With the release of ‘Inside Out 2’ in cinemas this summer, it’s got me thinking about emotions.

I think that it’s really important to explore our emotions and where that stands beside our faith. Sometimes, we are made to feel like we need to supress our emotions, or focus solely on the joy. Philippians 4:4 tells us to “be full of joy always”.

But joy isn’t the only emotion – there’s sadness, fear, anger and disgust. In ‘Inside Out’, when joy tried to take over all the other emotions and push them aside, it went wrong and ended badly. We may feel like we need to avoid any emotions that aren’t joy, to put them in a box and hide them away – but as ‘Inside Out’ demonstrates, this isn’t healthy.

As Christians, we strive to be like Christ. And when we look at the gospels, we can see that Jesus experiences all of these emotions.

First, we do indeed have joy. For instance, after Jesus sends out the seventy-two, we read that Jesus was “full of joy through the Holy Spirit” (Luke 10:17). But, Jesus is not constantly demonstrating a disposition of joy.

In John 11:35, we have the famous Bible verse “Jesus wept”. When Lazarus died, Jesus was full of sadness, and wept – despite knowing that he would raise his friend back from the dead immediately after. He allowed himself time to grieve.

Jesus displays righteous anger in Matthew 21, where we read that he overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple courts. He was angry at their impertinence for turning a place of prayer and reverence into a marketplace, and drove them out of the temple gates.

We also see that Jesus experiences fear – when he is praying in the Mount of Olives he was “in anguish” regarding his upcoming crucifixion, to the point that he was sweating blood.

If there is a place for Jesus – the perfect son of God – to experience all of these emotions, then what does that mean for us?

First, I think that we can take from Jesus’s experiences that it is perfectly acceptable to feel emotions other than joy – even ones with negative connotations such as sadness and anger. It is part of being human to have emotions that are not always positive, and we see that in both the animated film and the son of God.

Second, even when we are experiencing these other emotions, we can still have joy. Joy is not happiness – and this is an important distinction to make. Happiness is fleeting, based on external circumstances, but joy in the Lord is constant and unchanging. We can still have joy in the Lord when we are overcome by sadness or anger by the circumstances around us. This is how we can have joy in the Lord always, when other emotions seem to be overwhelming.

This means that we can have joy in the Lord when we are sad or angry or fearful because having joy does not mean we are superficially happy; joy is a state of our soul.

So, “be full of joy always”, but do not supress the other emotions you feel.