Lesson 24 | Turn from hardened hearts

Note: Please allow yourself one hour to watch and reflect on this lesson.

Summary of key points

1. God is compassionate and tenderhearted. We are blessed when we follow His ways but we fall into calamity when we harden our hearts.
2. We can harden our hearts as a result of pride. Pride before people is different from pride before God. Pride before God focuses on relying on ourselves.
3. We can also harden our hearts as a coping mechanism against stressful emotions. 
4. Emotional suppression is the act of pushing our true emotions, thoughts, and memories out of our conscious awareness. We learn to hide, ignore, or suppress our emotions from childhood. 
5. Emotions can cause physical sensations. Some emotions are secondary to other primary emotions. Emotional maturity means that we need to be able to identify how we feel and know how to respond in a godly way, by choosing to respond with God’s love.
6. Subconscious emotional suppression can lead us to develop sinful patterns (with 3 real life examples).
7. There are different reasons why we may think that it’s better to suppress our emotions (with 6 examples).
8. Emotional suppression robs us of joy and quenches the Holy Spirit’s soft prompting in our hearts. It hinders our relationship with God and leads us to sinful responses.
9. We need to give our emotional burdens to God and be freed to full emotional health through the power of the Holy Spirit in us (with guided prayer).

Group reflection questions

1. What emotions have you rejected in the past?
2. How do you react when you feel those emotions?
3. What bad fruit comes out of emotional suppression?

Transcript

Download the PDF of the transcript here: Love the Lord lesson 24 lesson notes

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