Hey All,
I've never posted here before but I wanted to share how I personally got closer to God. Hopefully someone out there will be helped by this.
I used to be agnostic and only recently became Christian again. I've become more involved in my church and with its the congregation. Since converting I've struggled with waking up and not feeling one with my personal God. I did some research and found this website,
christianspiritualquotes.com, which has helped me start the day on the right foot. It has a daily quote and a few relevant links.
I feel much more centered when I leave for work and throughout the day. Does anyone else use this site or sites like this one? I would love to build my Christianity Resources bookmark folder up a bit.
God Bless!
As someone who, while having been a Christian my entire life, spent a great deal of time stressing about the idea of "feeling" God it can be a very troubling road to walk.
Unfortunately there are a number of people out there who, if you listen to them enough, they seem to be suggesting that being a Christian involves certain feelings, a certain sense of feeling spiritual for example. And that can be a shortcut to shipwrecking your faith, because our feelings are incredibly fickle. There is no specific way that a Christian ought to feel, we are as much a broken people as anyone else and with all the foibles and faults of anyone else.
Speaking personally I was diagnosed several years ago with depression and anxiety. Coupled with elements of my particular church environment in my younger days this may have led to what is known as
scrupulosity. I think it is descriptive, in part, of what Martin Luther and the Lutheran tradition refers to as despair. Namely that when the Christian seeks to earn favor with God, or to reach God through his or her own efforts, seeking to feel, think, say, or do the right things to gain the desired effect (namely intimacy or rightness with God) it leads to despair--one begins to see the fruitlessness of their endeavors and it becomes a place of despairing guilt that can easily lead one to conclude that they aren't loved by God, or that they aren't God's, or even to conclude why even bother with the whole thing anyway? The result can, as I said above, a shipwrecking of faith.
Because Christianity is, fundamentally, not about our individual relationship to God, but God's relationship to and with us. That is to say, the vertical dimension of the Christian faith is not ourselves reaching up to grasp hold of God, rather it is God coming down to take hold of us. As an older Lutheran acquaintance, before I was a Lutheran myself, was fond of saying, "God always comes down, we never go up, God always comes down."
This isn't to say this is what you're doing, nor am I suggesting devotional time is bad (heaven forbid), I am merely cautioning what can easily become, for many, a thing of despair and anxiety if one seeks to make the interior, emotional sense the basis of Christian spirituality.
There is also a condition spoken by some of the Catholic mystics, notably St. John of the Cross, known as the "dark night of the soul", it is a period in life when the individual feels far and distant from God, there is a seeming lack of warmth, and one's heart seems distant and cold from God (and can easily be mistaken as though God has Himself withdrawn from us). Though John of the Cross and others have pointed out that this can, and should be, a place where we can grow; God has not left or abandoned us, God will never leave nor abandon us,
ever.
Always remember that our hope in Christ is never about our personal spiritual state or how we feel. Our "feeling" of closeness or intimacy with God is always fickle, subjective, and rooted up in our own broken, sinful, self. Rather we have something far more strong and stable, we have the Gospel. We have God's solemn, irrevocable promise in Jesus Christ, that having been baptized we are the children of God and no power in the universe can steal from us God's love, kindness, grace, and promise to us that He has made in His Word and Sacraments. So we can assemble together for worship, freely confessing our sins and be confident that we are indeed forgiven, we can in confidence of God's mercy come and receive the gifts of Communion, the body and blood of Christ in and under the bread and the wine, and say that we are Christ's, Christ is ours, and He has said this and no one can take it away from us.
We can state, boldly, that yes we are quite broken, fragile, and quite messed up sinners and that we rarely get anything right--but what of it? Christ is still our Savior, God is still our Father, and the Holy Spirit is still in us, pushing us toward our future hope of that Last Day when Christ returns and we will be raised up and made new and whole to that life that is forever. In the meantime we will fall and we will fail, but there is always mercy, and so we can push forward in the race not in confidence of ourselves, but in confidence of the Son of God who gave Himself for us. So that at all times, in fear, suffering, joy, laughter, or mourning there is always Christ, the one true and certain rock and foundation against which no storm can budge or break. He is our foundation and our cornerstone, always.
-CryptoLutheran
