Why Emotional Prosperity Shows in Your Reactions

Anger, bitterness, and unforgiveness feel like part of who you are. They aren’t. They are reactions you learned early, and you have been running them on repeat ever since. Most of us picked up a shallow, automatic way of answering whatever the world throws at us.

If you are born again, you are a new creation with God living in you. So here is the question your reactions put to you: is your emotional life prospering, or is it running on whatever you happen to feel in the moment?

Emotional prosperity is the fruit of the Spirit showing up in the choices you make, especially when something pushes back on you.

What does emotional prosperity look like?

Start with its opposite. Emotional poverty is having no control over your emotions. It looks like a temper, a loss of control, bad words, violence, bitterness, and a refusal to forgive. Your soul includes your mind, your will, your emotions, and your personality. When your emotions are ruled by whatever is happening around you, that part of your soul is not prospering.

Our culture makes this hard to see. Public leaders now vent with curse words, slander, and name-calling, and nobody blinks. The world calls that normal. By God’s standard, normal is not the same as prosperous. It is emotional poverty that happens to be popular.

God’s heart for you reaches every level: spirit, soul, and body. Your emotions sit inside your soul, right beside your mind. “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers” (3 John 2, NKJV).

How does the fruit of the Spirit change your reactions?

People know you by how you act. They know you by your temper, your language, your facial expressions, and your body language. All of those outward things have an inward source. What is yours?

Life keeps handing you stimulation: the way someone drives, the way someone treats you at work, the raise you expected and didn’t get. Then you respond. Many believers struggle at that exact point, not because the Spirit is absent, but because they haven’t been exercising what He has already put within them: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Your response shows what you are drawing from. Spiritual prosperity is meant to overflow into your emotions, and the fruit is in you the moment you are born again. But it does nothing for you if you never use it. Picture an account full of money that you never draw from. You would live like a poor man with plenty sitting right there. A believer can carry the Spirit’s fruit and still live emotionally poor for exactly that reason.

The fruit of the Spirit is God’s nature coming out through you, or getting smothered by you. The choice is yours: “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).

How do you walk in the Spirit when you are angry?

The goal is bigger than keeping your mouth shut. Aim for joy that doesn’t depend on a good day. Aim to love people who are hard to love, not just the easy ones. That is what it looks like to use the fruit instead of just owning it.

You don’t have to feel calm before you choose calm. However angry you are, the anger isn’t what decides this. The choice you make while you are angry is.

In practice, that means a pause. Count to ten, count to twenty, count to two hundred, whatever it takes. Then find the Spirit who lives in you and choose self-control, love, joy, and peace. You can even practice on the road. Driving in a crowded city is a daily chance to learn to walk in the Spirit.

You are also not stuck with the temper you have. A man with a very bad temper, especially on the golf course, grew out of it. He chose to live by love. He chose to forgive, and he chose not to be bitter, even when the person who wronged him deserved his wrath. He chose self-control in the situations where he used to lose it, until the new response became the way he lives.

Yes, you have the right to stay offended, to withhold forgiveness, and to hold a grudge. You also have the right, and the capacity, to reign in life instead of wallowing in those emotions. You can’t beat your flesh by fighting it head-on. Choose the Spirit, and the flesh falls by the wayside. Paul says it in one line: “I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16, NKJV).

What does love have to do with emotional prosperity?

First Corinthians 13 is called the love chapter, but it is really describing the nature of God, and Scripture says plainly that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, NKJV). Read it that way: “Love suffers long and is kind” (1 Corinthians 13:4, NKJV). Love is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, is not provoked, and thinks no evil (1 Corinthians 13:4-5). That is a picture of God, and by extension it is a picture of who you can be.

You don’t have to get provoked. You don’t have to think evil. When you are quick to take offense, God’s nature in you is getting smothered instead of expressed.

Love also does not seek its own way. God owns the whole earth, and He still will not make you do anything you don’t want to do. Maybe you wonder if people are out to get you, to criticize you, to destroy you. God is your source and God is your life, and His favor surrounds you like a shield. From there you can calm down and forgive. You can obey what Jesus said about those who spitefully use you and persecute you, and pray for them (Matthew 5:44). It isn’t easy at the start. But when you keep making that choice, it becomes simply the way you live.

Bitterness, unforgiveness, hatred, and being offended are emotional poverty. You can be as committed to emotional prosperity as you already are to spiritual and mental prosperity, if you will choose it.

What will your next emotional response show?

The next time anger or bitterness rises, don’t file it under your personality. Ask what it shows. It may be showing you where you stopped drawing on the Spirit. Then choose love or self-control right there.

Emotional prosperity determines your relationships, and it determines much of where you go in life. You will never prosper more on the outside than you do on the inside.

The fruit is already in you, so the next reaction is the one you get to choose.

Go deeper: watch Free Indeed, Episode 146 on YouTube.