Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out all the people buying and selling animals for sacrifice. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves. He said to them, “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a house of prayer,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves!” Matthew 21:12-13 NLT
A lot of people have made a lot of remarks about Jesus flipping the tables.
A lot of people have used this story of our good and sinless Savior, exhibiting holy anger, as an excuse for us to exhibit unholy anger every now and again.
For me - it hits different that this happened during Holy Week. That on the most pertinent week of Jesus’ ministry, He was able to access emotion, and display emotion, but what He does next is the most intriguing.
After Jesus’ flipped the tables in Matthew 21, angry about what was being done to His Father’s house, he went back to the temple. His holy emotion allows Him to feel and His holy emotion, His love and devotion, compels Him to go back and begin rebuilding through teaching the very next day.
For many of us who are tired and weary, it seems that if we open the floodgates of our emotions - it will be so exhausting to deal with them. But what if keeping our emotions in is not only causing us fatigue but also keeping us from the passion we need to bring God’s glory in the places that we’re called?
Your emotions are not a liability, and neither were Jesus’.
Maybe it’s time to flip some tables, figuratively, and make space to process our emotions safely with our Father.
We talk extensively about emotional fatigue in Tired of Being Tired, including how to create a container for our emotions if we’re worried they’ll cause us or others pain.
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