February 2020
Remember when you first made the decision to accept God’s gift of salvation? Perhaps you experienced a season of joy and excitement—feeling like Jesus was really real. You couldn’t get enough of the Lord, and couldn’t stop talking about Him! Then, somewhere along the line, the honeymoon faded and this “personal relationship with Jesus” became rather dull—a duty to be done. Sure, you still love Jesus in the abstract sense, but His actual presence feels as foreign and far away as ancient Israel. Do you ever look at your life as a Christian and secretly wonder, “Is this as good as it gets?”
It’s an Up-and-Down Journey
One of the best-kept secrets of Christianity is that while God often provides the delightful, initial euphoric stage for new believers, this stage is temporary. God never intends for us to remain only euphoric. That initial stage is merely the kick-off of a life-long journey.
Many Christians don’t understand the up-and-down nature of their spiritual journey when they make the decision to belong to Jesus. After the initial joy fades, sometimes we think that our job is to go to church, try to do more good than bad, and perhaps identify with a certain social/cultural/political demographic group. And then we go to Heaven when we die.
In The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, a mentor demon named Screwtape advises a younger demon named Wormwood that one of the most effective ways to pull a human “patient” away from God is to get the human to spend lots of energy trying to recapture the initial feelings of remarkable joy, and then convince the human to dismiss those feelings as a product of an over-excited imagination. The ideal result—from Satan’s perspective—is to have the human who is Christian settle into a state of lukewarm complacency that makes him or her completely ineffective and harmless to Satan’s cause.
Seasoned spiritual veterans can attest that warm feelings come and go. It’s what we do when the spiritual warmth departs, and we are left feeling abandoned and dry, which makes the crucial difference in the life of a follower of Jesus Christ.
After Mother Teresa's death, the world learned that she had spent most of her adult life with no sense of God’s presence. To me, that makes her life all the more remarkable in that she chose to faithfully serve God without experiencing the emotional reward of God's love for her. The mentor demon, Screwtape, writes: “Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
What to do when your faith feels old and dried up:
1. Make space for God—God won’t compete for your attention in a busy schedule. It’s up to us to make space and devote time in order to be alone with God.
2. Search your heart and confess any sin. Unconfessed sin blocks our connection to God.
3. Understand that spiritual ups and downs are to be expected—even welcomed—because they are a sign of movement and growth.
4. Don’t give up: The downs will not last forever, no matter how hopeless the situation feels in the moment.
5. Meditate on the fact that God’s love for you is always present, regardless of how you feel emotionally, or what is happening in your life at a particular time.