Have you noticed how much we all talk about our energy level throughout the day or the week? It really is crazy if you take a second to list just a few of the phrases we use - "Im so excited!", "I'm completely exhausted", I'm feeling totally refreshed!", "I feel like I'm running on empty". We tend to do this just in passing conversation as a declaration of our current emotional, physical, or mental state. Other times we explain how much gas is left in our proverbial tanks in response to being asked how we're doing or how the week is going for us in some area.
This is just human nature, and we all do it. It's just part of who we fundamentally are that we need to express how we feel at times. The problem with this can be that if we're not careful, how we feel can dictate where we're going in life and how succesful we "feel" we are at getting there, especially in our walk with Christ.
Emotions are an awesome part of who we are, given to us by God. They are often the reason that we feel like God is right beside us, giving us a giant bear hug in that incredible moment of worship or making it seem as if the message preached by the Pastor was a personal love letter written by God, just to us. He certainly knows how to flood our senses with His love. The danger in this, is to become so reliant on where our "spiritual feeelings meter" is at the moment, that our emotions shift from being an aid to help us on our journey to a progress report of the journey itself.
If we allow this to happen, we usually have thoughts similar to these - "well, I havent had a moving experience in worship in two weeks now, I guess I'm not as on fire as I was a few weeks ago." or "I just haven't been as excited to have my devotional time recently as I was last month. When we focus too much on thoughts like these, we are actually checking with our emotions to detrmine the current state of our relationship with Christ. This is what we all need to realize early on in our walk with Christ, though - Feelings should never be used to determine or measure our faithfulness. I fear we spend to much time from week to week worrying about where our feelings are at based on some imaginary spiritual thermometer (Am I on fire?, why am I not as excited about praying this morning as I was yesterday?) that we often time forget that Jesus didn't call us to feelings, He called us to faithfulness.
Let's not forget that we would all be without the forgiveness that came from Jesus' death if He had decided wheter or not to go to the cross based on how he felt that night in the garden. He didn't want to go through with it; that was how He felt. He did go through with it; that was His faithfulness. We are saved today because of the latter, not the former. 1 John 3:20 says "For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything." In other words, we can"t always trust our feelings.
Never let the enemy convince you that how you feel at the moment is a direct indication of where you're at in your walk with God. Feelings are fleeting but our faithful actions day in and day out, in times of joy and sorrow, in times of being on fire and feeling like we're on empty, that faithfulness stands as a monument before God. That's what matters and I'm sure He would tell each of us "you're doing better than you feel like you are." I hope we can all remind ourselves in the coming days that our journey with God is filled with so many awesome moments of elation, joy, and passion but if we haven't felt that in a while, don't stop to dwell on it too much. Just stay on the road of faithfulness and I promise you, more of those moments are in your future.
