- by Carrie Shaw
- on July 28, 2025
A video I saw recently on social media – I’ll get to that in a bit – got me thinking about feelings, faith built on feelings, and the distorted framework we can inadvertently create when we allow experience to trump Scripture.
But first, what are feelings?
We all have them, right? Anger, sadness, happiness, surprise…
There are, in fact, seven basic feelings that all humans share in common; disgust, contempt, and fear make up the remaining three.
Generated by our thoughts, feelings are described as “the perception of events within the body, closely related to emotion.” They’re often true for us, but they’re not necessarily reflective of truth.
Feelings Are Signposts
Feelings are valid and important – signposts to our inner world that we should acknowledge and understand. Yet we must also handle them with caution.
Humans are incredibly complex creatures, and not all feelings arise from a rational, logical, or even conscious place.
Feelings are mostly subjective, shaped by our individual experiences, opinions, subconscious influences, and sometimes instincts, but they are not necessarily grounded in reality. They can be objective, that is, based solely on facts and not influenced or affected by our emotions, but maintaining objectivity, in reality, is often difficult, if not impossible to do. There’s always an element of emotion involved in our thinking and decision-making, whether we like to admit it or not.
So, are feelings bad?
Well, no. God created us with the ability to feel – and we are intricately emotional creatures – but it’s how we use them and within what framework we allow them to govern our actions and decisions that makes the difference.
Relying on feelings alone when making decisions or taking action can often be disastrous.
Feelings Need A Framework
The impetus for the writing of this article was a video I recently watched online. A “gay Christian”* was discussing the Holy Spirit and the impact she believes the Spirit has had on her life.
She commented that the time she felt most filled with the Holy Spirit was when she kissed a woman: that was when she was filled with peace and joy. She says, “that [the joy and peace of the Holy Spirit] is a personal experience to the beautiful fruit of the Spirit of God being in my relationship with my wife and children.”
When pressed on her experience and asked if she could link the fruit back to Scripture, she responded that “if the person was going to put Scripture above her personal experience, they were making the Bible an idol.”
Joy and peace are certainly a fruit of the Spirit, but they are developed as a result of living in step with the Holy Spirit. The production of the fruit of the Spirit is rooted in God’s presence, aligned with His character, and connected to things that are good, pure, and loving.
A sense of happiness, pleasure, or excitement is also a human emotion, but it is usually circumstantial and often self-focused. Unlike the Spirit’s joy, this ‘false joy’ doesn’t endure hardship and is often temporary.
Just because we “feel something”, even something we might describe as ‘joy’ or ‘peace’, doesn’t mean we are walking in truth or aligned with God’s will.
Feelings are signposts, but which map are we using to read and interpret them?
Feelings need a framework, and without the map of God’s Word, our emotions can send us in the wrong direction. With Scripture as our guide, those signposts can help lead us toward what is good, true, and life-giving.
Scripture Properly Interprets Our Feelings
Scripture provides the lens through which we interpret our feelings and, especially in relation to the Holy Spirit, enables us to discern the kind of fruit we should expect from the Spirit’s indwelling presence.
That’s not to say that experiences are invalid, or that a person cannot have a genuine encounter with God before reading His Word.
Many people are led to repentance and experience the kindness of God long before they truly know Him. Yet it is only when Scripture is opened and read that those experiences are rightly framed and understood. What is false begins to fall away, and what is true puts down roots and flourishes.
Weighing and filtering our thoughts and feelings through the truth of God’s Word, rather than letting emotions or instincts be the final authority, is sound Christian practice, as it enables Scripture to interpret and moderate not only how we feel but also how we should act.
The Spirit and The Blood (of Jesus) Agree
On two counts, the woman in the video is dangerously misled and is misleading others.
First, she claims that her feelings and experiences, without being anchored to the authority of Scripture, are a reliable indicator of truth.
Second, when gently challenged to support her conclusions from the Bible, she asserts that Scripture cannot be placed above “her personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”
She sets up a false dichotomy – as if Jesus might lead us in a direction where Scripture has not spoken, or even contrary to it. Yet the same Spirit who unites us to Christ is the One who breathed out the Scriptures, and He will never contradict Himself.
The Holy Spirit will never lead us to a decision that Jesus Christ does not approve, nor to one that contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture. One of the Spirit’s roles is to “guide us into all truth” (John 16:13), and that truth is anchored in the person and character of Jesus Christ, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
So while experiences are valid and feelings inform us of emotional realities within us, they are not infallible guides. They must be tested and interpreted in the light of God’s Word, which reveals what is true and leads us in the way that honours Him.
Five Ways To Avoid A Feelings-Based Faith:
1. Be aware that your default setting is not aligned with God’s will
Scripture describes the human heart as desperately sick and deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9). By nature, we do not think like God or act like God.
Our feelings, while real, are unreliable without God’s truth to test and guide them, because they are bent by sin and shaped by the brokenness of the world.
Paul the Apostle acknowledged that even as a follower of Christ, there was a constant war within him, a struggle between doing what he knew was right and resisting what he knew was wrong.
Without God’s truth to guide us, our moral compass remains hopelessly misaligned. Only by submitting our thoughts and feelings to the light of Scripture can we walk in the way that pleases Him (Romans 7:15–25).
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” | Psalm 119:105
2. Familiarise yourself with God’s truth
Biblical illiteracy is at an all-time high, and is still declining.
Yet the Bible is the primary source of wisdom, guidance, and instruction for a follower of Christ, and it stands as the final authority over a believer’s life.
How can we begin to know God’s will for our lives, His character, and His moral standard if we are not reading and absorbing His Word? Scripture is God’s self-revelation; without it, we are left to guess at who He is and what He desires.
Feelings-only based faith often distorts this, elevating personal experience above Scripture. It allows feelings – subjective and shifting – to dictate what Scripture says, or worse, to keep Scripture from informing us at all.
Instead of leading with feelings, immerse yourself in God’s truth found in the pages of Scripture, and allow your emotions to be weighed and filtered through the truths it reveals.
“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.” | Philippians 4:8
3. Invite God into your decision-making through prayer
Prayer keeps us from rushing ahead on the strength of our emotions alone. It allows space and time for both Scripture to speak to us, the Holy Spirit to convict us, and for God’s wisdom to inform our decisions (Psalm 139:23-24).
When we bring our feelings before God in prayer, we open ourselves to His correction, His confirmation, or His redirection. Over time, this habit trains us to depend on Him rather than on fluctuating emotions.
It also opens us up to the help of the Holy Spirit, inviting God’s presence to calm the storms of emotion and bring stillness to the internal chaos we might be experiencing. What often seems an impossible situation or an overwhelming emotion suddenly becomes one we can overcome, or a way that is made clear where before there was no way.
“Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.” | Psalm 62:8
4. Let Scripture interpret your experiences, not the other way around
Experiences are valid, and feelings can be powerful indicators of what is happening in our inner world.
But without the “map” of God’s Word, those cues can easily be misinterpreted or misapplied, leading us in the wrong direction.
The Holy Spirit will never guide you in a way that contradicts Jesus Christ or the truth of Scripture (John 14:6; John 16:13). When we allow our experiences to be filtered through the lens of Scripture and framed by what is good and life-giving, it will become clear to us what is from God and what is not.
It doesn’t mean making the right decision will always be easy or moderating difficult emotions won’t sometimes be struggle, but the Holy Spirit doesn’t just convict and lead us in all truth – we are also comforted and helped in our time of need.
“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” | Romans 8:26-27
5. Test everything by the fruit it produces
Jesus taught that a tree is known by its fruit (Matthew 7:16–20).
This analogy of the tree and its fruit teaches us that discernment is a right and proper part of Christian life. It is an entirely reasonable expectation that someone who has been born again “through God’s everlasting Word that can’t be destroyed” (1 Peter 1:23) will produce fruit in keeping with that transformed and renewed life.
In fact, James’ epistle to the church (James 2:14-26) makes it clear that an unfruitful Christian is an unconverted Christian – a contradiction in terms.
Christians produce fruit, and that fruit is the result of the Holy Spirit’s renewing and regenerating work. As such, it produces the character of Christ in a person, seen in the attributes that Galatians describes – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
The Holy Spirit will never produce attitudes and actions that contradict God’s character. Anger, malice, sexual immorality, idolatry, jealousy, drunkenness – these are “works of the flesh”, behaviours that stem from a self-centred nature, resistant to and unchanged by the Spirit’s influence.
When our inner life is shaped by God’s truth, the fruit will bear witness to the source. And we will be able to see this fruit in other believers’ lives too. God’s truth provides moral clarity and an obvious distinction between those things that are from God and those that are contrary to His will.
It enables us, for example, to state, with complete clarity, that the woman in the video – who is actively pursuing a lifestyle contrary to God’s design for humanity – is not experiencing the fruit of the Spirit. Instead, she is being influenced by the spirit of antichrist, which produces self-deceived emotions that mimic joy but are rooted in falsehood.
True spiritual fruit is not just an emotional state – it reflects Christlike character that aligns with God’s commands.
“Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” | Galatians 5:19-23
Faith Built On The Rock
Faith that is built on feelings alone will eventually falter. It’s like the house in the parable of the man who built on sand, only to have it collapse and be swept away when the storm hit (Matthew 7:24-27).
Emotions shift, experiences fade, and personal perspectives can be easily swayed by sin or the world around us.
But the truth of God’s Word stands firm forever (Isaiah 40:8). The Spirit of God never leads apart from or against the Word of God, and the fruit He produces will always reflect the character of Christ (Galatians 5:22-23).
Faith built upon the character and person of Jesus – the Rock of Ages, revealed in the Scriptures – will be buffeted by storms, yet its foundation is unshakable. As Jesus said, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock” (Matthew 7:24 – 25).
So let your heart feel deeply – faith shouldn’t be merely a dry and logical collection of facts alone – but let your feet be planted firmly on the unchanging foundation of Scripture.
Test every thought, weigh every feeling, and filter every experience through the truth God has given us. In doing so, you will not only guard yourself from deception and from a shallow faith that falters under pressure, but you will also grow in faith that endures, matures, and brings glory to the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.
