Feelings Versus Reality
Surprisingly many celebrities feel unattractive despite being envied for their beauty. Countless students have felt sure they have failed their exams when they actually did well. Hypochondriacs are healthy people who feel sure they are ill or even dying. A whole range of phobias cause people who are quite safe to feel frightened.In total, billions of dollars have been lost by people who felt sure their business would succeed. Feeling lucky has plunged not just gamblers, but multitudes of other people into all sorts of disasters, and feeling inadequate has kept countless others from the success they could have enjoyed.
Trainee pilots have it drilled into them how critical it is to trust solely the plane's instrumentation and completely disregard their feelings about their orientation. What magnifies the danger of drink driving is that intoxicated drivers feel better at driving than they really are. Countless millions of people have felt perfectly safe minutes before they died.
Though notoriously unreliable, and often dangerously deceptive, feelings give the powerful illusion of reality. Never is this more so than when it comes to feeling unloved. We are about to uncover numerous and distinct reasons why being loved by God and feeling loved by God, are often a world apart. The same is true of God's presence and feeling his presence.
Negative Expectations
Suppose a teenage girl is convinced she is too fat for any guy to possibly like her. She has a secret crush on one young man and he actually likes her. She is so terrified of him telling her something negative about herself, however, that she keeps avoiding him. Even worse, she is so certain that she is unlovable that she keeps misinterpreting his every attempt to convey his affection. This frustratingly tragic situation is similar to what plagues the relationship many of us have with God.
Rejection or apparent indifference from certain people has convinced many of us that we are unlovable. From an early age, others of us grew to expect our father to be cold and indifferent and - deep down - we think God must be the same. Some of us have actually had it drummed into us since childhood that we are evil or incapable of gaining the approval of anyone who matters.
It is hardly surprising that most Christians who have suffered such a background, half expect God to reject them, or at least frown on them or be aloof. This mistaken expectation strongly pressures them to interpret every feeling or event, not in the light of the truth that God is incurably loving and forgiving, but according to their negative expectations about God. This can easily produce a vicious circle, with one's mind producing feelings in line with one's expectations.
We instinctively shrink from anyone we fear is angry with us. So if we fear that God is displeased with us, we are most unlikely to receive inner confirmation of his love, simply because we are too scared or apprehensive to draw close enough to him to know his heart. Even if we know we are forgiven but suspect that God has a low opinion of us, we will similarly be reluctant to spend long enough listening to whispers to hear him tell us how he really feels about us. Moreover, we will be strongly biased to dismiss or misinterpret according to our preconceptions his every attempt to convey to us the depth of his love for us. What a bind!
Let's consider some reasons for us expecting God to think negatively about us and see how they stand in the light of biblical reality.
Unforgivably Guilty?
First, the bad news: the most exciting Person in the universe is terrifyingly holy. Not even the most saintly person can relate to the Holy One until his or her sins are supernaturally removed through spiritual union with Jesus, the spotlessly pure, eternal Son of God. This supernatural transformation is the most critical factor in having a thrillingly genuine encounter with the Living God.
If Jesus has forgiven you, you are cleansed of all sin and have no guilt in God's eyes. Despite this, there is a good chance that you will continue to feel guilty. This is to be expected, since, as we have already seen, there is a vast difference between reality and feelings.
God has a supernatural enemy who is fiercely determined to minimize the impact of his greatest defeat. He attempts this by mustering all his evil cunning to afflict us with deceptive feelings of guilt and hopelessness. It is a cruel, deadly serious, supernaturally powerful attempt to fool us into rejecting the all-forgiving power of Christ's sacrifice. In reality, it is no harder for God to accept the vilest devil worshipper or reprobate former Christian than for him to accept humanity's most saintly person. Let me explain.
A single sin - even the most minor possible offense - plunges us so far below the perfection of God that the holy Lord could draw close to us no more than a sterilized surgeon performing open heart surgery could let himself touch a sewer rat. The "tiniest" one-off sin is all it takes to keep anyone eternally cut off from the fearsomely holy God. Like trying to unmurder someone, once defiled by the slightest imperfection, there is no way any of us can scramble back to the perfection required to relate to the Holy One.
Every one of us, whether good-goody or as debased as anyone can get, is in the same impossible situation. All possibility of being able to say we have lived a perfect life is shattered at the moment of our first sin. Once contaminated by a single sin, devoting the rest of our lives to pure things could remove our contamination no more than dripping drops of pure water into a bucket of already contaminated water. The wages of one sin is death. When someone dies of a smoking-related disease, he does not spring back to life when the corpse quits cigarette smoking. Neither could quitting sin bring us back from spiritual death.
So that's it. After one sin, relating to God becomes so impossible that even a billion more murders and blasphemies could not make it any more hopeless.
Defiled and unable to reach God, the whole of humanity - no exceptions - was in the clutches of the Evil One. Then God intervened by sending Jesus to swap places with us, thus making it possible for everyone - no exceptions - to be granted the righteousness of God's holy Son and thus have full access to God.
Jesus undid the devil's evil by dying for the sins of the entire world, thus making possible the full forgiveness of every sin, no matter how gross and deliberate and repeated, or whether committed before or after becoming a Christian. Nothing could rob us of God's yearning to pour out his love and forgiveness upon us, unless we do not want Jesus to deliver us from our sins, or we mistakenly believe that Jesus' costly sacrifice is too inadequate to forgive the grossest of sins.
Satan's defeat means that the only place where he can hold humanity captive is in a slave camp where all the prison bars, walls and fierce-looking guards are nothing but an illusion. At any moment anyone can walk out, free. The only people staying there are those who fear freedom from sin and so choose to remain captives, or those who refuse to believe that because of Jesus' victory, the prison's security measures are an illusion.
Powerfully intimidating, deceptive feelings of rejection by God, and feelings of guilt, hopelessness and condemnation are simply part of the Evil One's ploy to try to fool people into acting like his slaves when, because of Jesus, every one of those who act like captives can walk free at any moment.
It pains our loving Lord when we make unwise choices. Nevertheless, he honors our wishes by leaving it up to each of us whether we choose to believe in the power of the Deceiver or in the power of Jesus. In blanket statement after blanket statement, God promises over and over in his Word that he forgives whoever believes in Jesus. There are no exceptions. People who consider themselves unforgivable insult the crucified Lord, the Savior of the world, by choosing to believe in the power of their sin, rather than the power of their Forgiver.
Yes, Jesus spoke of an unforgivable sin, but whatever he meant by that cannot negate the Bible's repeated insistence that forgiveness is freely available to everyone who believes in what Jesus achieved by giving his holy life as payment for the death penalty our sins deserve. The context of Jesus' reference to an unpardonable sin makes it clear that he was referring to rejecting God's offer of forgiveness by choosing to believe that Jesus, God's Savior, is of the devil, not of God. No one believing that Jesus is anti-God would look to Jesus for God's forgiveness. So it turns out that the only sin that cannot be forgiven is one for which forgiveness through Jesus is never sought.
Since Satan is powerless to stop anyone who by faith accepts God's forgiveness through Jesus, we could expect faith in the power of Jesus' forgiveness to be the area of greatest satanic attack. God's spiritual foe, who the Bible calls the deceiver, is determined to flood us with exceedingly convincing feelings of guilt, hopelessness and rejection, in an attempt to get us to insult Christ by denying the unlimited forgiving power of his sacrifice. The choice is ours whether we break God's heart and dishonor him by choosing to believe deceptive feelings, or whether we refuse that cowardly path and cling to the integrity of God's love and promises, and to the power of Christ's forgiveness.
This area of satanic attack is so critical and affects so many Christians that I have devoted incalculable hours to writing webpage after webpage specifically for people who feel riddled with guilt or feel unforgivable.
Unworthy of God's Love?
What commonly sabotages our feelings and enjoyment of God's love for us is being unable to think of a single reason why God would love us. We think if we, who are biased towards ourselves and presumably have above average tolerance of our own failings, find ourselves unlovable, how could anyone else truly love us - especially the God of perfection? In fact, for many of us, the notion of God loving us - as distinct from him loving someone else - seems quite impossible. We forget, however, that the Lord is very different from fickle humanity. With the God for whom nothing is impossible, no one is unlovable.I cannot figure out how my computer works, but I don't let that stop me from enjoying it. Neither do I have to figure out why God loves me before I can enjoy his love. Nevertheless, our inability to understand God's love can gnaw away at our belief that God genuinely loves us. So let's look deeper into this.
To intellectually know the nature of God is not enough; we must take it to heart and let the truth transform us. The God of the impossible is not only perfect in his holiness; he is perfect in love. Not only is his miracle-working power without human limits, his love is also without human limits. The Creator of not just galaxies, but sub-atomic particles, has a mind so powerful that he is intensely interested not only in constellations but in every hair on your head. So far beyond human limitations are his powers of concentration that he could not be more aware of your every thought if you were the only person in an empty universe. The Creator's love is as unlimited and as extreme as his physical power.
God is not a machine. He is not merely rational; he is passionate. To glimpse a shadow of his love, picture the world's most selfless, devoted and proud parent of a tiny baby that can do little but cry, soil itself and wriggle. Multiply that love by infinity and you are approaching God's love.
Let's examine parental love to see just how mysterious genuine love is.
You know what it's like when a married couple hit on the idea of starting a family. They are having breakfast together when the man suddenly exclaims, "I'm sick of gardening, looking after the car, maintaining the house, and all my other chores!" His wife looks up from her cereal. "I've got this cool idea," he continues, "Let's have children so they can do all the work."
"Brilliant!" exclaims the wife, excitedly grasping the possibilities, "I'll teach them to do all the washing and ironing. They'll keep our house tidy and do the cooking. We'll have breakfast in bed every morning. They'll answer the phone so we can have long, undisturbed sleeps."
"Yes!" chimes in her husband, "Life is too hectic. We need some children to give us some peace and quiet."
"And think of all the decisions they could make for us," adds the wife. "I'm sick of having to choose what I watch on TV."
"Come to think of it," says her husband, "I've been missing Sesame Street. And my accountant says children are a goldmine. Pouring money into kids is the best investment we could ever make. We'll be millionaires! We'll be retired at 35. And think of later. What are we going to lie awake at night worrying about if we don't have teenagers? And when we're older who else would throw us into a nursing home?"
"I don't think a woman looks truly beautiful without stretch marks," muses the wife. "Dirty diapers and vomit, screaming kids, snotty noses, and temper tantrums are just the spark our marriage needs."
From a coldly rational perspective, having children seems almost an act of insanity, and yet billions of us yearn for it. Selfless parental love is a compelling desire placed within us by God himself - the God whose love doesn't make worldly sense. When he loves, nothing could be further from his heart than a profit and loss analysis. Divine love - pure love, undefiled by selfishness - is based on giving, not getting.
Even the most starry eyed would-be parents know ahead of time that their offspring will sometimes be naughty, self-centered and have disgusting habits. Billions of us willingly sacrifice much to have children anyway. Children inevitably embarrass and disappoint their parents but, despite having only a speck of God's love, good parents can't stop loving their offspring.
If there are parents, powered by only inferior imitations of God's love, who keep on loving when it does not seem profitable, how much more will the infinite love of God explode the confines of coldly rational, human thought.
If passion were cold and calculating, it would make sense to consider ourselves unwanted if we can't think of anything God could gain from loving us. Many of us choose to love adults only because of what they can do for us - kill loneliness, boost our status or egos or some such thing. We are so used to fake love that we are suspicious if ever we stumble upon the real thing. If real love were selfish, then loving not for gain, but simply for the sake of loving, would be insane. Because even humans know a little about the "insanity" of love, we have such expressions as "madly in love." But beyond that, genuine love does not hold back until there are obvious benefits, because real love is unselfish. And God is brimming with it.
God loves you because he loves you. He loves you because that's his very nature. It's who he is. He takes delight in you, not for what you can do for him, but for what he can do for you. His love singles you out as if there were only you and him. His love makes you special, irreplaceable, and of infinite value.
The story is a told of a boy who labored with his grandfather for hours and hours to design, build and paint a model sailing boat. When at last it was finished, he took his precious boat to the lake to try it out. It sailed beautifully. Suddenly a gust of wind swept the boat out of reach. It drifted further and further into the deep until the boy lost sight of it. Eventually, he trudged home, heart broken.
The boy's grandfather suggested making another boat, but the boy was inconsolable. Nothing could replace that boat.
Weeks later, the boy glanced in the shop window of a second-hand dealer and saw his boat. It was weathered and beaten but it was definitely his. Excitedly, he rushed into the shop to claim his boat, only to find he was not believed. He was told the only way he could get that battered boat was to buy it. He had to find work to earn enough to buy it. When at last the transaction was completed, he hugged his beloved boat and whispered to it, "You're mine! You're twice mine! You're mine because I made you and you're mine because I bought you. And I don't care how battered you are, I'll make you beautiful again."
That's how God feels about you.
God loves you because you are his. He loves you because he made you and because he bought you and because the All-powerful One sees the astounding person he can make you, if only you let him.
With God, you are lovable. To think anything else is to insult not you, but the God of love. The One for whom nothing is impossible is so passionately in love with you that there is no length to which he will not go to pour his love on you for all eternity. God's eternal Son went to the extreme of being tortured to death so that you could be as cherished by God as Christ himself is.
I beg you not to gloss over what the Holy Son of God did for you. The great temptation is to perversely under-rate God's personal love for you and malign the Lord of Glory by supposing Jesus died only for people in general, as if you were just one of millions, not the personal focus of the greatest expression of love in the universe. In our imagination we can cultivate twisted ideas about God's love, but in reality, divine love cannot be diluted or depersonalized. God loves you as if you were his only child.
The truth is that, with his Son's full agreement, God traded his Son's life for you. No matter what your analysis of your worth, no one is more important to God than you.
Mysterious Depression
As strange as it may seem, vast numbers of people suffer from clinical depression long before realizing they have depression. One such person is a missionary I know. Eventually she was diagnosed and then began to learn that a common characteristic of this affliction is an inability to feel loved by God. She writes:
- When I was first going through serious depression, I had not the slightest idea that it was depression. I knew I was keeping a close guard on my spiritual life, but in spite of that, it truly felt like God simply was not listening or responding to me, even though I prayed and prayed. And it was that way for months.
I also felt sure I was a failure in my missionary work, and that my teaching was futile. I now look back and see that the truth was very different to my feelings. People enjoyed my classes, and were eager to learn, and the papers they turned in proved they were learning.
I was also sure that my co-worker - another missionary, whom I got along well with and saw constantly - was displeased with me. That frustrated me, because I didn't know why she was displeased.
It turned out that I had simply projected onto those around me, and even onto God, the negative way my depression caused me to feel about myself.
I now know that one of the symptoms of depression is not being able to feel love, even by those who are close to you. In depression, most of our feelings are blunted. We feel useless, unworthy, hopeless, and that no one cares about us. Not feeling God's love was simply a symptom of the disease. It had nothing to do with God not being there, or me being "off" spiritually.
I have undergone much spiritual dryness simply because of depression. Now that my clinical depression has been diagnosed and I understand the implications, I'm no longer shaken by the spiritual symptoms.
So you could be unable to feel God's love because a chemical imbalance - clinical depression - is deadening your emotions and distorting your perception of earthly and heavenly reality. There are other possibilities, however. We could be unconsciously shutting down our emotions because lurking in the shadows of our mind is a fear of getting hurt.
Part of us - often subconsciously - actively resists feeling love, because to love someone is to make ourselves highly vulnerable. Loving someone gives that person the terrifying power to hurt us deeply. To really feel someone's love requires us to open our hearts to that person. It gives a person the power to lift us to the clouds but also the power to smash our hearts like a dropped egg.
Not surprisingly, the fear of getting hurt causes many of us to close off emotionally, as a form of self-protection. Tragically, the very attempt to seal off our emotions from the possibility of getting hurt, also seals off the possibility of us feeling loved. This is yet another instance when it is through giving that we receive.
In theory, for us to release our white-knuckled grip on our emotions, it should be sufficient to know that God is faithful and will keep his promise never to leave or forsake us. In practice, however, fear is seldom overcome quickly. For anyone terrified of spiders, to stop fearing a huge spider will take more than just becoming intellectually convinced that it is harmless. We can expect it to take a long while for us to trust God so completely that we relax enough to be able to feel loved. So, as back to front as it seems, the first but significant step towards realizing that we are loved is to not expect to feel loved.
Your emotional Fingerprint
Part of the uniqueness that makes us special is that we each have a distinctive emotional reaction to identical situations.
We all know that some of us are far more emotional than others. Some people seem to laugh at anything; some laugh at nothing. Some would cry if their cat sneezed. Others would not shed a tear if hit by the worst personal disaster known to humanity. The one who cries the least might have the softest heart. Lack of tears has nothing to do with how much people are hurting or how devoted they are.
How emotional you are, flows from your personality and past experiences, not from how godly you are.
The same is true of all feelings.
To adapt what I've said elsewhere:
- Never confuse devotion with emotion. The Bible measures love, not in tingles per second, but in putting one's life on the line (1 John 3:16-18). It's pain endured in the valley, not gooey feelings in the afterglow of mountaintop ecstasy, that validates love. Never assume that emotional deadness - a normal phase of anyone's spiritual life - implies spiritual deadness. We march by faith, not by warm fuzzies.
If a devout woman of God broke her neck and lost all physical feeling, it would be a challenge, but we would expect it not to hinder her relationship with God. Likewise, we should not allow not being able to feel emotionally hinder us spiritually.
A Wrong Emphasis on Feelings
It is astonishingly easy for us Christians to slip into unbiblical thinking. A quick statistical check of biblical word usage gives a crude indication of how we have strayed from the Bible's perspective on the significance of feelings. In the New International Version of the Bible, for every variant of the word "feel" (feeling, felt, feels, etc) there are over thirteen occurrences of variants of the word "faith" or "believe." In the King James Version, the figure balloons to thirty-seven times more references to faith/believe than to variants of "feel." For details and further relevant word analyses, see Word Stats."Now faith is . . . the evidence of things not seen," declares the Word of God (Hebrews 11:1, KJV). Most of us know the verse. The problem is that we tend to reject it and think that feelings are the evidence. The Jerusalem Bible renders the verse: "Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of the realities that at present remain unseen." Our temptation is to dethrone faith and try to make feelings, not faith, the guarantee or proof of spiritual reality. To do so is to stray from biblical Christianity. To cling to faith is to show oneself an authentic Christian.
Expecting a Sign from God that He Loves You
How do you think the Almighty would feel if you said, "God, I want you to prove to me that you're not a liar when you declare over and over in your Word that you love me." We'd never put it so bluntly, but regardless of whether we seek a feeling or supernatural skywriting, this is really what is going on when we seek some sort of indication beyond the Bible and Christ's sacrifice that God loves us.Hoping for such a sign plunges us into a no-win situation. To explain, permit me to draw upon something I wrote elsewhere:
- I've suffered times when I was convinced I desperately needed personal indications of God's presence, and I felt badly treated by God when he left me to stagger though life devoid of any tangible proof that I was important to him, even though he gave people all around me the signs I craved. Eventually I remembered Thomas, who was granted perhaps the greatest of all such experiences - the opportunity to physically handle the risen Lord. How blessed he was! And yet the astounding thing is that Jesus told Thomas that the person who is really blessed is the one who is not granted an experience like him. The best is reserved for the person compelled to hold on by faith alone (John 20:29).
Finally I understood how I had forced my Lord into the position where he either had to deny me the experience I was hankering for, or deny me the greater blessing he had planned for me - the chance to gain glory by finding faith without experiencing anything dramatic and, by doing so, grow in faith, that exquisite commodity more valuable than gold. The Lord had lovingly risked my wrath so that he could give me the greater blessing. And instead of being grateful, I was annoyed at him.
How often we must unknowingly put God in such a situation. Seeing only one possible solution, we demand it of God, convinced that he must either act the only way we can figure, or God cannot be loving. We force God into either denying us what is best, or acting in a manner that we have fooled ourselves into thinking is unloving.
Slightly edited, here's an email I received:
- I was just beginning to read on your website about how much God is head over heals in love with us, when the Lord said to me, "Fifty First Dates." This is a movie of a guy that falls in love with a brain-injured girl who suffers from memory loss. Every day the guy tries to win her heart and sweep her off her feet, only to find out that the next day she can't even remember who he is. Every day he tries to win her over, even though she can't remember who he is the next day.
That's how it is with us sometimes. He is crazy in love with us. We look for spiritual highs but even if occasionally we get them, almost as soon as the high is over we assume the fading of the high means God has denied us in some way and we revert to feeling as down about our relationship with him as before the experience.
Reminding me of the movie, God said, "Just because she couldn't remember the guy the next day didn't stop him from trying to love her and win her over. He just kept on loving her and helping her to remember who she was and who he is."
That is so much like the relationship many of us have with God.
There is another side to the parable of the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45). Jesus found us, and we were so precious to him that he sold all he had, relinquishing all his kingly status and wealth, just to buy us back to the Father at the cost of his own tortured death. This blows me away! His love is so far beyond our love. No wonder we have such a hard time understanding it!
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