I just don’t feel it right now...

A question I have been asked recently a few times has gotten me to think quite a bit about the ins and outs of my own relationship with God, and trying to understand some of the mechanics of it. The question goes something like this: “I just don’t really feel very close to God right now, and I’m not sure what to do about it.” I think all of us who call ourselves followers of Christ ebb and flow in our feelings about our faith and our relationship with Him. Our prayer life fluctuates, and our consumption of scripture does as well. Our worship is tearful and powerful in one season and then just feels empty and dead the next. We may have times when we are in a small group and can feel the Spirit moving in ourselves and those around us in dramatic ways, while other times we are wondering why we even show up. And the frustrating part of it is that we can remember the times when we are on fire, but we can’t just replicate the feeling. It makes us begin to wonder if it was ever even real before. We may isolate ourselves, pulling back from community, praying less, reading less, skipping worship, checking out during sermons and just showing up for social events out of a feeling of duty or obligation. Even worse, we may just stop showing up altogether and opt to explore life without an active faith. I have said many times that there are plenty of Sundays that I just don’t feel it; yet have to show up to work anyway. I act in obedience to my calling anyway, which can leave me feeling in some ways like a big fat phony in doing so. In any case, there is a longing within us -- a longing to connect with our heavenly Father. It is the thing that drew us in to a relationship with our Creator in the first place, and it calls to us, even in our distance away from Him. That… is the seed that leads people to ask the question in the first place, it’s that desire to restore what we feel is lost. But is it really? Has God pulled away from us? Or is it actually us who has done the traveling? I argue for the latter. God never changes, His love never fades, and His presence is never removed from our world or our life. In the end, we are never really moving away from Him at all, we are only moving closer to the day when we meet Him face to face. It is merely the path to Him that can meander about this way. So, what is the prescription for this feeling of spiritual distance or drought? How do we get back on track? How can we rekindle a relationship that once ran so deeply within us? Well, first it is important to see that we can’t manufacture faith, that it’s God-given. Second, we need to maximize ways in which we can participate in our relationship with our Creator. Third, we need to act out of knowing rather than feeling. And finally, need to lean on community in new ways, rather than pulling away from it. We aren’t very good at manufacturing faith. This is just a fancy way of saying “fake it.” Faking it is not the answer! In fact, fake Christians are one of the chief criticisms of those who leave the church, or refuse to go altogether. We don’t want to just train ourselves to put on a mask, to make a good show and become fake Christians. The fact is that faith is something we can not manufacture or produce on or own. Our emotions and desires are less of a part of the equation that we would ever really believe. Faith is a gift from God, produced and distributed by Him and Him alone. Faith is a fruit of the Spirit, and the only way we are ever going to grow in our faith is through true communion with the source of its production. God gives us life, He gives us faith, He gives us the air we breathe and the feet we walk on. He gave us Christ, His Spirit and the promise of eternity. These are all things that are in His will, and in His strength alone. Our role in all of this is not one of active construction, but rather one of receiving. Our role is to receive and only receive. But we can play a role in this relationship. We have a choice. We can fall into the trap of emotional discouragement and place ourselves in a position of degradation, or we can position ourselves in a position of availability, or we can place ourselves in a position of intimacy with our Creator. Just in the same way a person needing rescue from drowning can put a hand out hoping for a rescue or leave it next to their side and continue to drown, we can only place ourselves in a position to receive faith and be in a place of intimacy with God. And like the rescuer of the drowning man, the work of rescue can only be credited to the rescuer, not to the drowning man. There are ways that we can participate in this relationship, opening up our heart and mind to again begin receiving the blessings that come through a relationship that is waiting just above us the whole time. We can, figuratively, reach our hands up in the air and reconnect with the Creator that is already there and has already redeemed us to Himself for eternity. So how do we go about putting our hand up in the air? How can we rekindle the intimacy that our heart longs to feel with our Creator? Well, there are some tools that God has given us as avenues of intimacy with Him. While these may seem like basic things on the surface, however it is the intentionality of intimacy that will bring about the spiritual fruit from them. Through our consumption of scripture, our time spent in prayer, our worship and service to others, and our participation in community, we can access our Creator in unique and dramatic ways, positioning ourselves into a position of intimacy with Him. But it is not just opening the Bible and staring at it, letting the words fly by us. It means crawling through scripture with an intent to share in the mind of God. When we read His words to us, we are reading His mind. And the more we read His mind, the more ours will begin to work like His. And this leads us to pray. Prayer is a privilege, and without repeating my entire blog on prayer, it is simply to say that we can’t expect to have a relationship of intimacy with someone that we never talk to. Prayer is less about asking for stuff, but more a simple relationship maintenance tool. Beyond that we have worship, service and community also to be leveraged as intimacy-building tools in the hands of God. We sing our prayers to Him in worship, we demonstrate our intent to see Him working through us. As we lean into our community, we see His spirit represented in the various people around us. All of these things, when we see them as purposely reaching our hand up to our rescuer, will be powerfully used to increase and repair the intimacy we feel with our Father. I’d like to take a moment to rest on the power of community here. As I said earlier, our tendency is to withdrawal from community and intimacy with other believers, often blaming them for not knowing us as well as we would like. However, the truth is that community is present in our life for many reasons, but as it applies to this subject, community is a tool God will use to push us back into this position of intimacy with Him. Being in a small group, opening up about your feelings, allowing people to pray for you even when you don’t pray for yourself are all huge things. You will be strong for others when they are weak, and also you will be weak and in need of the strength of others as well. Paul tells us not to neglect the gathering together of believers. That’s because this life is not always easy, and we are not expected to conquer the world on our own or be some unwavering champion of positivity. It has been said that so often we are praying for God to do something in our life that He has already placed someone in our midst to do for Him, we simply need to look around us at the faces we already know. Community is a powerful tool in the hands of our Creator to reach and reform our hearts back into intimacy with Him. Continuing the metaphor of reaching up…in the case of community, it is more like showing up. Show up to your community with the intent to reconnect with Him, ask for prayer, and just be honest about your feelings. And aren’t feelings what this often comes down to in the end? It’s our emotional swings that can lead us to the most destructive of actions and decisions. We so often allow our current emotional state to determine much of our life and to drive our current spiritual health as well. And while our Creator never changes, our feelings change from week to week, day to day, hour to hour, even minute to minute. One of the greatest measures of maturity that we can pursue in our life is the ability to untether our actions and spiritual health from our emotions. If we can learn to act on what we know rather than what we feel, we will become a rare type of superhero among the fickle crowds of life. But even this is only an expression of the intimacy we are gathering from our Creator. It’s not a matter of just deciding to ignore our emotions, it is a decision to follow what we already know to be true instead. Our emotions may agree with what we know or not, but if we determine to act on what we know, we can come above the fog of our feelings and follow a clear path to our king. What we know is that God is real. We know that He made us, He made everything, He loves us, He came for us, He died for us and redeems us. He has claimed us for Himself, and has guaranteed our position in eternity with Himself through the blood of His very own son. If these things are true, why should our emotions from day to day determine our reality? No, God determines it! We can gladly act out of obedience and do what we can to position ourselves in a “hands up” posture...despite of our emotions. The key, as with everything in life, comes down to seeing who God truly is. It comes down to seeing what has been done for us and realizing exactly how powerful the love of God is. God has anointed our life with power to meet challenges, but not with our own power…it’s His. As we grow to know who He is, and what the cross really means for our life, we will see the true sufficiency of the cross, and the true purpose of our life: to be the expression, or the vessel of the love and glory of God. What joy it is to be the instrument facilitating the expression of the Glory of God! Through the receiving of His love, we show His incredible glory. So, in obedience, in humbleness, and in utter helplessness, we reach up our hands to our rescuer, our King, seeking intimacy with Him and resting on the security and sufficiency of the cross.