“God is gwayt’w dan ouw up-a-downs! God is gwayt’w dan ouw up-a-downs!” My recently turned three-year-old little sister meandered around the house happily singing (read: randomly yelling) this phrase a few weeks ago. Translated from toddlerese, it means, “God is greater than our ups and downs,” a sentence she had recently heard as the answer to her question, “What your shirt say?”
This sweet little reminder set me to thinking. We all have personal spiritual difficulties. In this article, I want to address one of the biggest “up-a-downs” I face—an apparent lack of any emotion toward God when I desire to burn brightly for Him. I don’t think I’m the only one, either, seeing as a fellow friend wrote this in a poem: “But why can't you feel it? / Maybe it's trust / And maybe it's faith / But your soul's a dead flint / And thus you can't feel it.” Sometimes I just don’t “feel” anything—not passionate for Jesus, not zealous for His work, not excited to read my Bible or pray. Try as I like to conjure up some little flame in my heart, I can’t. It just isn’t happening.
After a long period of this nagging lack of spiritual growth, I was essentially forced into discovering why I have this problem. One week at my Bible club, I made not-the-smartest-considering-my-workload promise to my Bible Quiz coach: I would finish half of the Bible study I had received that day by next club meeting—in one week. Needless to say, I sat at my desk almost all week, working on school and then Bible study and finished the book. So why do I tell you this story? Well, finishing my book forced me to read more of the Scriptures in one week than I had probably read in the past three months. At first, all I really wanted to do was finish the book. But as I was immersed in God’s Word, my passion for Him started coming back. I found that studying His Word released me from that lull of drudgery that I had been in and cultivated a love of learning all that He has for me and even a love of loving Him. The answer, then, to my “up-a-down” was to take time out from what I would normally do and spend it in time with God—whether I feel like it or not. Overcoming a lack of feeling takes doing what you know you must even with a stone-cold heart.
In a word, the solution to “blah-ness” is found in Luke 9:23: “Then He said to them all, ‘If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me’” (NKJV, emphasis added). Denying myself, forced though it was, and giving time to God made me want to spend more time with Him. Will you let Him take the place of activities you hold dear? Will you let Him rule and reign when it’s hard?
Hebrews 11:6—“… he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him” (NKJV).
No comments :
Post a Comment