Emotion, Desire, or Knowledge?

Here is a simple, rule-of-thumb guide for behavior: Ask yourself what you want people to do for you, then grab the initiative and do it for them. Add up God’s Law and Prophets and this is what you get. (Matthew 7:12)

Plato told us human behavior flows from three sources: desire, emotion, or knowledge. Thinking upon that one a bit, it is clear to see how behavior can flow from emotion, for many of our 'responses' in life are emotion based. Desire certainly plays a huge part in us either pursuing or avoiding certain things. Knowledge is learned and can take us a while to grasp, making emotion and desire seem a whole lot easier for us rely upon! Until we learn that all emotional responses may not produce the best behavior (actions), we might keep leaning upon emotion too much. Unless the desire we lean into is one Christ would have us pursue, we are spending a lot of time pursuing something that may not always work out the way we hoped it would. We need to be taught which desires are good, neutral, or bad. Equally important, we need to realize when emotion is not to be relied upon as our sole means of deciding to act. Actions based on knowledge tend to be a little better than those just taken without forethought or planning!

Behavior is frequently modeled and then emulated. When we see others behaving badly, does that behavior turn us away, or draw us in? Sometimes we are drawn in because we are way too dependent upon our emotions to guide our actions in those circumstances. It is a fine balance between knowing when emotion is guiding us to take 'reasonable' actions and when it is encouraging us to tread on thin ice! As the scripture implies, we need to have some guidance for our behavior. Perhaps that is why God gave us such a positive example in Christ. He also provided more than one example in scripture of godly men and women who struggled with desire and emotion, balancing it all within the realm of what they knew and trusted about God himself. This might just be key to obtaining that balance - getting the knowledge that comes from trusting God with what we don't understand fully and what seems to pull on our emotional strings all too easily. 

Grab the initiative and do it isn't license to do whatever feels good. It is instruction to consider what is good, proper, pure, and holy, then put it into action. We act upon what God teaches and see the goodness it produces in the lives of others. Jesus thought about others all the time. He fed the hungry, taught the unlearned, played with the children, and healed the sick. Maybe one of the best things we can is ask him to teach us how to live well, behaving in a manner that brings more goodness into a person's life. Just sayin!