What if becoming more like Jesus doesn’t mean becoming less emotional—but becoming more whole? We explore the emotional life of Jesus and what His grief, compassion, anger, exhaustion, and surrender teach us about emotional maturity for men.
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iHeartRadio What does emotional maturity actually look like?
As men, we can be good at describing everything happening around us—our work, responsibilities, problems, and what needs to get done—while struggling to recognize and describe what is happening inside of us.
But what if emotional maturity isn’t about becoming a man who feels less? What if it’s about becoming a man who knows what to do with what he feels?
In this episode of The Prodigal Journey, we look at the life of Jesus as the ultimate example of what it means to be fully human and fully surrendered to God. Jesus experienced grief, compassion, anger, exhaustion, fear, and anguish. He never allowed His emotions to become His master, but He also never treated them as irrelevant.
From Jesus weeping with those who were grieving to His anger in Mark 3, His need for rest, and His anguish in Gethsemane, we see a different picture of strength and maturity.
Jesus shows us that emotional maturity isn’t emotional denial, emotional suppression, or being ruled by our feelings. It’s learning to notice what is happening inside us, bring it honestly before God, and allow surrender to shape how we respond.
For men especially, this challenges the idea that strength means keeping everything together, never showing emotion, working harder, and carrying more. Becoming more like Jesus may actually mean becoming more whole.
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In this episode, we explore:
- Why feelings aren’t facts—but they are information
- What Jesus teaches us through His compassion, grief, anger, and exhaustion
- What Gethsemane teaches us about emotions, suffering, and obedience
- Why feeling the weight of obedience doesn’t mean your faith is weak
- How to bring your inner life honestly before God
- Why men often confuse strength with emotional distance
- What it means to become fully human and fully surrendered
- How Jesus models a life where emotion and faithfulness belong together
The goal isn’t to become someone who never feels. It’s to become someone who can feel deeply, tell the truth about what they’re experiencing, bring it before God, and still choose faithfulness.
Awareness isn’t the destination. Awareness is the doorway to surrender.
This is part of our series on formation and what it means to be formed into the likeness of Christ.
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Chapters:
00:00 — What Does Emotional Maturity Look Like?
03:40 — Where Do Our Emotions Belong?
08:25 — Jesus Was Fully Human and Emotionally Present
13:17 — Jesus, Rest, and the Limits of Being Human
15:21 — Gethsemane: When Obedience Is Costly
20:52 — What Emotional Maturity Actually Looks Like
22:44 — Why Men Confuse Strength With Emotional Distance
29:48 — Becoming More Like Jesus
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Next Episode:
We will look at The Fruit You Can’t Fake.
If Christ is truly forming us from the inside out, eventually that formation becomes visible. In the next episode, we’ll ok at what grows out of the life being formed in us - and why the fruit of our lives reveals more than we may realize.
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Thank you for supporting conversations about Faith. Struggle. Becoming.
If this conversation encouraged you, you can support the podcast here:
00:00 - What Does Emotional Maturity Look Like?
03:40 - Where Do Our Emotions Belong?
08:25 - Jesus Was Fully Human and Emotionally Present
13:17 - Jesus, Rest, and the Limits of Being Human
15:21 - Gethsemane: When Obedience Is Costly
20:52 - What Emotional Maturity Actually Looks Like
22:44 - Why Men Confuse Strength With Emotional Distance
29:48 - Becoming More Like Jesus
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Welcome to another episode of the Prodigal Journey. We are continuing in our series on formation,
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specifically geared towards the life of men. But I just want to encourage you, if you're
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a lady watching or listening, that this can be very helpful in your life as well. Regardless
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if you're married or dating or just the men in your family, these things we're talking
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through can be really helpful. and just understanding more about the world of men and what it means
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to be formed as a man. So the central question of this episode as we look at the life of Jesus
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is what does emotional maturity look like? And the reason I think this is important is
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because Jesus never ignored his emotions, but he was also never ruled by them. And he was
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able to bring his whole inner life into relationship with the Father. But before we get into the
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example of the life of Jesus, I want to just kind of go back and recap a little bit from
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the previous episode and set the stage for where we've been coming from in the last episode.
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But we talked about something I think that a lot of us as men struggle with because we
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are very good at being able to describe what's happening around us. And we can tell you about
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our work, our responsibilities. the problems that need solved, the things that need to get
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done, but we can really struggle to describe what's happening inside of us as men. In last
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episode, we really talked about the importance of just learning to notice our inner world
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because one of the things I talked about is that we cannot surrender to God what we refuse
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to acknowledge, but that raises another question for us. What do we actually do with what we
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find when we start paying attention to our inner world as men? Because like I emphasized before,
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awareness is important, but awareness is not the destination. It's the doorway for us to
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walk through and surrender those things to God. And simply knowing what we're feeling doesn't
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automatically make us emotionally mature. So if we're going to talk about being formed into
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the likeness of Christ, we really need a picture of what that actually looks like. And for me,
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that brings us to the life of Jesus. And I think that's where we need to look, not at other
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men, which are good to have examples of, but we really need to look at the life of Jesus
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as our example on formation as men. You know, very Early on in my journey, I was always given
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this analogy by different people about the train ride. And maybe you've been exposed to this
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analogy before, but growing up, I was exposed to this analogy. And it's the idea that our
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life is like a train and on this train, truth is the engine. Faith follows in another car.
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And then our emotions are meant to be the caboose of this train. And the point was simple in
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this illustration. And the point was being made that we should not let our emotions drive
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the train. And I still believe that there's something really important in that illustration.
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Our emotions shouldn't be in control of our lives. But just because I feel, or just because
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I feel something, doesn't mean it's true or just because I'm angry doesn't mean I should
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act out in anger. And just because I'm afraid doesn't mean I should make decisions based
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on fear because our feelings don't get to determine what is true or what is faithful. But you know,
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the older I've gotten, the more I've really wondered about this. And sometimes I fear
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that that illustration of our emotions being the caboose was an analogy that was taken too
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far. Because what happens if we start believing that because our emotions shouldn't lead us,
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that they shouldn't really have a place at all? And that's my fear with the way that analogy
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breaks down. But maybe, you know, the more I think about it, maybe emotions don't necessarily
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belong in the driver's seat, and maybe they don't necessarily belong in the caboose either.
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If we look at it more closely, maybe our emotions are the passengers on the train. And there's
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something we're meant to notice. You know, when you think of passengers on the train, they
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give feedback about that journey, about the ride they're on on that train, the food or,
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you know, the people they interact with and their passengers on a train give feedback about
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the train ride. And I feel like that's maybe a little bit closer. to how this analogy should
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be presented, our emotions as passengers on the train and something we're meant to notice,
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something we're meant to pay attention to, not because our emotions are always right, but
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because they're telling us something about what is happening inside us. You know, it makes
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me think of the fact that feeling isn't the same as being ruled. I think this is where
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we can get confused sometimes because we often see this played out in two extremes. You know,
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when you think about it, on one side, we can suppress everything. You know, we could tell
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ourselves, I'm fine. It doesn't matter. I just need to get over it. Feelings aren't facts.
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Now, sometimes those statements are true, but if that's all we ever learn to do, we can become
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disconnected from ourselves. So we see that extreme. And then on the other side, we can
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assume that because something feels real, that it must be true. Some examples of that might
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be because I'm angry, somebody must have wronged me. Or because I'm afraid, something must be
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dangerous. Because I feel rejected, someone must be rejecting me. maybe because I feel
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hurt, someone must have intended to hurt me. But that's another extreme on the other side
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of the pendulum swing, and that's not maturity either. Now, to say that and explain the two
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extremes, also doesn't mean our emotions aren't real because our emotions are real, but they
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aren't always reliable interpreters of our reality. So if they're not reliable interpreters of
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a reality, what are we to do with them? And that's the question it leaves us with. We can't
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suppress them and we don't surrender authority to them. We have to bring them before God.
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And that's one of the things we talked about last episode, bringing those things before
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God and processing them. And that's where Jesus gives us something that we desperately need.
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Jesus was not emotionally disconnected. And we're going to look at some examples of that.
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You know, when I look at Jesus in the Gospels, I don't see someone who became more spiritual
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by becoming less human. I see someone who was fully human and his inner life and his outward
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life were not disconnected. What was happening inside him mattered. and what happened inside
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him often shaped how he responded to the people and circumstances around him. You know, let's,
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if you take the story of Lazarus, for instance, and you look at this story, Jesus knows what's
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coming. He knows that Lazarus is gonna be raised. And yet, when he sees Mary weeping and he sees
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the people around her grieving, Jesus weeps with them. He doesn't try to explain their
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grief away because he knows what's coming. He doesn't invalidate their emotions. He doesn't
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say, I know how this ends, so we shouldn't feel this way. No, he weeps with them because
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it affected him deeply. And I think there's something important there. Knowing the truth
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doesn't require emotional denial. know, Jesus can know what God is going to do and still
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genuinely grieve what is happening right now in that moment. Those things are not contradictory.
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And oftentimes we try to separate them and make them contradictory. Contradictory. So that
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makes me think about Jesus and his compassion. Jesus had compassion that moves. We see something
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similar in the way he responds to people. You know, over and over in the gospels, they describe
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Jesus as having compassion. He sees people who are hurting, who are lost, who are sick, people
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who are hungry and burdened, and he doesn't remain emotionally detached from them. He moves
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towards them. His compassion moves Him toward them. And that's important because emotions
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aren't always obstacles to obedience. Sometimes those emotions help us see what matters. Our
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compassion, our grief, our love, those aren't weaknesses. Jesus' emotional life wasn't something
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He had to overcome in order to move towards more holiness or become more holy. His emotional
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life was part of his humanity and he lived that humanity in complete dependence upon the Father.
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Not only do we see Jesus's examples of compassion, but we also see in scripture examples of Jesus's
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anger, but we see those examples as anger without cruelty. You know, Jesus in Mark 3, we see
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a good example where he encounters a man with a withered hand while people around him are
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scrutinizing him and are more concerned about whether he will heal on the Sabbath. than they
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are concerned about the suffering of the man standing in front of them. And Mark tells us
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Jesus looked at them with anger and he was saddened by their hard hearts. And I think that's absolutely
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fascinating because we see here that anger and grief are present at the same time in this
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moment. Yet Jesus doesn't allow his anger to become cruelty. He doesn't lash out. He doesn't
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humiliate them. He doesn't use his anger as permission to sin, but he sees something that
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is wrong and he feels something about what is wrong. Yet he responds faithfully, but he's
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still saddened by their hardened hearts. And that gives us another important distinction.
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An emotion can reveal what matters to us without telling us exactly what to do about it. Again,
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an emotion can reveal what matters to us without revealing exactly what to do about it. Let
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me give you an example of what this looks like. You know, my anger might reveal that something
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matters to me, but that anger doesn't automatically tell me what a faithful faithful response looks
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like. And that's where surrender comes in. You know, we also can see. what this formation
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looks like in the life of Jesus. When we think about Jesus being tired, there's another part
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of, this is another part of Jesus's humanity that we can easily overlook because Jesus got
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tired. Jesus often withdrew from the crowds to rest and to sleep and to be refreshed. And
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he made space to pray and withdraw from those crowds. He didn't treat his physical and emotional
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limits as inconveniences that had to be conquered, but he lived within the limitations of this
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human body that he came in. And that matters because sometimes we talk about formation as
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though becoming more like Jesus means, you know, becoming more capable of carrying more and
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more, more responsibility, more work, more ministry, more sacrifice. Often as men, we're told that
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that's the true reflection of a man. Carry more responsibility, work more, make more money
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to provide for your family, sacrifice more of your family to make that money and work.
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And, you know, the phrase we often heard growing up was, just pick yourself up by your bootstraps,
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stop complaining, do more, don't show emotion, but... That reflects nothing of the life of
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Jesus. And Jesus did not model endless output for us. He knew when to withdraw. He knew when
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to be alone with the Father. And that's why it's so important to look at his life, because
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he knew that dependence was not a weakness. You know, he was fully human and fully surrendered.
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Those things were never in conflict in his life, in his example to us while he was on when he
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was during his earthly ministry.
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There's another example I also want to look at, and that's in Gethsemane, where we see
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this fleshed out even more, when we see that obedience is still costly. And we see this
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reflected in his life because when we come to Gethsemane, I think this is where the whole
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picture starts to come together, because Jesus knows exactly where his obedience is leading
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him. You know, he has already told his disciples that he's going to go to Jerusalem, and Jesus
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knows that suffering and death are ahead. This isn't just a moment when Jesus is suddenly
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reconsidering His mission, because that is what He came for in this earthly body that He was
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living in. He came for this very mission. But we need to make the distinction that knowing
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what is coming, Jesus... Knowing what is coming for him does not make the suffering emotionally
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insignificant. As Jesus enters Gethsemane, we see something remarkable. He allows the full
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weight of what is ahead to be felt. You know, he tells his disciples that his soul is deeply
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troubled. He falls to the ground and prays. And in that passage, he prays, you know, everything,
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Lord, is possible for you. Please take this cup of suffering away from me. And when we
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think of that prayer, the cup isn't simply a way of saying, I don't want to die. I don't
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want this. You know, throughout scripture, the imagery of the cup can represent suffering
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and judgment. So Jesus is here standing at the threshold of suffering. He came to endure.
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And he honestly brings that anguish before the Father. These things are not separate. They
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are together. He's not pretending that this doesn't hurt. And he's not trying to manufacture
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some emotionless acceptance of what is to come. He's essentially saying, Father, if there is
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another way, let this suffering pass from me. Yet in the same breath, he says, not what I
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will, but your will. So he brings all those things together into acceptance for the mission
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he came for. And that's important to remember in this example of all those things coming
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together and not being separate of each other. And that's what makes Gethsemane so powerful.
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He's not choosing between obedience and emotion. He's experiencing the full weight of what obedience
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will cost him while still willingly surrendering himself to the Father's will. And we see that
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he can genuinely say, this suffering, this is incredibly difficult. If there's another
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way, let it be, because this is difficult. I know what's to come. But at the same time,
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he's saying, I trust you. I trust my father. That's not rebellion. That is surrender. That
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is the emotions and the obedience coming into full surrender of what the Father had in the
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mission that He came for in this earthly body. And I think that's an important distinction
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for us. Sometimes we assume that if we know what God wants us to do, that we just shouldn't
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even struggle with it. Some examples, you know, if we're anxious about it, we tell ourselves
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or others tell us, if you're anxious, maybe your faith isn't strong enough. Maybe you don't
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have enough faith. Or when we pray and Jesus doesn't answer, you know, we've often heard
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that phrase, you don't have enough faith, your faith isn't strong enough. Maybe if we're grieving
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something, you know, maybe we're not trusting God enough. Or if we're afraid of obedience
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or what obedience will cost us, that maybe somehow that means we're failing. But Jesus shows
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us something different. Faithfulness doesn't require us to stop feeling the weight of what
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obedience costs. Jesus didn't need to convince himself that the cross was easy before he could
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obey.
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He didn't need to deny his anguish in order to surrender. He brought his anguish to the
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Father, and then he surrendered his will. And that example, all those examples is what a
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human, fully surrendered life can look like. And he's the perfect example. It's not the
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absence of emotion. It's not being controlled by our emotion. but bringing what is happening
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inside of us, bringing it honestly before God and allowing surrender to shape what we will
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do with it. It's having our hands open and bringing that before God. So what does emotional maturity
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actually look like? And we've seen some of these examples. You know, maybe emotional maturity
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isn't becoming someone who doesn't feel deeply. Maybe it's becoming someone who knows what
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to do with what they feel. Someone who can say, you know, I'm angry, but then ask, why am I
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angry? It's someone who can say, I'm afraid, but ask, what am I actually afraid of? Or they
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can say, I'm hurt, but what is this hurt actually revealing? Or I'm disappointed, but it's asking,
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what expectations am I carrying? Or maybe you're saying I'm overwhelmed, but you need to ask,
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what am I trying to carry that God never asked me to carry alone? And when we think about
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those examples, you know, the goal isn't to interrogate and ask questions about every emotion
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until we become obsessed with ourselves. The goal is simply to become honest enough to bring
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our whole inner life before God and surrender. And as we said before, We need to do that because
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feelings aren't facts, but they are information. They're passengers on the train telling us
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about our experience of the train ride. They can reveal what we're experiencing and what
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matters to us. You know, our emotions can also expose places where fear, pride, grief, shame,
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or unmet expectations may be shaping us. And when we take those things and bring them before
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God, He can begin to transform not only what we do, but the kind of person that we are becoming.
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So what exactly does this mean for men specifically? I think this is especially important for us
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as men because many of us were taught to be strong and strength is good. But I fear that
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somewhere along the way, Strength can become confused with emotional distance. We can learn
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that being a good man means keeping everything together, being dependable, being productive,
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being the one that everyone else can lean on. And those things can all be good things. But
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the question I would ask is what happens when the man that everyone else can lean on doesn't
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know how to acknowledge what's happening inside him. How reliable does that man become to be
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someone people can lean on if he cannot express those things inside of him and what's happening
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in his inner world? What happens when I'm fine just becomes a reflex? Or what happens when
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anger becomes the only emotion we're comfortable expressing? What happens when We know how to
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solve problems, but don't know how to sit with grief. Or what happens when we carry responsibility,
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but can't admit we're afraid? What kind of man are we becoming? Maybe becoming more like Jesus
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doesn't mean becoming less emotional and expressing less emotion. Maybe it means becoming more
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whole. You know, if that word emotions makes you a little nervous, Think of it in terms
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of becoming more whole as a man. Because a man who can say, I'm angry without making everyone
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around him responsible for that anger. It's a man who can say, I'm afraid without believing
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fear makes him weak. It's a man who can say, that really hurt me without turning that hurt
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into punishment for someone else. You know, and these were things that I've seen in the
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last eight or so years of my life with men I was surrounded by, men who have short fuses
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of anger and the littlest thing would make them angry. I've seen it play out in their families
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and the way they treat their families and the way they treated their employees for making
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mistakes and the littlest things would set them off. But they were considered to be men of
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God who were being shaped by the Word of God. And it left me feeling like we talked about
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in the first episode, it was men that I didn't want to become anything like because those
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weren't the examples I was seeing of Jesus. It's also a man who can say, I'm overwhelmed
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without immediately burying himself in work so he doesn't have to feel what he's feeling.
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Those examples are not examples of men of weakness. That is honesty. And we have a lack of honest
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men in our churches afraid to be honest, afraid to fully surrender that inner world to Jesus.
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and bring it to Him. And that's my burden for you. And that's my burden for myself as we
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continue to grow and be changed by the example of Jesus and what we see in His word. The honesty,
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bringing those things to Christ, that honesty creates a place for surrender. And again,
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I want to talk about what I'm still learning because I have not arrived. I'm passionate
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about this topic because I've seen it in my own life over the last decade and the ways
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I'm being shaped and formed. And this also connects back to something I shared in the last episode.
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how I've had to learn that sometimes I can hand emotions off to the people I love before I've
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actually taken the time to understand what I'm carrying myself. And I may have stressed this
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before, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't talk to my wife or my family about difficult things.
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I absolutely should. But along the way, I'm learning that there's a difference between
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inviting someone into what I'm carrying and handing them something that I haven't even
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taken before God myself. And that's the important distinction I just want to make again. Sometimes
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the most loving thing I can do isn't to say everything I'm feeling immediately. Sometimes
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it's to slow down, pay attention and ask God what is actually happening inside me. And then
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when I do bring it to someone else, I'm not simply handing them an emotional weight, that
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I haven't even begun to understand myself and to process myself. When I do that, I'm inviting
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them into something I've already begun to surrender. And I'm still learning that it's a tough journey.
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It's a tough thing to learn. But I think that's part of what formation looks like. It's not
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becoming a man who never feels. It's not becoming a man who is controlled by everything he feels.
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It's becoming a man who can feel deeply, tell the truth about what he's experiencing, and
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bring it before God and still choose faithfulness. That is what fully human, fully surrendered
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life looks like.
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When I look at the life of Jesus, I don't see a man who became less human in order to become
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more holy. We see the exact opposite. We see what it looks like for a fully human life to
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be fully surrendered to God. His compassion moved him toward people. When we talked about
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his grief, his grief didn't make him weak. We talked about Jesus' anger. His anger didn't
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become cruelty. We talked about his exhaustion and his rest and making space for that. Those
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things didn't make him less faithful. We talked about Gethsemane and how his anguish didn't
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prevent his obedience. He shows us through his example here on earth that his emotions were
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not his master. but neither were his emotions irrelevant. They were part of his humanity
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and his whole humanity belonged to the Father. And we saw that time and time again. So maybe
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that's part of what it means to be formed in the likeness of Christ, not to become someone
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who doesn't feel, someone who is ruled by their feelings and everything they're feeling, but
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to become someone whose inner life is increasingly increasingly brought into relationship with
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God. And maybe the question isn't simply, am I feeling? Maybe the deeper question for us
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to ask is, what is happening inside me and what would it look like to bring that honesty before
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God and surrender? Because as we've talked about on the last two episodes, awareness is not
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the destination. Awareness is the doorway that brings us into surrender to Jesus. And Jesus
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shows us that what surrender, He shows us what surrender can look like in a fully human life.
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And He experienced all of that when He came.
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If there's so much more we could dive into in the life of Jesus, examples and a deeper theology
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of some of that, but I hope this is helpful in just starting to get you to think about
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the life of Jesus, the example that He has set for us in our formation as men. And I also
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want to talk about the next episode and kind of set the stage for that because if Jesus
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is actually forming us from the inside out, eventually something begins to grow out of
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that formation and allowing him to form us. It's inevitable. And if you're not surrendering
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those things, there is still something that is going to grow, but it's not going to be
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the fruit that should be growing. So that's where this next episode is leading us. And
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when we think about something growing out of that life that's being formed, it's not just
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in what we believe or what we say, but in the way we live, in the way we treat people, in
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the way we use our influence that we've been given, in the way we respond to how we're being
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challenged. We see it in the way that... We see it in the way, in the kind of person we
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become when nobody is watching.
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We see it in the way we respond when we're challenged. We also see it in the kind of person we become
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when nobody is watching. So next episode, we're going to talk about the fruit that you can't
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fake. Because when you think about it, if Christ is truly forming us, eventually formation
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becomes visible. If we're being formed by our sin and our lack of humility, No matter if
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it's Jesus forming us or if it's something else that's not Jesus, formation will become visible.
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And those things will begin to flow out of our life and we cannot fake the fruit. We can't
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simply staple fruit to a tree that's dying and call it a healthy fruit. It's just fake. So
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I look forward to that episode, the fruit you can't fake. as the close out to this series
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on formation. again, if you're a lady watching this, you know, these things can be helpful
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in some things, principles for your own life, but also applying those things to the men in
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your life, whatever relationship that might look like. If you haven't already, go subscribe
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to the podcast at the prodigaljourney.com. You can find links there to subscribe through different.
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whether you listen on Apple, Spotify, wherever it is, you can listen to it or watch it right
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there on the website, which is what we prefer. You can just get all the content there and
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the back videos catalog, those are also linked on the website, videos.theprodigaljourney.com.
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You can find all those there. All right, thank you for listening and watching this episode.
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I truly am grateful for just the... the ways that you guys as a community have encouraged
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me. Oftentimes I have felt like quitting this completely, but it's during those times when
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I do get encouragement from listeners, whether it's through the newsletter or the podcast
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episodes. So make sure you continue to follow along with those. All right, we will see you
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on the next episode. Thanks for watching.
