The Healing Dialogue Between Faith and Feelings: Wisdom from Psalm 14
Have you ever tried telling your faith what you're feeling, or telling your feelings what you believe? This therapeutic dialogue lies at the heart of Psalm 14, which reveals how foolishness can sicken our hearts and how we can find healing through reconnecting with God's presence.
MENTAL HEALTH
5/14/20252 min read
Understanding Insensibility Through Psalm 14
David begins Psalm 14 with these profound words: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good."
Life without God is:
Insensible
Flavorless
Without sensitivity
Saltless
Meaningless
This psalm isn't merely criticizing intellectual atheism that verbally denies God's existence. Rather, it addresses a deeper heart condition that says, "God doesn't care" — a practical atheism that can exist even within professing believers.
The Dangerous Disconnect Between Heart and Lips
The dilemma David highlights is how people might verbally acknowledge God while their hearts say something entirely different:
"It's entirely possible that our mouths say things our hearts aren't saying. We often deceive ourselves with our words, while our hearts harbor different beliefs."
This text warns us about the danger of not listening to our own hearts because "the heart is deceitful above all things." We might avoid hearing it out of fear of what it might reveal.
The Health Consequences of Ignoring Your Heart
As a specialist in emotional health, I've observed how this behavior creates illness. Neglecting to hear what your heart is saying damages it.
Neglecting your heart's demands—what it's feeling and thinking—is a form of self-abandonment. Using the metaphor of the heart as a pump, ignoring your heart is like obstructing the artery carrying blood to your lungs. It's fatal.
A Two-Step Approach to Heart Healing
1. Listen to Your Heart
I want to encourage you to listen to your heart—hear what it's saying, even when it's expressing foolish thoughts that your lips would never speak. Listening to your heart is necessary for healing.
2. Help Your Heart Listen to God
Even more important than listening to your heart is helping your heart listen to God. Put your heart's attentive ears toward receiving what the Lord has to say.
Create this healing dialogue:
Tell your feelings what you believe
Preach to your emotions
Listen to your emotions so you can address their actual needs
God's Response to Insensibility
David's dilemma in this psalm centers on how God responds to foolishness and how we should respond. If you've been living a flavorless, senseless life—if you've lost sensitivity to God and are thinking "God doesn't care about me or how the world functions"—this is foolishness.
The world's response to suffering is often: "God isn't there. The world is left to its own fate. I can do whatever I want."
But God's response in this psalm is clear: "I am right here." Verse 5 declares, "God is present in the company of the righteous."
If the foolish heart says "God isn't there," the discerning heart recognizes, "Even when I don't perceive Him, He is right here. He is present."
The Journey From Despair to Hope
The journey toward sensibility leads us:
From despair to hope
From problem to promise
From humiliation to exaltation
From insensibility to sensitivity
It means feeling Jesus right here, present with us.
Have you experienced times when your heart and your words were disconnected in your relationship with God? How did you restore that connection?