This is an old copy (we have a new cover since then), but arriving today we have the new edition of Filtered Feelings, my wife’s four-week devotional for ladies. All day long I have been checking the shipping updates, and the books finally arrived today. This is the old version with the old cover, and on the screen you can see the new cover. This is my wife’s devotional, Filtered Feelings, a ladies’ study she taught for four weeks in the summertime. On Mondays, in two different classes, morning and evening, for four straight weeks, they went over the week’s lesson, and there were additional handouts the ladies took home and completed, with fill-in-the-blanks, through the week. Weeks one through four were compiled into this one book, Filtered Feelings, a way to filter all those feelings and emotions through the truths of Scripture. Hi, folks, and welcome to this week’s video. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California.
Inside the Book
This is her third ladies’ devotional. The first was the Joy book, the second was Ezekiel, and now I want to take you inside the Filtered Feelings book. Here is the front cover, and inside it just says Filtered Feelings, with a little coloring page. One thing we enjoyed about the previous books was that some of the ladies were filling in the line drawings. The Joy book and the Ezekiel book both had simple line drawings printed in black and white, and some of the ladies came back with beautifully, ornately colored devotionals they had spent time on, showing my wife, and she said, “Well, I did not even mean for it to be a coloring book, but I think it is awesome that you did that.” So this time we intentionally built some coloring pages into the design. The first couple of welcome pages say “Nice to meet you,” “Hello,” that kind of thing, and explain the layout of the book, which is similar to the previous formats: days one and two are the lesson my wife taught, broken into two days, with fill-in-the-blanks and journaling prompts, and days three through seven are additional Scriptures that could not quite make it into the lesson, each built out into a full journal-prompt lesson that connects to the Monday teaching, or whatever day you start on. I think they are numbered just days one through seven, so it does not matter which day you start. Days one and two are the lesson, and days three through seven give further insight into that lesson from other passages. Each day has a theme, a key verse, some reflection points, and a journal prompt. This is our very first full-color design, and I am really, really excited about it. It did not add too much to the cost, maybe four or five dollars more per book in print cost. Because it is such a colorful design, it goes with the colorful theme of feelings. There are no straight lines in here, just wavy “feelings” all around, so it is an exciting book, and I am really looking forward to everyone getting into it.
The introduction encourages ladies to focus on this for a month. It describes the start of the study, when my wife was going through the Scriptures, trying to read through the Bible with a focus on where it talks about feelings. She was surprised by how often feelings are mentioned, and how often they are mentioned negatively. It is not that feelings are bad; it is when our feelings run out of control that they turn into something bad. That is where she begins in her introduction, and the whole first week focuses on subjecting feelings to the truths of Scripture. Her overall focus in week one sets up the theme for the whole book, and day two expands on it. Days three through seven, as we said, add extra truths along with it. Then weeks two and three take the truth from week one and actually put it into practice. Week two is “Filter Your Actions.” I will scroll down to week three, which is “Filtering Your Speech”: complaining, bitter speech, those kinds of things. These are very, very good studies. At the top of each week you will see a little menu that shows you where you are, and once you get into day two and on, there are tabs on the far left showing exactly which week you are in. On the corners of the pages (I do not know if you can see it here) you can glance and see which week you are in; there are visual tabs to help you find and keep your place throughout the book. Then week four is the final wrap-up, the application week, which says, “Go put it into practice. Go train your heart to respond this way all the time.” At a ladies’ Bible study you do really well for a while, while the studies are going, but then you slip back into old habits. This book is aimed at life change, something that helps you long-term. My wife did not want people to slip back into their old routines. It has to be a new way of thinking, an entirely new way of reacting to God and to truth rather than to feelings. So the whole fourth chapter is very, very applicable, drawing from the story of David, who had a heart sensitive to God. As I said, there are a few coloring pages throughout, which will be enjoyable; I think each week has at least one coloring page, maybe two.
The Appendices
At the close of the book is a congratulations page with some verses to help you continue on, and then a very practical handout my wife gave the ladies, a worksheet, a kind of how-to. If we condense the whole book into a how-to: What do I do now that I have this feeling? How can I subject it to the Scriptures? The three steps are, first, recognize the feeling, the emotion; realize that it is a feeling, an emotion. Second, filter it through the Scriptures. What specific truth relates to this specific instance? Why am I angry? Why am I sad? Why am I depressed? What am I thinking about that is making me feel this way? Filter that through the Scriptures: are there scriptural truths that relate to this feeling? Third, choose to submit your feelings and thoughts to the Scriptures. Just as Jesus submitted to the Word of God, we place the Word of God above us and submit ourselves to it. On the left side she has this worksheet with blanks you can use as a format for your own struggles with feelings, and on the right side is a journaling example of feelings she put into words, captured, and submitted to the Scriptures, with a plan put in place. So this appendix has some really helpful thoughts for filtering your feelings. After that, we wanted to include the gospel at the close of the book. Many of our ladies were taking these booklets and handing them out to people they knew who were not connected to our church. When they received the booklets week by week, some were taking stacks of them, four or five at a time, and handing them to daughters and friends and others who would be interested in doing the study. I thought, what an opportunity to proclaim the gospel through a book. If you are putting a helpful book into somebody’s hands, the most helpful thing of all is to share Jesus Christ with them. The book’s format is to recognize your need, filter it through the Scriptures, and choose to respond to whatever the Word of God says. That does not relate only to emotions; it relates to your eternity as well. So we tied it to the gospel and called people to make the ultimate choice: respond to Jesus Christ, His sacrifice, His death, burial, and resurrection, His payment for our sin, in faith; trust Him, repent, and turn to Him. That is a two-page spread explaining the gospel. Then there is a Scripture index covering references throughout the book, and a layout of weeks one through four with their titles and the Scriptures used, so if you cannot remember what page something was on, you can go back to these appendices and check.
A couple of years ago I wrote a book called Scripture Helps, and I love it for its reference material. We have turned the chapters of Scripture Helps into brochures, which we have at our welcome desk and in some of the racks at our church. Those brochures talk about what to read in time of need, with different scenarios you might face and Scriptures you can read. There is an alphabetical index not only of feelings but of all kinds of topics you might face, with Scripture references that point to answers for those problems. So I took the content from that section of Scripture Helps, alphabetized it, and here are Scriptures on abortion, abuse, addiction, alcohol, anger, anxiety and stress, some feelings mixed in with other topics. I thought, let us include the entire thing, so this becomes a reference resource as well as training. You can go to the appendix of this book, look through the topics, and if you are feeling a certain way, maybe your feeling or a variation of it is listed, and you can find the Scriptures directly related to it and go memorize them for yourself. I am excited for this book to be a resource that helps people in the long term. Next are some promotional pages for other books from Calvary Baptist Publications: my wife’s Joy book and the Ezekiel book are listed on the right, and then her Filtered Feelings book. Our website has bulk discounts if you are a church and would like to order these a little cheaper; those discounts are listed on our calvarybaptist.pub website. And if you have purchased the book, I think it would be wonderful if you could review it; that helps get the word out. We are not making tons of money on this; that is not what this is about. I say we sell books so we can give them away, and the books we sell basically go toward missions. Our book sales go toward our missions revival offering every year, and many times, since we have them on the shelves, we are just handing books out all the time. We just want to help people, and this is a way to help ladies filter their feelings. It is an excellent resource, and I encourage you to grab your copy on Amazon or at the church. We will have the books available at our resource desk; hopefully by the time this video comes out, the rest of the books will have arrived. We have hardcover and softcover editions arriving. It is just a beautiful, beautiful book, and I am very, very excited about this one. God bless you, and we will see you in the next video.
