As I discussed briefly in my last post, I think that God wants wholehearted devotion from us. But an equally-important question is what do we want from God?
I think that most of us can certainly related to wanting to feel better—physically, perhaps, but certainly emotionally. So much of what we can observe in the churches today is aimed at helping people feel better emotionally. People want their sadness relieved, and their anxiety. They want the common suffering of uncertainty replaced with a feeling of confidence. They want to feel inspired and intrigued. They want the boredom to be replaced with amazement. They want to feel like they belong. They want their guilt to go away. They want to stop feeling lonely and to start feeling loved and taken care of.
And so it’s easy to try to design the churches around this. And yes, it’s true that the Bible does indeed address most, if not all, of these emotional difficulties. So, yes, we should certainly expect some emotional improvements when we draw near to God. But is having better emotions all we want from God? If so, we’re going to have some problems.
If I’m reading my Bible right, God offers character, knowledge, wisdom, prudence, learning, service, self-sacrifice, patience, godliness, and so much more to those who come to him. But what if all a person wanted was to feel better emotionally? That person would leave all these other things on the table, and just go after the good feelings.
But would that work? Can you have the good feelings while skipping the rest?
No. Not really. You might have an occasional “experience” that feels good, or different at least, or promising. But if you’re trying to skip all the goodness God wants for your life, how are you supposed to achieve some sort of steady and long-lasting emotional state?
I think that few of us understand what our emotions even are. That is, what causes them, how they work, and how it is that they change. And sadly, far too many have got the idea that the emotions are God’s primary means of communicating with us. For example, it’s fairly common to hear a Christian say, “I felt moved to….”. But how often do you hear one say, “After studying the scriptures on this topic, it seemed reasonable that I should do….” Or, “Given the Golden Rule, I just couldn’t justify my bad behavior against my neighbor anymore, so I went against my feelings and did the right thing.”
So often, it’s the feelings that win out, and our reasoning and our actions have to take a back seat to our feelings. But is that what God wants for us?
No! What if Jesus had given in to his feelings? We already know he did not want to die, yet he went against his own desire, and bore the punishment for sins he did not commit. And our whole religion is based on this selfless act—this act for which Jesus had to decouple from the certainty of physical and emotional pain if he was to accomplish his mission as Savior. Consider this verse:
Hebrews 12:2b …For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
When did he get the joy? Was it before the cross, or after?
It was after. But to get to that joy, he had to endure the suffering—both the physical suffering and the emotoinal shame of it all.
As the prophetic psalm said in advance of Jesus’ resurrection:
Psalm 30:5b …Weeping may tarry for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
And let us notice that the “night” came first, and then the “morning” after. But what if he had been unwilling to endure that “night”?
First Things First
There are certainly lots of emotionally-enjoyable things in Christianity, even from the beginning of someone’s faith. But the long-term steady enriched emotional state that so many want seems to be a thing that comes with spiritual maturity, and it simply cannot be had before maturity is reached. Now, you’ll not find an exposition in the scriptures on this topic, but you can find some examples of it in action in various ways. And here’s one I want you to consider, for we can learn much from it. And I want you to know in advance that I’m aiming at that “mutual affection” of verse 7, which happens to be one of the positive emotions for which many year:
2 Peter 1:4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. 5 For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. 8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.
If you’re paying attention to the type of argument Peter is making here, you’ll see that he’s building one thing on another. It seems to start with “precious promises”, having been made by God about believers being to participate in the “divine nature” at the end of the experience. But first, they would have to “escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires”. So then he proceeds to tell them how to execute this escape. He lists these things in a deliberate order, from first to last. They would need:
- Faith
- Goodness
- Knowledge
- Self-control
- Perseverance
- Godliness
- Mutual affection (which is literally translated “brotherly love” or better yet, “brotherly affection”. The word in here Greek is philadelphia, from philos/affection and adelphos/brother.)
- Love (agape—the commitment/serving type of love, and not the emotional feeling type of philos or philadelphia.)
As I mentioned in the last post, this final “love” (agape in the Greek) is the very thing in the first and second greatest commandments. It’s the very thing Jesus told his disciples they were not only to do, but to become “perfect” or “complete” in doing! Yet Peter seems to understand in this passage that if one is going to do that, some other pieces of the puzzle are going to have to be in place first. And which of those pieces are specifically emotional by nature?
Only one! It’s the “mutual affection”. It’s the seventh item down on this list of eight! And people may well long for this sort of emotional pleasure in their relationships, but what if they just can’t really have it without getting all these other qualities in line first?
So I want to take a minute and spell out very briefly what I think Peter’s saying here in regard to these eight items:
- Faith. This is the choice we make (or not!) to rely on God’s word and his promises to be true.
- Goodness. This is the decision that you make (or not!) that you yourself will be good. You are embracing God’s goodness for your own life.
- Knowledge. This is where you go find out what is good!
- Self-control. This is where you control yourself to do what you have found out is good!
- Perseverance. This is where you keep on doing it so that you can get to the next item on the list, godliness.
- Godliness. This is where it all pays off in your character—where you start to be like Jesus in his character.
- Mutual affection. This is where the positive emotions really become widely possible in your relationships. And I don’t just mean having sincere affection between those who are easy to love, but being able to form such emotional bonds even with those who are difficult.
- Love (agape). This is the putting into practice of all the aforementioned items, culminating in the fulfillment of the first and second greatest commandments:
Matthew 22:36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37 Jesus replied: “‘Love (agape) the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love (agape) your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Did you notice that the second command here is not about the feelings? It’s about the actions—about how we treat people. Yet even so, Peter’s teaching has this agape coming after the mutual brotherly affection in the hierarchy of maturation. Having sincere feelings for people is great, but this agape is even greater! This commitment to do what is best for that person, all the time, no matter what—no matter how you feel—even if you have to endure emotional or physical pain to get it done. And I think that it’s really important for us to realize that God and Jesus do not even consider their own feelings to be the most important things about them!
But even so, so many of us long for the good emotional bonds and other good feelings, yet stop short of the self-sacrificial agape love of Jesus. And why? Well, they don’t seem to value the latter; all they want is the former—the good feelings. They want Jesus to make them feel good, and they choose not to care that Jesus wants them to become like him—that he expects them to sacrifice and invest and train in godliness themselves. Here’s a small example of a “teachable moment” with Jesus and his apostles:
Matthew 14:15 As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.” 16 Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”
I can imagine the surprise on their faces when they discovered that Jesus expected them to feed the crowds. Surely that would have seemed unusual, and unnatural, even, as they had no apparent means to do so! Yet he expected them to do it, and they didn’t know how. They weren’t expecting him to whip out the huge miracle he was about to do, and they’d have had no idea that they could be part of feeding that huge crowd. Yet that was Jesus’ expectation for that day.
And I wonder if we’re not quite like them ourselves in a way. That is, I wonder if we often just want the good feelings, and are surprised to find out that Jesus wants us to be like him. It’s easy not to have a firm vision for us becoming like Jesus ourselves, and being able to give and to serve so much. I wonder if we don’t even really listen to that part of the gospel—that we’ve become fairly deafened to it. I think it’s very easy for us just to want a better life, and not to share Jesus’ vision for us to be better people ourselves! We don’t want to go through that “night” in order to reach the “morning” that follows. We don’t want to invest what we have been given in order to produce something more in honor of the Master.
And so we miss out on the greater promises of Jesus as we busy ourselves simply searching for a better emotional state. And I have certainly done this myself. And I don’t see where it works very well. No wonder so many give up on Jesus because they don’t find the emotional fulfillment they were expecting or hoping for! But my question is this: How it is that they expected to find that fulfillment without following the whole plan?
Interestingly, those very people whom Jesus fed that day—some of them continued to follow him about, but not for his teachings, but for more food. Here’s what he told them once:
John 6:26 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. 27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.
They were “working”, he said (following him around) for something that would spoil, when they should have been following him around for the real point of his ministry: his philosophy. And I think we can get quite like this while searching for good emotions in Christianity, and skipping the parts of it we don’t really care about. The training and the growth and the correction and maturation and sacrifice and endurance, we do not want, until we have decided to trust, to embrace goodness, to control-ourselves to live that way, to persevere in doing it, to attain to godliness, to have mutual affection to drive us, and to attain to the agape love that is the ultimate and certain expectation of Jesus for his followers.
Once we get to the agape, we can start to see for ourselves that it’s all worth it—even if it’s still not easy. But before that, we’re going to need to be driven by our faith in the promises. And so I think that this really presents a test for us—a test of what kind of people we are, and what kind of people we want to be—and of what we’re willing to do to get there.
One time, James and John thought to ask for a glorious thing; they wanted to sit by him on his throne in Heaven:
Mark 10:35 Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”
36 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.
37 They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”
38 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”
39 “We can,” they answered.
Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, 40 but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.”
Look how he did not grant them their request when they asked, but put them off, and still expected them to stick with the program anyway!
And James and John did stick with the program! They overcame and endured to their end of their time. But not so with everyone! Consider this man, who also wanted something great from Jesus:
Mark 19:16 Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”
17 “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”
18 “Which ones?” he inquired.
Jesus replied, “‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, 19 honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”
20 “All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?”
21 Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
22 When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.
The man wanted eternal life, but not at the cost of his earthly wealth. And I wonder at how many of us want good feelings from Jesus, but are not willing to pay the cost of working through Peter’s list (2 Peter 1, above) from the “faith” to the “love” at the end.
If Jesus promised some sort of euphoria, it wasn’t for this present world; it was for Heaven. He kept telling them that they had to overcome and endure to the end if they were going to make it there. (And if you want to see proof of this, I challenge you to search “overcome” and “endure” in the Bible and see for yourself how that was part of God’s plan for the faithful.) There is a great amount of confusion about this in the Christian world today, with a great many being flat-out irate at the suggestion that Jesus would actually expect and require the Christian to do or achieve anything other than simply to believe. They call this idea “works salvation” so as to twist it into something it is not. (They’ll say that I’m teaching that you can save yourself by your own works, but that’s not what I teach. And further, I don’t know of any church that actually teaches that—even as terrible as some of the churches are!) So they’re playing this semantic game in order to pretend that they get to have the fulfillment of all the desirable promises, without buying into the whole package—that they get the whole reward without working obediently through the training. But I ask you, where in this natural world does that ever happen?
Sure, offspring are born, not owing to their own labors, but how do they ever survive to adulthood without walking on their own legs and chewing their own food? Physical life itself requires labor from them. And the gospel of Jesus is no different. Yes, he welcomes people freely when they turn to him for forgiveness, but he expects them to learn from him once they’re there:
Matthew 11:28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Yes, there is “rest”—including emotional rest—but there is also a “yoke” and “burden” to be born. And also, they were expected to “learn” from him, which is to be distinguished from remaining as they were before knowing him.
This is the real Jesus. And in this reality, there is a Master to be heeded and learned from, and a yoke to wear and a burden to carry. And so many want to “find rest” without embracing all the rest.
And I don’t know about you, but I’ve never managed to get that approach to work.
I think that this world is filled with worldly churches that have not embraced the whole of Jesus’ teachings. They are worn down by the world—sad and tired—and quite understandably so—but they’ll never find substantial and long-lasting relief in fellowships that are committed to ignoring (or even explaining away) major portions of Jesus’ philosophy.
I no longer find it the least bit surprising that so many are having such dissatisfying experiences in the churches, for the one thing that the most want—the emotional fulfillment—is not to be found by following only half the teachings. And as a result, some among those looking for that fulfillment double down on “faith” without buying into the rest of Peter’s to-do list. So they turn the faith into an empty shell of a virtue, by making it about nothing more than mere mental assent to some proposition.
“Sure, I believe that Jesus is Lord!”, someone might say positively. But such a person might also be very surprised to here Jesus’ perspective on such things:
Matthew 7:21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
So many claim a “personal relationship” with Jesus, but it would seem from this that Jesus thought that the way to get to know him was to do the will of the Father. And further, he seemed to have been predicting that he would be incensed with anyone who would claim to know him, and yet not being deliberately doing his will.
So I think it’s such a trap that the churches have got themselves into, promising the emotional fulfillment, while de-emphasizing the necessary commitment to do God’s will with our own lives. It’s quite tragic. But whether the churches repent of this or not, individuals certainly can.
And I, for one, find it relieving to learn that in this way, God works quite like things work in the real world. With physical fitness, for example, I have long been willing to exercise and eat right, provided I could feel better first! But it doesn’t work that way in the physical reality of God’s creation. And that really raises the question of why God would create the physical world to operate by one set of rules, yet run his spiritual philosophy by another—where the harvest comes before the labor, and maturity before the training.
