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It was nearly 30 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Six-year-old Hopson was sitting in a tiny ramshackle house sitting on several acres in sweltering Amory, Mississippi. If I could transport you there, you would look around at that old house and you would feel like you had walked into a living time capsule. My great grandmother, known affectionately as Baba, had cooked breakfast for me and my family.

Now I know that breakfast at Baba’s doesn’t mean anything to you, but to my family this was an event loaded with memories. There was the inescapable musty smell of mildew that assaulted the senses once you walked through the back door. There was the green and orange floral linoleum floors, the wood paneled cabinets, and the yellow appliances that screamed of the 1970s. There was a half dozen stray cats that called this place home. And there was Baba.

Thelma Creely, was born in 1908. She survived the Great Depression and two world wars. To say she was thrifty was an understatement. In her eyes to waste a bite of food was a cardinal sin. So when you had breakfast at Baba’s, you were commanded to come hungry. And boy did we eat. If a deep-fried Mississippi girl like my great-grandmother knew how to do anything, it was how to cook. Biscuits and gravy, sausage, hash browns, eggs, and plenty of bacon, all smothered in enough butter to make Paula Deen blush.

I still remember my parents warning me and my siblings before we pulled into her driveway. You better eat everything she gives you. Everything. But there’s a trick to breakfast at Baba’s. If you ate everything too quickly, she would assume you liked it so much that you wanted more. So, without asking, she would serve up another helping on your plate. And then, after eating all you could eat, if there was any food leftover, she would pinch your belly and tell you “there’s still room in there! You better still be hungry!” before serving you another helping.

Breakfast at Baba’s was somehow amazing and awful at the same time. It was amazing because the food really was delicious, but it was awful because no matter how much you ate it was never enough. And because for some reason my great-grandmother didn’t understand that it is unreasonable for one person to command another to be hungry.

At least under normal circumstances. But God is not normal. God often does what seems unreasonable to us because He is no ordinary person. He sometimes demands desire.

Perhaps what you’ve just read seems strange and new to you. You’ve never heard anything like this before. You’re familiar and comfortable with God’s commands to act a certain way. Don’t lie, tell the truth. Don’t steal, work hard and give. Don’t murder, defend life and care for the vulnerable. These sorts of commands are easy for us to swallow (even if they’re sometimes hard for us to obey), but what we’re talking about now may not seem right to you. Does God really command me to feel? Isn’t hunger a feeling? How can you command a person to feel a certain way?

In their book True Feelings, Carolyn Mahaney and her daughter Nicole Whitacre write “Throughout the Bible, God tells us to obey with our emotions. Looking for emotional commands in Scripture is a bit like an egg hunt for toddlers where the eggs are all low to the ground and plainly visible. Once you start looking, you see them everywhere.”[i]

Here is a tiny sampling of God’s commands that we feel:

  • Psalm 32:11—Be glad in the LORD, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!
  • Psalm 37:4a—Delight yourself in the LORD
  • Psalm 97:10a—O you who love the LORD, hate evil!
  • Romans 12:15—Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
  • 1 Peter 2:2—Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk

 

So here’s a challenge for you as you study God’s Word this week: look for God’s commands to feel. Test what I’ve written here. Does God truly demand that we desire? I think you’ll find not only that He does, but that these commands are profoundly good for us. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

 

[i] Carolyn Mahaney and Nicole Whitacre, True Feelings: God’s Gracious and Glorious Purpose for Our Emotions (Wheaton: Crossway, 2017), 60–61.