This has been a multiple day learning process, navigating the highs and lows of living with Jesus, but I wouldn’t have it any other way! But first, before we dive in deep, some context!
On Wednesday (not this Wednesday, but last Wednesday), I spent all day talking with God and hearing His responses. This is something I’ve always wanted to get better at (talking throughout the day, instead of at set times), so all of Wednesday, I was on the biggest spiritual high!
Thursday morning came around, and I was still on a high. During worship, I asked God to give me a revelation of Him, and what He answered with is just so good!
He reminded me that emotions are of our flesh, and so they aren’t a good indication of how we’re doing spiritually. We feel the joy, peace, comfort, love, and awe of God when we talk to Him, but when we don’t feel them, we start to think we’re doing something wrong or we just get bored, so then we fall away to do something that actually feels productive.
As I heard a few days earlier, our flesh doesn’t want us to get closer to Jesus, because it’s not coming to heaven with us. This is the only life our flesh gets, so it wants to make the most of it. And if it can convince us that our worship, prayer, and time in the Word isn’t doing anything, then it has more time to do other, not spiritually filling but flesh satisfying, things.
But we’re not supposed to worship because of how it makes us feel! We’re supposed to worship because God deserves it! It’s just a happy coincidence (not actually, God orchestrated it this way) that we feel so full when we do it!
So anyways, that’s what God showed me, and as the day wore on, I clung to that teaching more and more as my high descended to a low. I still heard His voice, but I no longer felt the emotions I’d felt so strongly earlier. It made me think, “What’s even the point of talking if I don’t feel closer to God because of it?” Then God would gently remind me of what He’d told me earlier.
So I held onto this hope, believing it, but not fully, so God reminded me again through a book. It talked about how the first love and the last love are the strongest. It’s what happens in the middle that’s hard, because our feelings aren’t as strong and we have to put in the work without an award in sight.
When life gets easy, we get bored. In the same way, when we aren’t feeling the highs, it’s because our walk with God is so strong! We become comfortable with each other, and forget that there’s still so much more to learn! So pursue that learning, even if you don’t feel like you need it!
So yeah, that’s what God’s been teaching me!
I like this. It is such a great reminder to be anchored in. It makes sense that our flesh demands all the temporal things because it is all it knows. Thanks for your encouraging words.