Feelings and Faith
“I’m just not feeling it,” he said. He then explained that the “feeling” he was missing is closeness to God, like when he first believed and first experienced true Love. He was intellectually convinced and settled as a Christian, that wasn’t the problem. He just felt a relational disconnect. He was saying, in effect, “I’ve been to conferences and retreats, read the books, beefed up my prayer life, and nothing I do seems to recapture the feeling of God’s immediate presence – the overwhelming joy and peace, the exuberance of knowing God lives in me and I live in him.”
As I listened that day I was all too aware of many others who have told me very similar things. I have felt the same thing at various times in my life. I told him this as we sat there scarfing down the lunch-special pasta.
I have been a Christian for a ridiculous and embarrassing number of years, for the little maturity my life shows. This is not false humility; it’s just a fact. If only I had prayed a little every day rather than hit and miss, and been more faithful to read the Bible, memorize more Scripture, contemplate the sacraments more deeply, help the poor and share my faith more, I would be so much farther down the road.
Or would I? This is exactly where my Christian faith falls down – I have thought that Christianity was about my faithfulness, but it’s really about God’s.
It is not what I have done for God that matters, but what he has done for me. He was faithful when I wasn’t. He reached out when I was so busy reaching in. He prayed when I couldn’t or didn’t (Romans 8:34). He held me like a baby and sang and danced over me (Zephaniah 3:17) when I barely thought of him. He waited patiently for me to return like a worried Dad while I was out doing my own thing – even my own “religious” thing.
If someone told me this when I was younger, I don’t remember it. Confusing religion for relationship sucks the Spirit out of life. And the church is filled with people like my pasta friend and me. This was Jesus’s beef with the biblical Pharisees. They were so consumed every waking hour with what they were doing for God that they missed what God had done for them by sending Jesus Christ – Love – into the world. They based their belief and trust in their own performance – religiosity, their works – rather than in God. They failed to see that the best among them were “miserable offenders” because failing is what humans do naturally and best.
God rescues and loves only failures because only they are at a point in their lives where they can accept and find hope in the finished work of Christ for the world.
My pasta friend needs to see what I, only late in life, am beginning to see: that it’s not about feelings or feeling close to God. That makes Christianity all about “me.” In fact, it is all about God – promising to never leave us or forsake us (Hebrews 13:5-6), to be our friend (John 15:15), to love us even when we are complete failures (Romans 5:8), to die on the cross taking the punishment for what sinners deserve (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Once we get it straight that it’s about God and his faithfulness we will naturally and from the heart want to pray, obey, work for God’s Kingdom, and pursue him who first found us. Christianity – real Christianity – is based on God’s promises, not on our feelings. Hopefully “feelings” will follow (who doesn’t want that?), but even if they don’t, God is absolutely true to his word. Even if we never feel it again, God is absolutely true to his promises.
Please, Lord, don’t leave me in my emptiness, and please don’t let self-sufficiency and religion push me around. If you rescue failures, please rescue me. I pray in the name of the One who succeeded when I couldn’t, Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.
Chuck Collins