Emotional Spirituality

As human beings created in the image and likeness of God, we are all endowed with these wonderful things called emotions. We have been given the incredible privilege of possessing a very wide range of feelings which ebb and flow in response to the circumstantial climate we are in. Emotions are an internal thermometer inside of us which activates a neurological sensory response to the world around us. We also have 5 fantastic physical senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch through which we interpret our surroundings as well as communicate and interact with others. I realize that this moment is probably not the first time this whole idea has been introduced to you and I imagine you probably already know that you possess these things. No news flash here.

Even though we know these are things we all have built within us and we probably have been using them for a good number of years now, we are by no means experts on what to do with them or what they are really all about. The truth is that because our senses and emotions are things God created and put in us, He is the supreme authority on how they were designed to be used. He holds the owner’s manual on our hearts. He knows the depths of our inner person because he formed us and designed each cell and atom to work together in a beautifully orchestrated symphony of anatomical genius. (Ps 139)

In our ignorance, we often misuse these innate little gifts and when used inappropriately they can be highly destructive to our hearts and lives. This is especially true when it comes to our spiritual lives.

The vast majority of what I see being called faith today and what I hear being labeled as a “move of God” is rooted not in truth but in experience. Closeness to the Father is measured in feelings, sensations, impressions, “divine hunches” and the way a certain spiritual encounter made one feel. The closer we feel to God, the closer we think we are.

Now as I said at the beginning of this post, emotions and senses are truly awe inspiring things but when they are misdirected or used to navigate our lives and choices, they have a power and will all their own and become fueled by the soul-ish drives of our carnal humanity. Emotions and senses can be manipulated. They are like the variable “x” in an algebra equation. When they are not under the direction of the Spirit of God, by default, they become yielded to the flesh…which is Satan’s playground. When we do not submit ourselves to the Lord and filter our experiences through the truth of His word, we all too easily will yield to the temptation of trusting what we felt or experienced over what scripture teaches to be immovably solid and true. Emotions, thoughts and sensory experiences that are not completely yielded to the Lord become loose canons and we will be deceived when we use these highly unpredictable wild cards to navigate our choices and beliefs.

It seems in the present day religious culture of our nation that one can hardly set foot into a service or pick up a book without hearing some very distinct messages about what I will refer to as “feel good faith.” It is in effect not truly faith at all because it is based upon the foundation of personal spiritual experiences and emotions. True faith is to put our total and complete trust in God…the creator and sustainer of all life. It is a trust in the nature and character of the one true God who is the same yesterday, today and for all of eternity. It is not a trust based upon feelings, warm fuzziness or senses. We trust because He is supremely trustworthy and binds Himself to His own covenant and fulfills to the letter every word He says He will do. His love and faithfulness are everlasting and He is not like man that he should lie or wake up one day and have a personality makeover.

Having a “faith” built on emotion or sensory-based experiences is like taking refuge in a port a potty during a tornado. That sounds ridiculous of course…who would want to risk being pulled up in a cyclonic vacuum? In the same way, how do we expect to withstand the storms of life if we are not rooted and grounded in the truth of God’s word and placing our full and complete trust in the immovable anchor of His character? Where did we get the idea that our “experiences” were a safe thing to place our trust in to define reality? How can we prove the accuracy of our experiences when they dwell in the realm of emotional variables?

Herein lies one of the greatest dangers of having an experienced-based faith. It is our human nature to base reality on feelings. If we felt it, then it must be real. We become one with our experiences and when someone disagrees with our experience then they have disagreed with us. Tracking with me? So if our spiritual lives are defined by the “spiritual experiences” we feel in a service and we have decided that because we felt it then it must be real and if we think it’s real then it must have been from God then we are now in a dangerous predicament. It’s dangerous because if someone challenges what we are sure we have experienced and that experience is the foundational basis of how we relate to God then one tiny kick to the side of our “faith” will send that house made of straw falling down around us. It then becomes a game of my experience vs. your experience.

This is especially sticky, for example, when you encounter a situation where someone has justified a bizarre action or decision with “the Lord told me to do such and such”. Your spiritual antenna buzzes, a little red flag goes up and you now are in the realm of trying to determine the accuracy of someone’s said experience based on the fruit of their bizarre behaviors.

Here is the other side to this deceptive coin: there is the one who proves their faith by their experiences which automatically creates the flip side of the one who, by contrast, thinks they have no authentic relationship with God because they lack these feelings, manifestations, experiences, etc. So if they didn’t feel warm fuzziness or have goosebumps or feel a warm sensation or the like, then “something must be wrong with me.” Can you see what a dangerous dichotomy has now been created because experiences have defined reality?

Like I said earlier in this post, emotions and experiences can be moved and manipulated. You can be having a glorious and wonderful day and feel on cloud nine and one bad experience in a grocery store line, a traffic jam, a hurtful conversation with a family member or a myriad of other life circumstances can immediately and involuntarily alter your emotional state in a fraction of an instant. If natural events can manipulate emotion and change how we feel about our lives (even momentarily), how much more potentially destructive can a change in feeling or experience rock our spiritual worlds when we let that define our reality in God?

So if not from warm fuzzy feelings and experiences, where does true faith come from? How do we know if what we are defining our relationship with God by is truly accurate?

We must put our wholehearted trust in the nature and character of God and allow the truth of His word to be the plumb line which we measure our experiences up against. In the same way that we hold and handle different things in different ways in the natural, we are to treat spiritual things the same way. The grip you hold on a hammer when you drive a nail or the way you hold the leash on your Rottweiler is different than the way you would hold a baby or catch a lightening bug. In the spiritual sense, we should hold hard and fast to the truth of scripture for it is our foundation. It is strong, solid and immovable. It is what we should anchor our lives to. Teachings of man, warm fuzzy spiritual experiences, prophetic words that people give, etc. we should hold a bit more loosely and open-handed to allow the Lord to show us what is of Him and what is not. These are the variable factors and not the constants. These are the things we have to test, sift through and watch the fruit of to see if they truly be from Him. Sometimes things that appear to be “of the Lord” are not. Just because you felt it, doesn’t mean it was reality.

We have a responsibility to diligently guard and keep our hearts in check and filter our emotional and experiential messages through the truth of scripture which is never wrong and will never change. This produces a trust that is not easily shaken because it is built on the foundation of a God whose faithfulness never changes, whose love never runs dry and whose character is more dependable than the sun that pierces the horizon and heralds each morning. He is our rock and the fortress upon which we must build our lives. Experiences will change. Emotions will fluctuate. If we evaluate reality based on things that move, then we will totter back and forth based on this variable environment. If we are firmly rooted in truth, we can build a trust that is tried and true and that will carry us through any storm we face in this life.

Pause

Pause. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear or read that word? For some I would think their mind goes to movies, as does mine. Some awkward face on an actor, frozen in mid word while we get more popcorn or use the restroom.
Maybe one thinks of our good old VCR players back in the day.

But What about in our lives? Do we ever truly PAUSE?

In his book Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell speaks of how he had to learn to take a "sabbath". He had to intentionally set aside a day for him to not check his email, answer his phone, and make himself available to the ones he loves the most.

Bell states:
"Sabbath is taking a day to remind myself that I did not make the world, and it will continue to exist without my efforts."
"Sabbath is a day where my work is done, even if it isn't."
"Sabbath is a day where my job is to enjoy. Period."
"Sabbath is a day when I remind myself that I am not a machine"

One of the things that I personally struggle with is indeed this. Amidst the job, schoolwork, fixing the car, cutting the lawn, baseball practice, meetings at church, services at Church, deadlines, discussion preparation, event planning, report writing........

If there is no pause in the midst of these things, it is just a matter of time until I don't want to do ANY of it anymore. Not that these things are bad things, and not that these things are not important.

How do we expect to hear God's Voice when we are constantly running and doing and striving and busy? The answer friends, is simple.

We don't.

I would encourage any one of my friends to try this. Take a Sabbath. Take a pause. Try it for a whole day. You may even have trouble at first. Let your engine come to an idle. Daydream. Pray. Ask for God to speak to you. Clear your mind. Accomplish nothing.

What does God want to communicate to you?

Hebrews 4:9-11 ESV So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

Money Management, or LACK thereof

SO everyone understands money management in this day and age, or at least they should. If things are tight at your house, like they are in ours, here is something to think about.

What do you need?

By this I mean, what do you seriously need? For example: Shanon and I are smart phone users. We love them! They are convenient, we get all our email, use our favorite apps, anytime and anywhere we want. However, what do we really NEED from a phone? I would assume at it's most basic we need calling, right? We have a laptop and a desktop computer, so do we really NEED all of these features on our phones? The painful answer is NO. We are now in the process of trading in our Droids, and reducing our monthly bill by 52%. Thats just nuts.

What about other areas? Setting up automatic payments with companies definitely is convenient, but you can get in trouble if you are not paying attention. For instance, our cable company. We have had automatic payments set up with them since we moved here back in 2010. We had how much it was monthly, and it has been deducted from our bank account every month since then. BUT-What about after the 12 month promotional period ends? Yeah, pretty painful. Did you know that they can change your bill, add new fees, and still just automatically deduct them from your account? We weren't paying attention. Its tough to admit, but it's the truth. Our bill practically doubled, and did so many months ago. new "converter" fees, and the non-promotional pricing drove the bill up by almost $90.

This is a challenge. Take a look at your monthly bills. Especially if you have auto payments. What do you need? NOT WANT, NEED.

potential stumbling blocks

Shanon and I have found ourselves in a lot of strange places.

We often will look around and realize that what we are doing or where we are going doesn't really make sense. Now, most may say a simple "change it". Which sounds easy enough, but in reality, we aren't in charge.

What I mean by this is that we really have surrendered to God's plan for our lives, and believe me; we have thoroughly checked, nowhere in the Bible does it say that God's plan will always make sense.

The major issue here is that sometimes one can let their own conventional thinking take precedence over what God is actually communicating.

Obviously, you want to do whatever God is telling you to do, even if that means staying somewhere that is quite confusing to you. Believe me, we can identify.

Some people have a "life verse" that they use for signatures and things of that sort.

Shanon and I have a life prayer.

"God, give me peace in the things you want me doing, and no peace in the things you don't want me doing."

This has become a staple in our daily life. I challenge you to make it a part of yours.

God always wants us to understand what he is communicating.

We always should want to hear and do what He says. Even if that means that it won't make sense.

Step 5: Check Yourself

Like most men I know, sometimes, even the best of us, find ourselves with our foot in our mouth, wondering how we got here.

Although these times can be quite annoying, I find that with proper reflection, these can be some of the most highly educational times in our personal growth.

Like so many people out there in the Church today, I am constantly having to "un-learn" things that I was told or taught in my early formative years in the Church. It's not that the people in my life when I was younger had bad intentions, and even further, I am sure that they even believed the things that they said/taught me. It's just the fact that throughout my adult life, I have come to these places where I find that things that I believe and was introduced to in my youth, just plain aren't true.

Today, I had to sit down with a couple from my Church, and voice some issues that I had during an earlier interaction. The issue in question here, was with my friend's wife. Now, aside from just respecting my friend's authority in his marriage, and wanting him there to be witness to what I said, I also from a young age was told that this was also the "biblical" way to handle an issue with someones wife.

Throughout the course of the conversation, I said something along the lines of: "I wanted to wait until I could get you both together, so I could address this". To which she replied, "why did he have to be here"? So of course, me being the all knowing all powerful idiot that I am, reply with "because this is the biblical way". ((INSERT FOOT HERE))

So she asked me to show her where the Bible says that, and after my brain scan came up empty-I started to realize, once again, that this is yet another one of those seemingly harmless tidbits from the past that just plain isn't true.

Now, I am not saying that I disagree with my actions to have a husband present when I speak with his wife. As stated earlier, I believe just out of respect for the husband this is the better scenario, however, THIS IS NOT A BIBLICAL TRUTH.

We have to be careful about these little tidbits. I'm sure right now if you thought hard enough, you may come across something from your past that you've never actually opened the Bible and researched. It is such an easy pitfall for us as Christians, to take someone else's word for something. Even if it is someone that you trust.

We MUST test everything we are told and believe.

At the end of I Thessalonians, we have a list of things to do here in the end times:
[21] but test everything; hold fast what is good.
(1 Thessalonians 5:21 ESV)