This question was posed to me recently. The actual question was this: “Is the journey of faith not based on feelings? Doing things like going to church, Bible study etc even when you don’t “feel” like it.”
There’s an awful lot embedded in that question. Namely – Whether our faith is based on emotion or our intellect; whether our feelings are reliable (ie they are ‘our truth’ aren’t they?), whether we need to keep the feelings we had when we first knew Jesus, and if so how do we do that, and, what do we do when we just don’t feel like it? Any of it?
I bet everyone reading this has wrangled with various aspects of it on their journey.
There are so many points and they are so interconnected – and they are so personal to each of us that I’ll try and step through my thinking in a logical way.
God is emotional
We see time and again when God feels things: He is angry (Deut. 1:37), jealous (Ex. 20:5), loving (Deut. 7:8, Lamentations 3:22, Romans 5:5), compassion (Ex. 34:6, Matthew 9:36). Here is the big difference though: God’s emotions are not like human emotions. They are not impulsive or capricious. He is holy and constant and his justice is perfect, as are his emotions, and the actions he takes.
God created us to be emotional
This is a beautiful truth. For me especially because I am composed of like 90% emotion. In all our emotional tangles, in all our messiness – God made us this way. Why? Because we were made in his image and he is a feeling God. But also, I think this observation is insightful: “God created our emotions to work in harmony with our other two most fundamental faculties: the mind and the will. Just as our minds enable us to think and our wills enable us to choose, so our emotions enable us to respond. Our faculties are designed to function together.” (Caralyn Mahaney & Nicole Whitacre, True Feelings p32). Out emotions are a spur to action. When we feel shame we repent. When we fear, we draw away. When we love, we draw towards.
When we meet Jesus and are amazed, we respond.
A two-stage conversion
I became a Christian by intellect first. I read and researched and asked questions and I came to the point when I knew it was all true. My repentance was real. But about a year later, something clicked and I went through a second-stage emotional conversion. It’s like my brain and my heart finally connected and from that point I was all in.
I know for some people its the other way round. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, how God draws us to him is as unique as the person he is drawing. However, the intellect has to be engaged, otherwise how do you know what you have responded to?
“Calvin believed that no sinner could be moved volitionally to desire and seek after Christ unless his mind was first illumined by the Holy Spirit to see and contemplate the glory of God in Christ Jesus.” (Obbie Tyler Todd, Themelios, Volume 42 Issue 2). I think this is correct. Even if a person came to Christ via emotions first, the conversion is completed once the Holy Spirit has illumined Scripture to allow the intellect to fully engage in the choices to be made. The mind thinks (ie weighs up the information in Scripture as illumined by the Spirit), the will chooses (ie fully chooses God) and the emotion responds (ie repents). That doesn’t make a pathway via the emotions any less real, valid or important. It just means that the intellect must be in play. This is where the Holy Spirit is active and we are fully informed so our choice is full and free.
The danger of faith in the feelings
The engagement of the intellect is also important because our faith must lie in Christ alone through Scripture alone. If we set more store by our feelings, and then our feelings change our faith may wane. This would be us building our houses on sand. We must ensure that our faith is in the right object – our solid, rock and redeemer.
The unreliability of emotions
God’s emotions are perfect. We are human, so ours are definitely not. Our mind thinks, our will chooses, our emotions respond. We need to look no further than Eve in Genesis 3. All the serpent needed to do was sow the seed of doubt. He did not tell Eve to take the fruit. He merely placed in her mind the doubt that God was telling the truth. That was her mind engaging – as many of us engage with something tempting – but her choice was affected by her emotions:
“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it” (Gen. 3:6). I’ve highlighted the three emotionally driven elements that ultimately made Eve choose to disobey God. It was good for food (she was greedy for something not available elsewhere in the garden); It was pleasing to the eye (she was covetous); and, It was desirable for gaining wisdom (she was ambitious and arrogant).
I’m not saying we are all these things (although sometimes we are!), what I’m highlighting is how emotions affect our choices, even overriding our intellectual knowledge of what is good and right under God. Eminent theologian J. C. Ryle once noted “that ‘a sin’…consists in doing, saying, thinking, or imagining, anything that is not in perfect conformity with the mind and law of God…[a person] may commit sin and yet be ignorant of it, and fancy himself innocent when he is guilty.” (J. C. Ryle, Holiness p23)
Our emotions are horribly unreliable. They are pliable, malleable and they will often be shaped by what we want. Even when our emotions are pointing true north, we cannot rely on them as our spiritual compass because we can never be sure that they are working. This is why our rule and guide must always be Scripture and Jesus Christ himself who is unchangeable and perfect.
What if we’re just not feeling it?
Given that we are human, we can’t just ‘bring it’ all the time. Sometimes we just want to hunker down, retreat for a bit.
I get it. And sometimes you might genuinely need to do that – but for like a couple of weeks at most. Once you don’t engage with Scripture and prayer in community, you can find yourself isolated and drifting slowly away.
In saying this I do not mean to judge anybody. I don’t know your life. I don’t know what’s going on for you. I know last year for me, I had to stay away from Bible study for a while because things were going down in my family which I just needed to focus on. There have been other times when I haven’t wanted to go because I’m not “feeling it”. Not in a judgey Mean Girls way, I just didn’t feel like I had anything left. I didn’t feel like I wanted to. There was no pull that would overcome where I was at that day. I don’t think I’d be alone in this.
If, like many of us do, we find ourselves in a general state of ennui or despondency – you know, just feeling a bit “meh” about it all, I would say that is not a time to retreat. “Every emotion you ever feel reflects your loves, or what you worship” (J. Alisdair Groves and Winston T. Smith, Untangling Emotions, p39). At the same time, “Our negative emotions, like God’s, play a necessary role in our lives. They tell us when something is wrong.” (Ibid, p27). There is a gentle rebuke in this I think and a positive. If our emotions show what we love (and what we don’t) feeling “meh” shows that we aren’t loving God’s people, meeting together, singing praises and sitting under God’s word. Here’s the positive though – Our emotions also tell us when something is wrong. If we are not loving the things that God wants us to love, something is wrong and we need to act to rectify it. They are called spiritual disciplines for a reason – because they do take discipline. Again, not a judgement. Just a reminder that our Christian lives take investment from us.
So if we are not loving the things that God loves, we have to do something.
Remember the words John spoke to the churches at the beginning of Revelation:
To the church in Ephesus he said “You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” (Rev. 2:4-5)
To the church in Sardis he said “I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God.” (Rev. 3:1-2)
To the church in Laodicea he said: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:15-16)
These are all people who have gone off the boil. But these are all people who have the chance to re-find their joy! If we are feeling far from God, the wrong thing to do is to stay away. We need to move towards his church, his people and the teaching. If we are feeling “meh”, we need to re-find our mojo back in the church, not at home or doing something else. Doing something else will mean we never find it. Sometimes yes, that means we go to Bible study and church when we don’t “feel like it”. But the rewards are far greater, even if it doesn’t feel like it before you go. (By the way, there’s a whole book that is quite good that’s written about this whole issue of how to get over our “meh” feelings that is written by…ahem…me….check out the Shop page).
When faced with a choice like this, to go or not to go, we need to consider why we don’t want to go. If it’s because we don’t feel like it, why don’t we feel like it? What are our emotions telling us? What is wrong? Once you start to pinpoint what is wrong, you can start to turn it around. You can pray, you can ask your Bible study group to pray, you can talk to your Christian sisters in vulnerability and seek their wisdom. But please don’t give up meeting together.
Our emotions are not reliable. But God is. If we pray for God to help us find our joy again, if we go to church to engage with his people and his teaching – if we engage our intellect – we are allowing space for God to do his work and we are allowing our intellect to inform our emotions so our choices align with God’s will.
Remember this – every time you decide to go to church even when you don’t feel like it, that is the Holy Spirit moving you. Every time you decide to go to Bible study when you don’t feel like it, you are closer to Christlikeness than you were the day before. Every time you allow God to shape you and guide you, instead of fighting against him, you are loving the things that God loves.