Moods: If you read nothing else, please read this!!!

THE POWER OF THE “MOOD” - In modern times, feelings exercise almost total mastery over the individual. When people must decide what they want to do, feelings are all they have to go on. This is why contemporary Western life is peculiarly prone to gross immoralities and addictions. 

People are overwhelmed with decisions and can make those decisions only on the basis of feelings. As a result, people cannot distinguish between their feelings and their will, and they confuse feelings with reasons. They lack self-control, which is the steady capacity to direct yourself to accomplish what you have chosen or decided to do and be, even though you “don’t feel like it.” 

Without self-control, people drift through the days and years using addictive behavior to endure. Ideas and images foster and sustain feelings. Hopelessness and rejection live on images—often of a specific scene of unkindness, brutality, or abuse—that have become permanent fixtures within our mind, radiating negativity and leaving a background of deadly ideas that take over how we think. 

Such images cultivate moods, which pervade our selves and everything around us. Denial and repression of destructive feelings are not the answer. But feelings can be transformed by discipleship to Christ and the power of the gospel and the Spirit, through which the corresponding ideas and images are changed to positive ones. The proper course of action is to replace destructive feelings with others that are good or to subordinate them—anger and sexual desire, for example—in a way that makes them constructive. 

We do not try first to root out these destructive feelings, but they are eliminated as we make the first move: going toward love, joy, and peace, based on faith and hope in God. Then we experience feelings and moods associated with confidence, being acceptable, belonging, purposefulness, love, hope, joy, and peace. Being “accepted in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:6, KJV) is the humanly indispensable foundation for the reconstruction of all these positive feelings, moods, and their underlying conditions.