“You can’t help a bird flying over your head, but you can keep it from building a nest in your hair.”

For many Christians, Martin Luther’s witty remark about internal experience is great advice: sometimes unpleasant and concerning movements of soul just come upon us—like a bird flying over our heads. It just happens and we often don’t know why. We should not sweat this too much: what we should be much more concerned about and take responsibility for are those nests—settled sinful patterns of our lives like lust, sloth, anger, resentment, and bitterness.

But what about when hoards of birds attack? You swat, you run, you cover your head—but they keep coming, talons out, beaks sharp. What do we do when unbidden wicked thoughts and feelings come strongly and persistently? One author has put it his struggle against worry, and the typical advice given to him to try not to be anxious (Matthew 6:25), like this:

Did they not understand what worry is? That it doesn’t feel like something you’re doing? That it feels like wolves at the door? That this kind of excruciating worry is… A storm you can’t control, an avalanche you stand helpless under? That when they say, “Try not to worry,” what they are saying is, “Try not to be eaten by wolves”?¹1 John Andrew Bryant, A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023), 133.

“Each night they come back, howling like dogs” (Ps 59:6). Howling dogs, hungry wolves, avalanches—these describe some movements of my soul better than birds. They howl at me, screaming at me that something is wrong, making wickedness look attractive, preaching to me the intolerability of being me. Then, just as overwhelmingly, they accuse me for feeling and thinking those things. First the bullies, then the attorneys.

Of course, being attacked by birds is not exactly a common experience in real life, nor does it seem so for many Christian lives. This explains why most of the times I’ve tried to bare my assaulted soul to a fellow Christian, I’ve gotten the sanctified version of a raised eyebrow—“you were feeling what?!?” Confirmed, I am crazy. Isolation, stuffing it, that is much safer. Everything is fine.

But everything is not fine for many godly people and I want to convince you, whether you are one of those people or one of their leaders, that internal anguish and powerful inward temptations are actually normal according to the Bible’s account of Christian experience. It is also an experience well attested to in the history of the church, through which a whole theological tradition developed trying to unpack the contours of the spiritual life and attempting to advise weary, struggling, tempted sinners. If your thoughts and feelings are wild, if you get raised eyebrows when you bare your soul to others, you aren’t crazy, nor are you exceptionally wicked—you are, as Christians used to say, “sorely tried.” And you are not alone in being tempted and tried—you are brought close to Christ, and in the company of the saints of old.

First, I will first note a few features of evangelical culture that isolate those with internal anguish and strong temptations. Second, I will show how the Bible depicts and describes believers (1) with anguish unrelated to circumstances and (2) as sometimes acted upon by evil forces within and without. Finally, from the history of God’s people, I want to introduce readers to the “the passions”—a category of internal experience that is powerful and somewhat outside of our control. The tradition encourages us to endure, battle, and shape our passions—all while not identifying our passions with ourselves. I will close with a few starting places for accounting for inward misery in the Christian life and in ministering to tempted and tried people.

Inward Misery—Out of Fashion

There are a few reasons why inward misery and unbidden evil movements of soul raise eyebrows today, most of which are related to our bent toward practicality and simplicity about inward experience. A lot of books argue that our emotions are evaluative judgments in response to things that happen to us that reveal what we really believe or who we really are. One result of this is a working assumption that any and every emotional experience comes from within and is revealing of who we are. This is downright frightening for anyone who has the occasional frightening emotion—that is the real me?!?

A second result of this simple view of the emotions is that we find it less strange when people feel wild and bad things if something tangible has happened to them——they are responding to bad external things. Cancer, grief, traumatic experiences, a diagnosis—okay, now it makes sense that you are on an emotional roller coaster. But internal anguish without external causes doesn’t jive when positive religious feelings are seen as essential to the normal Christian life and when quick practical solutions are the heart of discipleship. Cheer up! Stop feeling that way! Read Philippians 4:4 and call me in the morning!

So while we’ve unwisely internalized so much of Christian life (the conversion experience as tantamount, God “speaking to me,” my emotions = the Holy Spirit’s leadership, etc.) we have also unwisely externalized temptation and affliction. Temptations and trials have become outside things—difficult people, pressing work circumstances, inappropriate bathing suits, health issues, etc. While we retain a category for sinful desires welling up from within our fallen hearts, we tend to assume that, while bad, these will be relatively straightforward experiences. As one pastor has said, if the devil were a football coach, he can only run a few plays, but he’s very good at them.

One of the most lamentable results of this simplistic view of inward experience is that watching porn or slandering someone is now less strange for a Christian than unexplained internal misery! Somehow it’s more normal—even if gravely sinful—for a Christian to give in to serious sins than to experience and resist powerful, trying temptations. Once again, our practicality is a part of this: gluttony and gossip make more sense and we can do tangible things to stop them. But an unexplainably strong shame, a screaming discontent, an intensely troubling and persistent desire, even as you bend your will against it? That’s alarming.

Temptanguish

As alarming as they may seem, these things are well accounted for in the Bible. I will now examine a few texts and show that Scripture has a category for what I will call “temptanguish”: a nexus of negative inward experiences God’s people have—complicated mixes of internal sorrow and sin, temptation and anguish, sometimes without any external circumstances bringing them about. Pictures of human experience in the Scriptures show that while we can’t claim innocence in our experiences because of our sinful condition, there still are unbidden, morally neutral internal experiences that come upon us to make us miserable.

First, let’s look at the infamous, skip-this-during-my-devotions Psalm 88. Here there are no happy endings, explanations, or practical solutions. Three things are clear from this Psalm: first, the afflicted author “cries out” to God (vv. 1, 9, 13); second, God has caused the author’s companions to abandon him (vv. 8,18), but third and foremost—the psalmist has decidedly unexplained and spiritual sorrows. His “soul is full of troubles” (v. 3), he is in the depths (v. 6), God’s wrath overwhelms him like waves (vv. 7, 16-17), and God casts his soul away (v. 14). There is no recognition of sin as a cause for this, and the abandonment of his companions is a result rather than the cause of his great misery. Without an external cause, with no guilt on his part, he is inwardly miserable. In his own recounting, something outside of him has come upon him—an experience so dark and dreadful that he describes it as drowning.

Moreover, if one considers this Psalm Christologically, Psalm 88 points to the experience of the Lord Jesus as He bears the wrath of God for the people of God as those very people have abandoned him. The paradigmatic Man, the ultimate example of a life that pleases God—overcome by temptanguish—yet without sin. I won’t try to prove that biblical connection here, I do not have to: the Bible tells us that Jesus was tempted and afflicted in every way, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15, Isaiah 53:3). He was acted upon from outside of himself with the greatest affliction one could endure. We are unlike Jesus in that we do have evil bubbling up from within; however, that does not mean that all of our wrestling is with the evil within. The fact that Christ was tempted and made miserable as a human without that revealing who he really was or what he really believed, the fact that that evil that had nothing to do with His heart came upon him to try Him—this shows that a part of the genuinely human life is to be tried, tempted, and sometimes to be made to be miserable, and not always directly as a result of one’s circumstances.

Psalm 88 is narrowly focused on the anguish side of temptanguish. What about internal temptation—of feeling strong impulses toward evil? The New Testament’s complex picture of Christian experience clarifies that while we are sinners who do have our own evil desires, we also experience powerful pulls towards evil that are not simply “who we really are.” I’ll consider Peter’s exhortation and two Pauline images as evidence for this.

First Peter 2:11 commands: “Beloved, I exhort you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.” Like other texts (Gal 5:16-24; Eph 4:22-24), Peter describes the complex, “already but not yet” nature of Christian experience: they are God’s sojourners, but the passions of the flesh wage war against their souls. While I will delay discussion of “the passions” to below, here I will note that Peter pictures a Christian as warred against from the inside. Importantly, they are not called to eliminate the passions of the flesh, as if this was their ability and duty, they are called to abstain from them. The command is ἀπέχεσθαι, which in similar contexts is translated, “to be far off from” or “refrain from.” A looser translation might be: “do not indulge in.” However one specifically translates the word, Peter recognizes that the passions of the flesh are there, they aren’t going anywhere even for a Christian, nor do they necessarily reveal a Christian’s deepest beliefs or loves. Christians should expect to feel the passions warring against their souls and learn to abstain from them. Being violently warred against from the inside? This is just Christianity 101. Nothing weird or strange going on here.

Pauline imagery is even more striking on this front. First, Paul describes himself as having been given “a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me” (2 Cor 2:7). Again, debates continue as to what exactly this thorn was, but it is very likely an internal affliction. Paul had a vision; to keep him from becoming conceited, a thorn was given him. It appears that one blessed personal experience is balanced by a tormenting personal experience. This makes it unlikely Paul is talking about a physical ailment or outward trial such as persecution or dealing with ministry opponents. Moreover, Paul describes the thorn as a “messenger of Satan,” likely indicating that his warfare, and thus torment, was spiritual in nature. This was the view of most premodern Christian interpreters, who had broader categories for internal affliction than we do today.²2 Including Gregory the Great, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. See Ralph P. Martin, 2 Corinthians, Word Biblical Commentary 40, 2nd ed (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), Chapter VII, section D.3, footnotes 875-876. Perlego. Spurgeon also interpreted the “thorn in the flesh” in a similar way, see Charles H. Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry: Direction, Wisdom and Encouragement for Preachers and Pastors, reprint ed. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2018), 166. Either way, the apostle is attacked and is miserable as a result—he is experiencing temptanguish. This is not just normal but good, as it will help him boast in his weaknesses and glorify God.

Most clear is Paul’s picture of spiritual warfare in Ephesians 6. Paul describes Christians at war with the devil, and this war is not pictured as merely fighting off sin or trying to be holy. Paul has already addressed dealing with sin and pursuing holiness earlier in Ephesians; what he gets to now is different—wrestling against the “cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” In his exhortation to take up the full armor of God, he particularly recommends the “shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one” (Eph 6:16). The devil’s actions here are pictured as a flaming arrow, one which engulfs its target in flames. The picture? Supernatural evil forces can send you stuff that engulfs you in internal anguish. There are inward experiences so terrible that only bare faith—rest and trust in Jesus alone against all you are feeling inside—will extinguish.

Many more texts could be cited and many more contours of Christian experience could be explored. But the above shows that, at the very least, a crucial (and normal!) part of Christian discipleship is wrestling with and abstaining from powerful and wicked forces experienced internally that are not merely you, your fallen sinful desires, your idols, or your unbeliefs. These experiences can range from temptation to inner torment. Moreover, these troubling inward experiences are not a sign something is wrong with you; nor is spiritual anguish easily explainable or healable. Tried and even miserable internal experience is both normal and quite complex.

Wisdom from the Past: The Passions

While you might get raised eyebrows sharing these kinds of experiences today, you will find more compassion and wisdom in the past. While much has been said on internal anguish and temptation historically,³For starters, consider the following: John Newton’s poem “I asked the Lord That I Might Grow”, Bunyan’s picture of Christian’s battle with Appolyon in Pilgrim’s Progress, and the following passage from C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity: “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.” one particular historical resource I want to commend is the idea of the passions.

When we read the word “passion”, we tend to think of intense, willful, and very much “who we are” feelings, as in the phrase, “that’s my passion project.” This is nearly the opposite of how historic Christians used the phrase “the passions.” The passions were inward experiences in which people were “passive” in the things they suffered. An antonym of this word is used to describe how God is unlike his creatures in that he cannot be acted upon or made to suffer by outside forces: His “impassibility.” The term “passions” denoted something opposite about us humans in our internal experience: we can be acted upon, indeed, suffer various passions.

Any distilled discussion of such a richly and variably used theological term will generalize and oversimplify.⁴For interested readers I would recommend Matthew LaPine, The Logic of the Body: Retrieving Theological Psychology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020). That being said, the passions were described within a nuanced view of human faculties and internal experiences. For example, in Thomas Aquinas’s view, the passions operated within two faculties, the sense appetite and rational appetite. The sense appetite is a lower faculty which bends itself towards what naturally appeals to one’s sensory experience, while the rational appetite is a higher faculty that bends itself to the good: what it believes to be best and right. One author puts how these can be in conflict like this: “sense inclines us toward tasty food; intellect reminds us that it is bad for us.”⁵5 LaPine, The Logic of the Body, chp. 2, section 7, “Sensitive and Intellectual Appetites,” par. 2, Perlego. To oversimplify once again, the passions are strong movements of the sense appetite, often movements that are troubling and the cause of great distress to those who would resist them for the sake of holiness. Movements of the passions are different from acts of the will, which are much more morally significant because it is more simply us who are doing them. However, through great effort of the rational will, the passions can be trained to desire the good—the tasty food addict, through training and habit, can change their appetite not just to eat healthy against what they want, but to actually want healthy food. One can learn to have “passions” for kale over chocolate cake, as impossible as that may seem.

Here’s a simple application of this complex concept: it creates a category for visceral inward responses to things we experience that, while often powerful and overwhelming, (1) are not simply “us,” (2) don’t necessarily reveal our deepest held loves and beliefs, and (3) don’t have quick, take-this-Bible-verse-and-repent-of-your-idols-and-call-me-in-the-morning solutions to. I am not saying we are innocent in the movements of our passions or that troubling movements of our souls are just “how I feel” and therefore okay. Our passions can and often reveal troubling things about us and our loves. But what I am saying is that we need to broaden the categories by which we understand and engage with the variety of things we feel. Sometimes big feelings reveal big idols of ours, other times they reveal complex ways our sense appetite is malformed and needs to be willed against—occasionally they reveal we overindulged at lunch!

Moreover, “the passions” is not merely an irrelevant piece of historic psychology: it better accounts for passages like 1 Peter 2:11. Being commanded to “abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your souls,” rather than to eliminate them, makes more sense if we are the kinds of beings who have faculties that can be acted upon by sinful forces. While we must be careful in trusting experience too much, the concept of the passions also seems to better account for one of the ways many people actually experience temptation and inner affliction. While there are certainly intellectual temptations (“take every thought captive”) and sins in which we are very much willing, much spiritual struggle is felt as non-intellectual, non-volitional yet extremely strong pulls towards things one’s intellect hates, or as irrational, unexplainable, tormenting feelings. In short, the passions best account for the bird hoards, hungry wolves, and avalanches.

Conclusion

Above I have attempted to normalize and explore internal anguish and the uncommon-enough-to-sound-strange experience of being sorely tempted and tried. Now I will suggest several principles for handling your own internal trials, or walking with someone else through them.

1. Begin with Christian Categories

Human beings are interpretive creatures and constantly seek meaning in their experiences—especially the unpleasant and difficult ones. We need to recover prioritizing the Bible’s categories for how we interpret internal anguish and temptation. Inward sufferers aren’t first and foremost in need of professional help, processing trauma, or responding to life the way their Enneagram number dictates. Nor are they strange or exceptionally wicked Christians who just need to get better at uncovering idols and applying the Bible to their lives. They are first and foremost tempted and tried; they are suffering sinners—and godly saints, ordained for various trials in God’s plan to make them like Jesus. This does not mean that modern mental health resources aren’t helpful or shouldn’t be consulted, but it does mean that those and other competing stories should not be the primary narrative through which we understand ourselves, our inner suffering, and our resources for our trials.

2. Complexity over Simplicity.

However, returning to Scripture’s categories is not a simple endeavor. While we don’t like complexity in our practical theology, embracing a complex view of human faculties and experiences is both more biblical and more helpful to tried saints. The Bible tells us both that we have wicked desires that rule us/lead to sinful behaviors and that we can be acted upon from the outside (or acted upon from the inside!) Wisdom dictates that we consider both of these as we experience inward struggles and walk with those who do. There is simple idolatry, there are also crafty messengers of Satan. Sometimes unbelief needs to be uncovered, other times cosmic assaults need to be endured. Sometimes my emotional experience reveals me, sometimes it happens to me. How do we know which is which? Often, we do not. Our hearts are like deep water.

3. Faith over Introspection.

Which is why my final encouragement for inward sufferers is faith over introspection. Now, many people could use some more introspection and reflection about their feelings and behaviors! Inward sufferers, however, often get lost in it. Moreover, our counseling practices often trend strongly towards introspection, seeking to uncover why these feelings or behaviors are happening—as if this was the best course of action for everyone. This, of course, is often extremely useful, and for most people, the best first step. But if the Bible’s full picture of internal experience is true, in many cases this kind of introspection will be of limited value and sometimes be downright harmful. There is a false assumption that if I can just explain what this is or why this is happening on the inside, I can overcome it—and that I have the ability to fully understand what is going on in my heart. But If the devil is a crafty accuser and liar, one can expect much introspection to be met with false condemnation and wrong conclusions about what is really going on. Sometimes, it will be appropriate to say to someone with great wrestlings of soul: don’t inspect this, rest upon Christ. Don’t investigate these persistent thoughts or strong feelings, ignore them and place your effort on looking to Jesus as your sanity. Don’t fret if you are really a Christian or not, cast yourself upon Jesus because that is all of Christianity.

I commend faith in inward trials the way the Second London Confession describes it, as “accepting, receiving, and resting upon [Christ] alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace.” Saving faith is a movement of soul that looks outside of itself to Christ for salvation and all good things. Faith directs us outside of our confused and tried experience to Jesus’s objective, steadfast, outside-of-us accomplishments for our salvation. In short, faith is wholehearted dependence. There is nothing quite like internal anguish to force you to depend on Christ. Perhaps that is its purpose.

[1] John Andrew Bryant, A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023), 133.

[2] Including Gregory the Great, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. See Ralph P. Martin, 2 Corinthians, Word Biblical Commentary 40, 2nd ed (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), Chapter VII, section D.3, footnotes 875-876. Perlego. Spurgeon also interpreted the “thorn in the flesh” in a similar way, see Charles H. Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry: Direction, Wisdom and Encouragement for Preachers and Pastors, reprint ed. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2018), 166.

[3] For starters, consider the following: John Newton’s poem “I asked the Lord That I Might Grow”, Bunyan’s picture of Christian’s battle with Appolyon in Pilgrim’s Progress, and the following passage from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”

[4] For interested readers I would recommend Matthew LaPine, The Logic of the Body: Retrieving Theological Psychology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020).

[5] LaPine, The Logic of the Body, chp. 2, section 7, “Sensitive and Intellectual Appetites,” par. 2, Perlego.