I think it is important to make a clarification: Feelings are God-given and have a role to play in our walk with God. Joy is something we feel, so is contentment, and peace, and love. But these things are the product of the work of the Holy Spirit illuminating our minds to God's truth. These feelings of joy, and peace, and love support a believer's faith but they must not direct it. For the Christian, our feelings, our emotions, are always to follow the mind and the will. Too often these days, however, this is reversed and feelings are made the primary basis upon which believers walk with God. When this happens, the believer's spiritual life soon goes awry.
Romans 12:2
2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Paul explains here that the believer's transformation spiritually is fundamentally the result of a renewed mind, not renewed emotions.
Philippians 2:5
5 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,
Paul here urges believer's, not to an emotional state, but to the adoption of a Christ-like frame of mind.
Acts 17:10-11
10 And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea: who, when they arrived, went into the synagogue of the Jews.
11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
Luke remarks here that the Bereans were "noble" because they received the word that was preached to them with a "readiness of mind." They didn't just respond emotionally to what they heard, but applied their intellect to their understanding of the truth of Scripture.
Matthew 13:20-21
20 But he who received the seed on stony places, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy;
21 yet he has no root in himself, but endures only for a while. For when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he stumbles.
Here Christ explains what happens when one has a primarily emotional response to spiritual truth. Our emotional dimension is "stony ground" for God's Word. Our emotions cannot supply to us the strength to endure in our commitment to God's truth when trouble and persecution arise.
Romans 7:22-23
22 For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.
23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
Paul connects the law of God to the law of his mind in this passage. That is, Scripture makes its appeal to Paul's mind, the law of God is received by his mind, not his feelings or emotions.
Ephesians 4:22-24
22 that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts,
23 and be renewed in the spirit of your mind,
24 and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.
Once again, Paul emphasizes the truth that the believer's spiritual life is directly related, not to strong emotions or feelings, but to the renewal of the spirit of one's mind.
And so on.
As I said, emotions have their place in walking with God, but that place is behind, or in a following position to, the believer's mind and will. Be very cautious, then, of believer's who urge you toward a highly emotional experience of God, who suggest that if you don't have a constant, powerful feeling of God, there must be something fundamentally wrong with your walk with Him. That is not biblical. We are called as disciples of Christ to "walk by faith, not by sight," which means that there will be times when neither what we feel, nor what we experience will bear out what God has said is true. Often as followers of Christ it is only on the basis of what we know, of what our minds have apprehended of God's truth, that we walk with our Heavenly Father.
Selah.
