I’ve got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart…. where?
I have often wondered through the various phases, highs and lows of my walk with Christ, in the moments when I feel God and more specifically the moments when I don’t feel God, how much emotions count for? Is it ok to seek to feel God? I have talked with a few people on what it means to delight in the Lord and how much I am supposed to feel concerning a relationship with Him. I found it disheartening when people would tell me “It’s more than feelings’, Emotions are fickle’ and ‘you’re missing something if you seek emotions’. But still wondered why then the emphasis to delight in the Lord? Why the command to abide fully in Him. Where does the self-sacrificing, soul-liberating, life-risking, I-count-everything-as-loss-compared-with-knowing-Christ-Jesus-Joy come from? My own will and strength?? -not a chance. I have a lot more to read and learn but something that John Piper wrote really stuck out to me today. “I have found for thirty years that preaching and teaching about God’s demand that we delight in him more than in anything else breaks and humbles people, and makes them desperate for true conversion and true Christianity. Oh, how easy it is to think we are what we ought to be when the emotions are made peripheral. Mere thoughts and mere deeds are manageable by the carnal religious mind. But the emotions—they are the weathercock of the heart. Nothing shows the direction of the deep winds of the soul like the demand for radical, sin-destroying, Christ-exalting joy in God.”
Just something to think about. If you guys have anything, thoughts, comments, disagreements I’d love to hear them, or read them. :)
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