By Caro January 23, 2026
Our emotions can be hurt, our hearts broken, and we need to seek healing for this. But that doesn’t mean we can no longer love! Through the Holy Spirit, we can tap into another source of emotions.
Let’s start with the basics: we are a spirit, with a body and a soul (1 Thessalonians 5:23). The body isn’t difficult to explain: it’s our senses and our impulses. Once we are born again, our spirit is alive and is the means of communicating with God. And our soul is the seat of our emotions, our intelligence, and our intuition. All of this is given to us by God. Our beautiful emotions lead us to do wonderful things (Colossians 3:12), and our negative emotions allow us to identify what is wrong within ourselves or in the world.
Because emotions depend on our experiences, they are easily changeable and not really a reliable source for making decisions (Jeremiah 17:9). Everyone can love, but when we love with our soul, that love can vary according to our circumstances. When we give our lives to God, accepting Jesus' sacrifice to erase our sins, it is our spirit that changes, not our soul or our body. We don’t suddenly become math geniuses after our salvation. When Paul says we are a new creation in 2 Corinthians 5:17, he is talking about our spirit. Our body doesn’t automatically change on the day of our salvation, nor does our soul. In these cases, the renewing of the mind, and therefore time, is necessary to see a change (Romans 12:2).
However, what is wonderful is that there is a wide range of emotions that we can experience through the Holy Spirit. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22-23 NKJV). The Greek word translated here as “fruit” is “karpos,” which could also be translated as “result” or “benefit.” The benefit for our spirit of being in communion with the Holy Spirit is to experience these supernatural emotions.
We all need to take care of our emotions and seek healing when they are hurt. But just because our heart is hurt doesn’t mean we can’t love our neighbor, because the Holy Spirit can pour out His love through us. It is also through our relationship with God that we can experience peace through the storm and a joy that surpasses understanding. Experiencing joy is wonderful, but if our joy depends on our circumstances, our adversary knows exactly how to steal it from us (he simply has to manipulate our circumstances). But if our joy comes from our relationship with God, from our salvation, the enemy cannot touch God, and therefore, we cannot have our joy stolen. If our peace is based on God’s promises, it will be unshakeable because our Heavenly Father is not a liar.
So, while we seek the healing of our souls and the renewal of our minds, let us not wait for that to be happy. Our relationship with God can fill us with beautiful emotions right now; that is the benefit of having the Holy Spirit in our lives.