Recently a friend who’s planting a new church in New England – in some of the hardest spiritual soil in the United States – wrote to me and a few other mentors, asking what advice we’d give him as a young leader. He’s 27, with a wife and three young kids. He’s aware that youthfulness can bring with it some blindness, and he’s trying to mitigate that blindness by seeking wisdom from others. I am humbled and encouraged by his initiative… unfortunately, too few young leaders have the foresight to learn from the mistakes of others instead of making their own.

He asked for three nuggets of wisdom I’d have wanted someone to tell me at his age. Here’s what I wrote him.

As my husband and I read God’s Word together as a couple, we learned that God desires for us to worship Him by fighting the self-serving nature of our flesh and choosing to live sacrificially. We knew that sleepless nights, restricted schedules, and child-friendly financial choices would be difficult sacrifices to make, but the Bible also made it clear to us that choices rooted in selfishness, fear, or preservation of personal comfort do not lead to the life God calls us to. We began to see the bigger picture and understood that the real question of family planning is not “Is choosing childlessness biblical?” but “Is living for myself biblical?”

What we call “moods” are simply feeling qualities that pervade our selves and everything around us. They are, of course, extremely hard to do anything about precisely because one cannot stand outside of them… Those feelings can themselves be transformed by discipleship to Christ and the power of the gospel and the Spirit, through which the corresponding ideas and images are changed to positive ones.

Here lies the secret to understanding contemporary Western life and its peculiar proneness to gross immoralities and addictions. People are overwhelmed with decisions and can only make those decisions on the basis of feelings… in their confusion they quite commonly take feelings to be reasons. And they will in general lack any significant degree of self-control. This will turn their life into a mere drift through the days and years, which addictive behavior promises to allow them to endure.

Much of the great power of feelings over life derives not just from the fact that they touch us, move us, but from the fact that they creep over into other areas of our life; they pervade, they change the overall tone of our life and our world. They spread like an unstable dye or a viral form or a yeast. They may take over all else in us, even that to which they have no relevance. Things and people around us then look different, take on a distinctive tone or meaning. And that can even determine the tendency and outcome of our life as a whole.