Spirit Home > Inner Voice > Feelings
For most of the past two thousand years, the leaders and thinkers of the churches have spent a lot of time and effort warning people about the bad effects of emotion upon religious faith. The list should be familiar to church-folks by now:
Those who are familiar with those 'spiritual laws' booklets might remember the illustration where the emotions are the caboose on the train of faith.
We live in a world that seeks thrills. We have become voyeurs of celebration, thrilling to achievements that are not actually our own, rejoicing for freedoms and victories won in fiction, for partying as we see it on TV, or even cyber-sex. The thrills get harder to come by as time goes on, but there seems to be no end to our capacity for creating new thrills, even for voyeurs. This is not God's way to live.
That's all well-taken, and true -- to a point. Emotions are a lousy foundation on which to build a faith or a way of life. It's like what Jesus said about building a house on sand : one good-sized wind or tide or quake, and it's flattened.
Some people have other, unsavory reasons for steering away from emotions: emotions are often seen as being feminine, or African, or of the peasantry. Anything that's disorderly will displease those who have the most stake in the existing order. If you find yourself having one of those reasons, I suggest you take a good hard look at how Jesus and the Church in Acts handled people who are not of their class, sex, or ethnic background. The early church's decision to reach out to both Jew and Gentile without trying to make one into the other was one of the main marks of its faithfulness to Christ. As far as the Christian churches have followed that lead, it has led to a deeper, fuller, truer life of faith, which has greatly affected the lives of both believer and non-believer. Much of that comes precisely from how people express their emotions !
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"The life of sensation is
the life of greed; it requires more and more. |
However, all those warnings do not change some very uplifting things about feelings:
The Eastern Orthodox mystics took note of what the Spirit can do to one's senses : they could smell, feel, taste, and see in a livelier or more attentive way, sensing what they could not sense before, in ways powerful and subtle.
God wants us to have feelings -- to be moved to sadness and joy and weeping and arousal. God put them there. God gave you soul. Our feelings will tend to run amok in what we do, because they're as broken and smelly and obsessed as anything else in this world. We keep hearing, 'Go with your feelings', but that can only be done when we know the limits of our feelings.
When the feelings aren't there inside you, God's still busily loving you. When the feelings are there, it's okay to rejoice -- to laugh out loud, to sing, to bliss out. Even if other people will think you're weird. However, please think enough of other people to do it in a way that doesn't get in the way of whatever others are doing at the time -- yet not so much that you don't appropriately celebrate. For instance, if you are at a typical church's service (where they're not used to this sort of thing) and this happens, send thyself out of the sanctuary into some place inside where you will not be heard much. Bliss out there. If you need help to do that, ask the usher.
Once you've celebrated, don't leave the feelings there. Take them into the rest of your life. Rejoice in the gift of life itself! Take this passion into the world around you. Do something good for someone else, thank someone for the good that they do, take part in a ministry of the poor. Take the celebration into every corner of your mind. Those feelings will go away, and God's not too keen on doing encores, since divine acts were done right the first time. So when the feelings themselves are gone, the work of the Spirit is still running where the feelings once ran, only in a quieter way in the background, while the rest of you simply lives life.
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"Ecstasy doesn't last. But
it cuts a groove for something that does last." |
The term 'experience' is more comprehensive than just 'feelings' or 'ecstasy' or 'the inner light'. It's about how God acts on us to make a relationship with us. The observable results are not what most counts, although it may seem so to you if it were your legs that were healed. It pays to look behind what happened to the One who is doing or causing it.
Scripture explicitly tells us to test and confirm experiences and signs: Acts 13:3, 16:10; ; ; ; . There are false spirits, demonic operations, misinterpretations, klutzed-up wonders, human stupidity, and other errata that can send us away from God's intent. Much of what have developed as the Christian spiritual disciplines developed as ways of sorting out and confirming or denying our experiences.
When one experiences the Spirit's work, there is new confidence and vigor. When head knowledge becomes alive through spiritual experience, the believer acts and lives with a strong sense that the Christian faith is true. Through the experience, the Spirit imbues assurance, raises commitment, and gives a sense of power. The experience can teach us to be confident that God will , and . . Belief is not enough to create this kind of confidence. Great teachings are not enough. Tradition is not enough. Solid preaching is not enough. Fellowship is not enough. The nub of it is, like with everything else, divine : God the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is enough. The confidence comes, amid the doubts and troubles and the treasures stored in this world, because the Spirit puts it there. The Spirit fills a human bottle that at first can only hold a little; the Spirit then stretches the Christian's spiritual capacity like a water balloon so that the Christian can burst off a goodly drenching onto his or her part of the world.
The Spirit confirms the experience not only by giving the ability to somehow do the specific task, but also by giving a sense of security that allows bolder action (as happened in ). Without that boldness, fear would stop us, even paralyze us. When you experience God, what you've heard or learned about God takes on either a new and central role in your life, or it is shattered as illusion.
Experiences of the Spirit don't have to be strange or
extreme. The Spirit is always working in every baptized
Christian, and grows fruit in anyone who trusts in the Spirit and acts
accordingly.
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"A tremor seizes our
limbs; our nerves are struck, aquiver like strings; our
whole being bursts into shudders. But then a cry, wrested
from our very core, fills the world around us, as if a
mountain were suddenly about to place itself in front of
us. It is one word : GOD. Not an emotion, a stir within
us, but a power, a marvel beyond us, tearing the world
apart." |
All the talk about 'experience' can sound dry, like one who observes or describes rather than one who's going through it. Yet there is a part of 'experience' which may be easier to relate to. The book of Revelation portrays the Church as Christ's bride, and there is something which goes with being a bride: passion. The Spirit seeks to kindle our energies and direct them whole-hog toward God, creating an intense love that becomes the driving force in our lives. This passion is more central to understanding the Spirit's strategy than even spiritual gifts, for when gifts fade, passionate love can remain. Passionate love for God, for other Christians, for those who do not know God or have turned away. The word 'zeal' comes to mind, but 'zeal' infers total commitment to a cause, not to people. Zeal enforces, commands, and controls; passion treasures, embraces, advocates, devotes, and serves. 'Fervor' is a useful word; it's steady, intense, and 'glowing'. But the image is caught best, I think, by 'passion', because passion is ordinarily seen as being directed toward some other person.
God answers this passionate love through spiritual gifts and blessings. It won't be noticed much at first. It will tend to just happen. Prayers become more vibrant. Counsel becomes more insightful. Words of insight, comfort and confrontation begin to come forth in a way that would in other contexts be seen as 'prophecy'.
Why would God be so giving? Because God is passionate. Really, that's the root of the passion I'm referring to. God loves us with a passion, and that is why the Covenant was made, the Son dies, the Spirit is sent, and the Kingdom comes. God loves passionately, like the lover in the Song of Songs (1). It is why God is like the woman searching for the lost coin, the shepherd looking for the lost sheep, or the one who lays down life itself for a friend's sake.
When we follow Christ and cooperate with the Spirit's work inside and
among us, what the Spirit creates in us is passion. We start to care, because
Christ cares and we are being changed into Christ's likeness. Our
heart begins to weep with the broken, celebrate with the joyous, and take
action to help those who don't know the hope that's there for everyone,
no matter how 'hopeless' they think they are. We start to care that so many
people don't understand who Christ was and what He did. The deeper we go,
the more we come to feel Jesus' passion for others in our bones, the more
of a passion we have for God's passions.
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As valuable as theology, philosophy and apologetics can be, what draws most people more strongly toward God are their experiences of faith and spiritual things. When you've had a spiritual experience, you're much more likely to believe, and to do so with passion. Life isn't the same anymore :
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If you go through a mystical experience, don't feed off of it like a vulture scavenging a dead carcass, or box it and put it away in your mental freezer so you can go back to it when you need a boost. Instead, take the time every once in a while to think it through and pray on it, to rediscover its meaning for you right now, to learn its daily lessons, to see again its vision and feel its passion.
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He is The Way. |
"Heart-suffering
because of sin is the best proof that the Holy Spirit dwells in
your heart."
Johann Arndt, *True Christianity*.
"We dare to believe that the
blessing [[of baptism in the Holy Spirit]] is as valid two
thousand years after Pentecost as it was twenty years after the
first outpouring of the Spirit."
David DuPlessis, about Pentecostalism, in Frederick Dale
Bruner, *A Theology Of the Holy Spirit*, (Eerdmans,
1970) p.25
Running like a lion who's been
startled suddenly,
Diving like an eagle towards her target in the field.
I am moving in the darkness of this morning,
shadow light.
It makes me wonder if I'm dreaming
as the doorway comes in sight.....
But things are not what they're s'posed to be here!
He is not here; He is not here!
----- "He Is Not Here", by (cf. John
20:4)
© 1986 Sola Scriptura Songs, Inc.
Note (1): Not that the primary meaning of those Song of Songs passages
is an allegory of God's love with His people, for that's probably not the
case. It's firstly an interpersonal human thing. But there is usually more
than one dimension to a story, and Jewish and Christian interpreters over
the years did not go too far wrong in finding the God/God's-people allegory
there, at least as a background or second meaning.
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| ver.: 18 August 2011 Feeling It. Copyright © Robert Longman Jr. |