you already knew. The new truth which you do not know and which you need must, in the very nature of things, be hidden precisely in the doctrines you least like and least understand.
There is always an immense temptation to see strange parts of the Bible as reason to discredit it. In the past century, people have been critical of the Bible’s understanding of miracles, creation, sex, women, hell, slaves, warfare, excommunication, authority, money, marriage, judgment—the list goes on and on. Lewis says that where my intuition is most upset is precisely where there is the possibility of growth and maturity. If we trust our intuition instead of God’s word, we will simply not grow or learn. Period. He compares our spiritual development to progress in scientific knowledge:
It is just the same here as in science. The phenomenon which is troublesome, which doesn’t fit in with the current scientific theories, is the phenomenon which compels reconsideration and thus leads to new knowledge. Science progresses because scientists, instead of running away from such troublesome phenomena or hushing them up, are constantly seeking them out. In the same way, there will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or repellent doctrines. A ‘liberal’ Christianity which considers itself free to alter the Faith whenever the Faith looks perplexing or repellent must be completely stagnant. Progress is made only into a resisting material. (Lewis, C.S., God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperOne, 1994), 88–89)
That last line should describe much of our experience at church: “Progress is made only into a resisting material.” Our God and his word are the resisting material into which we make progress. We should find God and his word resisting our intuitions, making us uncomfortable, upsetting our intuition. Christian growth and maturity can only come by hearing things I don’t like.
Some Caveats
This doesn’t mean that all repellant ideas are automatically true. An idea might be repellant because it is wrong. How can I know if my intuition is not to be trusted? Some might go further to ask, “If you are telling me not to trust my own intuition, isn’t that gaslighting? Making me feel crazy for feeling certain ways? Won’t I begin to question my whole sense of reality?”
I am not saying we should never listen to our emotions or intuition, but I am saying that we should by no means make them our supreme authority. We need to have in mind a sort of “pecking order” of authority, or sources we trust more than our intuition. Of course, the Bible is the highest authority. We must never dismiss parts of the Bible simply because they don’t sit well with us. Next are the historic doctrines of the church. Saints and councils of ages past, though flawed, are nevertheless generally far more reliable than our individual intuition. The same is true of pastors, elders, and deacons in the present. Mature Christians in our lives, people whose walk is filled with the fruit of the Spirit and who are knowledgeable about the Scriptures, should often be trusted above our intuition. All of these should help us mold our emotions to love what God loves in his word.
C.S. Lewis has been such a person for me. One of the things I love most about Lewis is how he always helps me to not only accept the “repellent” doctrines, but even more to love them. He leads me past the first impression of a doctrine to show me its goodness. In fact, one goal of my ministry has been to imitate Lewis in this way. I never want to tell people, “Well, you don’t like this doctrine? Too bad, you gotta eat it even if it tastes bad!” Instead, I’ve wanted to say, “I know your intuition hates this—but let me show you why it is so immensely good, and why you should praise God that his word says this.” God is true, beautiful, and good, and so everything he says and does is true, beautiful, and good. With that conviction, we press on past first impressions to discover the wisdom and goodness of God's word.
Our response to emotivism is not to shut down emotions and despise them— “stop being so emotional!”—but to subject them to scrutiny rather than automatically trusting them. Our emotions and intuition are not God. They are flawed, imprecise, and often self-serving. “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jer. 17:9). Instead of obeying our emotions, we can listen to them. In particular we should think, “What I am hearing from the Bible or from godly people in my life is upsetting me—maybe this is an area in which I need to grow.”
May we be a church that always walks straight into the “troublesome phenomena,” trusting that God and his word are always good, true, just, and loving. When things don’t sit right, we don’t have to grab onto our emotions as the one sure guide. We grab onto Christ and God’s word with the help and counsel of God’s people. And as we progress into that resisting substance, may Jesus teach us more and more to behold the wonder and goodness of who he is.
