I grew up in a Christian household, but for several years I was a backslider. I stopped praying and reading my Bible and instead picked up bad habits like watching perverse movies/tv shows, cussing, listening to secular rap, and smoking weed. For a while those things made me happy, but then I fell into depression so bad that even going outside was hard to do.
About a month ago I decided to turn back to Christ and have stopped all of my “worldly pleasures” hoping that a relationship with God would fix me. I’ve been praying and trying to reach out to God daily. Sometimes I feel ok (not great) but then other times I feel really bad again, almost worse than I did before.
My only hope in life is to have a relationship with Jesus, I see so many people who say they’ve been changed by it, but I feel confused and I guess you could say disappointed. I’ve given up a lot, but I feel I’ve received nothing back from him. Sometimes it hurts so badly that I just wanna turn away and go back into my old habits again, but I know that isn’t the right thing to do.
Ever since I’ve started seeking God I went from crying twice a month before to almost daily now. I’m trying my best to have faith and trust in him, but I feel empty, stuck, bored and sometimes bitter.
Here's the thing I want to tell everyone who is struggling with faith: It's about Jesus, it's about what Jesus has done for you.
People who have been told that Christianity is about having this personal experience of God, an experience that somehow will suddenly make their lives better if they just do X, Y, and Z: "Do this, don't do that, etc" have been misled, I'd even go so far as to say lied to. Though I don't believe that the sorts of people who are saying this intend to be deceptive, it's just that they are also misinformed and misled.
It's not about an experience of God. Or more accurately, it's not about a personal, individualistic, interior, mystical experience of God. There is an experience of God, but it is an external one: It is a meeting with God in Jesus through Word and Sacrament.
The Jesus we read about in the New Testament is the real Jesus that we worship, the real Jesus that really did suffer, die, was buried, and then rose from the dead, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. That's the real Jesus. And that same real Jesus meets us, not in our heart, or our feelings: He meets us in His word. When the Gospel is being preached, when you are hearing the Gospel declared to you, that is Jesus' word to you. Jesus speaks, but what He speaks is not an invisible, mystical, esoteric voice--it is the voice you hear when the Gospel is being preached from the pulpit. When we hear the Scriptures being read, when we read the Scriptures, that is the voice of the Good Shepherd to His sheep, to us.
In the waters of Holy Baptism that was Jesus, there, His word, in and with the water. Ephesians 5:26 says that Christ has cleansed His Church "by the washing of water with the word".
When we approach the Lord's Table to receive His Supper, there is Jesus, His own flesh and blood broken and shed for us and our forgiveness, as He Himself has said, "This is My body broken for you" and "This is the blood of the New Covenant which is poured out for many". Thus those words "Take and eat" and "Take and drink" are for us--that's Jesus there. The same Jesus who was born of Mary, the same Jesus who fed the five thousand with fish and loaves. The same Jesus that was crucified, the same Jesus that rose again.
When we look inward, we will not find God there. Because inwardly, I am just dead bones and sinfulness. The Holy Spirit dwells in me, just as He indwells all who belong to Christ; but I do not find the Spirit by looking inside myself--but by looking outside of myself. The Holy Spirit directs our gaze outward, to Christ, and what Christ has done and given us.
You list a number of things you believe to have been "worldly" and wrong; which you have given up. Giving up worldly pleasures does not make a person spiritual, holy, or Christian. One can find ascetics who devote themselves to extraneous rigors and denials of self in many world religions, such as Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains. But not a single Buddhist monk or Hindu sage is any closer to God than the most heinous of sinners.
The murderer and the sage stand together, neither is any closer than the other to God, neither is more spiritual than the other.
So how do we grow closer to God? The short answer is that we don't. The long and better answer is that God is the One who comes to us, God comes down to meet us, sinners, and to love us with the fullness of His grace and kindness in Jesus Christ.
It's not about us growing closer to God by climbing that mountain.
It's about God descending down, and meeting us in our lowliness and sin.
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" - John 1:14
God became man.
And Jesus does not hide Himself away waiting for us to come to Him. He freely and generously pours Himself out, gives Himself away, and comes to meet us--that is why the Church preaches His Gospel, it's why Christ told His Church to baptize and to celebrate His Supper, to preach the word, to proclaim forgiveness of sins in His name.
There's a reason why the Bible calls the Church "the Body of Christ", and that Jesus is Himself the Head of the Church, the Head of the Body. Christ meets the world through the Church, through those Means given to the Church to be the Church in the world: Word and Sacrament.
What I am saying, quite simply, is this: You don't have to get up, clean yourself, and then try and meet God. God has already met you, given you faith, given Himself to you in the Gospel. God has claimed you and adopted you in your baptism, you have received new birth from God (John 3:5). You partake of Christ's very body and blood in and through the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper (1 Corinthians 10:16). We have the Scriptures, to hear God's word, to hear Christ Himself speak to us.
All of this is already yours, by God's kindness and love for you.
We cling to these promises through faith. And faith is what we are given here in God's word, in the Sacraments, in what God has given us freely in Jesus. "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ" (Romans 10:17), "For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, so that none may boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9).
God's gift to you is nothing less than this: The fullness of Himself in Jesus Christ your Lord. And He is sufficient to save you, to keep you, to hold you, and to sustain you. He is everything you need, and He is already yours.
So then, why do we do good works? Why do we love our neighbor? What purpose does righteous living serve? This part is simple: To love one another, to love our neighbor.
The only righteousness that we have before God is the free gift of Christ's own righteousness given to us by God's grace, which is ours as a gift, through faith. Jesus makes us holy, Jesus makes us justified before God.
The righteousness we are called to live out in the world, before our neighbor, is not that righteousness that saves us; but that righteousness that loves our neighbor, and serves our neighbor.
Good works are for people, not for God.
And in that we can offer up our bodies "as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing, to God" (Romans 12:1) For God is pleased when our neighbor is fed, when the thirsty is given drink, when the poor and afflicted receive justice, when the naked are clothed, and when the outcasts are welcomed in.
Christianity is not about us pleasing God by our efforts. But God loving us in Jesus, and therefore saving us, and indeed all of creation.
-CryptoLutheran
