Faith
& Feelings
One of the great privileges of
growing up in an old-fashioned, Bible-believing church is the lyrics of
the great old hymns that get etched upon the memory. They create a
reservoir of song from which the believer can draw in response to the
scriptural admonition: “Singing and making melody in your heart to the
Lord” (Ephesians 5:19). One of my favorites is an Isaac Watts Hymn
written in 1707—“Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed.” Its refrain: “At the
cross, at the cross where I first saw the light, And the burden of my
heart rolled away, It was there by faith I received my sight, And now I
am happy all the day!”
I remember vividly the night in late
1959 when the burden of my heart rolled away at the moment I asked
Jesus to come into my heart. I also remember the thousands of occasions
since then when I was NOT HAPPY all the day.
This has been perhaps the greatest
failure of evangelical churches in discipling new converts. Instead of
training them to be soldiers engaged in spiritual combat, much like
Marine boot camp takes raw civilian recruits and transforms them into
combat soldiers, the church too often paints a picture of pure
happiness and bliss upon their decision to follow Christ.
But the God who saves sinners is far
more concerned with their HOLINESS than their HAPPINESS. He is
far more concerned with what we are BELIEVING than what we are FEELING!
It is far more important for the believer to be HOLY all the day than
HAPPY all the day.
The truth is believers can be
miserable all the day due to missteps. I submit to you Samson was NOT
HAPPY all the days after the Philistines plucked out his eyes. King
David was NOT HAPPY all the days he spent (nearly a year) concealing
his murder-adultery UNTIL the day the prophet Nathan confronted him
with his unconfessed sin. The apostle Peter was NOT HAPPY all the days
between his denial that he knew Jesus and his post-resurrection meeting
with Jesus on the shores of Galilee, at which time Jesus assured him he
had a lot of ‘feeding of the sheep’ to do.
Nothing does more to bring happiness
back into the life of a believer than to hear from his Lord that there
is STILL Kingdom usefulness in his or her future! Take, for example,
the prophet Jeremiah. I would challenge any student of scripture to
find a more extreme example of a godly man engaged in Kingdom business
that got more discouraged, more bitter, more DOWN IN THE DUMPS than
Jeremiah did.
In reading Jeremiah 20:7-18, you
discover Jeremiah actually accuses God of deceiving him, and concludes:
“I am in derision [NOT HAPPY] daily, every one mocketh me” (20:7). He
goes on to curse the day he was born, wishes he had died in the womb,
and that his mother had carried his dead body in her womb for the
remainder of her days (20:17).
Put yourself in Jeremiah’s shoes.
Here was a young man God gave to “the nations” in order “to root out,
and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to
plant” (1:10). Now some thirty-plus years into his ministry (during
which he was winning NO popularity contests), he FEELS like the ONLY
one being rooted out, pulled down, destroyed and thrown down is HIM! In
other words: “This prophecy business ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Boy, did God give me the raw end of this deal!”
Can you see a friend (assuming he had
one) saying: “Ah, come on, Jeremiah, you’re just having a BAD DAY,” to
whom he might respond: “Yeah, right, how about a LOUSY LIFE!”
It’s instructive God had no
rejoinder, no rebuke for Jeremiah, at least none recorded in the text.
Instead, his Lord gives him another preaching assignment that involved
king Zedekiah, an assignment with which Jeremiah immediately engaged
himself (21:1-3). God offset whatever Jeremiah might have been FEELING
with BELEIVING there was more usefulness, more service to render. God
got Jeremiah OUT OF HIMSELF by a renewed focus on things OUTSIDE OF
HIMSELF—namely, the WILL OF GOD in delivering the truth through
preaching, an activity consistent with his calling!
Believers in Jesus are not
necessarily happy all the day, every day. But a loss of HAPPINESS need
not involve a loss of HOLINESS! A man or woman steadfast in what they
BELIEVE need not concern themselves too much with what they FEEL in
times of difficulty.
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